#shampanier

Yes I know my followers have heard this before.

Tagging @toastedmarshmallowrose and my mutuals @majorabbey @whosbex @th3p0rtalmaker @noodlecruncher @frozenwolftemplar @rapunzelshorizon cause they expressed interest

Okay so for starters, this right here? Big Nose's story at the beginning of Under Raps?

Yeah I don’t buy it for a second.

It feels too...fairytale. Even for Disney. Shampanier was invested enough in the fight that she personally led her men and ransacked Corona herself in a full scale invasion.

And it's easier to see in the storyboards than in the actual show cause they ended up using the paper cutouts for the whole story but look at Shampanier's expression here.

That is a woman on the warpath. She is out to make him BLEED. and then she just somehow accidentally manages to knock his journal just right to find the page that declares undying love for her and up and changes her mind? After a war that's lasted for years? After hours of fighting him?

And look at her face here as she's reading the journal entry. That's not a face of "Oh my god my crush likes me back???" That's confusion and borderline disgust. You can kinda still see it in the paper cutout but it's way more prominent here in the sketches and storyboards.

And despite this "peaceful unification"...we see none of Saporia in the show. No Saporian people, no architecture, no stories, no music. Nothing. it's all just Coronan. Even the Saporian language is dead. In Lost Lagoon, Cassandra says this:

"Hundreds of years ago, Corona was two different lands—Old Corona and Saporia. The fact that this is written half in Saporian means that this book is genuinely ancient. No one speaks Saporian anymore except a few scholars.”

This heavily implies that after the Unifciation, people just slowly stopped speaking Saporian. That doesn't happen normally, languages don't just naturally die out. Even gradual assimilation doesn't usually wipe out an entire language like this, if Corona was unified then it should be a multilingual kingdom.

Lost Lagoon even states that there was even supposedly a whole "Era of Unity" where Shampanier and Herz der Sonne worked to blend their kingdoms and cultures together....where's the fruits of those labors?

Even in the royal library there's only a handful of Saporian books!!

And moving a little further into Under Raps

Now obviously the Separatists are a terrorist cult. They don’t represent the entirety of Saporians.

But two things

1- why did they feel so betrayed over this supposed Unification? If they were keeping their culture they have no real reason to be angry. But they’re still around.

And 2- if this is such a small sect, why are the Separatists all we see of actual Saporians?

Oooh Saporia is such a icky barbarian hippie culture and they all wanna hurt Corona! If they don’t wanna identify as Coronan that’s BAD!

Yeah, convenient, right?

And it's especially weird that the Separatist crest even appears on Herz der Sonne's tomb, what is up with that???

Next, let's take a little trip over to season 2. Rapunzel Day One.

This is a Saporian village. And how do we know this?

There's the Seperatist Crest, right there.

There's tents and wagons and even a building. Even with all the ruins and black rocks everywhere this is clearly a semi-permanent structure. A RECENT semi-permanent structure, MILES away from Corona. In fact it looks like the only reason they left was because the black rocks drove them out.

If you take away the Separatist propaganda there's only two things that we really know about Saporian culture.

The first is that they practice magic/witchcraft

Even in the show magic is very rare. In fact, besides Rapunzel and Cassandra and Zhan Tiri's followers Clementine is the only person we see using magic that we know where the magic comes from. Clearly a Wand of Oblivium is a Saporian invention, Rapunzel even says as much. And it's clearly an item of common use, so magic/witchcraft has to be a common staple of Saporian culture.

And sadly as anyone who knows history knows, witches have been a massive target pretty much since the dawn of western civilization. And based on the fact that we don't see any witch villagers or like a witch school anywhere in Corona, Saporia seems to be no exception. At the very least Frederic is anti-magic thanks to his sundrop shenanigans, but there could've easily been other Coronan kings who were prejudice against magic.

And it's not just the wands either, let's take a look at the old crest on Shampanier's shield

Remind you of anything?

It CANNOT be a coincidence that the old crest looks eerily close to the Sundrop Flower.

And the second bit of Saporian culture that we know about is that they have airships

This might have been such a pain for the animators (I don't know how hard it is to design and animate ships) but I wish we got to see these ships more cause they look so cool.

This is definitely a new ship but it seems that Saporians have made airships for a while since the Separatists are cultural purists. Where Coronans sailed the seas, Saporians sailed the skies.

And we might have seen these ships before.

They look a little different obviously but Vardaros is full of ships and ship parts, despite being a city stuck in a canyon miles away from any coast or large body of water. But if those ships are airships, then this would be a perfect spot to build and test them due to the high winds that canyons create.

So Vardaros may very well be a pre-Unification Saporian town. And if that's the case then that means there's a whole Saporian slum town on the outskirts of Corona that's being run by a criminal empire and neither the crown nor the royal guard is doing anything to help.

~~~~~

So who in the show is Saporian, besides the Separatists?

Well if Vardaros is indeed a Saporian town, then Lance and Eugene had to have been raised Saporian. And that means that Quaid and Vex and Miss Clare and everyone else in Vardaros is Saporian as well.

By ancestry, technically Rapunzel and Frederic are Saporian.

And it makes perfect sense for Cassandra to be Saporian as well. She and Gothel look a LOT like Shampanier. And people have said this before, but Saporian!Cass would make for an even stronger parallel between her and Rapunzel. Their conflict reflecting the conflict of the kingdoms that make up Corona.

Feldspar is another big candidate in my opinion to be Saporian

I think the "Every cobbler worth his shoehorn" is a bit of a fib. I don't think it's false, per se, but I doubt it's the only reason.

There is a word missing, in the story of King Herz der Sonne and General Shampanier as told by the poet Big Nose, where the King’s journal drops to the floor in front of the General on a page where he speaks of how much he loves her. Just one word. It’s a fine story, decent enough in any case, even if the length of the battle per se was slightly exaggerated, but the one word makes all the difference.

The word is still.

It's been so long since I've talked about this, but rewatching Under Raps the whole story of Shampanier and Herz der Sonne just doesn't add up. By the middle ages, monarchs and generals RARELY joined their troops on the battlefield. But Shampanier did. She led her men, ransacked the city, and stormed the castle all herself. That's a clear sign that somehow this battle was personal for Shampanier. Whatever it was, she had some score to settle.

And you can see here in the production art for the prologue, she is FURIOUS. This is a woman on a mission to make someone pay.

Big Nose outright says that Herz der Sonne and Shampanier fought for hours with neither of them relenting. If they were so focused on their battle that lasted for hours, then how on earth did Shampanier just happen to find the exact page of the journal saying that Herz loves her? Did she crash into the pedestal or something?

Even if that did somehow happen, look at her face here. This face doesn't look surprised or even happy to me. Shampanier looks almost disgusted or horrified reading the confession of love. If she stormed Corona herself and Herz der Sonne had enough time to build tunnels throughout his entire country, the War of Unification was clearly a very long and brutal war that was deeply personal for one or both of them.

Some more evidence I just noticed that points towards Gothel and Cass being related to Shampanier- they both have a sharp chin with almost the exact same slant to it, and their noses are both kinda flat with no real upturn. And also their hair has a very similar comb-back styled part.