#i don't necessarily think its heart is as pure as a truly great movie

[madamescarlette]

💐

[adorable-elsanna]

I don't mean to be rude, and I apologize in advance if I am!! But why do you ship this nd WHY does this ship exist? Aren't Elsa and Anna sisters? And blood related at that. I don't want to hate on ships, you can ship washer you want as long as you aren't hurting anybody!! It's just that ships like these with incest startle me a bit. Maybe I'm just confused since I really shipped Kistof and Anna so I'm missing out on this? Ahhh sorry if this is annoying!! -confused anon

 Hi Confused Anon ( aren’t we all? ;) ),

Thanks for your polite ask, lol finally I get to dust off this blog’s ask box! :)) I’d love to respond with a whole essay xDD but I don’t really have time :’( so maybe I’ll just give a quick rundown for now. 

I might not be the most representative person to pose this question to lol because I am an outlier in general, meaning due to my life experiences, my development, my major in college, my deep meditation practice, and more, I do not abide by normative, dominant, hegemonic social structures and social constructs (nor do I actively resist them per se), so I am unfazed by anything. 

I started shipping this after I watched the first movie when it came out in Nov. 2013. One of my first posts on this blog, 7 years ago, was me explaining how I came to ship this (I had made the post private, but now you can read it here. Also this other post, but I wrote it when I was a college student, so it’s a little too analytical for my tastes now. Those were my views at the time). 7 years is a long time, so my mindsets and reasonings have changed, but all the reasons I had for shipping them from before are still with me today. 

I didn’t go into the movie with the intention to ship them, but while watching it, I picked up on a lot of chemistry between them because their interactions and even storyline were infused with strong popular romantic tropes, tropes that were used in other classic Disney movies themselves. I used to watch a lot of romantic comedies so I was very familiar with common romantic tropes. Of course, having came away from the movie having noticed all these romantic notes between them, I was a little confused and thought maybe it was just me. But when I went online to search a bit to see if others saw/felt what I saw, I found out it wasn’t just me! 

So one of the reasons why this ship exists is because people picked up on the romantic tropes that colored some of Elsa and Anna’s interactions, tropes that have usually only appeared between romantic couples, in films and in real life. Even if the creators didn’t intend to and didn’t actively put the tropes there, they are there. 

If we apply the principles of Buddhism (not the religion. Many ppl mistakenly practice things as devotional worship or for superstitious reasons. But if ppl really want to know everything about the mind, how the world works, the universe, who they are, about themselves and “other” people and why people do what they do, the meaning of life, true happiness, the end of suffering and stress and conflict, and consciousness, then forget psychology [not saying it’s not useful though]. Buddhism, or rather Buddhadharma, is the true science of mind, or at least the much more effective tool), it says that there is the law of cause and effect, the universal law. Everything that is created in the universe and each phenomenon that happens is the result of the momentary coming together of causes and conditions that make that thing happen. There are many many causes and conditions and intricacies and things are interconnected and interdependent, no one person can control something to happen (certain conditions have to be there for something to happen). Something can not come from nothing. If something happens, then certain causes and conditions have been created to bring that result. A seed was planted. If we plant an apple seed, what comes out will be an apple tree (provided the right conditions were met, like water, soil, sunlight, etc.). It will never come out as a banana tree. And so we can understand the underlying principle behind how each situation and phenomenon arises, about existence itself, why each thing exists. 

Now WHY did I go off on that tangent??? LOL All of this is to say that certain causes and conditions have been created to result in the effect of many people shipping Elsa and Anna together and there being a fandom for them. (These principles and explanations might seem very simple and like kindergarten stuff, but despite that, many people can’t accept it. ESPECIALLY when it applies to heavy stuff in their regular everyday life. Or even trivial things tbh lol) The last I checked, there were people from at least 26 different countries shipping Elsa and Anna together. 

Everyone thinks they see reality exactly as it is and takes it for granted, and thus attach strongly to the notion that they’re right. But if that’s the case, then why are there so many fights over who is right? So who is actually right? Even if someone were to follow the majority consensus or some popular, ingrained, long-standing ideas / societal rules, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right. There are many cases of the blind leading the blind. People used to follow the geocentric model of the universe before they discovered heliocentrism. Ideas are always in flux and keeps changing and transforming, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes conspicuously. If you ask 100 different people why they ship Elsa and Anna, you will get 100 different answers (with a lot of overlap of course) with unique spins on their reasons. Because in the world, each person sees reality through their own color-tinted glasses and filters and adherence to labels, concepts, beliefs, upbringing, etc. And then the person seeing “reality” through red-tinted glasses gets mad at the person seeing with blue-tinted glasses for not seeing the world how they see it (and gets frustrated not understanding why), and vice versa. In this scenario, what is actually best? To realize you’re seeing “reality” through color-tinted glasses, and so you should take them off and truly see reality without any filtered lenses. (This is a little off-topic, but I had to bring some Buddhism into this because first of all, dharma applies to everything lol, and secondly, Buddhism is all about dispelling confusion. There is definitely a way to see reality exactly as it is, it typically involves meditation.) 

Yes, Elsa and Anna are sisters. But I’ve never seen any pair of sisters act like them before (if there are, then that’s great!). I have a sibling myself, and we are very close, but we don’t act like how Elsa and Anna act with each other. With most siblings, I would say there’s a lot more joking around, teasing each other, sarcasm, pranks, and casual relaxed communication than the intense intimacy, deep eye-contact, and soul-bonding that Elsa and Anna share. Disney has portrayed many other sibling relationships before, but it seems like they tried something a little different with Elsa and Anna’s relationship that made it pretty easy for many people to ship them together. 

I ship Elsa and Anna together because their pure true love for each other transcends all labels, concepts, preconceived notions, and time and space. They are completely selfless when it comes to one another and that’s what true love means. They make each other better people and it empowers them to extend this selflessness toward other people. Their sacrificing themselves for each other and selflessness in action is true love exemplified. No one deserves Elsa more than Anna, and no one deserves Anna more than Elsa (speaking from my shipper heart xD). Confining and defining their love as just sisterly seems limiting and not allowing the full potential of their true, expansive, infinite love to manifest. (A sibling relationship is really beautiful, but it still has to be shaped and look a certain way, it has to fit into a particular mold and box and abide by certain conditions. Otherwise, as we have incontrovertibly seen, people will scream bloody murder and be squicked out and all hell will break loose.)  

We can even go one step further to say that the same similarly applies to people’s definitions, notions, concepts, ideas, and beliefs about love. They say this love is like this and that love is like that, this is what love should look like, this person can love this person but only if it’s like this and not like that, this is what it means to love and to be loved, etc. Again, it’s limiting, and placing restrictions on something whose essence is boundless. In Buddhism, with the realization of Enlightenment, one realizes that true love is selfless, unconditional, boundless, free, all-encompassing, nondual, timeless, compassionate, wise, nondiscriminating, infinite, universal, endlessly flowing, non-judgmental, creative, indescribable, and inconceivable. So THIS is the love that I see and ship between Elsa and Anna. I love their relationship as sisters, but their love is so grand that it cannot be contained inside that label, so it transcends and goes beyond any attempts to neatly define and characterize it.

It’s okay if incest ships startle you. Uncomfortable feelings come up whenever the ego experiences anything that challenges its worldview and everything it’s ever known and held to be true, and that prompts it to question and reconsider its mind-constructs. We have a knee-jerk reaction to grasp, hold, and attach to what we like, and to avoid, reject, and push away what we don’t like and what makes us feel uncomfortable. For what it’s worth, Buddhism tells about the cycle of life, death, and rebirth from beginningless time, so we have all lived infinite past lives and been each other’s lovers, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends, enemies, grandparents, etc. at one point or another. (Deep, but intriguing!, topics for another time.)  

If you really like to ship Krist0ff and Anna, then go ahead and ship happily. First rule of Buddhist meditation: Whatever you do, ONLY DO IT, 100%. ;) And if you don’t do something, then don’t do it, 100%. And then move on to the next moment. Be in the present moment. And remember that everything is changing moment by moment. Mind is changing moment by moment. Don’t need to anticipate the next moment. Who knows where our shipper hearts will take us. 

I like to ship people based on their chemistry and characterization. Elsa and Anna have a great true love story that is theirs and theirs alone. I don’t like to ship relationships that seem contrived, thrown in there for the sake of it, not fleshed out, lacking in substance, trite, and with characters who are underwhelming or underdeveloped. 

Lol no worries, this is not annoying, I’m sorry this is so long and that I took 7 days to get back to you. I wish I could give specific examples from the movies with beautiful gifs to explain why I ship them (I’ve probably written such posts in the past. Maybe I’ll come back to edit this reply one day), but I’ve gotta skedaddle! I’d like to hear your thoughts about my reply if you actually read this, so please send me a message in the ask box again if you can. 

Also I’m a girl if that makes any difference, but yeah anyway, skedaddle time, love you all! 

Oooooh I never finished replying to someone else’s ask box message asking me why I shipped them, it’s from years ago :’(, I started typing my reasons and saved it in my drafts, but it’s incomplete. But here’s what I wrote at the time!

1. I just love everything that Elsa and Anna feel and do for each other. Elsa isolates herself from Anna to keep her safe, and Anna persists in trying to get Elsa to open up to her and goes to find her when she runs away. They’re always thinking of each other and worrying about each other. They act selflessly for one another and their unconditional love is expressed so genuinely. This kind of devotion in any relationship is rare.

2. There was a lot of chemistry between them in the movie. At the coronation ball scene, I get that the creators were trying to depict awkwardness between them since they haven’t spoken in a long time, and Anna wanted reassurance that Elsa didn’t hate her so she was nervous about getting Elsa’s attention and approval, but the scene came off as Elsa being kind of suave and flirty and Anna being flustered because her crush just complimented her. Then Anna gave Elsa a playful smile when she was dipped upside-down as if she only had eyes for Elsa.

When Anna stares admiringly at Elsa as she stands atop the staircase, it was like a scene straight out of A Cinderella Story or Enchanted where the prince stares at his true love like she took his breath away.