Kingdom of Isolation
is a Frozen oneshot by Shadow Wasserson. Can also be found on Archive of Our Own here.
The fanfic acts a darker, alternate ending to the film. When Hans' sword hits Anna, he doesn't just get flown backwards. Anna also shatters. With her sister dead, Elsa snaps and succumbs to her grief. She shuts herself in her castle and ignores the outside world. If she can pretend everything is alright, then it's alright. So, Elsa recreates her family and subjects out of snow and ice and lives her life happily amongst them.
Unfortunately, not everyone is so happy. Elsa might not mind a blizzard but the rest of her kingdom does. Kristoff, known as "the Burning Man" in the narrative, has to find a way to stop the blizzard and save Arendelle.
This fanfic provides examples of:
- Alternate Universe Fic: Kingdom of Isolation is an AU where Anna is killed by Hans at the end of Frozen.
- Crapsaccharine World: Elsa has built one for herself. Arendelle is thriving like never before, everyone loves her, everyone is happy and inhumanly beautiful. That's because they are her creatures of ice replacing real people who are either dead, like Anna and their parents, or desperately trying to survive in the Endless Winter outside. And at the royal palace's back door, there is a pile of bodies of those who have tried to kill Elsa to stop the winter.
- Dark Fic: Unlike in the original movie, Anna's killed by Hans, which causes Elsa to break. She loses her grip on reality and slips into an escapist world while her country dies outside. And Kristoff kills her in the end. Lampshaded in the author's notes:This is probably a bit too dark for Frozen. Oh well, when has that ever stopped me?
- Death Fic: In this AU, Anna doesn't survive her Heroic Sacrifice. In her grief over Anna's death, Elsa loses her grip on reality, and the Endless Winter in Arendelle persists. By the end, Kristoff kills Elsa to stop the winter.
- Downer Beginning: Anna is dead, Elsa has lost her sanity, and the Endless Winter in Arendelle persists. As Kristoff says, people are dying, starving, and no one can even get out of the kingdom, and the winter is spreading out from Arendelle into neighboring kingdoms.
- Downer Ending: A bit downplayed since "The Burning Man" saves other kingdoms from sharing Arendelle's apocalyptic fate by ending the Endless Winter. However, he achieves that by killing Elsa who's too far gone to save her, all her ice creations die with her, and even ending the winter doesn't change the fact that Arendelle is a barren shell of its former self with the population implicitly dead and the ecosystem utterly destroyed because the unnatural winter was maintained for so long.
- Endless Winter: Anna doesn't survive her Heroic Sacrifice, and in her grief, Elsa loses her grip on reality and keeps Arendelle in permanent winter — worse yet, the blizzard is gradually spreading into neighboring kingdoms. The endless winter ends with Elsa's death, but by the time that happens, the unnatural winter went on for so long that Arendelle's ecology is in ruins.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The narrative refers to Kristoff as "the Burning Man" because he's the only character who radiates body heat (with Elsa being naturally cold due to her ice powers and everyone else being made of snow and ice).
- God Save Us from the Queen!: Elsa has shut herself in her ice castle while her kingdom freezes to death. Anyone who tries to kill her ends up killed themselves.
- Gone Horribly Right: Snowman Hans notes that Elsa made him too well; he wants her dead even though he knows he'll die with her, too.
- Literally Shattered Lives: Unlike in the movie, Anna's frozen body shatters when Hans hits her with his sword.
- No Ontological Inertia: After Elsa dies, the winter ends and all her snow creatures melt.
- Sanity Slippage: Anna's brutal death takes a toll on Elsa. She shuts herself from everyone and creates a "perfect world" of snow people where Anna is alive and it's her coronation every day. Her parents and Anna are all alive while Hans is a pile of slush in the prison. In the real world, Arendelle is in turmoil because there's a raging blizzard.
- Together in Death: The snow Anna and Kristoff melted while holding one another. The real Kristoff also stayed with the snow Anna until she was completely "dead".
