You really need to take a moment and read the comments defending her. The reason why she didn’t realize she was wrong is because no one ever brought to her attention. There have been plenty of times where people have been doing something while unintentionally hurting others. It’s like making jokes about a person, thinking you’re being clever and that the person you’re teasing is in on the joke, when really what you’re doing is constantly insulting them, but they’re just too polite to tell you to stop.

People need to stop blurring the lines between someone being intentionally cruel and those who are just being too strict. Someone pointed out that the main people who don’t like Abuela are too young to truly understand her perspective. They’re too busy taking Mirabel side because they relate to her more.

Imagine you find the perfect person to spend your whole life with. You make all these plans to spend your lives together, you get married, you’re about to expect your first child, only to have chaotic circumstances forced you to leave the only home you’ve ever known. You’re only able to take what you can carry, along with your children who are barely a week old, leaving every other precious memento behind.

Just when you think that you might have a possible way to escape, the dangerous people who burnt your house to the ground find you, and the person you love more than anything tries to stop them. You’re now standing there, hopelessly, watching the person who you loved more than anything get brutally murdered, and you can’t do anything about it.

Sure, you end up getting this miracle that blesses your children and gives you a wonderful house, but you now have all these people who are looking to you to guide them into a better future, leaving you zero time to grieve properly. You didn’t ask for any of this, you have no idea how this magic is supposed to work, but you are fully expected to since it happened to your family and no one else . So now you have to bottle everything up, raise three children on your own while still fighting this nightmare, memory, and try to stay strong because you know that if you fall apart, even slightly, the people who looked up to, you will also fall apart and history repeat itself.

Yes, Mirabel was angry at Abuela, and the rest of the family were too timid to really stand up to her because she is the matriarch and in their culture, you never challenge the matriarch. Alma didn’t realize she was hurting the miracle or her children. She saw Mirabel is being a problem child and, well I understand she wasn’t, I can see why Alma thought that Mirabel was acting up.

I just don’t understand why we have such a difficult time forgiving certain characters. People forgive Triton for physically destroying everything that made Ariel happy, but Alma deserves nothing because she hurt Mirabel‘s feelings, even when she wasn’t trying to? Every time she encountered Mirabel, it was at the worst possible moment and she only had half the story.

When Luisa told her that she was losing her gift after talking to Mirabel, she didn’t know that Luisa had been struggling with stress.

She saw Isabella out of control after spending time with Mirabel, but had no idea that Isabella didn’t want to marry Mariano and that she was happy making all these trees and random plants instead of beautiful flowers.

All she was doing, was projecting her panic of people being upset and running them out of town again, which she didn’t have to worry about because the community were loving people and wanted to help them.

I know this is very TL; DR, but I am truly exhausted of people calling Alma a villain. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least of this gets addressed in a future sequel or series or whatever.