More Elena of Avalor headcanons, though they’re on Princess Valentina of Paraíso and her guard Manuel
I think the title says it all.
These are my headcanons for Princess Valentina and Manuel, how they met, what their relationship is like, and what the future may hold in store for them (though more Valentina).
Again, this post really got away from me in terms of length. Like the previous one, it is divided into parts to make things a bit easier and clearer (I hope...).
One important detail: in regards to my headcanoning Valentina as heir to her kingdom, I am following that route because I’m interpreting Manuel’s announcement of her as ‘17th Heir to the Golden Throne’, as meaning that there were seventeen heirs (herself included) since the kingdom was established, and thus she will be its 17th monarch.
To pre-emptively address the accusation that I may have gone a bit too far with Valentina in terms of Mary-Sue territory, I plead that at least I can see where you’re coming from. That said, many of the traits I mention down there will be taken from the series and I tried to make the way she gained them believable.
I also plead guilty to injecting perhaps a tad too much Manuelentina into it, but I think the way I portrayed it still makes a minimum amount of sense.
As one final tidbit, some details here are inspired from posts by @pizzansunshine , notably the detail about how Valentina cooked with her abuela and how Manuel was Valentina’s only real friend before Elena.
With that said, read on for my headcanons on Valentina and Manuel, with appearances by Princess Charlotte of Isleworth, her goblin Morris, and the sorceress Zinessa (all characters from Sofia the First), and references to Rafa and Elena herself.
Edit: Made a very small correction below (regarding the kind of té that Valentina took from her abuela’s garden) after realizing I mixed it up. Hopefully this will teach me the wisdom of not proof-reading headcanons so late in the night...
Princess Valentina Montañez Torres
Although Princess Valentina is the crown heir to the kingdom of Paraíso, one can say that her life there was anything but paradise.
Like many rulers in long bygone days - although unlike most in more recent eras - her parents had an arranged marriage. Some of it was for the sake of a political alliance, but a strong motivating factor is because Valentina’s paternal grandfather, father to the current king (then prince) of Paraíso, was a traditional sort who believed in keeping up appearances and felt that his son should marry someone ‘appropriate’. As a result, he set up an arranged marriage between his son and a noblewoman from Cariza.
Both Valentina’s father and mother resented the relationship, as they loved other people, but as their parents were both pushing the relationship to an inescapable stretch, they had no choice but to go forward with it. That said, they made a private agreement on their wedding night: they would conceive a single heir to make their parents happy (which had to be theirs because of magical ways to determine paternity), and then they’d go back to their affairs (which they knew their parents wouldn’t mind as long as said affairs remained behind closed doors).
Less than a year after their marriage, their heir, a girl who they named Valentina, was born. The king was less than happy, as he believed a grandson would make a better heir than a granddaughter, but he hardly had time to convey his disagreement, because he died less than a month after Valentina’s birth. After the mourning period, Valentina’s father became king.
Valentina turned out to be a very bright girl as she grew up, learning to walk and talk before the average ages for both things and learning to read at the age of three. Unfortunately, her intelligence meant she was bright enough to realize that neither of her parents truly loved her, as she could tell the difference between the way loving parents (both palace workers and villagers) treated their children and the way hers treated her.
In her young mind, she believed that her parents treated her that way because she wasn’t good enough, and as a result she strove to be even better. She tried to find as many things to do and tried to be as good at each of them as possible, but it never seemed to be enough. To both her parents, she was the child they had been forced to conceive rather than the one they’d had with someone they loved. To her father, she was a girl as well, and thus an inferior heir by default (as he agreed with his father on that point).
All the same, Valentina was close to her father’s mother, with whom she did plenty of things, from gardening to cooking. Her abuela always tried to shower her with all the love and affection she could in an effort to compensate for the one her son wasn’t giving her granddaughter, but it never seemed enough. Valentina loved her grandmother very much, but she still wished that, some day, her father and mother would love her.
Valentina kept up her progress as she grew. She started learning how to ride at the age of seven, with a mare named Maravilla (who had just been trained as a learning mare, and who she later was given as a personal mount), and started learning how to fence at the same age. She also took subjects many other children who learned them deemed as extremely boring, such as politics and economics.
And as she learned more, she started realizing the poor conditions that some of Paraíso’s citizens lived in, and vowed to do what she could to improve them. At first, she could do little, but as she grew older, learned more, and gained more ‘personal clout’, she managed to do more. Sadly, it only seemed to enrage her father, who now had to inwardly acknowledge that his daughter was a better ruler than him. He needed so many advisers that most of the palace couldn’t even keep track of all of them - his daughter would likely do with six at most.
In general terms, the people loved her. They called her ‘Defender of the Realm’, ‘The Shining Light of the South’, ‘Beloved Champion of The People’, and even more epithets, some so grandiose they crossed the line into ridiculous. Noblemen were a bit more divided, but by and large they knew she would be better for the kingdom than her father. It only took someone with half a brain to realize that if not for his army of advisers, the king would have put Paraíso in a rather bad state.
Valentina even managed to find some romance of sorts in the process, as she, to her great surprise, fell in love with her best friend, who she had known since she could remember, and the only one she trusted with literally everything, except with not having the shock of a lifetime once she poured that part of her heart out to him, because there surely was no way he could have such feelings for her (now being older, Valentina knew she could be difficult to put up with in many ways).
But there was a bump in the road when Valentina was nineteen, and her mother died from childbirth after an exhausting pregnancy - and it became clear that the child simply could not be the king’s. The identity of the man with whom she had the affair was lost, but a rumor came up that perhaps Valentina was not the king’s daughter either - which if true, would make her ineligible to rule.
An uproar ensued. Many shouted that Valentina had to be the king’s daughter - one simply had to look at them to see. Others said they didn’t care whether Valentina was the king’s daughter or not, she’d be the best ruler the kingdom ever had.
But royal protocol had to be observed.
And while it was decided that the kingdom’s wizards (of which there were a great deal) couldn’t be trusted with finding the truth, a visiting princess from Isleworth and her goblin friend happened to have the solution. They’d ask Zinessa, the most famous sorcerer of their kingdom, to do the magical paternity test.
She made it, and it turned out that Valentina was indeed the king’s and the queen’s daughter, to the joys of many, but to the ire of those who were interested in having her removed from the throne.
But her father finally got what he wanted - a marriage to the woman he loved. He cut the official mourning period short by months and married the woman he’d been having an affair with for years, bringing her children along and giving Valentina a set of three ‘step-siblings’ (two of which were ‘not so step’, as they were her father’s illegitimate children) she had to learn to live with.
And the pressure on her only mounted. She had worked herself into such a pinnacle of perfection that she dreaded the consequences of making even the slightest error.
And she could only confide in one person about it.
Manuel
The son of the palace gardener, he knew Valentina since they were both in diapers and was the only friend of Valentina’s age that she had until her early adult years. All the other children, both from the royal court and from the palace staff, were too intimidated by and jealous of her. Not only she seemed to be better than them at everything, but she took everything too seriously. Everything was a competition for her, and she had to win them all. There seemed to be no way to be friends with her.
While Manuel was more easy going than Valentina, he had known her long enough to be used to it, and simply went with the flow on that aspect.
The two of them were joined at the hip since they could remember, and did everything they could together. Manuel could not take part in her royal training (which he was thankful for, because he found it dreadfully boring) but he did everything he could with her. They learned how to ride together, they learned fencing together, and they played olaball together. Valentina even learned topiary from Manuel’s father as he taught Manuel.
Other than her royal training, the only thing Manuel never learned alongside Valentina was magic. It seemed too complex, and he did not trust himself to wield such a powerful thing.
The only things Manuel was better at than Valentina were topiary and olaball. But instead of pursuing either of those careers, he started training to be a royal guard, as his parents wanted him to have some kind of prestige and financial security in his job, and Manuel found the wisdom in their words enough to agree. It was something he was familiar with at any rate (he ended up spending a lot of time defending Valentina) so he should be able to do it.
And he did, but right before starting officially, he was discovered by an olaball sponsor, who wanted him to be part of Paraíso’s olaball team. As Manuel liked olaball, and the pay was quite good, he accepted.
But it didn’t take him long to be disappointed. For one, olaball revolved too much about winning, winning, winning. It seemed too much like being around Valentina, but with much less of an actual concrete reason for winning and none of the tempering qualities that made Valentina such a joy to be with. And, he had to admit it, it was hard also because Valentina wasn’t there.
Manuel wouldn’t admit it to anyone, not even to Valentina (who he trusted with literally everything else) but he had fallen in love with her. But he kept it quiet. How could someone as amazing as her ever fall in love with someone like him?
Eventually, it came the time for Manuel’s first olaball tournament… and to his surprise, Valentina was there in the audience, cheering louder than anyone else, and cheering only for him. Seeing and hearing her made Manuel think that, no matter what, she would always be a great friend.
They ended up winning the tournament, but Manuel thought one was enough. He couldn’t tolerate having his life be all about olaball. So he went back to the palace and asked for a post as a royal guard. Many were disappointed, as Manuel had been the most promising player of the season, but if that was his will, then it was it. Valentina however turned out to be thrilled that he was back, and even more so when he was assigned as her personal guard.
Manuel was relieved to be back with her, both for his sake and for hers. He knew how life her hard was, and had worried about how she had been doing without him. They had regularly corresponded, but it wasn’t the same thing as being back together.
And it was only shortly after his return that Valentina’s mother died and there was the whole public uproar about her possible paternity, which cost Valentina several nights where she cried herself to sleep in Manuel’s arms. Though it was proved she was the rightful heir, the ordeal of having such a personal matter come to light publicly, not to mention her father’s all-too-prompt remarriage, almost lead to her having a breakdown.
But to Manuel’s relief, and thanks in no small part to his support (though Valentina’s abuela and her supporters among nobility and the people also played important roles) she recovered.
The end of the feud with Avalor
Like every surrounding realm, Paraíso heard about the return of the rightful princess of Avalor, and of how the one they thought was the rightful queen (thanks to an elaborate ruse involving forged documents) was overthrown by a rebellion from the people. It was a frightful experience for them, as only a short time before they’d had a visit from Shuriki, and they’d spent forty-one years right beside her.
Unknowingly to them, they had actually been the main reason Shuriki never expanded her tyranny beyond Avalor. Not only did they have a strong army, but they had enough magical people in their kingdom that Shuriki would never stand a chance against all of them. Even Princess Valentina had ended up impressing Shuriki with her magical talent (during a visit she made to see if it would be safe to invade Paraíso) to the point she reluctantly decided to leave them alone.
Had it not been for their feud with Paraíso (and the fact that Paraíso stated their support of Shuriki while they believed she was the rightful ruler) the people of Avalor would have gone to them for help early on. Rafa de Alva, daughter of the royal wizard of Avalor, had particularly regretted that she had never been able to apply for magic lessons in Paraíso, but with all the risk factors at stake, she had been too afraid of what could go wrong.
At any rate, shortly after the stories of Princess Elena’s return came the stories of her many incredible deeds. Her treaty with the noblins, her pacifying a rock monster, her handling of a Yacali threat, her vanquishing of the fairy Orizaba, her participation in the olaball tournament, her victory of the fencing tournament, her defeating of Marimonda… it all painted such a portrait of her as to be inimitable. Even some in Paraíso (thankfully for Valentina, not many) started saying ‘She’s even better than Princess Valentina!’.
Manuel reassured her that no, Elena couldn’t be than her. All those stories had to be blown out of proportion. But, shortly after the second Dia de los Muertos after her mother’s death, an emissary from Avalor came for a peace treaty - the first attempt made in over a hundred years.
Valentina decided to go, and between herself and Manuel, they planned out everything they would need to prove things to them, just in case. A mirror to focus the sun on her, té de limón from her abuela’s garden, trumpets for a musical number, a bright parasol, and her tamborita for magic displays. Maravilla also went.
When they arrived at Avalor, they quickly found out two things.
One - the stories about Princess Elena were, if not true, at least not exaggerated beyond any reasonable amount. She really had done all those things, even if some details might have been blown a bit out of proportion.
Two - Princess Elena truly seemed interested in becoming friends with her and their kingdom. Despite the pragmatic goal, there seemed to be a genuine offer of friendship. And Valentina simply couldn’t comprehend such a thing. She got along well with many heirs of foreign kingdoms - Princess Charlotte of Isleworth had even shown true concern for her when the issues of her paternity came about - but none was her ‘friend friend’. Valentina assumed that Elena had to be trying to put her off guard, and, still insecure after seeing how she truly couldn’t compare to Elena, simply went for her plan of impressing them.
But eventually, after an ordeal that involved her being overbearing to everyone in Elena’s palace, a crushing victory at olaball, and two accidentally-awakened Xolos, Valentina and Elena struck up a true friendship, and Valentina went back to Paraíso much happier than she had been when she left.
Which later turned out to be all the better for her, given everything she ended up having to face in Paraíso.