Intentionality:
Where Power Ends (and Powerlessness Begins)
*last updated on February 15, 2026
Disney’s Encanto (2021) is a useful story for thinking about a common misunderstanding of power. The film introduces the Madrigal family as people with magical “gifts.” They can heal with food, shapeshift, lift impossible weights, talk to animals, make flowers bloom, and more. It sounds simple: they have powers, therefore they have power.
But as the story unfolds, that simplicity starts to break. Some characters can use their abilities on purpose, and some can’t. And that difference matters if we’re trying to understand where power ends and powerlessness begins—both in fiction and in real life.
I’m going to use one key idea to draw the line as clearly as it can be drawn: a person’s power shows up most clearly where there is at least some intention and at least some self-awareness. Not perfect intention. Not full self-knowledge. Just enough that we can reasonably say, “This wasn’t only something that happened through them; it was something they were doing.”
That’s why the word intentionality tempted me in the first place. It points to the fact that there is a difference between an effect and an act. An effect is something that happens and changes the world. An act is something a person is doing with at least some choice, some direction, and some awareness that they are doing it. When those ingredients are missing, we can still have impact, but it becomes harder to call that impact a form of power, and it becomes risky to treat the person as fully responsible for it.
But as the story unfolds, that simplicity starts to break. Some characters can use their abilities on purpose, and some can’t. And that difference matters if we’re trying to understand where power ends and powerlessness begins—both in fiction and in real life.
I’m going to use one key idea to draw the line as clearly as it can be drawn: a person’s power shows up most clearly where there is at least some intention and at least some self-awareness. Not perfect intention. Not full self-knowledge. Just enough that we can reasonably say, “This wasn’t only something that happened through them; it was something they were doing.”
That’s why the word intentionality tempted me in the first place. It points to the fact that there is a difference between an effect and an act. An effect is something that happens and changes the world. An act is something a person is doing with at least some choice, some direction, and some awareness that they are doing it. When those ingredients are missing, we can still have impact, but it becomes harder to call that impact a form of power, and it becomes risky to treat the person as fully responsible for it.
Image credit: Disney
In Encanto, several characters look relatively “in control” of their gifts. Julieta can choose when to cook and whom to feed. Camilo shapeshifts deliberately, often for fun or to help. Antonio listens to animals and responds to them. Luisa uses her strength when something needs lifting or fixing. Even when they feel pressure, their abilities still look like tools they can pick up and put down. That tool-like quality is part of what makes an ability feel like power.
Isabela complicates the picture in a helpful way. At first, her gift looks like perfection itself: graceful movements, beautiful flowers, effortless elegance. But the story shows that her “perfection” is also a constraint. She is locked into a narrow role, and her gift is shaped by what is expected of her. When she starts experimenting—growing unexpected plants, expressing something other than prettiness—her ability looks more like genuine power. Not because she becomes more magical, but because she becomes more agentic: she explores, chooses, and expresses. Creativity here isn’t just output; it’s a widening of what she can intentionally do.
The most revealing cases, though, are Pepa, Bruno, and Dolores, because their gifts don’t behave like tools. Pepa’s weather shifts with her emotions. Bruno’s visions are burdensome and not fully under his control. Dolores seems unable to turn her super hearing off. In all three cases, the “gift” creates problems precisely because it is not fully under deliberate control. These characters affect the world, sometimes dramatically, but the story itself gives us reasons to hesitate before calling that effect “their power” in a straightforward sense.
This matters beyond the movie because it mirrors a mistake people make all the time. We often look at someone’s visible impact and assume control. We see outcomes and assume intention. We see influence and assume freedom. And then we build moral stories on top of that assumption: praise, blame, admiration, contempt, simple heroes, simple villains. Narratives train us into those shortcuts, and real life punishes us for relying on them.
When we take intention and self-awareness seriously, we start to notice how precarious human power is. People do have agency. People can make choices. But our choices are made inside bodies that react, inside histories we didn’t choose, inside social worlds that push and pull us, and inside minds that are only partly transparent to themselves. Even basic self-awareness is not automatic. It is shaped by upbringing, culture, education, stress, trauma, temperament, and practice. Some people are taught emotional vocabulary early; some aren’t. Some people are supported in reflecting on themselves; some are rewarded for ignoring themselves. Most of us are walking around with blind spots we cannot see from the inside.
That’s why I don’t want this idea to collapse into a harsh standard, where we divide the world into “intentional people” and “unintentional people,” or “responsible” and “not responsible.” The point is almost the opposite. The point is that power and powerlessness are usually braided together. Many actions contain a mix of choice and compulsion, awareness and automaticity, skill and stumble. The boundary is blurry because humans are blurry.
Still, the idea is useful because it changes the way we talk about accountability. If we assume power wherever we see impact, we will routinely hold people responsible for things they could not meaningfully control, and that tends to produce moral certainty rather than understanding. If we ignore intention completely, we drift toward fatalism, as if nobody can learn, change, or repair anything. Looking for intention and self-awareness is a middle path. It lets us say: accountability makes sense where a person had some room to choose and some awareness of what they were doing. It also lets us say: when that room is missing or very narrow, punishment and blame are often the least intelligent responses, because they don’t address what actually drove the action.
This is one reason analyzing stories like Encanto can be helpful. Looking closely at these narratives can make the hidden problem visible. A character can look “powerful” and still be trapped inside something that operates through them. A person can have a dramatic effect and still be struggling with a lack of control. A “gift” can be a burden. Once you see that clearly in a story, it becomes easier to see it in ordinary life: in anger that hijacks speech, in fear that narrows choices, in habits that feel like “me” until they are noticed, in patterns that repeat because no one has learned how to interrupt them.
So when I say that power is connected to intention and self-awareness, I’m not claiming that power is simple or that responsibility is easy. I’m saying something more sobering: our power is real, and it is also fragile. It appears in glimpses. It grows with practice. It shrinks under stress. It is shaped by what we understand about ourselves and by what we cannot yet see. And if we want to talk about power and powerlessness without turning people into cartoons, we need to keep asking a practical question that stories like Encanto often carry as a hidden assumption: is this something the person is doing, or is it something that is happening to them?
In Encanto, several characters look relatively “in control” of their gifts. Julieta can choose when to cook and whom to feed. Camilo shapeshifts deliberately, often for fun or to help. Antonio listens to animals and responds to them. Luisa uses her strength when something needs lifting or fixing. Even when they feel pressure, their abilities still look like tools they can pick up and put down. That tool-like quality is part of what makes an ability feel like power.
Isabela complicates the picture in a helpful way. At first, her gift looks like perfection itself: graceful movements, beautiful flowers, effortless elegance. But the story shows that her “perfection” is also a constraint. She is locked into a narrow role, and her gift is shaped by what is expected of her. When she starts experimenting—growing unexpected plants, expressing something other than prettiness—her ability looks more like genuine power. Not because she becomes more magical, but because she becomes more agentic: she explores, chooses, and expresses. Creativity here isn’t just output; it’s a widening of what she can intentionally do.
The most revealing cases, though, are Pepa, Bruno, and Dolores, because their gifts don’t behave like tools. Pepa’s weather shifts with her emotions. Bruno’s visions are burdensome and not fully under his control. Dolores seems unable to turn her super hearing off. In all three cases, the “gift” creates problems precisely because it is not fully under deliberate control. These characters affect the world, sometimes dramatically, but the story itself gives us reasons to hesitate before calling that effect “their power” in a straightforward sense.
This matters beyond the movie because it mirrors a mistake people make all the time. We often look at someone’s visible impact and assume control. We see outcomes and assume intention. We see influence and assume freedom. And then we build moral stories on top of that assumption: praise, blame, admiration, contempt, simple heroes, simple villains. Narratives train us into those shortcuts, and real life punishes us for relying on them.
When we take intention and self-awareness seriously, we start to notice how precarious human power is. People do have agency. People can make choices. But our choices are made inside bodies that react, inside histories we didn’t choose, inside social worlds that push and pull us, and inside minds that are only partly transparent to themselves. Even basic self-awareness is not automatic. It is shaped by upbringing, culture, education, stress, trauma, temperament, and practice. Some people are taught emotional vocabulary early; some aren’t. Some people are supported in reflecting on themselves; some are rewarded for ignoring themselves. Most of us are walking around with blind spots we cannot see from the inside.
That’s why I don’t want this idea to collapse into a harsh standard, where we divide the world into “intentional people” and “unintentional people,” or “responsible” and “not responsible.” The point is almost the opposite. The point is that power and powerlessness are usually braided together. Many actions contain a mix of choice and compulsion, awareness and automaticity, skill and stumble. The boundary is blurry because humans are blurry.
Still, the idea is useful because it changes the way we talk about accountability. If we assume power wherever we see impact, we will routinely hold people responsible for things they could not meaningfully control, and that tends to produce moral certainty rather than understanding. If we ignore intention completely, we drift toward fatalism, as if nobody can learn, change, or repair anything. Looking for intention and self-awareness is a middle path. It lets us say: accountability makes sense where a person had some room to choose and some awareness of what they were doing. It also lets us say: when that room is missing or very narrow, punishment and blame are often the least intelligent responses, because they don’t address what actually drove the action.
This is one reason analyzing stories like Encanto can be helpful. Looking closely at these narratives can make the hidden problem visible. A character can look “powerful” and still be trapped inside something that operates through them. A person can have a dramatic effect and still be struggling with a lack of control. A “gift” can be a burden. Once you see that clearly in a story, it becomes easier to see it in ordinary life: in anger that hijacks speech, in fear that narrows choices, in habits that feel like “me” until they are noticed, in patterns that repeat because no one has learned how to interrupt them.
So when I say that power is connected to intention and self-awareness, I’m not claiming that power is simple or that responsibility is easy. I’m saying something more sobering: our power is real, and it is also fragile. It appears in glimpses. It grows with practice. It shrinks under stress. It is shaped by what we understand about ourselves and by what we cannot yet see. And if we want to talk about power and powerlessness without turning people into cartoons, we need to keep asking a practical question that stories like Encanto often carry as a hidden assumption: is this something the person is doing, or is it something that is happening to them?