#it captures those overwhelming moments of excitement when you're responding to a fandom you love

[aetherdecember]

Okay, this should be my last post on Turning Red, but I had to share some observations since Disney is making me think about my younger years.

I think it’s fascinating how Encanto and Turning Red handle similar subjects but with different responses. Especially concerning their main protagonists.

In Encanto, Mirabel is raised within a family culture of having gifts and using those gifts to serve the community. Those gifts are a blessing.

Turning Red shuns the gift and tries to get rid of it. It’s a curse.

Mirabel seems more mature than 15 because of the expectations of her family.

Mei is more or less allowed to be herself (sorry, I wasn’t paying close attention to this movie after the Daisy Mart scene... that scene murdered me with how hard I cringed).

At the end of Encanto we see that maybe those gifts weren’t quite the blessings they were made out to be (extremely simplified, there’s a ton of context I’m not unpacking here).

At the end of Turning Red we see that the gift isn’t exactly the curse it was made out to be.

Both are shaped by the experiences of those who have/use them.

Both had gifts that were given but perspective is what defines the experience of those who use them.

Ultimately, I relate to Encanto more because I lived with the responsibilities and pressures of meeting my family’s needs. As a teen, I was mute for several years because I felt my voice wasn’t worth sharing, that no one heard me anyway so I stopped talking. We’d moved recently too, so it wasn’t like I had friends to help me past that phase. Instead, I became the person my parents needed me to be. As the oldest, it was my duty to help support the family in every capacity possible. Whether that was financially, through service, or staying out of the way. Years later, I realized I was picking up my parent’s fears and acting upon it without anyone asking me to. At the time though, I didn’t know, and it was reading, writing, and discovering fandoms that brought me out of my muteness, but most days I still wish I didn’t have a voice.

And forgive me if I project my experiences onto Mirabel, but compared to Mei she doesn’t have the same social support outside her family. At least, we don’t see any friends or other teens in the movie. (Realistically I know they’re there, they just look so similar to the adults that you can’t easily pick out teen without studying the characters in the background closely.) Given how family centric the Madrigals are, it seems like Mirabel kept her friendships/social interactions mainly within her family.

Mei on the other hand has a tight knit friend group. She’s allowed to express herself without fear of judgement among them. She still has to balance her family’s expectations, but she’s not stuck in an echo chamber of what her family wants. By the end of the movie, she’s allowed to choose what direction she wants to go. That’s probably the only part I resonate with because I also managed to choose my own direction.

I just think it’s cool how those differences portray different attributes of being a teenager.