#yes i rewatched it agian instead of going to sleep

[thisstableground]

im super invested in the fact that various extra materials have stated that bruno used to be the golden child until things started going to shit when he was a teenager, and i am very on board with the implication that i’ve seen others mention where its like, him being sort of blunt and too honest about that stuff is seen as cute and precocious when he’s a kid, and becomes less so as he gets older. and there’s also the general social change inthe encanto as they move further away from the circumstances that brought them there as generations who never experienced the outside world firsthand grow up.

but it also occurs to me that perhaps another reason why things would have been so different with his visions and his relationship to the town when he’s young is because if a five year old is having a vision, chances are, he’s not going to understand a lot of the context of what he’s seeing, but nobody would expect him to. so it was far more likely that someone, whether that’s alma or whoever he was doing visions for, would be there to help him interpret it or discuss it because frankly otherwise i don’t think you’re gonna get a lot of sense out of that at all, five year old logic can be very convoluted. i don’t know if this predates the sand ritual that allows others to literally see what he is seeing, but even them sitting with him and asking patient questions and redirecting his attention to certain things and giving him some suggestions would be something, like when you sit with a kid who is learning to read and let them sound out the letters and let them mistakes then once they’ve done that, you guide them to the right answers.

but then at some point expectations started to change and it went from being a collaborative “okay, lets sound this vision out together” effort, to it being something that they expect bruno to do by himself, because he’s older now and because it’s His Responsibility and because all of the kids’ gifts slowly become less of a collaborative effort alongside the townsfolk and more of a thing that the town relies on as a crutch.

and i can’t see alma necessarily being the most understanding if, say, 16 year old bruno asks her to help him interpret like she used to when he was ten years younger - and getting “aren’t you old enough to do that yourself by now??” as a response is like. the fastest way to discourage someone from ever asking for help again.

so he just tries his best to do it entirely by himself, and that’s so much extra pressure on him, not just to see things that might be very upsetting to witness, but to understand them and to not miss anything and to convey them clearly and accurately when we know that what he sees is pretty cryptic and out of order. and then if the bad visions are the result of him feeling bad in general then that’s a very self-perpetuating cycle

idk, i think it’s just so sad how we can see how much of a difference having someone else to help him interpret what he’s seeing makes with mirabel giving him an assist, both in terms of actually interpreting the events, seeing further than he had been able to, and in terms of his emotions (i gotta imagine it’s very, very rare that he’d get as excited about most of his visions as he was at the end of the one he did in antonio’s room). like, i’m pretty sure seeing the future is always gonna hold some level of trauma to it but i wonder how much could’ve been alleviated if he hadn’t also been trying to go it alone.