I read the original Hans Christian Andersen story a long time ago, and didn't really understand it. I guess I was too young to grasp the motivations of the Snow Queen or the moral of the story.
Disney's adaptation was a nice movie and I liked the female empowerment story, but it was wholly unrelated to the source material and didn't really relate to any of the themes or plot.
Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden finally cracked the code for me. In it, Auril the Frostmaiden stands in for Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen, and her inciting action is to attempt to freeze the region of Icewind Dale in everlasting winter. According to the adventure, Auril is an uncaring goddess who seeks to preserve beautiful things in ice so that they'll never fade. This made a whole lot of sense to me: She cares about superficial beauty and cold, crystalline glamor over warm, true connections.
It was on the strength of this revelation that I wanted to run the whole adventure, and maybe remixing the scenario with Auril so that it's not a by the numbers fight but a quest to convince her to show some humanity. I was also going to switch her forms around, so that her first form was the humanoid "Brittle Maiden" one, and the second would be the Horned Owl creature, kind of like the fight between Dracula and Richter Belmont in Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. Turns out that I only care about the character of Auril, though, and not really the rest of the module.
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