Analyzing Amy

Author's Note: This piece is analyzing Amy from an original piece called "Conference Piece."(Lame title, good piece.)  This is for my character analysis score.  You can find "Conference Piece" under 2011, November.

In "Conference Piece", two girls are suddenly reunited with their father.  Though this should be a happy moment, things turn out to be terribly wrong.  The girls discover that their "father" is actually a shapeshifter, a demon-like creature that feeds off of animals and humans and is able to then shapeshift into whatever it has just eaten. The girls escape from it, but the shapeshifter catches up with them and eats Sabrina before Amy manages to kills it.  Amy is a dynamic character.  She changes mentally due to several events.  However, her story is quite common among songs as well as novels.

We are first introduced to Amy as a girl absorbed in a book.  Here we can gather that she is educated enough to know how to read.  Then she went outside and was reunited with her "father".  However, with her being intelligent, she suspected something wasn't quite right. With her father randomly showing up, she had a reason to be suspicious.  Her suspicions were proved correct and saved the two of them at that moment.  We can infer that her suspicions came from being protective of her sister and not trusting anyone until proven safe.

I think this next line is really important because it shows just how badly Amy wants to believe that she was wrong, that she didn't see red eyes instead of blue.  "Amy couldn’t help herself, she had to ask him.  It was her only hope.  “Dad, what is my name?”  Whether she asked the question for her sister, for herself, or just as a last stitch effort of hope, it's definitely asked out of desperation.  You can almost hear her heart shatter when her "father" answers the question wrong.

Amy was Sabrina's motivation to run away.  If Sabrina was alone, she wouldn't have known anything was wrong.  She wouldn't know to be suspicious.  Our inference of her is that she doesn't know about anything bad, that she's gullible because her sister protected her from all bad things in the world.  That is perhaps Amy's biggest flaw.  If she had introduced Sabrina to bad things, Sabrina would have been suspicious, she would have seen her "father" change, her and Amy could have ran without Amy having to explain, they would have had more time, and they would have survived.

Amy was overcome by a feeling of helplessness as she watched her sister get eaten.  All that protectiveness, gone.  There is nothing left for her to protect.  And this realization actually angers her.  It is her fuel and her fire is revenge.  Blazing, she gets her hands on a sword as soon as she can and she kills her monster.

As I said before, Amy's story is not unique.  It occurs often in songs.  For example, in "Demons" by Imagine Dragons a man fights with a different kind of monster, an inner demon that is slowly taking over his life.  "Look into my eyes, it’s where my demons hide" (More on that below)    Though slightly different, Westley's story (from The Princess Bride) is mostly similar as well.  Buttercup is taken from him by three men and he has to fight them to get her back.  The men being his "demons" and Buttercup being his Sabrina.  The difference is that he got Buttercup back.  Though, that might be exactly what happened to Amy.  The story ends with her killing the shapeshifter.  We, as the readers, have no idea what happens next.  It  could be possible that after she kills the monster, all of the things that it killed are revived.  It never mentions in the story what happens when a shapshifter dies.  I suppose that's why the author left such an open ending.  For all you people who love happy endings you could make it so.  Or, it could end they way I mention in the conclusion... 


You have to remember that as Amy kills the shapeshifter, it's still pretending to be her sister.  The image of her sister being eaten added to the image of the shapeshifter sister getting a sword thrusted through its heart is enough to give a grown man nightmares.  But this is just a young girl that had to grow up too fast.  A mother is never mentioned in the story and the girls seemed surprised to see their father back, so who knows when he originally left, or for what purpose.  We don't even know if they were good parents.  Amy could have been taking care of Sabrina for years.  Then Sabrina gets killed.  Everyone Amy has ever known is dead.  No other family members are mentioned, so we can assume that she's alone.  An orphan,alone, in the middle of the woods with a dead demon.  If anyone finds her, there are going to be a whole lot of questions asked.


Here are the two verses from "Demons" that I will be comparing to "Conference Piece."

I want to hide the truth

I want to shelter you

Here is a huge similarity.  These two lines describe exactly what Amy was trying to do for Sabrina, hide the harsh truth from her and shelter her from the world.

But with the beast inside

There’s nowhere we can hide

This is a little different.  While this man's beast is internal, Amy and Sabrina had to deal with a real, live monster.  However, they chose to run from it instead of hide.  Their decision doesn't matter, though, because the demon would have probably have found them anyway.

Don’t want to let you down

But I am hell bound

Though this is all for you

Don’t want to hide the truth

Amy practically lived to protect her sister.  Everything she did was for Sabrina.  Amy probably felt as if she let everyone down when her sister died; her parents, herself, her sister.