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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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If you love weird fan theories, take my Frozen theory:

The movie works just fine if you tweak the famous "Hans betrays Anna" scene just a little. You don't have to change anything before that scene, and you can change only a little bit after, like maybe one or two lines of dialog after, and it still is coherent, but improves the story 100%.

The change is this: Hans actually kisses Anna and nothing happens. Because Hans is a nice guy but true love is something that takes time and sacrifice to develop. Then Anna passes out and Hans genuinely thinks Elsa killed her.

Then the rest of the movie just stays the same. This works better because the Hans betrayal came out of nowhere, and it helps cement the theme that love is more than infatuation. It fits so much that I believe it was actually made this way, then an exec said there had to be a villain, and so they redid one scene to frame Hans as malicious and called it a day.

Ha! That's almost the same as my head-canon improvement. Hans isn't an actually-nice guy, but he's not pure evil, he's just as desperate as you'd expect of someone raised with wealth and a nominal title but expecting to inherit jack squat. He rationalizes that "I'll marry Anna and act like I love her" is still a better outcome than would otherwise befall a girl so sheltered and naive, and although he's not too surprised when his kiss confirms that this doesn't actually count as love as far as the spell is concerned, he still tries to monologue to Anna about why he's not a bad person for all of it.

I'd been thinking that he could do a more evil turn at that point, like "you're doomed anyway, so I might as well lock you in here and not be dispossessed in the process", but I like your "Hans genuinely thinks Elsa killed her" idea better. Except... does that allow the rest of the movie to stay the same? My kids have all thankfully outgrown it so I haven't seen it in forever, but I could have sworn the ending required Anna to be conscious much longer to go out and confront Elsa herself.

The next scene with Anna has Olaf finding Anna freezing to death on the floor with closed eyes. Olaf comes to Anna's rescue by starting a fire in the fireplace to warm Anna up.

Olaf says, "Where's Hans? What happened to your kiss?"

Anna says, "I was wrong about him, it wasn't true love."

Kind of a muted reaction to him giving an evil speech and trying to kill her! But it makes perfect sense in the context of my proposal.