Lit Apropos of Nothing - ACKBAR IN CAPITALS - The Lit Forum Social Thread, v2.0.15

I'm expecting no fewer than 18265 Frozen kids' books, given how many books showed up for Tangled and Brave.

Those weren't novels though.

 

Kids books of course. It's compared to snother book series which has books for kids ranging 6-9 at a length of about 130 pages.

But what else were you expecting?

 

There are a ton of illustrated books already.

"A Sister More Like Me" is amazing and is what made me decide Elsa was my favorite Disney Princess. It takes place between the years of the films, which is cool.

And it's online to read. Handy! http://imgur.com/a/R7snZ

Haven't read any of the others.

Edit: oh man a Stover Frozen book. The battle between Elsa and the soldiers would be SO GOOD.

 

Sigh


Next we'll see it in newspapers. I just can't escape.

 

"We can't work with him, he just refuses to stop singing".

 

So the first chapter of the Frozen book is available as a preview. After I got over the staccato simple sentences (reading YA books like Percy Jackson was challenge enough; these kids books might seriously test my tolerance), I thought it only vaguely interesting. I can imagine they probably won't get into anything too controversial like revolutions, judging by the simplistic sentiment that a monarch should be just like everybody else and that royal anthems are boring. Dammit Disney, if you're going to be encouraging monarchism you can't be doing things like this! Your movies make it clear that aristocrats are finer than commoners, your books should follow through. Let's have none of this bourgeois "woman of the people" stuff -- that's fine for Anna but it does not suit Elsa.

Disappointing.

I did take the random Stover comment from yesterday to mind though, and I'm rereading Heroes Die for the first time in years. I last read it maybe 7 or 8 years ago (if not more) and I'm a more sophisticated reader now so it'll be interesting. We'll see if I can be bothered to continue past BoT, since I basically quit at CBK last time.

 

I guess. There is a pattern in that chapter where Elsa tries to get the peasants not to treat her with awe and formality but it doesn't really work. Anna, on the other hand, has the common touch and can get then to open up.

Hopefully the lesson at the end of it is that Elsa should stop trying to chum around with the proletarians and should realize that she's better than them. After all, she's supposed to be true to herself, right?

 

See, I was actually thinking more of Stover's original work than ROTS. The freezing described in visceral (literally!) detail, the brutality of the winter and its effect on starving children, etc. He holds nothing back. Maybe his Elsa doesn't either, actually brutally slaying Weaseltown's guards with jagged spears of ice (dripping with frozen but not yet congealed blood) -- but coming to deeply regret it. Lots of mental anguish over what she's become.


And of course the whole thing about the weather being a philosophical allegory -- the pathetic fallacy writ large -- about Elsa's turmoil from having come from what is effectively a broken home. He'd take an already dark intro and make it darker yet. But it's not just grim dark because there would be a good reason for it; a lot of his narrative comes with subtext and meta commentary.