Warning: Spoilers for Frozen (2013) will be UNMARKED.
All That Glitters is a Frozen fanfic written by user othellia as a self-challenge to write a Hans/Anna Continuation Fan Fic which "sticks to both canon events and characterization and have it still work," without "glossing over Hans' actions from the film in the slightest."note
The story can be read here
on Archive of Our Own or here on FanFiction.Net.
This fanfic provides examples of:
- Becoming the Mask: Anna pretends to fall for Hans again in order to get close enough for him to be willing to give up his powers to save her life. She ends up falling for real.
- Bedsheet Ladder: Anna knots her bed sheets to try and escape from Hans while he holds her captive. She gets out of her room successfully but Hans catches her in the stables implying he watched her from the beginning of her escape attempt.
- Beyond Redemption: Elsa's opinion about Hans is that he fills himself with so much evil and hate that there's only one way it could end.
- Big Brother Bully: The three older brothers who canonically pretended Hans was invisible for two years are named here as Georg, Manfried, and Fritz.
- Black Sheep: Lampshaded. One of Hans' nicer brothers took off years ago. Anna comments that it sounds like he's the "brown sheep" of the family, with Hans being the black one.
- Blood Magic: Anna and Hans exchange blood to break an enchantment protecting a cave they need to enter.
- Cassandra Truth: Whenever Hans actually tells the truth or shows his real feelings, no one believes him because of his history of being a manipulative Consummate Liar.
- Character Tic: Anna tends to bit her lip or pace when worried or while thinking. Elsa loves pacing, too.
- Chekhov's Skill: Anna mentions that she learned to pick locks, because she doesn't want to end up locked in a room to die ever again. In the first act, she picks a lock on Hans' manacles when it's only two of them on a dangerous journey through the mountains. In the last chapter, she does this again to help Hans escape the trial that can only end with his execution.
- Completed Fic: The fic was completed in November 2017.
- Constructed World: Expands upon the geography established in Frozen, which includes the kingdoms of Arendelle and the Southern Isles, and includes the kingdom of Corona from Tangled. The author also invents fictional countries such as Wallonia, Ostenberg, Dunois, Summershire, Weideland, Romsdal, Vestmar, Fjordane, and Nordheim, as well as the cities of Stralshagen and Amersdam.
- Crossover: A mild one. Rapunzel and Eugene appear as secondary characters, and Anna spends a portion of the fic working in their kingdom.
- Determinator: Anna, as in canon. She absolutely refuses to give up any hope. When her only lead for stopping the blizzard is Hans claiming he read about a mysterious "magical artifact" in a book of legends, she decides she needs to at least give it a try, despite being even more suspicious of him than the rest of her group. And when Hans becomes an evil, immortal god, she still holds onto hope of defeating him. When no one can find even a rumor of a way to defeat a god, other than the god willingly giving up power, Anna insists on trying anyway.
- Determined Defeatist: Anna puts a lot of effort into pursuing a plan which banks on Hans saving her life after she willingly ingests poison. Yet it's implied she doesn't actually expect this to work, snapping at Hans during an argument: "At least when I poison myself, I'll finally be taking myself out of a world with you in it!"
- Doorstopper: The fic is over 168, 000 words.
- Endless Winter: The plot kicks off when the royal family of Corona, where Anna is staying, gets a message from a neighboring kingdom that they're suffering from a mysterious blizzard in the middle of June and that it's spreading.
- Evil Virtues: Hans sure isn't a saint. He's ruthless and often cruel, but he's determined, intelligent, and quite competent at what he does, including governing. He genuinely wants to improve life in the kingdoms he rules.
- Flashback Nightmare: Anna and Elsa have nightmares about Hans' previous attempt to kill Elsa in the climax of Frozen, although Anna's nightmares diverge towards at their endings, concluding with Hans succeeding.
- From Dress to Dressing: To break an enchantment they encounter, Anna and Hans need to exchange blood. Hans then cuts strips of cloth from his shirt to wrap the wounds.
- Hairpin Lockpick: Anna uses her hairpins to pick locks.
- Hypocrite:
- Hans. He says he wants to destroy the system where the privileged few people have all the power. He says so after becoming an immortal, immensely powerful god and destroying a means to do so because he's not going to let himself become part of a pantheon.
- Elsa.
- She repeatedly accuses Anna of being easily manipulated by Hans. When Hans arrives to Arendelle for peace talks, Elsa rises to every bait he puts out for her, in spite of her advisor pointing out that Hans is baiting her.
- In the last chapter, she insists that Hans should be punished for his crimes and states that it's her duty to ensure that her personal feelings don't hold more weight than the common man's. When Anna points out that she helped a murderer escape and thus should be put on trial and executed, Elsa says she'd never do this to her sister.
- Guilt Complex: Anna tends to blame herself for every bad thing that happens around her, even when there's nothing she can do about it and/or it really is someone else's doing. When King Henri dies, she suspects Hans is behind it and decides she's to blame for his and his daughter's deaths. When her memories about Hans becoming god are restored, she says, "It's All My Fault" about everything Hans has done to make it happen and everything he's done ever since.
- Improvised Lockpick: Anna uses a piece of wire included among her adventuring group's supplies to pick the lock on Hans' cuffs.
- Karma Houdini: Downplayed, Anna thinks Hans' punishment for the events of the film is light considering the severity of his crimes. After the second blizzard, she vouches for him, though, believing he's earned another chance with all of the helpful work he's done. Elsa still thinks he's gotten off too easily. And at the end of the story, both sisters think that Hans deserves more punishment, but Anna helps him escape execution anyway, believing he can still do at least some good, at least with supervision.
- Love Redeems: Zig-Zagged. During their journey to the cave, Hans seems to be falling for Anna and becoming less evil, although still a jerk. Then The Reveal shows that he's still planning on gaining power by any means necessary, taunting Anna about how he'd set off the blizzard as part of a plan to find the apples of Idun and become a god. Afterward, they bond once again and Hans clearly falls in love, but still remains ruthless.
- No Sparks: Anna feels herself growing distant from Kristoff, and doesn't feel a connection with any of the men she dances with at the Wallonian wedding.
- Past Experience Nightmare: Anna and Elsa suffer from recurring nightmares of Hans' attack from the climax of the movie.
- Physical God: Hans becomes this after eating Idunn's apple. He can't be killed, he has telekinesis, teleportation, and Elemental Powers, he can undo Elsa's magic, heal other's wounds, stop time, erase memories and jam spots from important documents.
- The Quest: The first part of the story revolves around searching for a way to stop another mysterious blizzard two years after Elsa's coronation.
- Seen It All: A downplayed version. While still taken aback by the revelation that she's had a forgotten encounter with a god, Anna's one of the few people not particularly concerned that Hans got all his information on an artifact that could end the Endless Winter from a book of legends because she's already seen wilder things turn out to be true. Not every character is so willing to take the chance.
- Related in the Adaptation: The fanfic goes with popular opinion that Rapunzel is Anna and Elsa's cousin.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: Anna and Hans actively search for an artifact that can stop the Endless Winter. Anna also takes on a job at the Arendellian embassy at Corona. Later, Elsa is on the frontlines of a war, conjuring up snow soldiers and controlling whether the fjord is frozen, depending on whether Arendelle's enemies are trying to cross it by ship or foot. After Hans takes over Arendelle, she and Kristoff search for a way to defeat him. And when he becomes a king, Hans takes an active interest in the work of ruling and politics, something Anna begins helping him with as she works on a plan to convince him to give up his power.
- The Reveal: Act III has a quadruple-whammy. After Anna suspects her memory may have been magically-tampered with again, Pabbie examines her and reveals she's been given Laser-Guided Amnesia by a god. The restored memory then reveals that god was Hans, who had explained in an Evil Gloating session that he had caused the blizzard of Act I in order to convince his brothers to let him out of house arrest to search for a particular magical artifact that could stop the blizzard. Hans had claimed the artifact was a stone with the power to nullify magic. What it really is a tree bearing Idunn's apples, which according to legend, gave the Norse gods their immortality and power.
- Royal Blood: Anna and Hans have to work together to access a cave with a protective spell that requires blood from two separate royal lineages.
- Running Gag: Building on the one from the movie, there's still a tendency for characters to get Kristoff's name wrong. Including Olaf, who still addresses him as "Sven."
- Starting a New Life: Hans in the end disguises himself as a man called William Schultz and goes to work for the Coronan treasury.
- Spiteful Spit: Anna's answer to Hans' We Can Rule Together offer is to spit in his face.
- Talking in Your Sleep: Hans mutters in his sleep about his nasty brother Georg when Anna tries to wake him for his turn watching the fire. And in a later chapter, murmurs "I love you."
- Wham Episode:
- In last chapter of Act II, Arendelle declares war on Weideland.
- Act III has The Reveal of Hans having become an immortal god, and ends with Weideland taking over Arendelle, Elsa on the run with Kristoff and Olaf, and Anna being taken captive.
