The Differences Between The Story Alma Tells And What Really Happens Just Kills Me Because It’s A Hint

The differences between the story Alma tells and what really happens just kills me because it’s a hint right from the beginning that she’s never allowed herself to process her grief. She turns the single most horrific moment of her life into a romantic story she can tell a child. She divorces any and all feeling from it - the Alma of her story suffers prettily, and on accepts the death of her husband, who valiantly walks into certain death.

The thing is that while the encanto definitely came from love, and is a story of love - her love for her children, her love for Pedro, and Pedro’s love for her - it isn’t a story of romance. There’s nothing romantic about her holding their babies and watching her husband be slaughtered. And the very crucial detail of her grief that’s missing from the story is so Obvious in retrospect.

In the original scene, the men on horses just disappear and the candle lights up gently. But what actually happens is that she screams and her grief blasts them away, very likely even killing the men who murdered her husband! The mountains don’t gently sprout up out of the ground, they shoot out with all the power of her pain. This isn’t a romantic drama, it’s just grief and senseless violence, and she romanticizes the death of her own husband because she can’t deal with what it really means. With the responsibility of protecting them falling only and completely on her. With going through the rest of her very long life without a partner.

Mirabel knows this story but when she sees the devastation on her abuela’s face she’s surprised and heartbroken because it just never occurred to her that Alma was leaving things out, that Alma actually felt that grief so viscerally it turned to a brutal, blinding magic.

But this is a story of love - so Alma prays for Pedro to show her the way and he sends her Mirabel to love her despite Alma’s increasingly withdrawn and worrying behavior. So Mirabel sees the butterfly and it clicks, finally, that it’s not a lack of feeling that Alma suffers from, but so much feeling she doesn’t know how to process it anymore. And finally, for the first time in the movie, Alma let’s herself grieve in front of her family and can heal.