>>105341873The thing is, if they acknowledged and let the audience recognize that Gerda and Kai were there, and gave them characterization and screentime, then they’d suddenly feel even more weirdly absent in a lot of scenes than if they’re just barely acknowledged and hidden in plain sight as part of the woodwork like we’ve got.
Think about it, you’d have these two domestic servants that would have had to have practically raised the two princesses. It’d feel really weird not to have these characters around to at least weigh in some feelings when the parents die, when one princess has a big important ceremony, when one of them announces a sudden surprise engagement, when one magically freezes the town and runs away, when a strange foreigner is put in charge of the castle and thus of them, and especially when one of the princesses is brought back from a perilous journey half dead and just left in a room. I can’t imagine the scene where Olaf saves Anna being the same if Gerda and Kai were actual characters, because it’s weird that they wouldn’t at least try to check on her, or even if they thought she was dead, they’d maybe want to enter the room with the corpse to begin mourning preparations. Them not being seen or heard from during all of this is weird enough already if you overthink it, but if they were given any more acknowledgement than they’ve already got, then people would actively notice it. We’d have a bunch of threads just after the movie came out asking “wait, where were Gerda and Kai during X?” And meanwhile, if you force them in to all the places they’re missing by writing up an unnecessary excuse for them having no impact every step of the way, they’d still add nothing. If anything they’d detract from Anna and Elsa’s relationship dynamic as the only family either of them has got left now that the parents are dead, because Gerda and Kai would probably have to come off as second family to them.
