[ooc: application]
♖ RAPUNZEL ♖
for luministi
Player Name: Ari
E-mail and/or AIM: mercurialking
Timezone: EST
Character: Rapunzel
Fandom/Series: Tangled
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Used: Tangled
Age: 18
Gender: Female
Species: Human
Appearance: Adorable.
Personality: Will “adorable” suffice here, as well? Because that’s what Rapunzel is. Having spent her entire life (save the past day and a half) with only her mother and a chameleon, Pascal, for company, Rapunzel would have every right to be nothing more than a whining, selfish brat. But instead, she’s sunny and bright, always trying to see the best in things. During the 17.99 years she lived in the same tower, Rapunzel tried to keep herself occupied-she learned how to bake, how to sew, how to dip candles, how to paint. She cooks, cleans, does laundry, and takes care of the entire tower herself. She’s read books on anatomy, geology, and has charted all the stars in the sky she can see. Rapunzel isn’t one to sit around doing nothing. She may have been confined to a tower, but she kept herself busy throughout the years!
Rapunzel loves to paint. Her entire tower was covered in paint, from the vast spans of wall in the main room and her bedroom to the couple inches of space between the hinges and edges of a wardrobe. She is shown to be proficient with chalks as well-she loves to be creative and create new things. Drawing and painting also help to personalize something, as well: if she were to receive a new mirror, for instance, it wouldn’t really seem to belong to her until it had been covered in a new layer of paint and detailed to sit alongside everything else. To compensate for being unable to ever leave her own little world, she tries to put a little bit of herself into everything else she comes by.
In spite of living in a tower for just about eighteen years, Rapunzel is a very active girl. She likes to stretch, uses a pair of brushes to “skate” around the tower while scrubbing floors, and will almost daily go for a climb, using her long, long hair as a rope. Rapunzel frequently uses her hair to create “harnesses” for painting, and so being able to hold her weight up while keeping her hands free to hold paint and brush is one reason why she tries to keep herself in shape. She is also responsible for pulling her mother up to the window from ground level, and it’s very important to her that she’s strong enough to be able to do that.
Speaking of whom-her mother is the most important person to her in the world. Mother Gothel was the only other person that Rapunzel had ever interacted with before Flynn Rider came swinging in through her window (aside from her parents, but shh! She doesn’t remember that part). Gothel is the one who has always taken care of her, who has always watched out for her best interests, protecting her from the outside world. Mother Gothel has always been a source of comfort for Rapunzel; even if she’s sometimes vain and petty and doesn’t listen to her daughter at all, she’s all Rapunzel has ever known. No matter what happens, Rapunzel loves her mother: even after fighting with Gothel multiple times over her desire to go beyond her tower and see the “floating lights,” she still frets that her decision to leave regardless would break her mother’s heart and, later, runs right back into her arms.
Rapunzel wears her heart on her sleeve. She makes friends very easily (and loves having them, after having been alone for so long), largely due in part to her contagious excitability and her naïveté, but also due to her determination. Her determination helps her in many different ways-it helps her to find a way to leave her tower when her mother has expressly forbidden her not to, and it helps her to bully Flynn into agreeing to take her to see the floating lights. She isn’t above coercion, and pretty much forces his hand, though once she left her tower she realized that she didn’t need to put on her “tough girl” act as her “default” face. Rapunzel doesn’t hide behind any front, what you see is what you get with her.
And what you get is a whole lot of sunshine. Since she’s lived inside a gigantic stone tower for so long, everything for her is brand new and exciting. Rapunzel is a bit naïve then, understandably so (she had to check Flynn for fangs when he first broke into her tower!), and after initially leaving her tower was inherently distrustful of many things she first came across. So she won’t purposely throw herself into situations she thinks dangerous without a good reason-but the people she loves are a good reason. Rapunzel is not afraid to hold her ground when it comes to protecting the people she cares about. Even before she began to develop feelings for Flynn, she was still willing to wade into a fight with a dozen thugs armed with nothing but a frying pan and her hair in order to protect him, even though she’d been terrified of them not five minutes before. Once she’s formed a bond with somebody, Rapunzel will fight tooth and nail to protect them from any harm.
That’s the thing about Rapunzel: when she wants something, she really, truly wants it. Rapunzel feels every emotion with all her heart, which can sometimes lead to her swinging wildly between two extremes of the scale if she’s really torn (“I am a horrible daughter. I’m going back.” “WHOO-HOOOOOO, I AM NEVER GOING BACK!”). And when she’s on a mission, she is not going to let anything get in her way. She can be quite the daring thing, almost to the point of being reckless. She’s unafraid to face down thugs, or leap from high places, or even dive underwater when she’s never learned to swim. If that’s what it takes to get her where she needs to go, Rapunzel will do it without a second thought.
However, life isn’t always sunshine and roses for Rapunzel, as much as she would like it to be. She’s spent most of her life listening to Mother Gothel tell her how terrible the world outside her tower is, how the people are all mean and selfish and would try to use her for her unique abilities if they could. Gothel has also spent a lot of time telling Rapunzel that she herself would never survive in the outside world (and has an entire song devoted to reminding her of these two important facts), outlining all of her faults and trying to prevent her from leaving. For this reason, Rapunzel can be extremely self-conscious and insecure, should she let herself slow down enough to let those fears catch up with her, and can also easily spook, should something happen when she’s not expecting it/if she’s at rest and not actively pursuing something at the moment.
All in all, Rapunzel is a girl made of sunshine and bubbles, ecstatic to be exploring the world outside her tower for the very first time and thrilled to have finally accomplished her dream.
Strengths/Abilities: From the mouth of Rapunzel herself, “I have magic hair that glows when I sing.”
Entirely true.
Rapunzel’s hair has a few remarkable qualities about it-it’s blonde, it’s about seventy feet long, it seems to be unbreakable and never gets split ends, aaaaaand much like she said, it glows when she sings. It also heals injuries, so that’s pretty cool. She can heal pretty much anything, from minor scrapes and bruises, to injuries that would normally kill a person, to actually reversing the wear and tear put on the body over time and keeping somebody forever young. In order to utilize this power, the person being healed has to be in contact with her hair, whether it be by brushing it, or having it placed on the wound. After that, Rapunzel sings a special song:
Flower, gleam and glow-let your powers shine
Make the clock reverse, bring back what once was mine
Heal what has been hurt, change the Fates’ design
Save what has been lost-bring back what once was mine
What once was mine
And then they’re healed!
Rapunzel also has some pretty strong arm-muscles, developed from years of hauling her mother up to the tower’s window from the ground. She’s a mean shot with a frying pan, is a pro at flicking her hair just so that it will wrap around something tightly enough for her to either use it as leverage (such as opening doors, though this does not apply to any door with a latch) or as a pivot point to swing from. Finally, she’s got a knack for the arts, and is fantastic at painting and drawing.
Weaknesses: Rapunzel’s hair may seem like it would have no downsides, but there is one: if her hair is cut, the magic dies. So Rapunzel has been growing her hair out her entire life. She has one shorter piece, right at the nape of her neck, that was cut when she was a baby-it has turned dark brown and cannot grow any more. The rest of it? Seventy feet long and counting. This makes for quite the long bath when it comes time to wash her hair, and can be a definite hindrance while out adventuring! In addition to this, she has to make it through the entire song for somebody to be fully healed. Rapunzel may be able to sing fast, but that’s still a fair few words to get through!
Rapunzel cannot bring anybody back from the dead.
Outside of the hair, Rapunzel may be an Action Girl, but she’s still just an eighteen-year-old girl. She’s not very proficient in fighting at all, and has all of the weaknesses you’d expect from a typical human.
History: Although Rapunzel is only eighteen, her story starts many centuries before that. Her story begins with a flower. This flower was a magic flower, having grown from a pure drop of sunlight that fell to the earth. The magic flower could be used to heal people without even having to remove it from the ground, provided the one wishing to be healed sang to it a specific song. As centuries passed and the kingdom of Corona grew out of nothing nearby, a woman named Gothel discovered the flower, and used its power to keep herself young forever.
In time, Rapunzel’s parents married and came to the throne. But as the Queen neared the end of her pregnancy, she fell ill. The King, afraid he would lose both his wife and his unborn child, sent his people out to find the legendary magic flower. Gothel had been hiding the flower whenever she wasn’t using its power, but a momentary misstep knocked the camouflage from the golden flower, and it was discovered by one of the palace guards.
The flower was dug up from the earth, brought back to the castle, and the flower itself harvested to make a healing broth to save the Queen. She quickly recovered, and soon after gave birth to a daughter-a daughter born with a full head of golden hair. She was named Rapunzel by her doting parents, and was everything they could have wished for. However, Gothel, angered by the loss of her precious flower, one night snuck in to cut a lock of the child’s hair for herself, so that she could continue to use the flower’s power. But the hair turned brown almost as soon as the blades had snipped closed, cut off from the magic. With no other choice, Gothel stole the baby Rapunzel from her bassinet, spiriting her away to a tower hidden far away from the castle. In this tower Rapunzel grew, never leaving its walls, even as she grew from babe to toddler to teenager. Gothel told her from a young age that she couldn’t leave the castle, explaining to her that her magic was a gift that had to be protected, and for a long time Rapunzel obeyed her without question. But although Gothel could shelter from most things that went on outside the castle’s walls, she couldn’t cover up the skies, and Rapunzel grew up watching the mysterious floating lights that drifted up from the trees every year on her birthday. As she aged, she began to long more and more to leave her tower’s walls to see them up close, and as her eighteenth birthday approached, she began to dream of the day she’d be able to see them for herself.
Unfortunately, Mother Gothel had other plans. When Rapunzel finally worked up the nerve to ask her if she would take her to see the floating lights, Gothel promptly shut her down, saying that Rapunzel wouldn’t be able to take care of herself outside and going on at length about why it was a bad idea.
At this same time, Flynn Rider was looking for a way to escape the Corona palace guards.
Mother Gothel left the tower to go gathering herbs for food. Rapunzel had gone back to her day and had just pulled out her hairbrush to start the daily ritual of brushing when she heard a sound-something striking against the stones on the outside of the tower. She chanced a peek outside and was rewarded with the sight of a man climbing up her tower, wedging arrows between the stones and steadily making his way upwards.
Rapunzel panicked. She grabbed the first weapon she could think of, a heavy cast-iron frying pan, and when the man stopped to look into his bag, clocked him over the head as hard as she could. And then ran away in terror.
After locking him away in a wardrobe, Rapunzel thought to use him to prove to her mother that she could indeed handle herself outside of the tower. But Gothel was having none of it, and when Rapunzel’s repeated attempts to get her to reconsider ended in Gothel’s shouting, she realized that she would have to take matters into her own hands if she really wanted to leave the tower.
Her methods were a bit harsh, she knows, but Rapunzel strong-armed Flynn into agreeing to accompany her to see the floating lights, which he told her were lanterns sent up every year for the missing princess of Corona. So the two of them set off, Rapunzel excited and faintly terrified about going to see the lanterns, Flynn just grumpy and armed with a plan to manipulate her into deciding to go home and return his satchel to him. Unfortunately for Flynn, it was more difficult to scare Rapunzel than he’d anticipated, and after she turned a whole pub full of brutish thugs into nothing more than children excited to talk about their numerous dreams on Christmas morning, he began to realize that he wasn’t getting out of things that easily.
But Flynn’s past came back to haunt him, and before she realized it, the two of them were running through an underground tunnel to evade a group of men (and a horse!) that she’d never seen before in her life. They only just managed to escape into a tunnel before it was blocked off by falling stone, and as the tunnel began to fill with water and Flynn couldn’t find them a way out, Rapunzel realized that maybe she couldn’t handle everything that lay outside of her tower. A stroke of brilliance struck her, though, as Flynn admitted to her his darkest secret and she responded in turn. Her magic hair was able to light up the tunnel, helping them to see where the water was draining from the tunnel. The two of them managed to break through the barrier of stones in the nick of time, falling into a much larger but gently-flowing river and coming to safety on the far banks. That night, Rapunzel got a look at the real Flynn Rider-Eugene Fitzherbert, as his real name was, a much less arrogant man than he’d first appeared.
But their peace was to be short-lived, as Gothel appeared again and tried to order Rapunzel home with her. For the first time in her life, Rapunzel defied Gothel to her face. Her mother hadn’t been anticipating such a response, and didn’t take it well, telling Rapunzel that Flynn was only accompanying her for the eventual reward (the tiara that had been inside the satchel), and that if she gave it up to him, he would certainly abandon her. The two parted on bad terms, Rapunzel worried about what might come to pass later on.
The next day was Rapunzel’s birthday. After an initial hiccup wherein the horse from the day before-Maximus-tried to seize Flynn and drag him kicking and screaming back to the kingdom, Rapunzel, Flynn, and Pascal made it to the city.
It was everything she’d ever dreamed of, and so much more.
Quickly, though, they discovered that Rapunzel’s long hair would not last long in the city. Fortunately Flynn noticed and called over some of the city’s girls, who were absolutely ecstatic to have such a long length of hair to play with. By the time they were done braiding her hair, Rapunzel’s hair had been tied up to ankle-length, leaving her able to run and dance without worry that she would be caught up by it. And so the two explored the city-they wandered the streets, looked at several books in a library, chalked a gigantic design on the city’s cobblestones (well, that one was mostly Rapunzel), shared cupcakes and evaded the castle guard, and near the end of the day danced with a large number of the townspeople. At the end of the dance, the sun was on its way down, and it was time to head to the boats for the lantern-lighting.
Rapunzel was curious when Flynn tugged her along to a smaller, two-person boat at the docks. As they sat on the water waiting for the first lantern to go up, she confessed her deepest fears to him-“I’ve been looking out of a window for eighteen years, dreaming about what I might feel like when those lights rise in the sky. What if it’s not everything I dreamed it would be?”
But when the first lanterns of the evening went up, she was nothing short of enthralled. The lanterns all around her were just as wonderful as she’d dreamed, the atmosphere amazing. And as she watched the lanterns rising, she finally recognized the budding feelings she’d been developing for Flynn for what they were-love.
Unafraid now of what might happen, Rapunzel gave Flynn’s satchel back to him. Sitting there in the boat, the two leaned in, and were just about to share their first kiss…
When Rapunzel found herself in the town of Luministi.
Canon Point: End of the “I See the Light” sequence, right as Flynn and Rapunzel are going in for the kiss.
for luministi
Player Name: Ari
E-mail and/or AIM: mercurialking
Timezone: EST
Character: Rapunzel
Fandom/Series: Tangled
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Used: Tangled
Age: 18
Gender: Female
Species: Human
Appearance: Adorable.
Personality: Will “adorable” suffice here, as well? Because that’s what Rapunzel is. Having spent her entire life (save the past day and a half) with only her mother and a chameleon, Pascal, for company, Rapunzel would have every right to be nothing more than a whining, selfish brat. But instead, she’s sunny and bright, always trying to see the best in things. During the 17.99 years she lived in the same tower, Rapunzel tried to keep herself occupied-she learned how to bake, how to sew, how to dip candles, how to paint. She cooks, cleans, does laundry, and takes care of the entire tower herself. She’s read books on anatomy, geology, and has charted all the stars in the sky she can see. Rapunzel isn’t one to sit around doing nothing. She may have been confined to a tower, but she kept herself busy throughout the years!
Rapunzel loves to paint. Her entire tower was covered in paint, from the vast spans of wall in the main room and her bedroom to the couple inches of space between the hinges and edges of a wardrobe. She is shown to be proficient with chalks as well-she loves to be creative and create new things. Drawing and painting also help to personalize something, as well: if she were to receive a new mirror, for instance, it wouldn’t really seem to belong to her until it had been covered in a new layer of paint and detailed to sit alongside everything else. To compensate for being unable to ever leave her own little world, she tries to put a little bit of herself into everything else she comes by.
In spite of living in a tower for just about eighteen years, Rapunzel is a very active girl. She likes to stretch, uses a pair of brushes to “skate” around the tower while scrubbing floors, and will almost daily go for a climb, using her long, long hair as a rope. Rapunzel frequently uses her hair to create “harnesses” for painting, and so being able to hold her weight up while keeping her hands free to hold paint and brush is one reason why she tries to keep herself in shape. She is also responsible for pulling her mother up to the window from ground level, and it’s very important to her that she’s strong enough to be able to do that.
Speaking of whom-her mother is the most important person to her in the world. Mother Gothel was the only other person that Rapunzel had ever interacted with before Flynn Rider came swinging in through her window (aside from her parents, but shh! She doesn’t remember that part). Gothel is the one who has always taken care of her, who has always watched out for her best interests, protecting her from the outside world. Mother Gothel has always been a source of comfort for Rapunzel; even if she’s sometimes vain and petty and doesn’t listen to her daughter at all, she’s all Rapunzel has ever known. No matter what happens, Rapunzel loves her mother: even after fighting with Gothel multiple times over her desire to go beyond her tower and see the “floating lights,” she still frets that her decision to leave regardless would break her mother’s heart and, later, runs right back into her arms.
Rapunzel wears her heart on her sleeve. She makes friends very easily (and loves having them, after having been alone for so long), largely due in part to her contagious excitability and her naïveté, but also due to her determination. Her determination helps her in many different ways-it helps her to find a way to leave her tower when her mother has expressly forbidden her not to, and it helps her to bully Flynn into agreeing to take her to see the floating lights. She isn’t above coercion, and pretty much forces his hand, though once she left her tower she realized that she didn’t need to put on her “tough girl” act as her “default” face. Rapunzel doesn’t hide behind any front, what you see is what you get with her.
And what you get is a whole lot of sunshine. Since she’s lived inside a gigantic stone tower for so long, everything for her is brand new and exciting. Rapunzel is a bit naïve then, understandably so (she had to check Flynn for fangs when he first broke into her tower!), and after initially leaving her tower was inherently distrustful of many things she first came across. So she won’t purposely throw herself into situations she thinks dangerous without a good reason-but the people she loves are a good reason. Rapunzel is not afraid to hold her ground when it comes to protecting the people she cares about. Even before she began to develop feelings for Flynn, she was still willing to wade into a fight with a dozen thugs armed with nothing but a frying pan and her hair in order to protect him, even though she’d been terrified of them not five minutes before. Once she’s formed a bond with somebody, Rapunzel will fight tooth and nail to protect them from any harm.
That’s the thing about Rapunzel: when she wants something, she really, truly wants it. Rapunzel feels every emotion with all her heart, which can sometimes lead to her swinging wildly between two extremes of the scale if she’s really torn (“I am a horrible daughter. I’m going back.” “WHOO-HOOOOOO, I AM NEVER GOING BACK!”). And when she’s on a mission, she is not going to let anything get in her way. She can be quite the daring thing, almost to the point of being reckless. She’s unafraid to face down thugs, or leap from high places, or even dive underwater when she’s never learned to swim. If that’s what it takes to get her where she needs to go, Rapunzel will do it without a second thought.
However, life isn’t always sunshine and roses for Rapunzel, as much as she would like it to be. She’s spent most of her life listening to Mother Gothel tell her how terrible the world outside her tower is, how the people are all mean and selfish and would try to use her for her unique abilities if they could. Gothel has also spent a lot of time telling Rapunzel that she herself would never survive in the outside world (and has an entire song devoted to reminding her of these two important facts), outlining all of her faults and trying to prevent her from leaving. For this reason, Rapunzel can be extremely self-conscious and insecure, should she let herself slow down enough to let those fears catch up with her, and can also easily spook, should something happen when she’s not expecting it/if she’s at rest and not actively pursuing something at the moment.
All in all, Rapunzel is a girl made of sunshine and bubbles, ecstatic to be exploring the world outside her tower for the very first time and thrilled to have finally accomplished her dream.
Strengths/Abilities: From the mouth of Rapunzel herself, “I have magic hair that glows when I sing.”
Entirely true.
Rapunzel’s hair has a few remarkable qualities about it-it’s blonde, it’s about seventy feet long, it seems to be unbreakable and never gets split ends, aaaaaand much like she said, it glows when she sings. It also heals injuries, so that’s pretty cool. She can heal pretty much anything, from minor scrapes and bruises, to injuries that would normally kill a person, to actually reversing the wear and tear put on the body over time and keeping somebody forever young. In order to utilize this power, the person being healed has to be in contact with her hair, whether it be by brushing it, or having it placed on the wound. After that, Rapunzel sings a special song:
Flower, gleam and glow-let your powers shine
Make the clock reverse, bring back what once was mine
Heal what has been hurt, change the Fates’ design
Save what has been lost-bring back what once was mine
What once was mine
And then they’re healed!
Rapunzel also has some pretty strong arm-muscles, developed from years of hauling her mother up to the tower’s window from the ground. She’s a mean shot with a frying pan, is a pro at flicking her hair just so that it will wrap around something tightly enough for her to either use it as leverage (such as opening doors, though this does not apply to any door with a latch) or as a pivot point to swing from. Finally, she’s got a knack for the arts, and is fantastic at painting and drawing.
Weaknesses: Rapunzel’s hair may seem like it would have no downsides, but there is one: if her hair is cut, the magic dies. So Rapunzel has been growing her hair out her entire life. She has one shorter piece, right at the nape of her neck, that was cut when she was a baby-it has turned dark brown and cannot grow any more. The rest of it? Seventy feet long and counting. This makes for quite the long bath when it comes time to wash her hair, and can be a definite hindrance while out adventuring! In addition to this, she has to make it through the entire song for somebody to be fully healed. Rapunzel may be able to sing fast, but that’s still a fair few words to get through!
Rapunzel cannot bring anybody back from the dead.
Outside of the hair, Rapunzel may be an Action Girl, but she’s still just an eighteen-year-old girl. She’s not very proficient in fighting at all, and has all of the weaknesses you’d expect from a typical human.
History: Although Rapunzel is only eighteen, her story starts many centuries before that. Her story begins with a flower. This flower was a magic flower, having grown from a pure drop of sunlight that fell to the earth. The magic flower could be used to heal people without even having to remove it from the ground, provided the one wishing to be healed sang to it a specific song. As centuries passed and the kingdom of Corona grew out of nothing nearby, a woman named Gothel discovered the flower, and used its power to keep herself young forever.
In time, Rapunzel’s parents married and came to the throne. But as the Queen neared the end of her pregnancy, she fell ill. The King, afraid he would lose both his wife and his unborn child, sent his people out to find the legendary magic flower. Gothel had been hiding the flower whenever she wasn’t using its power, but a momentary misstep knocked the camouflage from the golden flower, and it was discovered by one of the palace guards.
The flower was dug up from the earth, brought back to the castle, and the flower itself harvested to make a healing broth to save the Queen. She quickly recovered, and soon after gave birth to a daughter-a daughter born with a full head of golden hair. She was named Rapunzel by her doting parents, and was everything they could have wished for. However, Gothel, angered by the loss of her precious flower, one night snuck in to cut a lock of the child’s hair for herself, so that she could continue to use the flower’s power. But the hair turned brown almost as soon as the blades had snipped closed, cut off from the magic. With no other choice, Gothel stole the baby Rapunzel from her bassinet, spiriting her away to a tower hidden far away from the castle. In this tower Rapunzel grew, never leaving its walls, even as she grew from babe to toddler to teenager. Gothel told her from a young age that she couldn’t leave the castle, explaining to her that her magic was a gift that had to be protected, and for a long time Rapunzel obeyed her without question. But although Gothel could shelter from most things that went on outside the castle’s walls, she couldn’t cover up the skies, and Rapunzel grew up watching the mysterious floating lights that drifted up from the trees every year on her birthday. As she aged, she began to long more and more to leave her tower’s walls to see them up close, and as her eighteenth birthday approached, she began to dream of the day she’d be able to see them for herself.
Unfortunately, Mother Gothel had other plans. When Rapunzel finally worked up the nerve to ask her if she would take her to see the floating lights, Gothel promptly shut her down, saying that Rapunzel wouldn’t be able to take care of herself outside and going on at length about why it was a bad idea.
At this same time, Flynn Rider was looking for a way to escape the Corona palace guards.
Mother Gothel left the tower to go gathering herbs for food. Rapunzel had gone back to her day and had just pulled out her hairbrush to start the daily ritual of brushing when she heard a sound-something striking against the stones on the outside of the tower. She chanced a peek outside and was rewarded with the sight of a man climbing up her tower, wedging arrows between the stones and steadily making his way upwards.
Rapunzel panicked. She grabbed the first weapon she could think of, a heavy cast-iron frying pan, and when the man stopped to look into his bag, clocked him over the head as hard as she could. And then ran away in terror.
After locking him away in a wardrobe, Rapunzel thought to use him to prove to her mother that she could indeed handle herself outside of the tower. But Gothel was having none of it, and when Rapunzel’s repeated attempts to get her to reconsider ended in Gothel’s shouting, she realized that she would have to take matters into her own hands if she really wanted to leave the tower.
Her methods were a bit harsh, she knows, but Rapunzel strong-armed Flynn into agreeing to accompany her to see the floating lights, which he told her were lanterns sent up every year for the missing princess of Corona. So the two of them set off, Rapunzel excited and faintly terrified about going to see the lanterns, Flynn just grumpy and armed with a plan to manipulate her into deciding to go home and return his satchel to him. Unfortunately for Flynn, it was more difficult to scare Rapunzel than he’d anticipated, and after she turned a whole pub full of brutish thugs into nothing more than children excited to talk about their numerous dreams on Christmas morning, he began to realize that he wasn’t getting out of things that easily.
But Flynn’s past came back to haunt him, and before she realized it, the two of them were running through an underground tunnel to evade a group of men (and a horse!) that she’d never seen before in her life. They only just managed to escape into a tunnel before it was blocked off by falling stone, and as the tunnel began to fill with water and Flynn couldn’t find them a way out, Rapunzel realized that maybe she couldn’t handle everything that lay outside of her tower. A stroke of brilliance struck her, though, as Flynn admitted to her his darkest secret and she responded in turn. Her magic hair was able to light up the tunnel, helping them to see where the water was draining from the tunnel. The two of them managed to break through the barrier of stones in the nick of time, falling into a much larger but gently-flowing river and coming to safety on the far banks. That night, Rapunzel got a look at the real Flynn Rider-Eugene Fitzherbert, as his real name was, a much less arrogant man than he’d first appeared.
But their peace was to be short-lived, as Gothel appeared again and tried to order Rapunzel home with her. For the first time in her life, Rapunzel defied Gothel to her face. Her mother hadn’t been anticipating such a response, and didn’t take it well, telling Rapunzel that Flynn was only accompanying her for the eventual reward (the tiara that had been inside the satchel), and that if she gave it up to him, he would certainly abandon her. The two parted on bad terms, Rapunzel worried about what might come to pass later on.
The next day was Rapunzel’s birthday. After an initial hiccup wherein the horse from the day before-Maximus-tried to seize Flynn and drag him kicking and screaming back to the kingdom, Rapunzel, Flynn, and Pascal made it to the city.
It was everything she’d ever dreamed of, and so much more.
Quickly, though, they discovered that Rapunzel’s long hair would not last long in the city. Fortunately Flynn noticed and called over some of the city’s girls, who were absolutely ecstatic to have such a long length of hair to play with. By the time they were done braiding her hair, Rapunzel’s hair had been tied up to ankle-length, leaving her able to run and dance without worry that she would be caught up by it. And so the two explored the city-they wandered the streets, looked at several books in a library, chalked a gigantic design on the city’s cobblestones (well, that one was mostly Rapunzel), shared cupcakes and evaded the castle guard, and near the end of the day danced with a large number of the townspeople. At the end of the dance, the sun was on its way down, and it was time to head to the boats for the lantern-lighting.
Rapunzel was curious when Flynn tugged her along to a smaller, two-person boat at the docks. As they sat on the water waiting for the first lantern to go up, she confessed her deepest fears to him-“I’ve been looking out of a window for eighteen years, dreaming about what I might feel like when those lights rise in the sky. What if it’s not everything I dreamed it would be?”
But when the first lanterns of the evening went up, she was nothing short of enthralled. The lanterns all around her were just as wonderful as she’d dreamed, the atmosphere amazing. And as she watched the lanterns rising, she finally recognized the budding feelings she’d been developing for Flynn for what they were-love.
Unafraid now of what might happen, Rapunzel gave Flynn’s satchel back to him. Sitting there in the boat, the two leaned in, and were just about to share their first kiss…
When Rapunzel found herself in the town of Luministi.
Canon Point: End of the “I See the Light” sequence, right as Flynn and Rapunzel are going in for the kiss.