|
In the depth of winter, I found within me laid an invincible summer. |
—Albert Camus | |
Klara Spejl [she/her] is the daughter of Kai from The Snow Queen.
Energetic and optimistic, Klara is a sweet girl with unrivalled excitement for her destiny, thus aligning with the Royals. Although she's not fond of the idea of getting her heart frozen or spending ten years in a chilly castle (even if her only company is one of the besties), Klara loves the idea of being a major part of a major fairytale.
To her, being part of the Snow Queen is a legacy that should be carried on, at all costs, especially since it's such a precious, yet fragile, tale.
Klara spends her time energetically making new friends, and learning about people. Having always been inspired by the stories of her grandmother and her mother, Klara wants to collect stories from all around the world herself, and holding onto her optimistic belief that there's a story to be told in anyone, she aims to have these stories remembered for centuries.
Character
Personality
Who is Klara Spiegel?
For starters, Klara Spiegel appears as a self-defined person. If you asked her that question, you’ll get a sharp, well-thought out response.
She would pause for a few seconds, smile warmly (so warmly, you think, how could she be the one to have cold infest her heart?), and give her reply.
“I consider myself friendly. I would say I’m a connoisseur of beauty – I see it in everything, from numbers to nature and of course, your smile! Oh, and I’m not simply Klara Spejl. I am Kai.”
Most people would give their legacy prefixed with a ‘next’. Not Klara Spejl. It’s less of a shock, she thinks, if she sees herself in her father’s role soon. It’s less painful.
As Kai, Klara is destined to get poisoned in her eye from an evil mirror shard, corrupting her and removing any semblance of kindness and warm. She’s well aware that in her destiny, she’ll turn violent and rude – the very antithesis of the person she wants to be. It’s a very real fear to the girl, who is scared of putting her identity in peril.
And so, Klara persistently strives to be the person she is when she’s able to. She doesn’t want to not be Kai. The role is family tradition, and so so so important to her. To lose that role is to lose herself. But to fulfill it? Why, she’ll lose herself in it anyway.
Hence, she carries herself with optimism and excitability. Energetic and talkative, she can find almost everything interesting and makes an effort to learn about as many things as possible. (After all, she will get holed up in a chilly castle for ten years – might as well explore the world while you can.)
To become Kai is to forget. A kiss from the Snow Queen would erase both senses and memories – and to Klara, the world is too beautiful to forget. She wants to live her life knowing that she’s lived it well. For this reason, Klara gets easily attached to people and things – and often documents as much of her life as she possibly could, through social media and cute polaroid photos and little mementos. However, this means that she can also be quite overbearing and can sometimes overstep people’s boundaries. Furthermore, her habit of trying not to forget means that she has the habit of remembering a heck ton. That means Klara is exactly the sort of person to remember your fashion disaster, or your social mess-up, or the fact that you forgot her birthday for the second year in a row.
Constantly in fear of losing control and losing herself, Klara can be a very restrained person sometimes. When she speaks, there’s often pauses between phrases. Every word she uses, Klara reckons, much be precise and perfect. Much like a mathematical theorem, she appears logical and sound, as if she could say no wrong.
(It’s nice, she thinks, to know that you still have your self-control.)
However, one cannot remain restrained all the time. It’s hard to keep up an image, and when Klara struggles to do so, she can easily become quick-tempered and irritable. In anger, she becomes careless. Sometimes, it manifests as irrational impulses, other times she’s silent and closed off.
Jekyll and Hyde, she describes those dual dueling sides of her like so once. She raises her voice – and hopes, in doing so, she heightens her certainty. “That can’t be me. A person is more than the effects of her destiny, correct?”
But the moon has phases, yet is still the moon. Surely, the Kai part of her is still Klara.
Klara doesn’t know. She questions it. When she has nothing but herself, her mind spin with thoughts, trying to make sense of everything. But there’s no candor. There’s no finite proof. Every conclusion her thoughts draw is not a theorem – not absolute proof. Rather, it’s a theory, a mere model of her world.
There is mathematical beauty in everything, Klara Spejl would acclaim.
What she refuses to address, in the recesses of her mind, why her own life seems like chaos.
Appearance
Klara immediately strikes most people as a sweet, excitable young girl. She carries herself with incredible energy as she's constantly moving about, which is the most recognisable part of her appearance.
She has brown skin and wide, inquisitive brown eyes. Usually done up in microbraids, her hair is dark blue, with some lighter streaks. Her face is usually graced with a grin or a laugh.
Her figure is short, with lanky arms that seem to be growing too fast for her body to catch up. Despite this figure however, Klara is a very flexible and agile person, participating often in sports like figure skating and icehockey. Basically, anything where she can be fast and graceful.
Hobbies & Interests
|
|
To see the world in a grain of salt, and heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. |
—Auguries of Innocence, William Blake. | |
(Pure) Mathematics
How do I even begin the explain the importance of her? The answer is that I don't.
Klara sees mathematical beauty in everything. In fractals, in snowflakes. The Fibonacci sequences weaves its way into her life, she implements and calculates poisson distributions for ease and for fun. When you poke around empty classrooms at Ever After High, chances are you'll see Klara in one of them - hands and dress covered in chalk dust, tracing out numbers and figures on blackboards thrice her size.
It is a fact (a true one, indeniable - much like mathematical proofs): if you don't understand the importance of mathematics to Klara Spejl, you do not understand Klara Spejl.
You will not understand the way that she speaks, the precision and the accuracy of her words, so carefully chosen. It is as she is offering no a theory up for debate, but infutable truth. You will not understand her gait, how she traces out golden ratios and patterns in tiles with every step. You will not understand how she thinks, her constant seeking for absolute truth and elimination of falsehoods at all turns. You are what you love, and Klara Spejl is mathematics personified.
- In particular, her favourite field is pure mathematics, particularly number theory.
- She is beyond fascinated with the concept of infinity, and proofs to infinity.
Writing
Klara's other main interest is writing. It stems from growing up with stories from her mother and her grandmother, to the point where those stories have inspired Klara even today. Other than that, Klara's inspiration for her writing mainly comes from her love of people – that is, finding out about people and their lives, and gaining a wider sense of what life is REALLY like in this wide, open world of fairytales. Klara writes to capture moments and events in Ever After, and to capture what it's like to live here. Klara doesn't write for propaganda or the thrill or the sensationalism of writing. Rather, she writes in the most candid ways, and that is to present the reality of everything.
Adventure
Klara is also a very adventurous young lady. Her father caught wonderlust after his tale, and that has been passed down to Klara. This girl wants to explore the world, and fall in love with the world. Not just for the sights and the places, but mainly for the people and the history. Klara wants nothing more in life other than to go to foreign lands and faraway places just to meet new people and hear about their culture.
Iceskating and Ice Hockey
Another of Klara's hobbies is iceskating. Klara loves to iceskate, having been fluent in the sport since a young age. She's lithe and nimble and just speedy on ice in general. Her love of iceskating has grown so great that she ended up joining Ever After's ice hockey team and trains on the magical indoor ice hockey field regularly. Despite Klara's short stature and lanky figure, she kills on the hockey turf. Not literally, because that would be rude.
Fairy tale – The Snow Queen
Basically, there's a mirror. A troll breaks the mirror, and shards fall down to Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, there's a boy and a girl who are next door neighbours. They're best buds, growing flowers together and stuff, and their names are Gerda and Kai.
Their friendship is stabbed when a mirror shard falls into Kai's eye, and he starts being an asshole to Gerda, wrecking flowers, yelling and whatnot. He storms off, and runs into the Snow Queen. He kisses him once to remove the cold sensation, twice to remove his memories. She pauses, saying how she can't kiss him a third time, or else he dies.
So Kai runs off with this Snow Queen, who he impresses with his maths skills (which gives me, Zena, hope that I may someday also impress girls with my maths skill). Gerda is not cool about that, because she just lost her best friend. And that starts Gerda's journey to find Kai.
After facing many trials and tribulations, and getting a bonus girlfriend (aka the Little Robber Girl), Gerda reaches the Snow Queen's castle.
Kai's there, and he has a frozen heart. Literally. He's like Anna from Frozen, but with more personality. Anyway, the Snow Queen's forcing him to take part in a Spelling Bee because he has to use pieces of ice to spell out the word "eternity". If he spells out the word, the Snow Queen unfreezes him and gives him a pair of iceskates, which is a pretty snazzy deal I think.
Gerda runs up to her best friend and they hug and (platonically) kiss. Kai's saved by the magical power of friendship. The two hold hands and dance, and the ice pieces decide to start dancing as well, and fall down to spell out "eternity". Kai is freed, and the two leave her domain. Gerda meets up with her girlfriend, the Little Robber Girl, again, and they all walk back home.
Everything back home is the same, except for Gerda and Kai, who have grown up. And it also happens to be the glorious summertime.
How does Klara come into it?
When Kai's older, he desperately misses the adventure he had with the Snow Queen and Gerda, and developed a huge sense of wanderlust. He ended up travelling the world in order to gain a better sense of geography and culture.
In one of his journeys to Africa, he met a really nice Ethiopian girl. He lived with her for a while, getting to know and understand the culture. The two were eventually married in a traditional Ethiopian wedding, and had Klara there. However, since Kai realised that his daughter had to attend Ever After High to fulfill her destiny, he and his wife moved back to Norway in his old, childhood home that had been handed down for generations.
His mother welcomed him back with open arms, and nodded her approval for his wife, and hugged her new granddaughter tightly. Klara grew up with her nan telling her stories of the bees and their queen, and how a lovely, yet lonely, Snow Queen governed a far-off northern realm. Klara was raised Norwegian, but always aimed to never forget her Ethiopian culture.
Opinion on Destiny
Klara greatly believes in the preservation of the Snow Queen. The reputation of her story had been destroyed a few years ago by a popular animated movie and its subsequent hype, and Klara is determined to get the holy, strongly upheld and venerable position of the Snow Queen back. She prefers to her tale as precious and fragile. (Meant endearingly, no mockingly, of course).
One thing she's glad for though is the fact that Kai's personality and her interests align. Klara's more than happy to spend her years in a cold castle doing puzzles, more than happy to talk about her maths skill, and more than happy to get a pair of iceskates at the end.
Plus, the people she's living the Snow Queen with? She adores them.
And so, Klara acts like she has no qualms about her destiny. What is there to hate?
Oh.
Being infected with evil.
- Read Klara's Personality section for more details.
Parallels
- Klara's skill and interest in mathematics is a reference to Kai's love of mathematics.
- Iceskating clearly parallels with the snow theme, as well as the Snow Queen's gift of "a pair of iceskates and the whole world"
- Her love of geography and exploring the world parallels with the Snow Queen's gift of "a pair of iceskates and the world"
- Klara is associated with yellow roses. Roses are the flowers grown by Gerda and Kai primarily, and yellow roses symbolise friendship (the main theme of the Snow Queen)
- Kai and Gerda are implied to be Norwegian. Klara is Norwegian.
Trivia
- Klara is a name that can mean "bright, clear, famous". All three of these are relevant to her role - bright can reference Kai's great mathematical mind; clear references mirror, ice and glass; famous references the nature of the Snow Queen, which is a highly iconic fairytale.
- The spelling with 'K' rather than 'C' was chosen as 'Kai' also starts with a 'K'.
- Spejl means mirror in Norwegian, a nod to the devil mirror that catalyses the fairytale.
- In her original draft, Klara was named "Eternity Kayson". This was changed due to it sounding "too tacky".
- Klara is Norwegian, with Ethiopian ancestry through her mother's side.
- In the Snow Queen, a raven mistakes Kai for the prince of his land. For this reason, many corvids around the school have dubbed Klara many variants of the title the "Prince of X", just as fans of certain celebrities call their faves "Queen/King of X".
- This is doubly fitting because two famous mathematics also have been dubbed with "Prince of X" epithets. Fermat was the "Prince of Amateurs", and Gauss the "Prince of Mathematics".
- A lot of Klara's inspiration came from Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem. I love STEM history books in general, and this was a book that truly demonstrated the power of mathematics and how beautiful it could be - how certain, how much its power could reverberate through history. This book recounted the story of the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem so beautifully, that I could not help but incorporate themes from it into Klara. If you ever get the chance to, please have a read of it, I recommend it highly.
- Her speaking style is directly inspired by Andrew Wiles. No hyperbole, no exaggeration. Only certainty.
Quotes
|
|
Sitting in a chilly castle for most of my story isn't exactly... well, cool, but I'll just love to have the whole world and a pair of ice skates by the end of it! |
—Klara's opinion on her destiny | |
|
|
You know, when I tell a story that sucks, it'll be about vacuums. |
—Klara employs her magnificent wordplay. | |
|
|
While Turnus stumbles through gracelessly, the Prince of Princes herself fills herself with fairytales, in the same way birds fill the undersides of their wings with air, in the same way the heart fills with blood. |
—Stories are life. She does not merely live for stories. She lives as a story. | |
|
|
“Our sweet prince,” they say. “The Prince of X,” and they fill in that unknown variable with whatever they fancy. Of flowers, of mathematics, of laughter and light and all that is sweet and holy. They call her prince, and [Turnus] thinks - how the ever more deserving she is of that title than him. |
—Klara Spejl strides with regal grace, smiles upon the world like it’s her own. She has no title on paper, but nature has gifted her one nonetheless. If you listen closely, you can hear the corvids of the forest whispering. The crows, the ravens, they all hail her. | |