hi anna! I was wondering what you make of amelie not telling adrien the truth about his father, what her motivations might be? of course, with episodes not yet aired, this could still be a plot point. but was just wanting your take on amelie :)
hi anon i have SO many thoughts about amelie. a lot of them are extrapolated from my thoughts about emilie, which are extrapolated from pieces of canon, so. take everything I say with a grain of salt. but please yes journey with me into the recesses of my amelie-pilled mind<3
so, like I said, a lot of what I understand about amelie comes from what i understand about emilie. and since there's very little actual emilie content in the show's canon, we're left to gather what we can from the hole she leaves behind. and it's a very striking silhouette. since gabriel, nathalie, and adrien are the characters who reference her the most, we can gather a lot about her from how the three of them act, particularly in response to her death.
family systems theory posits that a person's behavior doesn't exist in a vacuum, but instead functions as an integrated part of a family unit, or system. for about thirteen years, gabriel, emilie, nathalie, and adrien functioned as a family system where everyone had a role to play. what we witness in canon is the breaking down of that system after a core part of the unit (emilie) was removed. gabriel struggles with a loss of direction and object for his obsession. nathalie is haphazardly shoved into an ill-fitting maternal role. adrien struggles with a lack of nurturing and self-identity.
from these responses, I gather that emilie was someone who once provided gabriel with direction and acted as an object for his obsession (after she was gone, he got direction from nathalie and obsession from the miraculous). she was someone who filled a very classic wife and mother role (the one that nathalie was shoved into after she was gone). and she was someone who nurtured adrien and strongly influenced his self-identity (to fill this gap, adrien pursued friendships to fill his need for nurturing and was able to build his identity on being chat noir.)
and the extent to which this family unit struggled to cope with emilie's loss tells me that she was deeply entrenched in these roles. I believe the family system was largely built around her influence. she was the engine, the beating heart. alongside other details we know about her - she was an actress, a rulebreaker, a person who went to frankly insane lengths to magically create a perfectly obedient child who looked exactly like her - I think she enjoyed being the center of attention. I think she stayed with gabriel for so long because she liked how obsessed he was with her. I think she enjoyed nathalie's undying loyalty. I think she liked how adrien loved her more than anything, that he was made exactly for her, that she was his entire world. but I think she also wasn't fully devastated to leave them. I think it made her skin crawl, a bit, to stay in the same place for too long. after all, her very first important relationship was with someone she left behind completely.
which brings us to amelie.
and emilie's propensity for telling people what to do, becoming the center of their worlds, making them beg her to stay, had to start somewhere, right? the older sister decides what to do. what to play, when to stop. the younger sister listens and follows and copies. emilie and amelie grew up as best friends in a big house with an angry father and a scared mother, and one of them was the older sister. emilie was always in charge.
what i'm getting at here is that emilie liked to make people emotionally dependent on her, and then she would leave. (not that I think emilie was truly malicious or anything. I just think that deep enmeshment felt good, and then commitment scared her. she acted on impulse. she loved being worshipped and hated being tied down.) I think amelie watched her do it to a string of boyfriends in their adolescence, and never imagined emilie would do it to her too. but then emilie met gabe, and she was gone.
I think that amelie was just as predisposed to dependence as emilie was predisposed to control. from birth, they created a tight little family system of just the two of them, where emilie made the decisions and amelie followed them. emilie was lovable and amelie loved her. they both just reinforced each other's bad habits, ad nauseam. when emilie left amelie, she found new people to love her and follow her lead (to fill the void amelie left in her system). and when emilie left her, amelie had never truly had a chance to exercise her own independence. she was immediately forced into an abusive marriage where she wasn't loved, valued, or offered any agency at all. the only skill she'd ever honed was keeping her head down and following orders, and boy did she use it.
when felix came into amelie's life, I think he was the first person she had ever met who truly loved her and wanted to stay with her. when felix was old enough to understand his situation, I think he knew that he was going to have to be the one to change things. amelie had been stuck in survival mode since she got married. he had to be the active agent here. so, felix took the lead. he started making moves. he started telling amelie what to do, started protecting them as much as he could against colt. (amelie had of course been doing what she could too, but her protection was all defensive, not offensive.) when colt died, felix did what he had to do to protect himself from his uncle. amelie, who hated that guy for taking her sister from her, was completely on board.
amelie slotted easily into a new family system with felix, where he takes the lead and she follows. but this time, felix loves her and wants to stay with her. I think, to amelie's nervous system, it feels like a rewrite of what happened with emilie. she feels safe now, she trusts that felix can tell her the right thing to do and isn't going to leave. and because of that, she reeaally isn't going to fight him on anything. when he says it's best to keep secrets from adrien, she follows his lead. when adrien's headstrong girlfriend pushes hard for her to lie about gabriel, she gives in. not because it's truly what she believes is right, but because she's been trained her whole life to give in when people tell her to do things. it's what her nervous system is hardwired to do.
anyway. these are just some of my thoughts about my daughters flight and freeze. I mean active voice and passive voice. I mean emilie and amelie. also there is still much to be said about emilie's choice of creating a new identical fully dependent person after cutting off her twin sister but alas that's for another day. thank you for asking about my special interest amelie graham de vanily<3
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