You know why Anna’s sacrifice didn’t sit well with me?
because it should have been Elsa’s sacrifice.
The reason why Anna sacrificing herself out of love for her sister doesn’t work is because we already know that Anna loves Elsa.
Throughout the film, we are constantly shown how much Anna loves her sister through her persistent attempts at bringing Elsa back into her life. Even when Anna apparently gives up on this at the end of Do You Wanna Build a Snowman, she still proclaims multiple declarations of trust in Elsa when her powers are revealed at the coronation, despite really having no reason to trust her at all. On top of that, Anna frequently defends Elsa and makes excuses for her even though Elsa almost always screws her over. Sacrificing herself to prove that was simply redundant.
Elsa, on the other hand, shut her out for years and did nothing but run away from her problems, even when her beloved sister pleaded with her to come home. Out of all the characters, Elsa is the only one that actually needed to learn something. She needed to go through an arc. And what better way to redeem herself than to sacrifice herself to save the one person whom she has been hiding from and pushing away for the last thirteen years? It could have been a major character change for Elsa to have to actually do something and deliberately put herself in harm’s way, even at the cost of her life, in order to save Anna, because before, Elsa’s definition of “protecting” Anna was to shut herself away and basically give up on having a relationship with her.
Contrariwise, it could have been a major character revelation for Anna as well. After constantly being ignored and given the cold shoulder (no pun intended), would it not have brought everything full circle if, after all these years, Anna realizes that her sister still loves her? Maybe Anna could have run over to Elsa and cradled her body in the same way that Elsa did for her when she hit her in the head with the ice blast. It would have been a clever reversal set up.
But on its own, Anna turning into an ice statue while Elsa cries over her for a couple seconds before she miraculously comes back to life with teh p0wer of lurve, just doesn’t have much weight to it. It really aggravates me because Anna practically did everything she possibly could for Elsa and basically gets nothing in return. Well, she gets her sister’s love I guess, but that’s not saying much is it?
I guess this all comes down to the fact that, had she gone through an actual story arc and learned from her mistakes, Elsa could have been the most dynamic character in the movie. Instead, she was reduced to being a tragic mary-sue and a victim of circumstance just so that she could have her happy ending handed to her on a silver platter. She never earned her happy ending and she never earned her sister’s love, which is a huge failure for a movie that claims to be about the bond of sisterly love.
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