Goodreads feminist reviews - A Warm Welcome (Frozen short story)

Book: A Warm Welcome, by Erica David.

   2.5-3/5. Abridged review for Goodreads review also here.

This review contains spoilers

 Brief summary for context, taken from Goodreads: "Olaf has news for Elsa! He has heard of a summer queen from a summer land with summer magic—someone with similar powers as Elsa’s, who can control fire and heat. He says her land is trapped in an eternal summer. Olaf thinks it sounds great, but Elsa and Anna think she might be in trouble. Either way, a journey is in order!" 

I liked this one a little bit better than All Hail the Queen, but still it was underwhelming and written in a rather bland and 2D way. Once more, rather worried that this author is gonna make me dislike Elsa, Anna and Frozen more than I would like to, because I quite like the movies and the rather deep themes they have going on :S xD Characterization could have been better in this book as well. I know this is a children's book, but I'm not asking for super elaborate writing styles or incredibly deep themes, I'm asking for better characterization and more engaging prose 😅.

There's quite a lot of female bonding ♀️👍 in the story, between Elsa and Anna, between Elsa and an Eldoran weaver woman, and between Elsa and Queen Marisol of Eldora (more on this later). It’s refreshing compared to many other children’s media and fairytales, but it’s unfortunately not enough to really save the way these stories depict other issues :S

The dynamic between Elsa and Marisol was definitely the highlight of this story.

The adventure travel plot is also a bit more engaging than the other short stories I've read in this collection so far, but it's also regrettably filled with rather cringeworthy plot points which follow typical Disney problematic conceptions about the class system, and also some ideas veering into cultural stereotypes and colonialism quite a lot 😬😕. Which we're gonna talk about lengthily now, because the time I spent reading this book I was steadily more and more frustrated about it :S xD

CLASS SYSTEM

·          The author keeps upholding the class system in a sugarcoated way typical of Disney. The narrator insists on how Elsa loves to help people (which is fine in itself) and how she is entrusted with taking care of the villagers (phrased as ‘her villagers', once, not even 'her subjects', which sounds kinda meh 🤨). Wanting to help people is all very well, but what's cringy to me in this context is how it's the typical Disney move of having the privileged rich people and especially the royals framed as super kind and benevolent, taking care of 'their' subjects and the lower classes, without addressing ot changing the imbalance of the class system as a whole at all 😕. 

        Like, the book begins with Elsa returning from a day full of delivering ‘supplies and gifts to her villagers’ – such as saws and ice picks to the ice gatherers, hot soup and blankets to stable boys, and 'even' books to the schoolchildren. Elsa is literally patting herself on the back saying what a good queen she is and how well she treats her people for giving them basic necessity items they should already be able to fully afford! 🙃 I find this kind of framing to be incredibly patronizing.  

      Like I commented on the previous review, there’s a focus of Elsa’s role as queen in these stories as a ‘protector of her people’, focusing on supplies and gifts, which I think is slightly more anachronistic in the framework and mindset of 19th Century monarchy. But even bearing that in mind, if it’s her freaking job in exchange for a huge palace and a life in luxury, why are we focusing so much on just how benevolent a queen she is giving soup to stable boys the one day? Why are we not thinking instead about how fucked up it is that the Queen herself has to provide basic needs such as food and blankets to the people at her literal whim, and think she's doing her daily good action of the day? Let us remember that meanwhile, all the time, she’s living in a huge castle with servants and literally every luxury she needs. The class system doesn’t budge a millimeter, no matter how many ice picks and blankets and food the royals deign to gift around on the days they’re feeling benevolent 😕

·       We've just seen Elsa give away basic needs to 'her' villagers, right, so we can assume the villagers need the Queen to do that for them at least from time to time - which gives me a very bad impression of how Arendelle's wealth distribution is working, rather than highlighting how good of a person Elsa is 😬. Well, when Elsa and Anna are afterwards leaving Arendelle to travel to Eldora, the villagers gift them meat, bread and cakes for their travels. So the villagers apparently also need to fulfil a role of providers of supplies and gifts for the royals who have everything now 🤔? Especially after that first scene where stable boys apparently need the Queen's charity to get hot soup it just seems so....wrong to see the Arendellians giving the rich royals their hard-worked for food as gifts, to be honest :S I mean, Arendellians aren't all stable boys who apparently need the Queen's charity to eat soup (that's still so fucked up), there must be successful middle class merchants, business keepers and the bourgeoisie in general as well, but we're contrasting all middle and low classes here against very rich people with a castle and lots of servants and several cratefuls of luggage, who are travelling on a whim, and who can most certainly bring and pay for their own food supplies on their travels! The villagers also have to amass at the harbour to happily send their farewells to the Queen and princess when they probably would rather be working for their daily livelihood or just minding their own business at leisure, you know, far from the whims of the royals 😐 (I really, really dislike monarchy as a system, and I guess it shows lol).

Thank you for all your meat and bread we didn't really need, now have fun working while we go on an adventure because we felt like it! LOL, peasants!

       While travelling, the ship captain assumes that of course Elsa, Anna and the rich people will be having dinner first, and then the crew who’s actually toiling away on the journey will eat. That’s all very realistic, even if unfair, but of course Disney has a way of sugarcoating just how benevolent the rich people are without changing the class system imbalance one bit. Elsa invites them to have dinner at the same time as ‘friends’, and of course the crew very gratefully accepts. Of course, it’s better when the more privileged are also more humane, but this rings very cringy and patronizing still because the statu quo per se is never challenged, not really, the royals are just feeling kind and nice that day. The class system is never challenged, and so I tend to read these moments more as a power trip for the powerful to feel benevolent and lenient. And I don't love that they're feeding this kind of discourse to children continously, to be honest 🙃. 

       SO MUCH ENTITLEMENT

·       Every villager, be they from Arendelle or Eldora, treats Elsa and Anna with the utmost deference as royals throughout the whole story. And it doesn’t matter that the Arendellians are visiting Eldora without having been invited or expected, or that they keep interrupting everyone while they’re working 😒 (similarly to the last story but a bit better this time, at least they aren’t destroying everything this time 😬) - Everyone seems to be happy to see them and is completely deferent to their wishes, especially after they learn that they’re royals (white supremacy is another factor here, as we’ll see). Asking for directions is one thing, but Disney royal characters seem to keep making it all about themselves (well, royals tend to do that in general, it's kind of in the job description xD), and everyone passing their way makes them their priority as well. There’s a scene which is a yes regarding female bonding, but a meh in this respect, when Elsa interrupts a female weaver who’s working on her carpets, and the weaver stops her work to teach Elsa to weave. While it's nice to see Elsa interacting with more women and be excited about learning something new, at the same time it seems like the whims of the rich and powerful always take first place. Everyone’s perfectly happy to have them there because they’re royals, no questions asked. 

Stop working, peasants, and pay attention to the royals who came to your land uninvited!

       I’m not saying keep the borders closed to everyone or not be friendly to strangers, that’s all very good and well, but then there’s the supreme entitlement of Elsa and Anna suddenly deciding on imposing on Eldora’s people, both as high class members and as white European people, and this entitlement never being minimally challenged in any way 😑. Because Elsa and Anna literally suddenly decide to make an overseas trip to another country without, I don’t know, writing to Eldora’s Queen to get an invitation or something 🤨?? The way this story reads, even if that's never directly phrased on the page, is that the combination of their social class and their North European and white status just makes them so sure they will be happily welcomed, and of course, this content always pandering to this kind of demographic, they end up being exactly right. Eldora’s queen Marisol is very happy to learn that a Northern queen suddenly made it her business to come to her castle completely uninvited. I’m not saying this can’t also send a positive message of intercultural friendship and communication, which I'm sure was an intentional aim of this story, but the fact that they feel so entitled to do so and never ever had anyone stepping in their righteous path also bugs me. Which brings us to the second part of problematic baggage -

WHITE SUPREMACY, WHITE SAVIOUR COMPLEX AND COLONIALISM

·       This is going to be messy, so let's talk about some positives first of all 😅: It's badly executed, but the story does have an intentional aim of showcasing intercultural friendship and relations, with Elsa and Anna (and especially Elsa) making friends with Eldora’s Queen Marisol. Elsa initially thinks Marisol also has magical powers (Summer powers with fire and sand storms, which do sound badass af xD) and may have difficulties in controlling them like she had. There are problematic ideas in this line of thought, as we’ll see, but this plotline also focuses on Elsa’s desires to meet other women with magical powers like her with whom she can further identify, relate to and not feel like she’s so alone and singular. It's important to see women interacting with other women in positive relationships, and express their desire to do so, so this dynamic was the highlight of the story for me.

 

·       The setting in another country, Eldora, clearly a fictional Middle Eastern country reminiscent of Disney’s Arabia (a bit of a poutpourri of influences and cultures from the north African, Middle Eastern and South Asian regions as per Disney's general representation of the Middle East :S), also helps to have poc characters and more race and ethnicity representation, which in and for itself is also always a good idea. But not all representation is good representation if it's not handled well. And unfortunately I felt a continuous cringe factor while reading this story, and I believe that these issues have been handled pretty clumsily, and are framed in a system of European white supremacy and colonialism that are never challenged or disputed 😕:

·       Like I mentioned above, Elsa and Anna hear of this kingdom of Eldora and its queen, rumoured to reign in a land of ‘eternal Summer’ and to wield powers of heat and fire. So Elsa immediately assumes, comparing it to her own personal experience, that the fact that there’s an ‘eternal Summer’ means that this Eldoran Queen also has difficulties controlling her powers, in a similar way to how Elsa unwittingly created an eternal Winter in the events of Frozen I when she still didn’t have full control of her powers because of fear and self esteem issues (one of the great topics the movies do talk about). So she assumes Queen Marisol doesn’t have full grasp of her powers either, so, naturally, she needs her help and Anna’s to save Eldora from the eternal Summer!

      This is an assumption completely devoid of factual evidence and literally based on some rumours Olaf heard in the village, but it’s enough for Elsa and Anna to ship away at once to Eldora uninvited, determined to save Eldora’s people from the uncontrolled magic of their queen 😅. And while I love the concept of strong and empowered female characters who are ready to save the day and help fellow women and people in general, I generally would prefer if they also asked beforehand before presenting themselves in another queendom, you know, or something. Because this whole portrayal just reeks of White Saviour Complex, to be honest. The fact that they did not even begin to think to write to Eldora’s queen to ask about the situation or, you know, get an invitation to visit, is just baffling. I mean, they do diplomatic bureocratic shit in the comics just fine! But no, here they just left Arendelle in the hand of Elsa’s ministers (some kind of council of state/privy council/cabinet is mentioned here at last, tho, not like in All Hail the Queen where it totally seemed like it was Elsa and no one else lol), and they let themselves be gone to foreign, distant lands because they also fancied some tourism! I understand the concept of travel fics and the thrill of adventure and getting to know new places, but the setting and the way to go about it was disrespectful and entitled 😕. Of course, this is never challenged because everyone in Eldora is baffled by their appearance there, but generally very happy to see them, especially when they discover they’re royals too, like we ranted beforehand. So their behaviour is always treated as completely legit 🙃.

I would be way more excited about explorer traveller Anna if the setting and attitudes where different, but ah well :S

             Also, these books and some of the comics are making Elsa seem like a truly incompetent – or just very entitled – monarch 😐. And that bugs me a lot because, while I'm not a fan of monarchy, we also do need positive representations of fully competenet queens and female leaders in their own right - And incompetent and stupid she is not in the movies and other extended material, either! Like, in other comics, diplomatic relations and visits between countries, European and non-European, are a thing. Missives are exchanged. Ambassadors make appearances. Various European and non-European monarchs visit Arendelle  (or Elsa and Anna visit other countries following invitations) in settings that are generally not cringy or offensive (there are a couple of exceptions which fall more in the line of this story, but we'll address those some other time :S). Those examples in the comics are more of an actual multicultural representation sending the message of open relations between countries, and it's generally nice in those respects (of course, also taking into account that the comics are still pandering to the monarchy Disney ideals and don't challenge any class system issues). But no such thing here. No letters are exchanged, no invitations issued. They just decide to go, motivated by rumours and White Saviourism.

     Another problematic aspect that bugs me to no end here is that in the comics Elsa and Anna are not so utter and completely ignorant in the face of countries that are not their own 😑. They know of other countries, have visited them, ambassadors and royals have visited them! They know of the in-universe equivalents of China, Russia, Laponia, Arabia, Italy, and a bit of Africa (but not that much info there either, which is a shame. There’s a comic story that shares more than one problematic trait with this one and which I will tackle another day 😬). However, here they have absolutely no clue about anything, they only rely on what is being rumoured in the village to know something of Eldora, and they only find out where Eldora is perusing a dusty obsolete and inaccurate atlas in the castle’s library (they incidentally do the exact same thing in the comic story about their interactions with an African queen who comes to visit 😬). 

     Obviously Internet wasn't a thing in the 19th Century, but the Stone Ages it was not either, come on, people travelled the world amply and even with the prejudices and misinformations courtesy of colonialism and racism, people in charge generally tended to know a bit more about geography and how freaking climates worked. Because she is queen and must make it her business to deal with diplomatic relations from time to time, I simply refuse to believe Queen Elsa is ignorant of where the Middle Eastern countries lie, even if she doesn't know a while deal about them, and the fact that the weather and climate there are different to those of Arendelle, come on. Then again, it's regrettably true that some current day Western countries - you might know which one I mean especially 😅- are also woefully ignorant about countries and continents that are not their own and their geography education is bafflingly minimal, but I do expect more from a queen who is actually shown interacting with diplomatic issues and ambassadors often in the comics :S xD.

      Be it as it may, this kind of setting makes Elsa (and Anna) look incompetent af as rulers, and it also normalizes the (unfortunately also historically true, and still going on) idea that white people are both clueless about other countries, feeding off very basic and often offensive stereotypes and rumours, and also perfectly entitled to visit them on their own terms. Which promotes the general system of white supremacy in imperialism and colonialism, even if the initial intention was to make a story about multicultural friendship 😕. Why are Elsa and Anna so clueless, ignorant and entitled? They really weren’t this dumb and this obnoxious in the movies, even though all these systems of monarchy and white privilege remain mostly unchallenged in more than one Frozen story (Frozen 2, however, which incidentally is also my favourite Frozen story to date, did endeavour to address the topic of colonialism in a way that was central to the plot of the story, and also added more racial diversity in Arendelle, and I really liked that). 

     Eldora is described as a rather generic Aladdin’s Arabia, with men in turbans, carpet makers, sandstorms,  and so on. While this is a legitimate problem in and for itself that stems in Orientalism (and it's perfectly valid to be offended by it), I would venture to say that at least Eldora and the Eldorans are treated reasonably...fine, except for the fact that well, the European visitors rely on stereotypes and rumours to try to understand this country and its people, and except for the fact that all Eldorans are there to suit the plots of the Arendellians, of course. OK, so maybe I'm setting the bar of 'it's reasonably fine' to 'poc characters are not directly called racist slurs to their face', 'poc characters are not demonized or described negatively (but they fawn over the European impromptu visitors all the same)' and 'white characters are supremely entitled but at least everyone is civil with each other and seems happy to be there' 😬. So it’s a mixed bag, veering towards the meh. We’ve got poc representation, yes, but we also have a story where the poc country is generic Middle Eastern with no depth and all its inhabitants exist to further the plot of the white Scandinavians. Again, I guess that not all representation is always grear representation even if it's not the kind of overt offensive representation we may be more accustomed to challenging. 

        Eldora’s queen, who is bafflingly called MARISOL (I get the Sun reference, but what kind of a Middle-Eastern sounding name is that 🤨?? Other Eldoran villagers at least have vaguely Middle-Eastern sounding names), does get a positive characterization, and it's also positive representation that we get another ruling queen in her own right, interacting with other female characters. Elsa and Marisol’s dynamic and budding friendship is one of the things I liked the most about this story, and because Elsa is also heavily queer-coded by many fans, Elsa and Marisol are also being actively shipped by some in the fandom, as well as showcasing their friendship. Now I’ve read the book I even recall a Tumblr post with some extracts the parts focusing on Elsa thinking about how Marisol would be, describing her and her name as beautiful, and generally queer coding their relationship. There are also several fanarts of them:

Elsa x Marisol fanart by Elphabart on Tumblr

 

Source and artist

Source and artist

      So yes, thankfully there are also some positive parts in this book as well 😅, regarding  representation in the LGBT+, female bonding and female empowerment areas. These are all great, and that’s where the 3 in my rating mainly does come from. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t more negative factors at play as well, as we have just seen, and that's also why we're going to keep talking about those a little bit more, because unfortunately in this case those factors do dominate the story.

·       Elsa and Marisol have a nice rapport, definitely one of friendship, and easily a queer coded one as well, but she still takes second place in her own country in a story that's (not unexpectedly, it's a Frozen story, after all) focused on white-blond-haired Elsa and her ice powers, powers which she wields during the feast organized in her honour to wow all Eldorans. Marisol also bafflingly and hilariously asks Elsa for ice to store their fish in a country where we have already seen that ice melts rapidly (never mind how on earth they're expecting that the ice blocks would arrive in solid icy condition from Arendelle to Eldora in the first place lol 🤣), so that's freaking stupid (Marisol is supposed to be a competent queen as well, but apparently we doesn't know how climate works either 😬). But the idea is that a trade and new friendship forms from their impromptu visit, which is nice, I guess. 

      Then again, there’s also the fact that the Arendellians are convinced that Eldorans, who are accustomed to live in a hot desert climate which makes it warm pretty much all year round (in the daytime at least), also need the cold and snow to feel well in their daily lives 🥶. Which is another show of entitlement and self-centered double standards, the last one we're discussing here 😅 -

·       Arendellians love the cold because they come from a Northern country so they're accustomed to it, but Eldorans can’t be OK with the heat, apparently: White Saviour complex and double standards ensue. Because the Arendellians think that liking the cold is how everyone should be (I'm most certainly not 🥶 xD). Arendellians are literally obsessed in this story about bringing the cold and the oh-so-soothing snow to the Eldorans, who literally live in a hot desert climate, and are also - gasp - accustomed to that. The double standard? Arendellians are also very uncomfortable with the heat because they aren’t accustomed to it, and long to see snow and return to Arendelle! Which OK, it's understandable, but what’s not understandable is their White Saviour obsession with bringing their own climate to other peoples who have a different climate, because it’s unthinkable that they would be OK with this level of heat because they aren't! They literally think they have to save the Eldorans from the heat, and how freaking entitled and ignorant is that? As part of the feast Queen Marisol dedicated to Elsa, there had to be a scene where Elsa creates a skating ring out of the festive dinner hall and snow to fall from the ceiling, and everyone was conveniently hyped and happy to experience the cold and the snow, because that's apparently what they were craving all along, and ah well 🤪.

     Also, people in lower latitude hotter climates don't need ice to keep their fish from becoming stale either, what the hell, they use other methods like salting it! (which reminds me about how shooketh many USA Americans are when they learn that we one traditional way we keep ham from going bad in Spain is by salting it, and I've come across people who thought we were eating jamón serrano raw because it's not 'cooked' the way they would go about it lol 🙄 🤣).

'We must save the brown people from these unnatural sandstorms!' (but snowstorms are totes normal in their mind, no need to save Arendellians from those unless you unleash an eternal Winter without meaning to xD)

·            So yeah, Elsa and Anna are not only completely clueless about other countries and cultures in this story, they’re also completely dumb about how climate works. And I fail to understand why, oh why, these books are trying so hard to make Elsa and Anna to look so utterly stupid about some things. Didn’t they teach them how climate works back in Arendelle, minimally? Basic geography a queen should know? They must have! But no, Elsa and Anna literally thought that they had to save the Middle Eastern Eldorans from the heat, thinking that they lived in a magically induced eternal Summer just because they didn't have snow and ice there! And the plot twist of this story is literally the fact that no, that is HOW THEIR NORMAL CLIMATE IS, and Marisol has no magical powers at all 🙄🤪! It would be funny, but it also speaks volumes about the entitlement and ignorance of white supremacy, so it isn't relly. And I still think it would have been way cooler to have a magical Middles Eastern queen wielding fire and creating sandstorms, better than 'Elsa and Anna don't know how climate works' as the 'funny' plot twist for this story, but maybe that's me.

I really don’t get why we still have to dumb things down for children and why we have to make them read about frankly problematic issues such as sugarcoated sexism, racism, colonialism, classism, heteronormativity or what have you – issues that they later have to unlearn, if they even do so. In Frozen we did get quite a lot of female bonding, strong feminist themes, and several well-treated themes in the movies as well, so that’s great, but children (and adults) would still be getting loads of problematic messages about the class system and white surpremacy reading ‘harmless’ short stories like these.

And even though the class and white supremacy systems are still there in the movies, the plots and characters are much better constructed and there are imo a lot of very interesting and subversive topics and symbolism to discuss both in Frozen 1 and 2 (like mental health, self-esteem, identity and acceptance as the lead female protagonist's main arc, and a discussion of colonialism). I also do believe that, while Elsa and Anna are white European royals with all the privileges that entails, and we should still bear that in mind, there are way more intelligent, less obnoxious and more conscious to several matters than the impression their overall characterization in these books and the comics often gives 😬. So I’ll be definitely tackling in other posts topics talking about why I also do love Frozen and why I love the characters of Anna and especially Elsa.  But alas, I’m afraid this book series is not a place where I can happily hype about all the things I love about Elsa, Anna and Frozen 😅. And these discussions are also important to have.

 Till the next time!