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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 fears her destiny - fears losing her memories and spending her young adulthood held in an icy castle, but also holds a strong hope that things will work out for the best. She cherishes her family's story as a precious tale that deserves its due respect through repetition, hence she aligns with the Royals.
Beyond her incredible friendliness and ability to always lend an ear, Klara is known on campus for her skill in mathematics - being a proud member of the Maths Mt. Olympiad Team -, her enthusiasm for ice hockey, and her love of writing, with her name in the byline of Knightly Knews articles.
Character[]
Personality[]
Who is Klara Spejl?
For starters, Klara Spejl 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 & Skills[]
(Pure) Mathematics[]
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In his eyes she was perfect, and she did not feel at all afraid. He told her he could do mental arithmetic, as far as fractions,-- |
—A Little Boy and a Little Girl, The Snow Queen | |
Klara sees mathematical beauty in everything. It's the lens through how she comprehends the world - in patterns, in shapes, like fractals and snowflakes. If 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's difficult to explain the importance of mathematics to her when she treats her entire life like mathematics.
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. When she speaks, the precision and acccuracy of her words are carefully chosen, as if she's offering not a theory up for debate, but rather infutable truth. When she walks, she steps on tiled floors with a repeated pattern. When she thinks, Klara searches constantly for absolute truth and elimination of falsehoods at all turns - a style that factors into her problem-solving (something that can negatively impact her sometimes - she often wants a perfect solution, not the best solution)...
Her favourite field of mathematics is number theory, particularly involving the concept of infinity, and she prefers Pure Mathematics to Applied Mathematics.
Geography[]
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-- and that he knew the number of square miles and the number of inhabitants in the country. |
—cont'd | |
Her father, a previous Kai by the name of Klaus Spejl, caught wonderlust after his tale, seeking to travel the world after destiny was over. That adventurous spirit has been passed down to Klara, who is equally in love with the world. Not only for the sights and the places, but also people and history. Thus, outside of mathematics, geography is one of her main interests. It mostly manifests as "knowing a lot of facts": if you give Klara a country, she could probably tell you its capital and describe its flag immediately.
Iceskating and Ice Hockey[]
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When you can find out this, you shall be your own master, and I will give you the whole world and a new pair of skates. |
Klara grew up with the sport of iceskating, and has never lost her affinity for it. At Ever After High, she not only tries to keep it up, she's even built upon it - joining EAH's ice hockey team. Despite being short and skinny, Klara has a certain nimbleness that makes her a capable player on the turf.
Writing[]
At Ever After High, people probably know Klara most from her writing. She's a writer for the Knightly Knews, mostly doing news articles, but has written a fair few opinion pieces as well. It's not just nonfiction she likes, but fiction too. Storytelling runs in the family: her grandmother, a previous Kai, weaves the most beautiful tales, which have embedded themselves for eternity in Klara's mind. Ultimately, Klara's inspiration for her writing stems from her love of people - figuring people out, learning about their lives, gaining a wider sense of what life is really about in the world of fairytales. Thus, Klara writes to capture moments and events in Ever After candidly, like a snapshot, a preservation of memory. It's almost like a preparation for destiny, since losing herself and her memories is the scariest part of it all.
Other[]
- Klara is adept at Rubik's Cubes, being a casual speedcuber. This is a pun on icecubes.
- She is in a Dungeons and Damsels campaign, of which Turnus Wyllt is the DM, and other players are Bays, Dee and April. Her character is a Tiefling Druid.
- She has tried to write a novel before.
Fairytale: The Snow Queen[]
- Wikipedia: The Snow Queen
Kai, in the Snow Queen, is next-door neighbours to Gerda, and the two grow up like siblings. The roofs of their houses meet, allowing them to plant roses together. One day, a demon-mirror in Heaven shatters, raining shards down, one of them falling into Kai's eye. The demon-mirror is only capable of reflecting evil, so Kai is poisoned, and can only see evil in the world. He yells at Gerda, then is greeted by the Snow Queen, who kisses him once - to remove the sensation of cold, then again - to remove emotions and memories, and is taken to her icy palace, where he is assigned to pierce together icy puzzle pieces to spell out the word eternity. Gerda must trek across the countries to rescue her best friend. When she reaches him, the warmth of their friendship heals Kai. The Snow Queen promises him the world and a pair of iceskates, and the two return home, older, into summertime.
How does Klara come into it?[]
Klara is the only daughter of Klaus Spejl, the previous Kai. Klaus, like all Kais, was a clever young man, and frustrated by how the story took away the early youth of his life. Mathematics was a game for the youth, and in his late 20s, he felt aged. Nonetheless, the time post-destiny was spent best healing, so he travelled the world, hired a psychiatrist to help him through, and all-throughout, still engaged with his great academic love of mathematics, solving problems to keep himself in check and following new mathematical papers.
He married. He got his first degree, then his PhD, eventually, though he always emphasised to Klara that the most important thing to him was raising her well. Now, he works as an Assistant Professor at some university in Norway, so he made it in the end. Klaus Spejl supposes that the next step is tenure.
Opinion on Destiny[]
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"We're lucky here, all we have to do is forget." "But I don't want to forget you." |
—Dirty Computer (2018) | |
klara is deadset on seeing the world as beautiful. in fact it's ended up forming a core part of her identity, so she feels really threatened that this is going to be something that she has to give up for destiny, even if temporarily. so, before destiny, she's desperate to be honest! to be truthful to her emotions! to EXPRESS!!! her emotions. but in this attempt to be true to herself for as long as she can, she's grown to see her current self as her 'best' self and doesn't want to let go of that.
crystal winter is ok, just a bit weird. they both love iceskating and hockey, so she's kind of hoping that the hostage situation will end up a bit like a sleepover. but if you asked klara, there's a different maiden of ice and snow she'd rather have whisking her away 👀 hi rue
nonetheless, ten years is a long time, the world changes, she'll be a different person by the end of it. klara is optimistic, above all, and she looks towards her father as an example, and look at her father - he turned out alright, didn't he? won't she also turn out alright? but klara doubts that her father is as put together as he appears, these fears have abounded ever since she talked more to her peers, who have parents that struggled to cope after destiny
Interpretation[]
It's probably immensely obvious by now that I grew up on Andersen's fairytales first. The Snow Queen were among those, and ever since I was a child, my favourite character had been Kai -- the young boy with the shard in his eye, swept away by a lady of snow, earnest to impress her with his knowledge in mathematics and geography.
I tried to tackle the role early on in my EAH OCs, a poor attempt by the name of Eternity Kayson. Over the rest of 2014, I engaged with The Snow Queen in a different manner: posting and reading criticisms of the Disney movie Frozen. My dislike of Frozen brought in new revelations - why did I like the Snow Queen so much? Why do I see it as my childhood fairytale? Critiquing the most famous adaptation of the story forced me to analyse the fairytale, and by the end of 2014, I had solidified my Kai OC into Klara.
I love the Snow Queen because it is fundamentally a story about the power of friendship - how Gerda transverses the freezing North for her best friend, and how she's aided by supportive characters. I love the Snow Queen because I love nature imagery - nature preserves, Summer will come again, and just as Kai and Gerda grow up, we will grow from our experiences. I love the Snow Queen because, above all, Kai was my favourite character. While he is locked for most of the story in a icy palace, what we see of him in the beginning -- earnest to impress, someone who loves facts and statistics -- resonated with me.
Klara is a love letter to mathematics. Just as the Snow Queen was my childhood fairytale, mathematics was my first love. Klara is a love letter to the struggles of maintaining your own identity, and I have identified strongly with Kai. The demon mirror in the story reflects all that is ugly in the world, and I hope Klara is the opposite. I hope she reflects what I find beautiful.
Parallels[]
- Like Gerda and Kai, Klara is Norwegian.
- She's meant to room with her Gerda - if she had one -, as a nod to how Gerda and Kai are neighbours.
- Gerda and Kai grow roses on their shared windowsill. Yellow roses specifically symbolise friendship, the primary theme of the Snow Queen, hence Klara is associated with yellow roses.
- As a nod to this, Klara's dorm window is a miniature garden of roses.
- Another theme of the Snow Queen is maturity and growing up, represented metaphorically through the changing of seasons. Klara, however, is clinging to the beauty of her youth, scared of losing this version of her that she's convinced is the "best" version.
- Kai takes pride in telling the Snow Queen about his skill in mathematics and geography. Klara, likewise, is skilled in both these areas.
- The Snow Queen promises Kai "a pair of iceskates and the whole world". This is reinforced again through Klara's love of geography, and through her love for iceskating and ice-hockey.
- Whereas Kai only sees wicked things in the world through him being poisoned by the demon-mirror, Klara is meant to represent Kai before the mirror, and hence, she insists on only seeing what's beautiful about the world.
- Likewise, she's constantly described as warm-hearted, as opposed to the frozen heart Kai possessed.
- However, the demon mirror's power is to amplify faults. Klara is insistent on things being perfect - wording herself without error, reaching a mathematical ideal.
- Klara loves puzzles - she keeps a table in her room for a weekly jigsaw puzzle, and owns LEGOs. Kai, while in the Snow Queen's palace, is forced to spell out the word eternity using shards of glass like a puzzle.
- The White Witch in Narnia is inspired by the Snow Queen, and the scene where she tricks Edmund onto her sleigh has obvious parallels with the Snow Queen taking away Kai. Klara's favourite food is Turkish Delight, a nod to how the White Witch convinces Edmund to betray his siblings.
- Gerda's grandmother weaves stories, recounting to the children the legends of the Snow Queen and her army of bees.
- Klara's grandmother is a nod to Gerda's. I also explicitly have Klara's grandmother exist as a previous Kai legacy. Klara's similar love for storytelling draws a parallel between her and her grandmother, and reinforces how the fairytale of the Snow Queen persists and cycles on, like the seasons.
Quotes[]
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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 | |
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You know, when I tell a story that sucks, it'll be about vacuums. |
—Klara employs her magnificent wordplay. | |
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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. | |
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“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. | |
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Young and sweet, only fifteen, bring in the ice skate queen! |
—Bugs | |
Etymology[]
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.
Trivia[]
- Klara is Norwegian. She is also Ethiopian through her mother.
- 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.
- She chose Heroics 101 as her elective in Freedom Year.
Acknowledgements[]
- Bugs for being supportive of Klara in the early days, and helping out immensely with her design and background.
- Some fellow Snow Queen enthusiasts on Tumblr, who helped me keep at my interest in the fairytale, which in turn added to Klara immensely.
- Shoutout to Am in particular. They have their own Kai and Gerda - not EAH OCs, but a take on The Snow Queen, who are worth every second of your time.