He sent an automaton to attack her, which caused her father, King Frederic, to confine Rapunzel to a tower, and then willfully mutated his pet raccoon to attack the castle guard, distracting everybody while Varian kidnapped Rapunzel's mother, Queen Arianna.
Varian threw away his moral compass when he came to the conclusion that he needed Rapunzel, not the flower, to free his father. He became bitter, spiteful, and manipulative, setting up a large-scale problem and tricking Rapunzel into helping him acquire the dried remains of the Sundrop Flower and hatefully telling her off for breaking her promise to help him should he ever come to her and turning him away from a moment of real need. However, due to a crisis going on, Rapunzel reluctantly turned Varian away, causing him to lose all faith in her, the royal family, and the people of Corona, vowing to make them pay. When one of his experiments in finding a solution goes horribly wrong that it entraps his father in unbreakable amber, Varian is overwhelmed with guilt and went to the only person he hoped could help, Princess Rapunzel. He is irritated by people calling his work magic when he insists it is science, and he has a progressive mind, wanting to help his village when it is under siege by mysterious spikes of unbreakable rock, despite his father's wishes to pretend that the problem doesn't exist.
He had a strained relationship with his father, whose approval he longed for. He is voiced by Jeremy Jordan, who also played Winn Schott on Supergirl.Ī young but brilliant-minded scientist, alchemist, and inventor, Varian started out with a youthful idealistic view that sought to be of help to others through his work as an alchemist. In the second season, he briefly appears as a hallucination in "Happiness Is." and was mentioned by Adira as the "Son of Quirin." He later returned in the third season, as a primary antagonist in the premiere episode "Rapunzel's Return" and later, redeems himself and serves as a major protagonist in the third season. After a failed attempt at freeing his father and exacting revenge upon Rapunzel, he is arrested, swearing on his life to make his father proud. He is a young, brilliant, yet often clumsy alchemist and a friend of Rapunzel, who later becomes obsessed with getting revenge on both her and Corona after they are unable to help save his father due to a blizzard threatening the kingdom and the people’s lives. He serves as a supporting protagonist in the first half of the first season, but later serves as the main antagonist of the second half of the season when his father, Quirin, was trapped in the amber that he caused and felt betrayed by Rapunzel’s decision to save her people and the kingdom over Quirin. Varian is a recurring, later major character in Tangled: The Series. We were in this together, but if I can't have a happy ending, then neither can you!