“This particular dynamic transfers over to Camille when Adora is out of the picture. Regardless of Camille’s parenting style, regardless of her love and how unconditional, Amma was born starved and strangled blue. Poisoned. Like Adora, she can only find the sanctity of love through destruction. So, when Camille’s attention finally shifts for the briefest of moments, there’s another little dead girl waiting to be found. And Amma adds a new lock of hair, woven into the form of a rug, to her dollhouse full of little dead girls. She cannot stand to be replaced. She hurts to be loved.” (From a very old Substack post of mine)

What you could call their whole “almost-incest” thing is trauma-bonded intimacy. Camille feels pulled toward Amma not just because she’s her sister, but because she becomes this eerie, living ghost of Marian: this second chance that isn’t really a chance at all. Amma knows exactly how to fill that space, and she weaponizes it. There’s something deeply manipulative and performative in the way Amma plays at being Camille’s fragile little sister one second, then flips into this seductive, controlling force the next. It’s a mimicry of love. It’s control and desperate need.

And yes, there’s the erotic charge simmering under the surface—not necessarily because either of them wants the other in a romantic way, but because everything in their world has been corrupted by Adora’s version of affection. It’s all blurred. Amma doesn’t know how to be loved without performing for it. Camille doesn’t know how to receive love without absorbing pain. So what they give each other becomes a grotesque amalgam of comfort and contamination. Camille can’t save her. Amma doesn’t want to be saved, unless it still lets her win.