The Invisible Likeness of Being: Agnes DeMille as a Queer Coming-of-Age Allegory
(a.k.a. Invisible Girls II)
Alright, pull up those chairs again, because it's going to get long. I could write volumes about youth and queer culture (real world, pop, etc.), but I do have other things I need to be writing. Feel free Ask or continue the discussion in Comments.
Invisibility as Queer Adolescence
Agnes’s refrain of being invisible maps onto one of the most recognizable queer experiences. A lot of isolated queer kids start here: unseen by their families, unacknowledged by peers, and unsure of how to even recognize themselves. Invisibility is both protection and prison. For Agnes, it is painfully literal. She tells Orloff and the body parts of how she feels, but later tells Wednesday (and Enid) why: that her mother has left her behind for a new normie family, either unable or unwilling to deal with having a "mistake" of a daughter who can vanish as she does. Ignored (though also monitored) by her father, she does not exist at home, so she struggles to exist anywhere else.
This invisibility hits harder because of her age. At 13/14, Agnes is right where identity exploration begins to press forward. These are the years when crushes, attachments, and first attempts at self-definition take shape, and when figurative social invisibility can feel unbearable.
Projection: The First Step Toward Identity
Agnes latching onto Wednesday means more than just ‘psycho fangirling’ because Wednesday embodies what she cannot claim for herself: unapologetic difference (and indifference, since it's Wednesday). This projection is the first step of queer coming-of-age: Queer kids at 13 or 14 often idolize or obsess over figures who seem to live openly/freely not because they want to consume them, but because they see in them the possibility of their own reflection.
This is why her fangirl obsession isn’t just comedic exaggeration. It dramatizes that awkward, desperate stage of identity-seeking where admiration, envy, and desire blur. At this age, those feelings are especially heightened: Too big for the child self, not yet shaped into the adult self. This can be said of any of the three girls, by the way.
From Invisibility to Recognition
The heart of the allegory comes when Agnes admits that she feels more invisible than ever at the Some of Your Parts support group. This is the hinge moment of queer coming-of-age. Invisibility is no longer sustainable. The longing shifts — from projecting onto others to demanding recognition for the self. It is the step between hiding and claiming. Agnes embodies that fragile, formative stage: when the invisible child starts insisting on being seen.
Finally Seen by a Peer: Preceding the Dead Dance
Technical nitpick: I wish Marshall had included a close-up of Ortega's face in its shocked expression. We can barely see it from this angle.
Agnes spends most of her arc trying to be seen through mimicry: first by orbiting Wednesday, then by attempting to “become” Wednesday with her full-on Single White Female stunt. In Episode 7/”Woe Me the Money”, the cycle breaks: Enid stumbles upon a crying Agnes, the failure of her costume transformation laid bare.
Instead of ridiculing her or dismissing her obsession, Enid does something Agnes has never received from a peer: She listens and acknowledges her. She pushes Agnes not to vanish into someone else’s identity, but to embrace her own. Even though Enid doesn’t phrase it as directly as “I see you,” the sentiment lands with equal force: a peer finally recognizing Agnes as more than an invisible shadow. It's fertile ground for queer exploration and is only amplified in the next few scenes where Agnes asserts herself to Wednesday by telling her that she no longer cares what she thinks about her, echoing a queer coming out moment: The defiant shift from craving approval to claiming one’s own visibility, the instant when a young queer person stops begging to be validated and instead begins to live their truth.
These moments matter because it reframes Agnes’s invisibility: Recognition doesn’t come from authority figures, but from a peer struggling with identity herself (as Enid fears for her future as a possible Alpha). The Dead Dance becomes a symbolic rite of passage: a queer allegory where one girl tells another that it’s okay to exist in her own psycho, messy, searching self. For Agnes, it is the first flicker of visibility that doesn’t rely on projection or imitation, but on being acknowledged as who she is.
Experimentation: Orbiting Enid
In the last episode, Agnes didn't fully mirror Enid’s bright style or extroverted warmth, but she edged toward it. After the disastrous attempts at trying to be “seen” by Wednesday, she then orbits Enid after the dance, testing out what belonging might feel like without fully crossing into imitation. This is another recognizable queer stage — the blurred line between “I want to be like her” and “I want to be with her.”
At 13/14, queer crushes often start here (and a lot of times, earlier). Admiration and attraction fold together, leaving the young person unsure where one ends and the other begins. Agnes’s near-glomming onto Enid captures that confusion perfectly. (If you watch her after Enid kindly rejects her offer of a list of boys, you can see acceptance and a glimmer of curiosity; as if she's still trying to figure out how to be valuable to Enid. Old habits, as they are.)
What cements Agnes’s allegorical weight is how her arc parallels Wednesday's and Enid’s. Season 1 centered around mother-daughter tensions: Enid’s yearning for maternal (and pack) acceptance, Wednesday’s struggle under Morticia’s shadow. Agnes belongs in that same framework in Season 2. Her invisibility and maternal abandonment position her as a peer in the show’s meditation on what it means for young women to come of age under pressure, rejection, and difference.
By placing Agnes alongside them, we recognize her not as a joke or a side plot but as a crucial figure in the larger allegory of visibility. Her arc insists that queer identity is forged not only in flamboyant declarations, but in the quieter, painful journey from erasure to recognition.
Media Literacy and the Importance of Reading This as Queer Allegory
Why does this matter? Because media often disguises or misdirects queer longing. Characters like Agnes get written off as creepy fangirls or comic relief when beneath those surface tropes lies allegory and to stop at the surface is to miss the point. Media literacy — the ability to read subtext, to ask what invisibility and queer longing might represent — is the tool that transforms Agnes from a caricature into a symbol.
For queer youth around Agnes’s age (13/14), this practice is more than analysis; it’s survival. It gives them permission to see themselves in characters not explicitly labeled queer, and to recognize that invisibility, awkward crushes, or clumsy attachments aren’t pathology, but part of the universal arc of queer becoming.
Actual media literacy teaches us that Agnes’s story isn’t disposable or comedic background; it’s an allegory of identity-in-motion. It shows that visibility often begins in longing, projection, and the painful confession of being unseen, and for queer kids watching, that allegory can provide the mirror they may not find anywhere else.
Sidebar, with Enid: A Popular Example of Adolescent Identity Exploration
I'm gonna interrupt here for a minute to tell you all that queer TV has been showing us this queer youth questioning identity for 25 years, and I can think of one winding link back from the current day media that we have: Ryan Murphy’s Popular (his cackle-worthy YA comedrama precursor to Glee) which aired on the WB during Y2K. It featured not one, but several episodes featuring LGBTQ+ youth (and adults) and the identity issues that they faced back in the day. Character Harrison John’s mother was a lesbian, whose relationship he wanted to hide from his friends. There was a 🔥decidedly🔥 gay🦭 “new kid” Adam Rothchild-Ryan portrayed by Wentworth Miller; there was an episode devoted to a trans shop teacher who was transitioning from male to female (and in other episodes, LGBTQ+ and gender identity issues were explored).
But the one relevant example I’d like to use is Lily Esposito’s journey to self-discovery, because the heart and tone of Agnes’s journey made me remember this particular scene (which is what the scene between Enid and Wednesday in the lupin cages also reminded me of):
Two things: Lily Esposito was an excellent character (they all were, they had a perfect ensemble cast) and excellent Latino (Mexican) and social justice representation (she was a raging SJW a decade before the term became pejorative). Secondly, the hilarious little bitch who asked about tongues being involved in the kiss is Nicole Julian, portrayed by Tammy Lynn Michaels who, right after Popular ended, went on to film the short film D.E.B.S. in 2003. The original D.E.B.S. short film was Angela Robinson’s USC film school project that was her way of breaking into the industry and planting a queer narrative in mainstream genre film. As many of the queer fans know, Robinson directed “Hyde and Woe Seek” and “Woe Thyself”, the body switch episode that is beloved by a lot who have watched.
This wasn't allegory, it was explicit, but for queer kids watching, they could certainly feel that confusion and frustration of not knowing what’s up or down or where they belong. Invisibility isn't just literal, as it is with Agnes, but it's spiritual as well, and Lily was, as she admitted, just exploring her identity. Everybody wants to be seen, but all teens are struggling to find their identity at that age, and this struggle also includes Enid Sinclair coming to terms with her possible Alpha wolf status. (And for the record, the girls in this video were mostly a lot older than 16 and 17; cosplaying high school aged teens is not at all new. A few of them were pushing 30, like Hunter Doohan was in Season 1. There was a joke about older people playing teenagers in-universe.)
The de Mille Echo: Her Name is Deliberate
Agnes de Mille was a woman asserting power and artistry in a masculine sphere in 1940's WW2 wartime America. In her memoirs, she often reflected on how she was dismissed or underestimated, forced to carve out her own space to be taken seriously; not only as an artist, but as a woman working in a field dominated by men. Sound familiar?
The choice to name her Agnes resonates beyond coincidence. Agnes George de Mille (1905–1993) was an American choreographer who revolutionized Broadway by weaving ballet and modern dance into musicals like Oklahoma! and Carousel ; she was a key advocate for the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, and by her name and profession she becomes a meta-shadow here in both Enid and Agnes’ identity arc.
Enid’s brief solo ballet sequence before her first Alpha wolfout invokes that same tradition of movement as character revelation: Dance as a language of becoming. Later, the namesake’s own moment of visibility arrives when she dances with Enid at the Venetian Masquerade Gala. In queer terms, both moments stage choreography as a connection between repression and release: Enid’s solo dance preludes her transformation, Agnes’s joint dance is a dance of freedom for recognition. Together, they fold de Mille’s legacy into a queer allegory of visibility, desire, and self-making.
Closing Thoughts On Agnes (also a TLDR;)
Agnes is the invisible girl who wants to be seen, much like queer kids who feel unseen and long for recognition and validation; choosing to read that subtext is an act of queer media literacy, and a lesson in how stories like this can reflect truths that, for a lot of queer kids, mainstream narratives written by straight cisgendered people still leave unsaid.
