Self-Criticisms for The Queen of Hearts

The first thing I want to say is that you guys are not going to believe how much of this story I actually made up as I went. The question about Elsa's lineage (a.k.a. the entire plot), the King of Corona as a red herring, and the Queen's backstory during the war are all things that I decided to include as I was writing the chapters that they were included in. The one thing I've had planned out from the beginning is the trajectory of Elsa's relationship with Rolf. I've known since I started writing this in December that nothing definitive was going to happen between them, and he was going to leave with his brothers on a ship, and the future of their relationship was going to be open-ended. I know it ended up looking an awful lot like what happened with Elsa and Albert at the end of Songs of Ice and Snow (which I was kind of obsessed with, and you should read if you haven't), but I want to assure you all that this ending has, in fact, been planned since December, before it was even clear that Albert was going to be Elsa's love interest. Also, as I've mentioned, I've had the epilogue written in my head since I wrote chapter four, but pretty much everything else I made up as I went along. This story started out one thing and became something completely different, which is why the title doesn't really make sense anymore.

I had a couple of goals when I started writing this. First, I was tired of seeing Elsa being paired off all the time. It can be done well (I know one story that did it extremely well), but a lot of the time it isn't, and when it isn't developed correctly, it goes completely against her characterization, so I wanted to write a story where Elsa sort of had a love interest but, first, didn't realize at all that he liked her, and second, realized she wasn't ready for a relationship. I wanted to write a story that showed that, after thirteen years in solitude, Elsa probably wouldn't have really known how to interact with people on an adult level. That's where all the awkwardness between Anna and Elsa and some of the awkwardness between Elsa and Rolf came in. Elsa not recognizing that Rolf was, as Anna puts it, trying to court her, when it should have been really obvious was a big part of that one too. Finally, I just wanted to show the effects of everything she'd been through. In canon, Elsa has depression and anxiety, and I wanted to explore that.

I think I achieved some of those goals, but I do have a couple of complaints about how things turned out. The first thing I want to address is the Princes. I didn't really start out with set personalities for them, so I feel like it took me a couple of chapters to really figure out who they were, so, in the beginning, I think they came off kind of generic. Also, I regret that, the farther I got into the story and the more serious the relationship between Elsa and Rolf became, the more Erlend, Anton, and Ivar kind of stopped being in any of the scenes at all. I fumbled the relationship between Elsa and Rolf too. To take another example from Songs, they were supposed to look a lot like Elsa and Albert ended up looking (unintentionally, of course; as I said, I've had their relationship planned for a long time), but they never quite made it there. Whether that's because of poor planning on my part or because I was trying to do it in ten fewer chapters is open for debate. My last complaint about the Princes is that I wish I had given them some purpose in the story other than to just give Elsa information. Other than Rolf, that was really all they did, and I think it was kind of a waste.

Next, I have some characterization things. Elsa came off way mopey-er than I originally intended. She also came off more emotionally unstable than I meant to write her, though there is canonical support for that idea. I really wish I had introduced the nightmares and the drinking more, and I wish they had played a more integral role in the story instead of being filler scenes. Anna was a lot deeper than she was in the movie, though I think you could chalk that up to her learning a lot over the course of the film. One of the biggest things that I did that came back to haunt me later on is having her refer to her parents as Mother and Father. I think it worked for Elsa because she wasn't very close to them and she's a very formal person anyway, but Anna should have called them Mom and Dad. I never in a million years meant to make the King of Corona so annoying. He was supposed to come off as benign and fatherly, but he ended up sort of seeming bumbling and intentionally unhelpful.

One of my biggest regrets is that I decided to tell this story solely from Elsa's point of view. About eight chapters in, I realized how much more I would have been able to include if I had rotated between Elsa and Anna. There were a lot of things I wanted to do, like bring Kristoff in earlier and develop the relationship between Anna and Anton, that I wasn't able to because I could only write scenes were Elsa was present.

Alright, those are my complaints. Hopefully, despite all these things, you enjoyed the story. Thanks very much for reading, and hopefully I'll see you all next time.