• The first essay that I was assigned was the Aesthetic Experience essay, which was a bit hard to write considering I hadn’t written anything all summer and forgot how to use MLA format and my grammar properly.

Aesthetic Experience Essay: The Power Of Love

“Conceal. Don’t feel. Don’t let them know” In these lines from Disney’s musical, Frozen, you can see the struggle Elsa goes through in trying to conceal her power to create ice and snow from her own two hands. What most people fail to recognize is how flawlessly this connects to our every day lives, and the way we chose to present ourselves to others. Growing up I used to hide my emotions deep inside, in fear of how people would react to them; I’ve just always wanted to be liked, and the possibility that someone would disagree with my feelings and hold that against me was the most frightening. This is similar to the feelings that Elsa had in most of the film up until the very end. She lived her whole life in fear of how others would react to her having this capability to manipulate the weather, and rather than being herself she chose to conceal that part of her life in order for other’s to like her, and value her role as the queen of Arendelle. This way of living may actually work to those who don’t know you well enough to see that you aren’t being your truest self, the best version of yourself, but certainly won’t help those closest to you and will ultimately allow you to grow further apart.

• Starting off with the first sentence: I failed to put a period after I quoted a line from the musical and also failed to put Frozen in Italics. In the two sentences that follow I put a comma after “lives” and “inside” when there was no need for them. Overall, my grammar was not as spot on as it is after having taken this course.

After hurting her only sister Anna, with a frozen blast to her face in an attempt to save her fall, Elsa had become isolated from her and everyone else. This made me realize that hiding your feelings goes against human nature. Even if your feelings may hurt or have hurt others in the past, locking them up will only worsen the situation and you won’t learn anything valuable from your previous actions; hence why Elsa continued to cause destruction within her town by

creating a blizzard and freezing the ports, and then hurting her sister. Back when I was in middle school my best friend told me that he had feelings for me and I didn’t totally understand what to do with that or how much that would change things between us, so I stopped being friends with him. This changed me as a person, causing me to become more fearful of expressing my feeling towards people I had become fond of because I thought that others may react in the same way that I had and maybe I deserved that. After viewing this musical it made me realize just how wrong I was because I have learned a lot since that incident and I shouldn’t bottle up my emotions in fear that what I had done in the past would come to hurt me. It also made me realize that love comes in many different forms and you don’t need love from a romantic relationship to make you feel whole.

• There are quite a few run on sentences within this paragraph, which makes me appear less sophisticated. After writing a couple more essays and getting feed back from my professors, I have learned how to narrow down my thought process and write my ideas in a more shortened/comprehensive way.

At the end of the film Anna saves her sister Elsa from getting struck by a sword before she herself is completely frozen due to the blast Elsa had bestowed upon her heart. This ends up saving Anna’s frozen heart as well because she performs an act of true love by saving her sister. This allowed Elsa to come to terms with her own power, and save the town from the blizzard that she had created through her love for her sister. Previously viewing other Disney musicals the main protagonist, usually being a female, had been saved from their traumas by a man that they fell in love with. Frozen was different from most of these musicals; Elsa was saved by the love from her sister not the love from a man. I had always been in love with the idea of having a romantic relationship in order to feel something stronger than I have felt before, but Frozen helped me see that the love from my friends and family is enough, and quite possibly stronger than the love I would feel towards a romantic partner. You can see that in frozen the bond between the two sisters is stronger than the bond between any other two characters in the musical when nothing else can save Anna’s frozen heart besides the love she shares for her sister, Elsa,

and no one else can help Elsa control her powers besides Anna. After watching this musical I came to cherish the love from my family and friends rather than taking that love for granted, and I know that’s enough for me at this point in my life. I no longer “conceal” my emotions; I tell people how I feel and understand that if those feelings aren’t reciprocated there is always room to move on and enjoy the love that I do have in my life.

• This last paragraph lacks analysis and contains too much summary of the musical, along with more run on sentences and grammatical errors. This class has helped me expand my ideas and realize that I must do much more research when writing essays in order to discover different view points that could be very influential to my writings.