Beyond: Two Souls

With the launch of Detroit: Become Human (personally I would have titled a game about androids set in Detroit "Detroid" but whatever) and a resurgence of the regular mockery David Cage games have to endure on social media, I thought it might be time to finally check out Beyond: Two Souls on that Quantic Dream PS4 collection I once bought. With already having tried out Heavy Rain a couple of years earlier, I was preparing for the absolute worst but to my surprise I discovered a story that was at least interesting enough to allow me to slog through the terribly odd (and oddly terrible) game design decisions. As such I want to talk a bit about narrative games and how I feel Quantic Dream does them wrong. I doubt I'll be saying anything that hasn't been properly discussed yet but playing through the entirety of Beyond has left me with a fair few frustrations to shed, so this will mostly be a long rant.

Some Thoughts on
Beyond: Two Souls

Personally I'm not really interested in getting Detroit: Become Human anytime soon for several reasons. Part of it might be motivated by somewhat recent accusations of a toxic work environment at Quantic Dream, or the fact that it was revealed there's a detailed nude model of Ellen Page in Beyond: Two Souls despite her not having agreed to it (seriously, why is that even in the final product?), but actually in truth it's simply because I've done what David Cage himself suggested and judged him by his work, which as it turns out really does not appeal to me all that much.

My short time with Heavy Rain annoyed me. Years after release I was already spoiled on the identity of the Origami Killer so I didn't have as much eagerness to see that particular mystery through to the end anyway, but my hopes for an enjoyable experience were already tanked when the message 'Hold R2 to walk. Use the LEFT STICK to change direction' appeared on screen. That is something I would expect to see on the PlayStation 1, not in a game released in 2010.

Then the game expected me to go through the main character's morning routine that included him brushing his teeth by forcing me to shake the controller and shaving him which had me moving the right stick at a precise speed otherwise I would have to do it all over again. Then I was supposed to explore a house I could barely navigate, had to witness doors that hinged in places where doors aren't supposed to hinge, and was continuously bothered by button prompts for the most mundane tasks imaginable. That combined with a rather unappealing art direction, unconvincing voice acting and character models that fell hard into the uncanny valley for me made it so I soon turned the game off and I haven't looked back since. Supposedly the story is really good though but because of the unwieldy nature of the gameplay I doubt I will find out first hand.

Beyond: Two Souls managed to grab me more than Heavy Rain did however. The art design was more appealing, the setup of controlling both a girl and a ghost tethered to her was rather original, and the non-linear story-telling raised enough questions that I actually wanted to know what was going on and what would happen next. The game does look great and the stellar acting of both Ellen Page (Jodie Holmes) and Willem Dafoe (Nathan Dawkins) goes a long way in balancing out the game's lesser aspects. Surprisingly I actually liked some of it. However that just meant if Beyond: Two Souls were a B movie or TV series it would probably be a decent one, unfortunately its state as a video game is what drags it down.

In general my problem with Quantic Dream's design philosophy is that it feels like they believe they are pushing the boundaries of game design, while actually they are implementing gameplay that has already been judged as horribly dated and unwieldy. Beyond: Two Souls only takes minimal advantage of the gaming medium because at its core it is overly concerned with being a movie, and so rather than being a bold step forwards, it feels like a spiritual successor to Dragon's Lair (1983). Rather than allowing the player to interact with the game world, it feels the game plays by itself and simply punishes you for not responding to it the way it wants you to (and is so surprisingly lenient with mistakes you might be forgiven for doubting your input matters at all). David Cage explains (rather infamously by now) that he feels game overs in narrative games are a failure of the game designer, and so his games implement alternative story paths that go around what would otherwise be a game over state.
While this sounds nice in theory, in practice it means a player who is at least somewhat invested in doing well is robbed of the ability to hone their skills, as the ability to retry scenes has also been removed. If you are lucky you can exit the game before the next save point and hope the previous save point wasn't too long ago, otherwise you just have to live with it. 

Life is Strange (2015)

I feel Life is Strange (2015) solved the problem of a narrative game without game overs much more elegant than Beyond: Two Souls did. At the start our protagonist Max Caulfield discovers during a traumatic moment that she has rewind powers with which she can turn back time for a few moments and so allow the player to experiment with how conversations will go or get out of harm's way when it should be necessary (when an action occurs that should harm Max, time simply slows down and turns the screen grey to allow the player to revert back). The player can't get stuck into a corner because we can simply rewind ourselves out of any situation again. Unfortunately where Life is Strange messed up is by making the rewind power an attribute of the main character that she herself is aware of rather than simply a player option, meaning it was unavailable when we took control of Chloe Price in the prequel Life is Strange: Before the Storm (2017), so Chloe also had to live with her decisions but at least she didn't have to wrestle with button prompts and motion controls to brush her teeth.

Omikron: The Nomad Soul (1999)

However I fear the inability to redo scenes to your liking isn't so much an unfortunate limitation of the way Beyond is set up, but instead an intentional design choice on David Cage's part, since the opening of Omikron: The Nomad Soul (1999, also simply known as The Nomad Soul), Quantic Dream's first title, makes clear: 'There's no saving and going back if you get into trouble. You are entering a real world. If you make mistakes, you'll just have to accept the consequences'. Again this is stuff that sounds cool on a design document and might have even been an impressive selling point in 1999 because we didn't know any better, but some of us want the option to experiment with the game world. Of course we don't have to be aware of the long-term consequences of our decisions but it seems rather counter-productive to remove failstates by simply having the game continue with an obvious failstate still active whether we want to or not. Having to put up with situations we know little about yet being forced to make decisions on them we can't reverse is what we already have to do in our day-to-day lives and it being a horrible experience is why a few of us find solace in video games in the first place. It is especially troublesome in Beyond because the non-linear storytelling means we are making decisions independently of how Jodie Holmes might feel about the situation, simply because we have no clue of how we got to that point in her life. For most of the game's runtime we are controlling a protagonist where it has been made nearly impossible for us to actually play the role of said protagonist.

Specific Chapters

After the tutorial chapter where a young Jodie is being tested on her control with Aiden, the next chapter drops us several years later in a CIA operation in a Saudi Arabian embassy where an adult Jodie has to copy certain documents with the threat of torture should she be discovered. From a narrative perspective it might have been an interesting setup for the story to get us wondering about how Jodie's life went to bring us to this point. The problem however is that since we aren't actually watching a movie or a TV show but are instead given control of a situation we know absolutely nothing about. We aren't actually told what we are supposed to do until we stumble upon button prompts that allow us to proceed. Jodie Holmes was presumably briefed on mission parameters, but we as players don't have any context for why we are here. Mercifully this game without game overs doesn't allow us to make a fatal mistake, but that doesn't protect it from the massive narrative dissonance where we have to take control of a situation where we don't even know what the game expects us to do. So unless you accidentally stumble upon the next prompt, you could be stuck here for a while. From a control perspective here is also where we discover the awkward mapping of the right control stick controlling both the camera and triggering the environmental prompts. After finishing the game this chapter also feels like it barely fits in Jodie's story. Since nothing seems to connect back with this chapter I am at a loss over the entire point of it. I suppose it introduces Ryan but we learn so little about him and he disappears for so long it barely matters.

 "So you want me to just trade in my car for a Jetta just because
you flunked out of every private school I ever sent you to?"

The Party is a rather infamous chapter. In an attempt to let her have a bit of a normal life, a 14-year old Jodie is attending a birthday party for the daughter of one of Nathan Dawkins' colleagues. While I didn't hate the chapter that much as it did give me a bit of room to mess around, it does have two major flaws that annoyed me. The first is that the teenagers act completely unnatural just for the sake of having a bad ending, and the second is the inevitability of that inconsequential bad ending.
Jodie is presented as shy and introverted, not helped by the fact that she doesn't actually know anyone at the party, but aside from a few bitchy comments from the other teenagers, they at least somewhat try to be nice to her. That all changes when, of all things, the birthday girl doesn't like Jodie's gift (a rare book of poems by Edgar Allan Poe). Suddenly all these kids, who are at the very least aware that Jodie has supernatural powers (and possibly even demonstrated them just a few moments earlier depending on player choice), decide to torment her and lock her up ... over a birthday gift. One girl gives birthday girl a thong, but somehow a book is offensive enough for Jodie to be mercilessly bullied, burned, called a slut and locked below the stairs.

This chapter stands rather disconnected from the rest of the narrative, so the fact that the only real choice we have is whether or not to take revenge on the teens with Aiden is disappointing. Here is where the developers could have stretched their legs in terms of having multiple paths in a self-contained story but instead the chapter simply has us wasting time interacting with the environment until the inevitable bad ending. Why not make it possible for the party to go well? Weirder still is that the player can choose to ignore Aiden entirely and not take revenge with him, meaning the chapter is not even particularly relevant in Jodie's recollection of having had to live with him.

Then came the chapter detailing Jodie's CIA training. One tutorial would explain that during action sequences, time will slow down and you will have to finish Jodie's moves by following her direction on screen by moving the right stick in that direction. Fair enough, I've played enough Karateka to prepare me for stuff like this. However it soon turns out the game wants to remain being overly cinematic even when a good sense of direction is vital for completing these segments properly, so the camera circles Jodie, objects or particles obscure her from view and her movements aren't always clear or straightforward to begin with. The result is that without actual guidance these action segments more often than not devolve into a pure guessing game.
Rather mind-blowing is that this chapter also includes a tutorial on cover shooting gameplay with stealth sections. Partially it feels odd because they will only really be relevant for one other chapter in the entire game, but primarily because Quantic Dream apparently thought it was a good idea to include gameplay that has been refined over the last ten years in actual shooter genres and include it in a clunky quick time event narrative game. This is a game where walking through a simple door takes several tries, and now it expects to hold up in any way compared to a cover shooter?

"Ryan is great"

The Dinner. Oh boy, The Dinner. Jodie invites Ryan Clayton to dinner at her new apartment to the annoyance of Aiden, who is suddenly very possessive of Jodie. As the player we then have to prepare for the date while Aiden does everything he can to sabotage it. It's decently fun to explore Jodie's apartment while getting ready and you have a fair amount of freedom to decide how the date is going to play out (minus a bit of emotional scarring carried over from earlier chapters). However there's a glaring flaw with the entire setup: we as the player have been given no reason at all to like Ryan. At the start of the chapter Jodie launches into an angry monologue to Aiden about how she's allowed to have a relationship with however she wants, how great Ryan is and how she thinks she is falling for him, but from our perspective the only information on Ryan is the previous chapter at an earlier point of Jodie's life where he forces her to abandon the only people she loves to join the CIA while being absolutely heartless about it. This being literally about five minutes ago makes it feel like Jodie did not really develop genuine affection for Ryan but rather that she's developed a case of Stockholm Syndrome where she's now declaring her feelings for an abuser.

Ryan literally 5 minutes earlier

Should we still remember his sparse appearances early in the game, we might remember him from The Embassy chapter I mentioned earlier where we could find him talking about how his CIA job forces him to have limited empathy so he wouldn't really care should Jodie be captured and tortured. So essentially we are now forced into a dating scenario where we are given very little motivation for it to go well outside of Jodie's insistence that Ryan is great. That disconnect between our feelings on Ryan and Jodie's feelings for Ryan while still being expected to help Jodie is immersion-breaking to say the least. Personally I tried to sabotage the date without making it too obvious, so I just dressed casually, ordered pizza and refused to kiss Ryan. (I was rewarded with a scene of Jodie breaking down crying, so go me...)

Ryan only becomes a little bit likable in the final few chapters of the game where he has sort of a redemption arc (after a chapter where he also becomes so much worse) but that only means we might gain (emphasis on might) a little respect for Ryan when it's already way too late for the chapters where developing that relationship actually matters. What's even worse is that a relationship with him is essentially unavoidable. So even if you do everything to turn him down at every opportunity, he will still be there declaring his love for Jodie and kissing her in the final chapter. Romance is also an aspect I feel Life is Strange does better because even just a kiss between romantic options requires the player to have at least worked in the direction of said romance. Chloe Price does not appreciate being ignored in favor of other characters. Meanwhile Jodie Holmes can't seem to meet a guy (if he's handsome) without getting an option to immediately kiss him.

Navajo had some strange implications in that the Navajo people were apparently performing magic rituals that summoned demonic Infraworld entities into our world, and in general it suffered from the same problems as the rest of the game (including one especially annoying action sequence that is also tied to a trophy), but from a narrative perspective the build-up made the mystery engaging, the developing relationship between Jodie and the family felt natural (aside from yet another opportunity to kiss a guy we've just met and who was being a dick to us the majority of the time), the characters themselves were mostly likable and the desert setting makes for a nice break from the rest of the game and was enhanced by a great soundtrack, so I would say I actually like the Navajo chapter and wish more chapters were like it. However it was also home to a handful of glaring flaws.

On the PlayStation 4 version at least, the chapter endings have these percentages that show the amount of players who took specific paths. It's here you often learn about possible "paths" that the game prior didn't give you a clue was even an option (I replayed the Navajo chapter twice because of it, although that specific spoiler choice should have been obvious in retrospect). One of the best examples of awkward design choices here is that apparently there was a bike hidden on the farm that we could repair, but which was evidently so out of the way that only 8% of people found it (I only did because the second time I knew to look out for it). That also wouldn't be that much of a problem, except at the end of the chapter you are given the bike anyway regardless of whether or not you fixed it (if not you get it because the brothers fixed it). It might seem like a small detail but this was one of the major times during my playthrough when I realized my choices really didn't matter, and that's probably also the reason why David Cage doesn't want players to replay his game more than once, because a second run brutally lifts the illusion that the game was giving you agency in the first place.
For trophy purposes I replayed the Hunted chapter where I was supposed to get captured and escape three times, so on the train section I ignored all button prompts and refused to do any of the action scenes and still Jodie was dodging objects, opening doors and fighting policemen effectively (although with a short red flash supposedly to indicate failure). Jodie ran two entire cars until finally there was the single button prompt that was apparently relevant and I got captured. Out of curiosity during a motorbike chase I purposely stopped and found out the police simply stop chasing you. These sequences made me realize that much of Beyond: Two Souls's runtime does the equivalent of handing you an unplugged controller so you can pretend you are playing a video game. It felt like Beyond resented my involvement at all.

Dating your superior officer while on a mission. That's fine.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Beyond: Two Souls is a would-be decent TV series or B movie that was forcefully pushed into the mold of a big budget video game. Everything considered, I can't say I truly hated the game because the performances of Ellen Page and William Dafoe are great (though Dafoe feels a bit misused) and go a long way to make otherwise cliche or awkward scenes enjoyable. The game is thus surprisingly a rather effective vehicle to push Ellen Page. The story is interesting enough to get the player moving forward, but as a video game it ends up a mess of questionable, dated or otherwise frustrating design choices. That frustration is only exacerbated as the developer apparently insists these questionable design choices are actually deliberate and supposedly aimed at moving game design forward. So with that in mind, I am inclined to skip Detroit: Become Human.

Split the Ice Apart - Frozen

I already talked quite a bit about Disney's Frozen (2013) in my Response to Stefan Molyneux's The Truth About Frozen but I feel this movie deserves some more elaboration outside the context of weird YouTube pseulosophers (if that's not a word, I'm claiming it) over-analyzing things they clearly don't understand just to ruin it for their daughters. As such, here are some of my thoughts on Disney's Frozen, primarily I'd like to dig into the cliche of True Love's Kiss around which the final act is centered.

There will be spoilers for Frozen (and some for older Disney animated movies).

Split The Ice Apart
Disney's Frozen

The story is about two sisters: princesses Anna and Elsa of Arendelle, the latter of whom was born with ice powers. After accidentally blasting her sister with ice, Elsa gets isolated until she learns how to properly control her powers and Anna's memories of Elsa's powers are wiped. Unfortunately Elsa's isolation and anxiety only causes her growing powers to become even more uncontrollable as she grows up. Then during her coronation as Queen of Arendelle, in front of her entire kingdom, she loses control and in her panic she accidentally freezes the entire kingdom, after which she exiles herself. Anna then takes it upon herself to go into the mountains to find her sister, repair the relationship that was broken for 13 years and find a way to unfreeze their kingdom.

First of all, I love the movie. I don't think it quite deserves its spot as the highest-grossing animated film of all time but I still think it's a great movie (although number 2 on the highest-grossing list is Minions so at least Frozen prevented worse). My main issues are that Anna, although a very fun character, lacks the appeal to make her iconic on the level of a Disney Princess as well as a number of questionable story decisions that were likely the result of having to rewrite the movie without Elsa in the villain role. There's also the trolls and especially Olaf that feel like they were added primarily to sell toys to kids (only for it to be the Elsa dolls that were consistently sold out). While it is certainly a good movie, I don't think it quite reaches the level of quality of the princess movies preceding it.

True Love's Kiss, The Cliche That Wasn't One

During the final act an accidental ice blast to Anna's heart is causing her to slowly freeze to death from the inside. Advice from the wise troll leader Pabbie reveals that an act of true love will thaw a frozen heart. Immediately another troll jumps in and assumes that it must be a true love's kiss, causing Kristoff to storm Anna back to Arendelle so she can get a kiss from Prince Hans. Ultimately Hans proves to be a deceptive manipulator who sees this situation as an opportunity to claim Arendelle for himself by letting Anna die and then ordering the execution of the 'traitor' Queen Elsa. The real act of true love then comes in the form of Anna sacrificing herself to protect her sister Elsa from Hans' sword. 

My problem with this entire scenario is that it feels incredibly forced and tries to subvert a cliche that isn't a cliche at all, at least not in the Disney Animated Canon. It's one thing to play on audience expectations, but the fact that they obviously twist Pabbie's words to force a scenario that the movie prior to this moment has already beaten down as Anna being incredibly naive just makes it a mess. Furthermore the trolls were just a minute ago trying to get their Kristoff hitched with a girl who was already engaged, evidently just for the sake of him getting hitched, but suddenly they start having overly romantic notions about true love? Why doesn't Pabbie interject to clarify his own advice anyway? He's right there! (To be fair Anna's condition suddenly worsens significantly while they're talking so urgency became a factor, but still)

It is the expectation that the troll's assumption is also the audience's assumption that, I feel, dates the movie horribly. It's an overly transparent attempt at subverting and thus falls flat. The thing with the True Love's Kiss cliche is ... that it really hasn't been a thing in ages at all. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), a princess under a sleeping curse is awoken when the prince she's in love with finally finds her and kisses her. However even there the curse specifies that it is Love's First Kiss, not True Love's Kiss, which is already a significantly lower barrier. A similar situation happens 21 years later in Sleeping Beauty (1959), where it is indeed specified that the kiss must be true love's kiss. And then ... what? In just a few years time we've had several Disney properties, such as Once Upon a Time (2011), Maleficent (2014) and Frozen (2013), struggling at subverting the cliche when the subversion itself is now a better represented cliche.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Let's run down the traditional Disney Princess movies where, according to expectation, the cliche could show up. At the start of the Disney Renaissance with The Little Mermaid (1989) the concept of a true love's kiss is already being more subtly subverted. Ariel requiring a true love's kiss from prince Eric is explicitly an unreasonable demand from the sea witch Ursula, with which she intends to trap Ariel as leverage over King Triton. In the end that kiss never happens. The Beast's curse in Beauty and the Beast (1991) is lifted because he and Belle simply got to know each other and fell in love; no kissing required (my personal interpretation is that by accepting his own death, he had truly set Belle free and thus proved he understood how to love. Also for your accusations of Stockholm syndrome, please go [here]). 

Princess and the Frog (2009) once again plays around with it, in that prince Naveen just requires a kiss from a princess as an unreasonable constraint by Doctor Facilier. When he kisses Tiana early in the movie, ostensibly his true love by the end of it, instead she is turned into a frog for not meeting the requirements. Then in Tangled/Rapunzel (2010) there is once again no magic kissing, instead the solution comes from residual healing magic still inside Rapunzel healing Flynn's wounds through her tears (okay that sounds weird out of context).
Cinderella (1950), Aladdin (1992), Pocahontas (1995), Mulan (1998) had no curses requiring kisses. In the periphery of these movies (the unofficial Disney Princesses), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), The Black Cauldron (1985), The Lion King (1994), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997) or Tarzan (1999) didn't have magic true love's kisses either.

So that puts the grand total of straight-up True Love's Kiss movies at ... two, if we're being generous. The last movie of which, and the only one that really qualifies at all, having been released well over 50 years ago. This is like "The Butler Did It" of modern fairy tales: It's only a cliche because people mistake it for being more prevalent than it really is. Disney movies have been subverting the cliche for 30 years and have done it way more subtly and effectively than Frozen did. Reverting all that and attempting to forcefully subvert a cliche that was barely relevant in the first place dates the story and makes it awkward to take seriously.

Queen Elsa, Unwilling Villain

During the early stages of the movie's production it was always the intention to make Elsa the actual villain of the movie. That changed when the crew started to really feel for her and realized that up until her transformation into the Snow Queen, she hadn't done anything wrong. Rewrites to accommodate Good Elsa is probably why certain plot elements from the second half feel so messy, but I feel the changes to Elsa herself do make her into a more compelling character than she would likely otherwise be. Throughout the entire movie there's still an undercurrent of the intention to make her a villain, but the fact that she then doesn't end up as one is actually touching.

The name 'Elsa' does not sound villainous like how 'Maleficent' sounds like a synonym for- or a misspelling of 'malevolent' (which is also why it was stupid to base an entire movie on how Maleficent wasn't just a tragic villain, but an actual hero who just had a really bad day that one time). Still, Elsa's name has a certain synesthetic sharpness to it (See The Bouba/Kiki Effect). This already differentiates her from the other Disney princesses, most of whom have names with more rolling r or l sounds. Consider the most similar name among the princesses: Ella, Cinderella's birth name in the live action adaption. 'Ella' rolls. 'Elsa' feels like there's a sudden stop in the middle. As such her name alone already makes her sound somewhat harsh.

The first 30 minutes of the movie leading up to Let It Go sets up the perfect environment for Elsa to eventually snap and put her into an anti-villainous role. Let It Go itself is the breaking point where she finally lets go of her good girl persona and embraces pure selfishness. However it is quickly revealed that the song was just Elsa lying to herself in a moment of ecstatic relief that she finally got to express herself through her powers. She wasn't actually descending into villainy at all. Despite having all the mental baggage to justify it, Elsa never crosses the line. The only time she ever comes close to crossing the line is in self defense against people who are actively attempting to kill her.

In the end it is what makes Elsa so engaging: it would be perfectly understandable for her to have gone evil, but her strong moral center prevents her from crossing that barrier. She is one of the most powerful heroes Disney has ever created, yet she evokes sympathy by also visibly suffering from anxiety and depression over what her powers have put her through and what they could potentially do to others. In that sense you could say she's an even more emotionally-charged version of the Genie from Aladdin, who despite his phenomenal, cosmic powers only wanted to be free (itty-bitty living space).

It also makes Elsa a foil for Rapunzel. Both characters have incredible powers, but they differ in that Rapunzel has beneficial healing magic that requires effort to bring out while Elsa has (until she learns control) destructive ice powers that she's unable to restrain. They were both locked away and have significant anxieties regarding their powers, but Rapunzel was taught to be scared of people who would abuse her gift by an abusive adoptive mother while Elsa is afraid to hurt her loving family. In personality Rapunzel is outgoing while Elsa is restrained, which translates into Rapunzel wanting to escape her tower but being afraid to go while Elsa voluntarily exiles herself into her ice palace. Both characters are primarily imprisoned by their anxieties and insecurities. Frozen and Tangled are thus exercises in how a character archetype (the classic Disney Princess) would grow if you add a specific power into their development.

Crossover Theories

Movies in the Disney Animated Canon tend to have very little overlap between each other. Still many of the movies have cameos or references that can reasonably link some of them together, although often just as a joke (there being a Beast toy in the Sultan's collection probably doesn't mean Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast are related). For example, there's a scene in The Hunchback of Notre Dame where Belle is visible in a shot of Paris. Since both movies are set in France, there's the possibility that Belle and her father lived in Paris until they had to flee Frollo burning Paris in his search for Esmeralda, ending up in the little town near Beast's castle.

Belle in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

Possible the most obvious example of crossovers happens in the episode Hercules and the Arabian Night of Disney's Hercules: The Animated Series (1998). Jafar, having been defeated and killed in The Return of Jafar (1994), ends up in the Underworld and meets up with Hades. First they make a bet that they can get rid of their rival's arch enemy, which they both fail to do. Ultimately they devise a plan where they attempt to get rid of their respective hero problems by setting Hercules up to fight Aladdin, revealing that at least the adult section of the Hercules (1997) movie takes place long after Aladdin and the King of Thieves (1996) has already concluded.

For Frozen there's a fan theory that it is linked with both Tangled (2010) and The Little Mermaid (1989). Linked with Tangled because Rapunzel and Flynn Rider have an actual cameo when the gates are opened near the start of the movie and with The Little Mermaid because the ship Ariel investigates at the start of her movie might be the sunken ship of the king and queen of Arendelle. Arendelle is Norwegian-inspired while Eric's castle would be on the shores of Disney's equivalent of Denmark, so there's definitely some geographic proximity to back that argument (I've also heard an extension where it is theorized the king and queen survived the sinking and ended up becoming Tarzan's parents, but that sounds a bit too far out there).

Top: Frozen (2013)
Bottom: The Little Mermaid (1989)

So if we're to link it all up, Rapunzel and Elsa would be roughly the same age, with Rapunzel likely being older depending on how long after her eighteenth birthday she and Flynn got married. Tangled would take place first with the Rapunzel's marriage (which Anna and Elsa's parents were allegedly on their way to) being the indirect cause of Elsa's parents being lost at sea, setting up the events of Frozen three years later. Then an indeterminate amount of time later the royal family's sunken ship gets looted by an inquisitive mermaid at the start of The Little Mermaid.

I mean it's not exactly some great insight since it's just a fan theory but it is kind of cool I can watch three of my favorite Disney Princess movies as sort of a pseudo-trilogy. I would call it Disney's Scandinavia Trilogy except Tangled's Corona being in either Germany or Poland might make that a bit of a geographic stretch.

WE WILL NOT SPEAK OF THIS
HELP ME

A Response to The Truth About Maleficent

Once again I indulged myself into another one of Stefan Molyneux' 'The Truth About' series in regards to the movie Maleficent because apparently people think my bewilderment on Twitter about these videos is funny. Long story short: this man should not be allowed near movies because holy crap. In The Truth About Frozen there's an obvious undercurrent of his disdain for these women, in The Truth About Maleficent he goes into outright rape apologia and takes personal jabs at Angelina Jolie. Hence, I'm less patient with him than last time.

Note that this movie has a main character named Stefan, so to differentiate him from the maker of this video I will refer to this character as "King Stefan" or variations thereof and I will refer to Stefan Molyneux mostly as "Molyneux".

And of course, there will be spoilers for Maleficent.

The Spindle of a Spinning Wheel
Or A Response to Stefan Molyneux' The Truth About Maleficent

Full text [Here]

1. Introduction

Whereas I think Frozen is a good movie that has flaws, I think Maleficent is a bad movie with enjoyable aspects. It's obvious Angelina Jolie (Maleficent) and Sam Riley (Diaval) had fun with the roles and it absolutely shows. Their scenes are often delightful. Where it turns me off is that, rather than just turning Maleficent into a more complex character with deeper motivations than mere pettiness, it turns her into an outright hero who was just having a particularly bad day when she cursed princess Aurora. It was really King Stefan, a benevolent character in the original movie, who is now the true villain. Here we have the most iconic villain in the Disney animated canon (depending on where you stand with Fantasia's Chernabog) who even has a name that sounds like an alternative spelling of "malevolent", but somehow she was actually good all along. Those parents must have really hated their child when they named her.
In the end, Maleficent is not a more modernized remake of Sleeping Beauty. It's a completely different story that only really shares its basic characters and the cursing scene with its original incarnation. Then the movie ends by confirming this is the real story because the narrator is revealed to have been Aurora: a character not born for roughly half the movie, and asleep for a portion of the latter half.

After having done Frozen, it was interesting to me how Molyneux would react to Maleficent. As I said last time: Stefan dislikes representations of the state and he disproportionately blames female characters for slights he either imagines or unfairly subscribes to them. Whereas in Frozen those two aspects were centralized into a single person, namely Queen Elsa of Arendelle, here we have a situation where it's a woman, Maleficent, against a kingdom.
Unsurprisingly, he still shifts blame primarily to the female characters, but this time he somehow almost completely absolves the male characters. Because when a male villain does something despicable, it's either not actually despicable, or it's the writers inserting "[0:52] Nazi-levels of anti-male propaganda". Yes, really.

He then ends it by chastising women for demonizing men, including a graphic of how children are harmed when there's no father figure present in the life of a child. This might all be true in a real life context, but it's once again Molyneux being offended because he's reading his own conspiracy theories into a Disney fairy tale movie that happens to be about a man that grievously harmed a woman. Yes, both kings in the movie are shown to be overly ambitious monsters, but just like in Frozen, it is not maleness that is vilified, but reckless ambition. By contrast Frozen's Kristoff might be anti-social and cynical about people, but he's also a hard worker who understands sacrifice and has a deep moral center. He might not have a beard but he's nonetheless manly. Diaval in Maleficent leans closer to a pretty boy stereotype thanks to being portrayed by Sam Riley and his raven features giving him more of a goth look, but he's nevertheless a man with a deep moral center. Apparently it's the beard that's the defining characteristic of being male.

2. Oh, Magic is no Longer Madness

Oddly missing in this video is Molyneux' previous assertion that all magic in all of fiction is always a metaphor for madness. This despite the fact that the movie is about a young boy who enters a magic kingdom where mankind isn't allowed to go, befriends a fairy who he then betrays, and later actually goes completely mad with paranoia attempting to kill that fairy who threatens his power.
From this lens where magic is always madness, it can thus be argued that Maleficent herself is not real, but merely a metaphor for King Stefan's growing insanity and paranoia as he gains and then tries to protect his political power, projected onto an external tormentor. Not really of course, it's just telling that Molyneux foregoes his own framework fully because otherwise he couldn't be blaming women for being everything wrong with the world.
Last time when Queen Elsa's accidental ice powers got out of control and she exiled herself to keep her subjects safe, Molyneux deemed her a mad queen who would subject the kingdom to tyranny. When King Stefan actually does go insane for 16 years and redirects all his kingdom's wealth into a war with a woman he himself mutilated for personal gain ... well, it's her fault because she demanded he give back a gemstone he stole as a child.

The further absence of this argument is interesting in that there is a dichotomy of good and evil (mad) magic in the movie itself. When Maleficent is using benevolent magic, such as when healing trees, her magic is a golden yellow. When she's using malevolent magic, most notably when she casts the curse, it's green. The difference between the two is most clear when Maleficent tries and fails to undo her own curse before it comes to pass. The scene shows her benevolent magic clashing with the malevolent curse. Hence the color of her magic is a rather convenient method of telling what state of mind Maleficent is in. Humorously enough the color of her magic is also golden-yellow when she's merely playing pranks on the three fairies.

Maleficent, when in a state of destructive anti-societal anger, or in other words 'mad', is conveniently color coded green. The fact that there's a difference between the two types of magic is however evidence that magic is not always and forever a metaphor for madness, as one type is clearly based around benevolence and healing.

3. Protecting Your Property is Theft

[1:23] This interaction is completely insane – and immoral. A starving boy picks up an unowned gem so that he can eat, we assume, and the little witch takes it – just to throw it away. She does not offer him food, or gold, or anything else - she just takes away his treasure and trashes it. Can you imagine meeting a starving, orphaned child who is about to eat a banana, ripping that banana out of his hands, and grinding it underfoot? [24:24] However, it seems to have crossed no one’s mind but mine that Maleficent did the boy an enormous wrong, and sent him down a very dark path through her imperious theft. 

The future King Stefan enters a land his kingdom is explicitly at war with, only to rob its precious stones. It's never mentioned that he's starving, only that he's poor and intends to move up in the world, which he does in spite of not having stolen the gem. However Maleficent is somehow in the wrong because she didn't allow an invader to steal from her land and returned the gem to where it came from. Not to mention young King Stefan got a powerful sorceress as his best friend out of the deal. A relationship which he then squanders for personal gain until he once again needs her.

The very fact that he stole a gem and not food shows in the narrative sense that it was greed, not hunger, that inspired him to steal. Compare to the movie Aladdin (1992) where the titular character steals a loaf of bread, but then gives it to other hungry children in spite of his own needs. This shows Aladdin is a moral character despite being a thief who puts the needs of others before his own and only steals what he needs to survive. By contrast King Stefan already starts out in a more gray area because he sought riches in a place he wasn't even supposed to go. Maleficent only "throws the gem away" in the sense that there's no visible treasury the boy took it from because this is fairyland.

The fact that it crossed no one's mind but Molyneux' that this is an enormous wrong on Maleficent's part is that it's an insane conclusion to begin with. Once again Molyneux places disproportionate blame on women for slights only he imagines.

[1:55] Also, I don’t know if you have been to a mall lately, but if I recall rightly, women don’t seem to be particularly partial to taking expensive gems, and throwing them in a river. It is women who are responsible for the rape of the earth called diamond, mineral and gold-mining – not men. Angelina Jolie had a quarter of a million dollar engagement ring made for her, for a year, by Brad Pitt.

What amazes me about this bit is that it's so obviously a lie just to take another jab at women in general and Angelina Jolie in particular. It's not like we're mining the Earth exclusively to provide women with jewelry. What are all your fancy electronics made of? If you haven't upgraded to electric yet, where does the fuel in your car come from? 80 percent of mined diamonds are unsuitable for jewelry and is instead used industrially anyway. Only half of newly produced gold is put into jewelry. What a brazen lie or profound ignorance to pretend we only maintain the mining industry to provide women with precious jewelry.

However it seems Molyneux can't decide which one is the moral position here. Was King Stefan raping the Earth by taking the gem or was Maleficent doing the boy an enormous wrong for taking the gem back? Are we supposed to show women how they should react 'morally' or are we supposed to show them as they really are according to Molyneux? What exactly are we supposed to take away from his contradictory statements? He just places contradictory standards upon fictional women which they can never meet.

4. Being Raped is the Woman's Fault

[10:37] Taking advantage of their former friendship, Stefan drugs Maleficent, but finds he cannot bring himself to kill her, and so instead burns off her wings with iron – a substance deadly to fairies – and returns them to the king as proof of his victory. It is essential to remember that, on the King’s orders, someone from the castle is going to kill Maleficent – Stefan in fact actually saves her life by only taking her wings.

Molyneux takes it as a given that someone is definitely going to kill Maleficent, a powerful sorceress and protector of a magic kingdom who was just seen demolishing the king's invading army with ease. The fact that the future King Stefan was the only person Maleficent would even allow near the Moors to betray her trust in the first place is apparently an irrelevance. No, she should be grateful he merely drugged and mutilated her for his own benefit.

It's a running trend that when Molyneux calls something a "jaw-dropping sequence" or something similar, that usually means he's working overtime misinterpreting the events that are happening on the screen to fit his biases. So better prepare yourselves because we're now truly going off the deep end.

[11:04] Next comes the most important moral dichotomy in the movie. Immediately after Stefan effectively saves Maleficent’s life by taking her wings, Maleficent comes across a crow in a net about to be beaten to death by a farmer, who is tired of the crow eating his seeds. Maleficent turns him into a man – thus taking his wings!  [11:40] Maleficent replies, “Would you rather I let them beat you to death?”. Diaval mournfully regards his missing wings, and then replies, “I’m not certain.” Maleficent says scornfully, “Stop complaining! I saved your life!” Diaval lowers his eyes and murmurs, “Forgive me… In return for saving my life, I am your servant.” I am so susceptible to propaganda that I did not even notice this until watching the movie for the second time, but it is truly a jaw-dropping sequence.

These two events are apparently equal to Molyneux:
1. An overly-ambitious man betrays the trust of the woman who loves him by drugging her and painfully burning off her wings, and visibly contemplated killing her outright, forcing her to have to relearn how to walk because she no longer carries her wings as ballast.
2. A woman saves a raven from death by turning him into an intelligent shapeshifter.

The next line after Diaval says "I am your servant. Whatever you need." is "Wings, I need you to be my wings". So Maleficent did not in fact take his wings, as made abundantly clear by the one line Molyneux omitted from his reproduction of the script. She needed him to be her wings. As shown on screen when 4 seconds later he transforms back into a raven and flies off. How is this in any way, shape or form supposed to be a moral equivalent? What was done to Maleficent was clearly an act of mutilation, whereas what was done to Diaval was an act of empowerment, which is also why she told him to stop complaining: he didn't lose anything in the first place!

[14:52] Watching the movie, I understood that Maleficent’s “wings” were a metaphor for her breasts, and watching Angelina Jolie – who recently underwent a double mastectomy – awaken from a drugged sleep and howl in agony at the surgical removal of her “wings" made me pretty uncomfortable. I prefer a bit more acting in my movies.

Seriously, what is wrong with this guy? Not only is he making up once again what is a metaphor for what, but he's using it as a personal attack on Angelina Jolie for having underwent a preventative medical procedure. What. The. Hell! It doesn't even make sense as the story would have certainly been written long before Jolie underwent the procedure in 2013. Even if Jolie brought some of those emotions to the forefront during these scenes, why in the world would Stefan then take a jab at her for that? She's still acting! They didn't film her waking up from a mastectomy and then CGI'd a fairy tale landscape around her! God.

At the end of the video, he does confirm that it's an 'interpretation' that the mutilation scene is analogous to rape, however not only does he fail to mention that this was actually the intention of the scene by the filmmakers themselves and not just an interpretation, he also dismisses it.

[23:31] I have some problems with this interpretation – not least of which is that Stefan’s supposed rape is considered a crime, but not one commentator has mentioned anything about Maleficent’s theft of Stefan’s gem, which really set the whole story in motion. If the young Maleficent had not stolen the boy’s gem, he would never have had to go and work in the Castle, and never would have been infected with the desire to become King, and therefore would never have cut off her wings.

In other words ... Maleficent's rape was justified. Young King Stefan trespasses into a place where he's not supposed to be, steals a gem that doesn't belong to him and gets caught by Maleficent, who demands he gives it back. To Molyneux this somehow means she stole the gem and that she's now fair game to be raped. Absolutely incredible.

He's not even correct that this event is the reason why the future King Stefan has to go work in the castle. His intentions were to get there from the start. We know this because he tells Maleficent when they first meet. His greed was always there, it was just more subdued in his childhood.

5. Metaphors are a Metaphor for Metaphors.

[15:42] If we understand that Maleficent is the King’s mistress who gives birth to a child, the rest of the movie makes a whole lot more sense.

And this is why I feel this man is unfit to analyse media of this kind. He's absolutely incapable of interpreting the events on screen and instead goes into rewriting the script under the guise of explaining "the truth" so that he can spin his moral outrage into it later. Somehow the child of the king and queen is actually the bastard backup child of the king and Maleficent in case the queen proves infertile ... which she isn't because she just gave birth to this very child. Evidently Molyneux is petty enough to use the character Maleficent to mock Angelina Jolie for having a mastectomy but the idea that she could love children she didn't give birth to is too unbelievable.

That's about all I can take from this madness, however there's one last bit I want to include to show just how far he takes all this made-up nonsense.

[18:18] Historically, a spinning wheel was a dowry present for a woman getting married, so this curse is basically for Aurora to die giving birth to a child when she is 16. ("Prick" is slang for “penis,” of course; a finger is a metaphor for a penis, which enters the woman on her wedding night and makes her bleed.) [18:57] So the curse means a continuation of the sexual disasters and dysfunctions of the bloodline – Aurora will get pregnant, just as Maleficent got pregnant, and these disasters will just repeat, over and over again, because Aurora will never wake up to reality, to the truth, which is withheld from her.

Pure. Unadulterated. Fan fiction. If a woman weighs as much as a duck, she's made of wood and therefore a witch: a woman who was pregnant but never actually was pregnant curses a child who was born from a woman who couldn't get pregnant to die in childbirth while also never having been pregnant because the only man she ever knew growing up was a raven who lost his wings because of Maleficent despite being shown flying with his wings intact four seconds later. This is the truth about Maleficent and this is why women hate men because they grow up without father figures. Or something.

6. Conclusion

Just like last time there's a lot more to cover, but I feel I've hit on most of his basic points where it actually interjects with the movie. What I didn't cover is mostly a repeat of the same things he chastised Frozen for (such as Maleficent's supposed unearned expertise in magic, despite the film opening on her practicing it), manosphere talk regarding Maleficent's beta male tree guards and how Maleficent's value lies in how sexually attractive she is or isn't.

In the end this "philosophical review" is just another vehicle for Stefan Molyneux to project his own damage onto a movie. Unlike his review of Frozen however, this time he just completely lets his disdain for women snowball into personally attacking even the main actress. He doesn't actually unpack any truths, he's just feeding the portion of his audience that throws hissy fits on Twitter when a movie has a female protagonist using bile wrapped in pseudo-intellectual nonsense and an intentional misreading of the movie's scenes.

While I disagree with the direction they took with this movie, at its core Maleficent is a movie about an abused person who becomes an abuser herself. Certainly the filmmakers lacked the spine to then take the story to where it was supposed to go (an actual re-imagining of Sleeping Beauty), but that doesn't exactly make it a Nazi-level anti-male conspiracy just because the villain had a beard.



A Note on Spelling:
Last time someone asked me if spelling it "Molyneux'" (apostrophe, no s) rather than "Molyneux's" (apostrophe, with s) was a deliberate choice. My reason for doing so is that I would pronounce it "Molyneus", rather than "Molyneuxes".

Links & References

Stefan Molyneux - The Truth About Maleficent
http://freedomain.blogspot.be/2014/06/the-truth-about-maleficent.html

Images from
- Maleficent (2014)

A Response to The Truth About Frozen

I have my own problems with Frozen which I will delve deeper into someday (it boils down to that it tries to be clever by forcefully subverting cliches that haven't been cliches in Disney movies since the 1950's, and thus ironically dating the movie to that time period). However Stefan Molyneux' The Truth About Frozen struck me as both so far off the ball and oddly popular enough that I feel compelled to respond to it. Now I don't have any personal problems with Stefan Molyneux, I never met or talked to the gentleman, his style of presentation is also rather entertaining despite it just being him in front of a blank wall, but some of his views stand in such stark opposition to my own that some of my responses will regretfully come off as being less than polite. I will endeavor my best not to misrepresent his arguments, but I will only reproduce his words here when I feel they are emblematic of his arguments rather than post his entire script (that would be too long anyway) and I will attempt to summarize his points otherwise. I will also not talk about everything he talks about, as that would make this response a massive project. Still, it's going to be a long one because his video is somehow over an hour long and he packs in a lot of weirdness.

And of course, there will be spoilers for Frozen.

I've Started Talking to the Pictures on the Walls
Or A Response to Stefan Molyneux' The Truth About Frozen

Full text [Here]

1. Introduction

Literary analysis is almost inherently peppered with the speaker's personal biases because the process of analysis usually involves placing the work into a larger context and thus mirroring it to the speaker's experience. I do this myself and am quite open about the fact that my intention is to put a more positive spin on stories in the cultural zeitgeist as I believe that to be a way forwards (although without making up that this is how I see the particular work). As such it is perfectly understandable that Molyneux' analysis contains his personal biases, however I feel this video steers so far into Molyneux' biases, away from the text of the movie itself, that I hardly feel it is appropriate for it to have the title "The Truth About Frozen". In the end his video isn't about Frozen, it's about Stefan Molyneux. The movie is merely a mirror upon which he reflects his anti-state, anti-woman and kinda anti-family-of-origins values.

Stefan Molyneux' entire analysis can be boiled down to these points: he hates the royal family of Arendelle because they represent the state, he disproportionately blames the female characters for slights he either imagines or unfairly subscribes to them and he presents the same tired criticisms regarding the lack of realism in a Disney animated feature. Furthermore he buries the text of the movie beneath a nonsensical reading where magic is really just code for madness. His argumentation style is like a YouTube version of Alan Wake's Dark Presence, in that he fills up holes in world building (as in, the elements that often aren't necessary for the story to work anyway) with his own interpretations, which he then uses as a springboard for his political agenda.

If it's not explicitly explained in the movie, he'll make something up. If it is explicitly explained in the movie, it doesn't matter because it's a metaphor for something else anyway. As such his movie analysis is little more than him taking a Rorschach test in public.

2. Magic as a Metaphor for Madness / Magic isn't real

A running theme throughout Stefan Molyneux's analysis is his assertion that magic in all of fiction, from Harry Potter to the Force in Star Wars, is merely a metaphor for madness. He then rejects the events and explanations on the screen and instead applies his own rationalization to the events, regardless of whether or not they make sense, they then become further evidence for it being due to "madness". It is in fact a totalizing system which allows him to demean the characters and ignore the actual messages and instead insert his own.

 [2:15] Magic by definition is irrational, and thus cannot exist in the objective, empirical universe. Therefore it must exist within the mind, which unlike reality is capable of error, delusion, fantasy and superstition.  [3:25] Magic in stories is always and forever a metaphor for madness.

He goes on about how Elsa doesn't actually have ice powers, but her hurting Anna is in fact a metaphor for abuse. Elsa's madness being the result of having been brought up in a dull environment with an abusive father. The rationale being that because there is no magic in the author's world, that means there's no magic in the fictional world and thus this is all metaphor.
To be sure, Elsa's struggle with her ice powers can be metaphorical for a lot of things. After all her life is made a living hell because she is forced to deny an intrinsic part of herself, then when she finally gets to express herself fully (the Let It Go sequence) she overindulges regardless and clueless of what it does to anyone else, ultimately guilt-catapulting her back to the denial phase. Take your pick of a personal secret, Elsa's ice magic is probably applicable as a metaphor. There is thus indeed a framework based in reality upon which Frozen's fantastical story can be built.

However Stefan continues the video insisting the events on screen are merely our lying eyes telling the story through Elsa's delusions, where she was driven insane by a dull environment which escalated and eventually caused her to murder her parents and rationalize it with a storm at sea. Her absence at the funeral being evidence she might have been under suspicion.
I mean ... that might be a good surprise twist for a movie, but this is still Disney's Frozen, not Fight Club or Sucker Punch. It's not even Alice in Wonderland. On some level you have to stop forcefully rejecting the willing suspense of disbelief and accept that within the text of the movie, there's a kingdom called Arendelle where the queen was born with ice powers or else you're just making stuff up.

The assertion that magic, always and forever, is a metaphoric stand-in for madness might superficially look like a compelling lens to analyze media with, but in reality it doesn't hold much water. It is merely creative interpretation that at first glance might resemble profound insight, but in the end is meaningless. Similar to how the Pokémon anime series has been interpreted as Ash's coma fantasy: it's a fun thought experiment, but it's not profound insight and actually hinders the critic in engaging with the text. It is, to steal a phrase, not an argument. As is the case with the Truth About Frozen.

Because I watched Stefan's The Truth About Frozen, YouTube helpfully linked me to another relevant video of his: Harry Potter, Star Wars and the Violent Fantasies of Crushed Souls. In this video he reads a post he came across that interpreted the Harry Potter franchise as a metaphor for a child being carted off to an insane asylum, which he called a 'brilliant theory' and which in turn I suspect gave him the idea that all stories about magic are metaphors for madness.
Again, where this idea fails is that it doesn't actually engage with the text of the movie. Instead it starts from a conclusion (magic = madness) and then tries to find facts in the text to support it, which of course will be found because magic is being used, thus allowing the critic to bypass the actual events on screen.

As an example to how it doesn't make sense:

[27:02] When the merchant complains that Elsa tried to kill him, Hans replies 'You slipped on ice'. This indicates that Hans did not see the ice magic. Another example of its internal nature.

Okay, but then how come there was ice at all when it was a warm summer's day in July? Was the Duke of Weselton (not a merchant, a duke) also mad for having seen the ice magic? He explicitly refers to her sorcery and it being 'her' ice after all. Clearly the answer is that Hans is merely trying to endear himself to Anna by downplaying the situation with Elsa. He's not actually the beacon of sanity that can see through the madness.

3. Character Assessments and Stefan Molyneux's Anti-Woman Bias

Before I start this bit, I have to mention that Stefan Molyneux often proclaims that he believes it is sexism not to hold men and women to the same standards, which sounds like a reasonable position. In practice however Stefan has a tendency to shift blame for a large amount of things to women exclusively. It's one of his more well known positions for example that he believes you can rid the world of almost all evil if people could just be nice to babies for five years straight. Which he then elaborates that child-raising is an industry ran by women. Furthermore male jerks exist because women keep having babies with them at the expense of better men. Also he blames women for being vain as they base their worth on their looks, rather than personality or expertise. Little mention of men's responsibility in furthering any of those scenarios however, it's just women that all need to get together and fix their issues collectively. This philosophy to my estimation, which also seeps into his criticism here, makes Stefan's analysis fundamentally anti-woman. The only times he'll chastise a male character is when Stefan can use him as a proxy to demean the state (or kingdom).

At its core, Frozen is a movie about two deeply broken women who after years of loneliness have to mend their equally broken relationship. As such it's a rather dark psychological story. However every time Stefan attempts to analyze the place these women mentally occupy, he instead comes to a conclusion that runs counter to the evidence on screen and he'll demean these characters because they do not adhere to his worldview (even when ... they do). Even the minor character of Anna and Elsa's mother is not safe from his scorn.

[9:47] As usual, Elsa's mother nods in a scared, stupid, sheepish way as her husband proceeds to outline his plans to do exactly the opposite of what the healer he respects recommends. She has no voice, she married the ultimate alpha male, and so cannot contradict or instruct him, because there is no one for her to trade up to. [...] Her natural hypergamy - the female desire to "mate up" - has tragic consequences for her youngest daughter Anna, who almost gets murdered pursuing the same estrogen-fuelled ambitions.

To be sure, he places plenty of blame on the king, not because of his well-intentioned worry for his daughter however. Rather, according to Molyneux, his mistake was due to being afraid of his witch-daughter losing him his political power. So there's that anti-state thing. If it wasn't for his being a powerful politician, presumably he would have made the right choice in raising his daughter. However in the end even the king's misguided plan to help his daughter Elsa eventually gets blamed on a character who has exactly three words and a contraction worth of dialog in the entire movie. Here we have a character who essentially exists as visual padding and to provide a voice cameo for co-director Jennifer Lee, yet Stefan can't help but to put her in a manospherian context of alpha males and hypergamy.

Furthermore if we go by the explanation in Once Upon A Time Season 4 Episode 7 (which we probably shouldn't take seriously as even the show itself runs on the premise that it isn't canon with its source movies), the queen was understandably wary of her daughter's powers because she had already seen them and their disastrous results before: in her own sister, Elsa's aunt, the original Snow Queen Ingrid. Again, this isn't a canon explanation, but it shows a possible reason why the queen would "stupidly, sheepishly" nod along with her husband's plan out of a place of personal agency rather than us having to impose hypergamy on a minor character in a Disney movie.

Elsa's aunt (Snow Queen Ingrid) and mother.

[15:43] Lonely Anna makes her sudden reappearance, alarmingly none the worse for wear after a childhood of crushing isolation and rejection, an imprisoned sister who nearly killed her, and the deaths of both parents. 'What horrors? There might be a pretty boy at the DANCE!'

It seems rather odd to claim the Sandwich Princess grew up fine despite childhood trauma when she's so starved for human contact, she intends to marry the first person she literally bumps into. She's ridiculously naive and outrageously socially awkward despite her overly extroverted nature. Just take a moment to relisten to Love is an Open Door with Hans' motives in mind. Suddenly it becomes a villain song about Hans' duplicity while he's also desperately struggling to keep up with Anna's random mind. This together with her completely reckless actions later reveal her to have remained into a childlike innocence into adulthood that she must now overcome through the trials and tribulations that result from her sister's outburst. I don't know how you can watch the movie and come away with the idea that Anna was just fine.

[17:39] When the sisters greet each other for the first time in over a decade, they exchange vapid nothings about how warm it is, how much fun they are having, how pretty each other is, and how much they like chocolate. Dear lord, are they adult women or mentally challenged trivia addicts? 

See, this is where his bias overrides even his sense of analyzing the movie from an overhead realistic viewpoint. Here we have two girls separated for 13 years, one believing the other hates her, the other scared of accidentally committing murder, and both of them having been cut off from society in general, yet Stefan doesn't recognize how this could have resulted in severe social awkwardness between the two. The core story is about two sisters reconnecting after years of separation but he complains when it doesn't happen instantly. Even worse, he denies the sisters having endured psychological hardship (aside from 'the madness') even while he's talking about their obvious psychological scars.

[17:20] The late king did nothing to prepare his daughters for being in charge of a kingdom. There's no evidence of any education, books, parental conversation, the imparting of wisdom and justice and magnanimity in statecraft. This is noticeable only in its absence.

This bit caught me off guard because Elsa's obvious education was something I picked up on during my first viewing. During the Let It Go sequence we see Elsa growing in power as she very rapidly learns to understand how her powers work. When she's creating her ice palace however she suddenly starts singing about fractals, meaning the flawless ice marvel isn't just the result of her magic, but also of her aptitude in mathematics, particularly geometry. This is also why her more natural creations such as Olaf, Marshmallow or her ice statues are very simplistic by comparison: she's not trained as an artist, she's trained as a mathematician. Which is confirmed in the book A Sister More Like Me, where Elsa is also seen surrounded by several books and clearly taking joy in her education.

And I'd have loved to have a friend who knew geometry-
I would have, if I could have had a sister more like me.

As for Anna, well she recognized a painting as being one of Joan of Arc (though not a historically accurate one) and seems to really enjoy spending time in the art room. Possibly due to her craving for human contact she has substituted art for people. Hence she has likely gained an appreciation for the arts. Furthermore one of the rooms Anna plays in as a small child is the library and Elsa can be seen practicing keeping "the madness" with the [23:17] penis-and-testicle ball and rod for her coronation in front of several giant bookshelves, so there definitely were books. In fact at the start of the movie the king searches for the map to the trolls on a bookshelf.

[18:00] The grim political reality is that neither of these highly unstable women are even remotely fit to rule the kingdom. They show zero interest in economics, politics, education, literacy, the arts, or even the toiling masses around them that keep them in heels and hair clips.

Continuing from above, and frankly I just put this in here because it reveals Molyneux' disdain for these women. The only bits of Anna and Elsa's childhood we are shown are directly related to their relationship. None of it is focused on how they actually grew up. So little in fact that it's easy to forget (as Stefan apparently did) that there was still a skeleton crew of servants around Anna and Elsa, so they wouldn't have been entirely isolated even after their parents died (the main servants even have names: Kai and Gerda, after the protagonists of the Hans Christian Andersen tale). What I mean is, he has no basis for any of these claims. He's just complaining this musical about the bond between two estranged sisters isn't actually about statesmanship or education.

The "merchant"

[23:58] When a merchant - i.e. a man who actually works for a living - bows while asking Elsa to dance, the two sisters giggle at him when his toupee flops over. This lofty contempt for and indifference to anyone who works is offensive, but is not noted in the movie because the two girls are so very very pretty.

As I mentioned earlier, the 'merchant' Stefan refers to is actually the Duke of Weselton, which is repeated so often in the movie that I don't understand how Stefan could have missed it even though he took the time to dissect the lyrics of several of the songs line by line. This is a man whose onscreen introduction has him plotting to exploit Arendelle for riches and later intends to have queen Elsa murdered. He's intentionally portrayed as a loathsome villain so he can serve as a red herring for the final act.
In the scene Molyneux describes, he is mocked by the servant Kai who introduces him to queen Elsa as the "Duke of Weaseltown". However once again Stefan displaces his scorn to the women on the scene, who let out a light embarrassed giggle when the Duke's hairpiece suddenly flops over. Their crime being caught off guard by this fussy royal.

[10:30] There are certainly overtones of lesbianism in the story. As a man says about Elsa's sexual availability: no one was getting anywhere with her.

Of course no one was getting anywhere with Elsa. She believed she was an immediate danger to everyone and had to be kept away. Unlike Anna she simply wasn't open to become either physically or emotionally close with anyone. The only hint of lesbianism is one the viewer imposes. Thankfully Stefan himself clarifies that Elsa being closed off could stand for a great many other stigmatized characteristics ([11:20] religious skepticism, scientific advancement, forbidden love of every kind, creativity among dull people, existential boredom, child abuse, contempt for small talk). It's just odd he would include the certain overtones of lesbianism when he himself refutes it. There are no overtones of lesbianism as Elsa has no love interest.

[41:18] It is a horrible form of sexism to pretend to women that they can be just as good as an experienced man without any experience at all - it discourages them from taking the necessary steps to work hard to achieve excellence, condemning them to lives of mediocrity; useless youthful sexual power followed by decaying middle-age resentment.

He makes this statement following two observations: the first is a goofy chase scene where Anna and Kristoff fight off wolves, and the second is Elsa rapidly learning to control her powers when she can finally let loose.
His description of Anna fighting off the wolves is false to begin with. It is Kristoff who first notices the wolves while Anna is clueless to them. It is not Kristoff who falls of the sled while Anna maintains her balance, Kristoff was forcefully dragged out by an attacking wolf. Both her hits on the wolves are clearly presented as being accidental for the sake of comedy, because it is funny when an obviously untrained person shows surprising or accidental aptitude. Contrast to Flynn Rider taking out an entire unit of (hopefully) trained guards by blindly swinging a frying pan in Tangled and then losing to a sword-wielding horse.

"You should know that this is the strangest thing I've ever done"

[40:13] Why on earth would they not understand how insulting and limiting it is to tell women they can become experts without working?"

See the only actual 'expertise' that was shown on screen was Elsa using magic, which she didn't even learn to control properly until the very end of the movie (I also don't remember Genie Jafar getting much of a training montage before he started juggling planets). Anna just showed off some reckless dumb luck for the sake of comedy, which is sandwiched between sequences where she shows off a complete lack of expertise also for the sake of comedy. Yet Stefan gets mad because there's no arbitrary training montage in this movie that's not about either of the sisters gaining expertise anyway (aside from figuring out the off switch on Elsa's ice power).

He complains about the lack of such training sequences, with few exceptions in the movies Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Million Dollar Baby, but he lacks the understanding of the Disney Animated Canon that they likely forewent any such sequence in Frozen because it would have been nearly identical to the one in Tangled, where Rapunzel's opening song When Will My Life Begin describes her daily routine growing up locked up in the tower, which consists of honing various skills to stave off boredom.

Furthermore we have girls and women in training sequences and variations thereof in Mulan (I'll Make a Man Out of You), Brave (her princess education + practicing horseback archery in Touch the Sky), Tinker Bell (the entire movie), Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy (Zarina in the opening), Wreck-it Ralph (somehow to Rihanna's Shut up and Drive) and Tarzan (Jane for a short time in the latter half of Strangers Like Me). Tiana's entire personality in Princess and the Frog is that of a dedicated workaholic trying to make her dream of owning a business happen (Not to mention later movies Big Hero 6 and Zootopia would also contain training sequences). He mentions none of them and pretends they barely exist, which is my Sassette Principle in action. Besides, Let It Go is a training montage, simply shortened to one moment for narrative and stylistic convenience.

[58:57] The madness of the ending – “I will love you only when you are dead!” – is hard to fathom. The moral of the story – “An act of true love will thaw a frozen heart” – will help breed legions of codependent cannon fodder for sociopaths and narcissists: “If my heart is still frozen, it’s because you do not love me enough!” 

The insanity of this part and the bits before it is that he had to make it up out of whole cloth. He gets to portray Elsa as a violent sociopath only because he projected sociopathy on her due to his baseless assertion that "magic always means madness". "An act of true love will thaw a frozen heart" is not the moral of the story, it is merely a rule of the in-universe nature of magic. The real moral is that a personal burden is lighter to carry together with your loved ones than it is locked away in solitude to fester over years. Meanwhile the real sociopath gets called on his being the only frozen heart, after which he is punched in the face and booted out of the kingdom.

4. Hidden Meaning in Stylistic Choices

I already mentioned several times when Molyneux tries too hard reading hidden messages in what are actually simple elements of visual shorthand, comedy or metaphor (which, again, he ignores because he's reading too much of his own prior conclusions into them). However there's one more sequence he talks about that I'd like to elaborate on.

[37:05] The opening of the movie “Frozen” baffled me for quite some time – why was there an extended and dull sequence of men cutting holes in ice and shipping them down to the city? The music was monotonous and dirge-like, and it seemed to have little to do with the rest of the story, which was about sisters and sex and magic and madness.

The Frozen Heart sequence at the start of the movie foreshadows several story elements and themes and also introduces us to Kristoff and Sven (the workers are the Greek chorus, if you like). The fact that Stefan doesn't recognize the themes of the movie in the introductory song because he's too occupied with sex and madness should probably also have tipped him off that's he's not thinking in the right direction.
The stylistic reason for it being included is likely because Frozen took cues from The Little Mermaid, the other Disney movie based on a Hans Christian Andersen story (as well as inspiration from Dumbo's Roustabouts, according to co-director Jennifer Lee). The Little Mermaid opens on a ship with several working sailors who sing about plot elements before we go deep into the ocean to the more fantastic kingdom of Atlantica inhabited by merpeople¹. It is a way to instantly broaden the movie's universe to majestic scales because we are now aware of both a dull mundane world, which follows relatively realistic rules, and the hidden fantasy world, which runs on magic and is inhabited by mythological creatures. The conflict in both movies partially hinges on the interaction between both worlds.

The mundane world, which leads into...

... the hidden fantasy world

In Frozen we have the mundane world represented by the ice harvesters, which then leads us into Anna and Elsa playing around with magic, representing the hidden fantasy world which Elsa ultimately gets locked into and tries to ignore until adulthood. Unfortunately, no luck in expecting Stefan Molyneux to pick up on artistic direction in a Disney movie. Instead he explains it as yet another hidden metaphor for gender roles.

[37:30] It hit me eventually – men produce ice through dangerous, hard, grueling labor in freezing conditions. Women produce ice through magic.

Women don't produce ice through magic at all. Elsa produces ice through magic, and she doesn't sell it for a living. This isn't the story of a female ice harvester who picks up the skill without trying, it's the story of a future queen who carries an out of control magic talent that prevents her from ruling effectively. There is simply no comparison. The ice harvesters are only there for thematic reasons and to show off the animation studio's fancy new ice rendering software. Besides, if magic is just a metaphor for madness, that would mean even Elsa doesn't produce ice at all.

But this is just emblematic of how Stefan isn't looking for analysis or "the truth" of Frozen. He is merely seeing his own damage reflected in the story. Hence some ice harvesters leading us into a movie about sisters is actually a secret message that keeps women vain and preoccupied with being pretty while their eggs are being used up on abusive alphas.

¹ Incidentally, it has been theorized by fans that The Little Mermaid is a sequel to Frozen, as due to the geographic location where both stories take place, the sunken ship that Ariel explores during her introduction might have been the doomed ship that carried the king and queen of Arendelle.

5. Conclusion

With all this I hope I have been able to show some of the main failings in Stefan Molyneux' argumentation. The madness argument is meaningless as it is the literary equivalent of an unfalsifiable hypothesis. He reserves scorn towards characters who represent the state (except when he ignores that they are part of it) and especially if those characters are women. Furthermore he is confused by stylistic choices and not well-versed enough in the Disney Animated Canon to put Frozen into a larger perspective. As a closing positive, I will say that at least his core philosophy remains more or less consistent throughout all his arguments, unlike certain other popular media critics. It's just a shame he was never really analyzing Frozen in the first place.

6. Hans the Alpha Male, Kristoff the Beta Male

The last part of Stefan's analysis is mostly dedicated to the typical 'manosphere' talk about alpha males, beta males, resources and fertility and the like. So let's now do an in-depth analysis about his arguments on that subject.

[53:27] Olaf the snowman is the beta harem male kept around by Anna in case none of her real men marry her.

... That's it, I'm out.

Links & References

http://freedomain.blogspot.be/2014/05/the-truth-behind-frozen.html
Stefan Molyneux - The Truth About Frozen
Stefan Molyneux - Harry Potter, Star Wars and the Violent Fantasies of Crushed Souls

Images from
- Frozen (2013) (Taken from the movie, trailer, the UK sing-along version of Let It Go and Disney Wikia)
- Frozen: A Sister More Like Me (2013)
- The Little Mermaid (1989)
- Once Upon A Time S04E07 (2014)
- Tangled / Rapunzel (2010)



Oh God, there's a The Truth About Zootopia...