Fight for Your Life

Within Frozen, I think the most controversial scene with Elsa is when she fights the Duke’s two henchmen in her ice palace. There are some fans and haters of the film who believe that Elsa was really trying to kill the men, that this was the moment she became a villain, or evil. But that is not the case at all. Elsa is and was always good. I believe that these haters are just not looking, and maybe even refusing to look, at the scene correctly because murder was never Elsa’s intention.

When the thugs first barge into Elsa’s palace and corner her on the top floor, she pleads, “No, please.” Like all other times when she is around people, she is afraid and hesitant. She knows she can harm people with her powers, and she desperately wants to make sure that doesn’t happen. But when she pleads, how does one of the men respond to that?

By firing an arrow straight for her head!

Elsa conjures up a small wall of ice to protect herself from being hit. But once she notices the arrow and how close it is, Elsa realizes that she is in danger, that the men are going in for the kill, and that they will not stop until she is dead. They came to the palace for one reason and one reason only, and that is to kill her. They have no intention of leaving until that mission is complete.

So while Elsa understands the mens’ intentions, she still doesn’t want to fight them. At the same time, she knows she has to protect herself. She subsequently fires a few shots of ice in an attempt to ward them off, saying “Stay away!” But she doesn’t want to use her powers against them because she still fears she might accidentally harm or kill them. She shows great reluctance, fear, and uncertainty while firing the shots. The last thing she wants to do with her powers, besides harming people, is use them to fight.

And when she tells the men, like she has said to everyone else, to stay away, it sounds like she is saying, “Don’t hurt me.” But what she really means in saying this is “I don’t want to hurt you.” Her face seems to be saying just that in the gif below.

However, as Elsa tells them to stay away while firing the ice, the men yell to one other, “Fire, fire!” and “Get her!” while throwing each other more arrows to fill up their crossbows. They completely ignore her warning to stay away and are engaging her more violently. They grow more relentless, ruthless, and persistent.

Then after Hans defeats Marshmallow, the fight between Elsa and the guards grows more intense. By now, Elsa’s fight or flight response has finally kicked in, and it’s kicked in big time. She’s not going to run away; she’s going to stay and fight. Now when a person is in a situation like this, adrenaline gets pumped around the system, and you become focused on only one thing: self-defense. While in this state, nothing else matters to the person. Elsa currently has two targets on which to focus, and she manages to do so with ease now because her senses are fine-tuned, thanks to that rushing adrenaline.

As Elsa stands her ground, the guards surround her, ready to fire, then she notices that the clean-shaven man about to shoot an arrow. Seconds before he can do that, Elsa releases ice to pin him to the wall, which is needed for her to do so she can stop one dead in his tracks and focus solely on the other. And while it may look like it, she is NOT trying to stab or impale him with those spikes! Her only intention there is to make sure that the man is stuck, that he is unable to go anywhere, and has limited access to his weapon. This leaves her free to focus on the mustached man.

After trapping the one man, Elsa senses the moment when the other man is about to strike, so she quickly fires back and successfully disarms him. Once that is done, her next move is to get him out of her palace. So she creates an ice corridor to prevent him from escaping, then starts to push him out the balcony door.

Now this is the start of the scene that makes people think that Elsa is acting evil or murderous, but I have a good explanation for it. Just think about it for a moment: these men broke into her home, started the unprovoked, attempted murder, and refused to listen or negotiate even when Elsa pleaded and didn’t even harm them first. They were the ones who tried to murder her in cold blood! And now that she’s disarmed the one man, what do you think is the next instinctive thing for her to do? Get him out of her house! Just think about all of that and what YOUR instincts would be if someone came into YOUR house uninvited and tried to attack you!



Then there is the moment that focuses on Elsa’s expression right in the gif below. I think this is the moment that especially makes people think she is in a bloodlust, murderous rage. But if you look at it another way, it is actually suggests that Elsa is in extreme concentration here because she’s focusing so hard on getting the man out of her home. Sure, she looks mad, too, because she is mad! As I said before, these guys broke into her palace and immediately went for the kill when she did nothing at all! That alone gives her every right and reason to be mad! But at the same time, she’s very concentrated on the task at hand.

The other misinterpreted part of the scene here is where Elsa is pushing him. What viewers should understand here is that she’s focused so hard on getting him out that she’s just pushing him out of the closest door. The closest door just so happens to be the balcony door, which faces a cliff. But remember, Elsa’s sole intention here is self-defense. She is just so caught up in trying to get rid of the guard that she hasn’t taken a moment to think about where she is pushing him. She just wants him out, so she’s taking the opportunity to get him out in the fastest possible way.

Enter Hans along with Arendelle’s guards. He quickly takes notice of the man pinned to the wall and immediately realizes that Elsa has almost pushed the other guard out from her balcony. Making a quick judgement from the scene before him, Hans immediately works out his entire game plan. He acts accordingly, by addressing Elsa with, “Queen Elsa!”

At first, she’s annoyed at the disruption. She’s busy trying to deal with two men who entered her house unannounced and immediately tried to kill her. Then she’s infuriated. Hans is the last person with whom she wants to deal right now. As he keeps talking, which she just does not want to hear, she angrily turns to face him.

But just as she is turning around, Hans speaks: “Don’t be the monster they fear you are!”

Elsa stops dead in her tracks as Hans says those words, and they hurt. She realizes that what she’s doing is exactly what she wanted to avoid doing her entire life, and the realization makes her recoil. But make no mistake: Hans’s words were fully intended to have this exact effect on her. They were chosen carefully to catch her off guard and make her pause.

Despite what some people say, and I know they do, Hans did not say those words in order to save Elsa from turning into a monster. He did not save her in that scene and had no intention of doing so. Simultaneously, Hans was not protecting the guards, either. His actions were specifically chosen to serve one person: himself. He could have said the exact same thing if the guards were dead, and that would have had even more of an impact on her. Hans just took advantage of the situation presented to him.

Elsa never turned evil in this scene, so anyone who says so and thinks she was redeemed, that’s not true. At least, you can’t compare Elsa’s “redemption” with Hans having one, too. In the words of my friend foreverfrozensolid, Elsa was more freed than redeemed. Elsa gets redeemed and accepted back into Arendelle because she removes the winter she unintentionally created. She realizes she can fix what she makes and that her powers aren’t all bad, which is what the Arendelle citizens learn, too. She makes the ice rink in order to give the townspeople something enjoyable. Hans is a completely different story, however. He indirectly tries to kill Anna. He lies to the dignitaries that Anna had died and that they married before her death. He lies to achieve power in Arendelle. He lies about Anna to Elsa, then tries to kill the latter while managing to keep his real motive for doing so a secret. So again, you really cannot compare Elsa and Hans each having a redemption, or even the negative things they do in the film. Elsa is aware, feels bad, and tries to stop it and change, while Hans doesn’t care and doesn’t stop.

I once explained in this analysis that I believe part of the reason why Elsa was so afraid of her powers being exposed was because she knows that it makes her so different. Like in the real world, there are people who do not always accept others due to the kind of, sometimes unusual, differences they have and thus only assume the worst about them. Anger, confusion, and fear are the kinds of reactions people have when they don’t understand something so different or unique. And Elsa knows just that, so she knows that there is always a chance of people not accepting her and deeming her as weird or a monster just because of her powers. In seeing how they can be dangerous, such people might only see her as a danger, and some would fear or hate her so much for this that they would want to kill her. As we see at the start of the scene, she wants to avoid fighting as much as possible because she fears harming others. Also, unlike Hans, Elsa is well aware of the difference between right and wrong, and she definitely does not want to kill someone, even accidentally. But if people like the thugs just try to kill her and won't stop until they do, then I think Elsa will fight back because she knows she would have no other choice.

So if you go back to the beginning of the scene and watch it again, Elsa never intended to kill the men nor did she turn evil! Again, look at it from this angle: these thugs broke into her home and initiated an unprovoked attack on Elsa with the sole intention of killing her! They completely ignore her when she pleads for them to stay away; they just keep going at it because they will not stop or leave until they have killed her. They were the ones aiming straight for the kill, never Elsa! She looks angry during this scene because she is angry! They instigated her and tried to murder her in cold blood, and she did absolutely NOTHING to make them do that! As much as Elsa didn’t want to do it, she knew she was in danger and had no other choice. The thugs were not afraid of her at first, but by fighting back, Elsa had to let them know that she meant business just as they did. She wanted to scare them off so they would never come back and do this again. In all, if the men hadn’t attacked Elsa first, she wouldn’t have attacked back. She only attacked back in order to defend herself from being killed.

So there you have it with my analyzation on Elsa during this scene. For those of you just think Elsa was turning evil and trying to kill the guards, read this, then watch it again! That is not what is happening here!!

And finally, today is my birthday, so I decided to make this analysis as a present for myself. :)