Zeebee

so, i was just looking through some encanto fanart and headcanons and came across this piece (artist: https://mobile.twitter.com/ye_enc): 

abuela had triplets - julieta, pepa, and bruno. both julieta and pepa had three kids - isabella, luisa, and mirabel for julieta, and dolores, camilo, and antonio for pepa. 

what i noticed is that for each batch of three, each individual falls under a certain category, and it seems to follow by age. 

julieta was, as this lovely fanart shows, likely depended on quite frequently for her ability to heal via her cooking. her gift would have been the most useful and therefore she likely would have been praised the most as “the perfect one”. 

this, of course, next falls to isabella, who we see this with the most frequently. abuela very clearly is living the life she wished she could have lived through isabella, and is viewed as the perfect golden child by everyone around her. 

dolores is a little different, but i believe she still fits the trope. she is basically the physical embodiment of “seen but not heard.” she keeps quiet on the things she knows would upset her family and doesn’t make herself heard, even when she is in pain, whether physical or emotional. she doesn’t tell anyone that she knows bruno has been living in the walls for the ten years he’s been missing; she doesn’t tell anyone about her feelings for mariano, because she knows that will upset abuela and her cousin’s “perfect for the encanto” arrangement; and one can only imagine how loud certain things are to her, that are endurable for us (fireworks, for example). 

next are the middle children: pepa, luisa, and camilo. all of them have some kind of pressure on their shoulders. (and - just a fun thing i noticed - while luisa’s literal pressure is the many things she carries, pepa’s pressure is atmospheric pressure, because she controls the weather. but anyway, lol). 

all three of these characters are told in one way or another to bottle up their emotions and keep them buried inside. with pepa, we see this very directly as she is constantly told by the other characters (especially abuela) to, as the fanart above shows, calm down and essentially turn off her emotions because of the damage she can cause with her weather powers. this kind of reminds me of the “conceal, don’t feel” thing that elsa had with her gloves. both pepa and elsa demonstrate the same growth throughout their movies, too - learning to accept themselves and their abilities and thus being able to control them instead of being controlled by them - but, i digress. 

luisa, by contrast, is indirectly told to keep her emotions at bay. she is treated as something of a useful tool, both by the town and by abuela, and seen in a very masculine light despite her relatively feminine personality. because of this treatment and the expectation that she will always be strong that comes with it, she falls into the same category as pepa. 

camilo, like dolores, is a little different, but still fits. we don’t see much of him in the movie, but i imagine he is depended on as being the funny one. if anyone reading this is into k-pop or bts, think of camilo as like the j-hope or the jin of the group. he’s always expected to be funny and smiling, lifting everyone else’s spirits - but who lifts his spirits? 

and lastly, we have the youngest siblings - bruno, mirabel, and antonio. they fit into the roll, of course, of the scapegoat, of family disappointments. 

bruno was rejected by the town and by his family, seen as a harbinger of chaos and horror, a bad omen - all because he can see the future, something that he obviously cannot control. but, of course, it’s easier to simply blame someone else than accept the truth or take responsibility for your own actions. 

mirabel, of course, is treated in much the same way. she is seen as a bad omen, as well, and is quite literally feared to be the one who will destroy the family and the encanto, because of bruno’s vision. 

antonio does not quite fit into this category, but i think if he had not gotten a gift, he would have been shunned in much the same way as bruno or mirabel. it can also be argued that his gift isn’t really very useful, and we can see abuela struggle for a moment to think of how they could put his gift to use at the breakfast at the beginning of the movie (”i told them to warm up your seat”). 

@pscentral event 09: comfort

godskin ?