Oh man, yeah, I didn't really mention Bruno because I'm not really sure what they were going for regarding his relationship to the family. With Luisa, Isabela, and Mirabel, I felt like their songs/story made it pretty clear what the message was (considering yourself responsible for supporting everyone to the point of anxious breakdown, suppressing self-expression because you don't want to disappoint people, and trying to always be supportive of your family when they're not supporting you isn't healthy). Well, I guess Bruno is similar to Mirabel in terms of always trying to support a family that never reciprocated that support. There are definitely scapegoat vibes to the way the family treats him, but I also kind of thought it wasn't as clearcut as (for example) your situation.
Like, the dynamic between Bruno and his family was clearly toxic, and Alma could have shut it down but instead was part of it. But with the living in the walls of the house thing, for example, that plotpoint is a bit odd because part of that situation is that no one *knew* he was there (apparently? not even the girl with good hearing??). Everyone thought that he had left to pursue his happiness. The vibe I got from that was that (even though his family mistreated him) it was more Bruno's idea to retreat from them publicly while staying close so that he could watch over them and keep them safe (because Bruno does care for his family and does think his prophesying skills just make them unhappy) and none of the family would have agreed that was right or necessary if they had known he was doing that.
And then the resolution to Bruno's plotline seems to be to just, like, communicate? For example, it seems like a lot of the family thought that Bruno tends to tell them bad prophecies out of malice. This is very odd as it seems to indicate that the family can't seem to separate "Bruno's prophecies" (which he has zero control over) from "Bruno's behavior/what he is responsible for bringing about." I think there's two ways to interpret this: (1) the family is just... really dumb/ignorant about how Bruno's prophecies work and/or Bruno has difficulty communicating his intentions so a lot of his behavior of revealing inconvenient prophecies seems impish or mischievous or spiteful and is interpreted by his siblings and nephew/nieces that way, or (2) the family DOES know better but they have a toxic dynamic where Bruno is an easy target for pinning all their frustrations on and so they blame him without considering how hurtful that is. A lot of the interactions with Alma does seem more like (2), where she treats the power as harmful, but also *Bruno* as harmful by extension and so he needs to be shunted off to the side wherever possible, without ever seeming to acknowledge that, if Bruno's powers are a curse, that doesn't mean *Bruno* is a curse. But the film kind of treats the problem as mainly (1), where a lot of characters just assume that Bruno doesn't care about them when actually he does, and finding this out helps repair the relationship. I don't know, I can see how the relationship in the movie is less dark than a typical scapegoat type relationship, but also that there are definitely scapegoat elements to the family dynamics there. Depending on how you interpret why the family members seemed to blame Bruno for his prophecies and how severely/frequently they did that, the relationship could vary quite a bit in how mendable it seems, maybe? But yeah, the relationship between Alma and Bruno is definitely Not Good.
In any case, yeah, there are definitely family dynamics where no contact is by far the best option, and Disney was definitely tapping into some of that with the relationships in Encanto. But it either held back in terms of how terrible families can get or it held back in terms of being realistic about how damaging these kinds of family dynamics can be. Ultimately, at the end of the day, the family in Encanto *is* quite communal and cares about each other. But that's not really a guarantee in the kind of dysfunctional families that Encanto was trying to depict, maybe?
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Like, the dynamic between Bruno and his family was clearly toxic, and Alma could have shut it down but instead was part of it. But with the living in the walls of the house thing, for example, that plotpoint is a bit odd because part of that situation is that no one *knew* he was there (apparently? not even the girl with good hearing??). Everyone thought that he had left to pursue his happiness. The vibe I got from that was that (even though his family mistreated him) it was more Bruno's idea to retreat from them publicly while staying close so that he could watch over them and keep them safe (because Bruno does care for his family and does think his prophesying skills just make them unhappy) and none of the family would have agreed that was right or necessary if they had known he was doing that.
And then the resolution to Bruno's plotline seems to be to just, like, communicate? For example, it seems like a lot of the family thought that Bruno tends to tell them bad prophecies out of malice. This is very odd as it seems to indicate that the family can't seem to separate "Bruno's prophecies" (which he has zero control over) from "Bruno's behavior/what he is responsible for bringing about." I think there's two ways to interpret this: (1) the family is just... really dumb/ignorant about how Bruno's prophecies work and/or Bruno has difficulty communicating his intentions so a lot of his behavior of revealing inconvenient prophecies seems impish or mischievous or spiteful and is interpreted by his siblings and nephew/nieces that way, or (2) the family DOES know better but they have a toxic dynamic where Bruno is an easy target for pinning all their frustrations on and so they blame him without considering how hurtful that is. A lot of the interactions with Alma does seem more like (2), where she treats the power as harmful, but also *Bruno* as harmful by extension and so he needs to be shunted off to the side wherever possible, without ever seeming to acknowledge that, if Bruno's powers are a curse, that doesn't mean *Bruno* is a curse. But the film kind of treats the problem as mainly (1), where a lot of characters just assume that Bruno doesn't care about them when actually he does, and finding this out helps repair the relationship. I don't know, I can see how the relationship in the movie is less dark than a typical scapegoat type relationship, but also that there are definitely scapegoat elements to the family dynamics there. Depending on how you interpret why the family members seemed to blame Bruno for his prophecies and how severely/frequently they did that, the relationship could vary quite a bit in how mendable it seems, maybe? But yeah, the relationship between Alma and Bruno is definitely Not Good.
In any case, yeah, there are definitely family dynamics where no contact is by far the best option, and Disney was definitely tapping into some of that with the relationships in Encanto. But it either held back in terms of how terrible families can get or it held back in terms of being realistic about how damaging these kinds of family dynamics can be. Ultimately, at the end of the day, the family in Encanto *is* quite communal and cares about each other. But that's not really a guarantee in the kind of dysfunctional families that Encanto was trying to depict, maybe?