Sunday 17 August 2014

Hating on Hans

Admiral Hans Westergard, Prince (13) of the Southern Isles has possibly drawn the shortest straw of all time in Fanficland.  His fatal mistake was probably not dying - at least at the end of the film.

It has given Fanficland license to put him through hells he couldn't have imagined.  For every fanfic in which he is redeemed - including one in which he becomes a baker and falls in love with a girl whose only wealth lies in bun skills - there seems to be another in which he is horribly, horribly doomed.  Descent into madness is a popular fate, with or without an ice statue of Anna to keep him company, though nearly often accompanied by a guilt-plagued Elsa, who has her fair share of portrayals as a raving lunatic.  

He frequently features only to behave appallingly - often by being the archetypal teenage boy, I notice - and get his butt kicked. In the modern AUs he is usually a jock and the butt-kicking is often by Elsa, which is very satisfying and frequently funny.  It leads to my supposition that the reason the Prince in the Arendelle AUs is wandering about burnt by his own fire powers, destroyed by absorbing Elsa's ice powers, scarred beyond recognition, tortured to dementia/death or with limbs missing - name a limb, the Prince has lost it somewhere -  is to do with his being both the archetypal suave villain and the boy you just couldn't go out with - because they are pretty much the same thing.

Dan in Bridget Jones' diary may survive, but the original - George Wickham - gets the fate worse than death - married to an empty-headed girl with no means of support in a world of perpetual debt.  The writers about Hans are simply doing the same thing.  Except for the ones with literal castration.  I think that's pure revenge. 

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