🎩 Proving that Dr Facilier is Mama Odie's Son 🎩
You may or may not have seen the Buzzfeed article which mentions that Dr Facilier was planned as Mama Odie's son in early development of the film. I'm not 100% sure if that came from an official source but I have found plenty of evidence in the film which supports the claim, so let's dig a little shall we?
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~ First of all we have "I'm a royal myself on my mother's side" which is sung inside the Voodoo Emporium during Friends on the Other Side. And as Dr Facilier sings this line, he pulls out a shrunken head
At first it doesn't look like anything other than a somehow green shrunken head with a crown, but if you look at the eyes you can see that one is closed and the other appears to have a cataract, which are both visual signs of blindness, pointing towards his mother also perhaps blind. Although there is a possibility that the shrunken head is actually his mother which in that case yeesh
~ Something I noticed in the movie is that each main human character has visible family: Tiana has her parents, Naveen has his family, Charlotte has her father, Lawrence has his family and even Reggie the frog hunter is a father to Darnell, so it would make sense in that way for Dr Facilier to also have a visible family member. Or pehaps not and that could be a reason he resorted to villainy due to him lacking familial love which in a way is pointed out when he shows Tiana a past vision of James
~ On the topic of James, him and Tiana would serve as brilliant foils for Mama Odie and Dr Facilier because whereas Tiana and James were united by cooking and James the parent died, Dr Facilier and Mama Odie are split apart by their beliefs in how to practice voodoo and hoodoo and Dr Facilier the proposed child died
~ Speaking of death, isn't it odd that Mama Odie never attended Ray's funeral? Sure we don't know how exactly close she was with Ray but we do know that she already knew him once the main characters reached her, so surely quite close and she seems to be friendly with his grandmother too. And it's not like she's unable to leave her boat house because we see in the movie that she can walk away from it and in supplementary tpatf media, she even goes to Tiana's Palace. So what if on that night she was attending someone else's death, someone who was ever so near and dear to her despite all their differences?
~ Ok this one is a bit of a doozy, because we'll be looking at concept art. Both Dr Facilier and Mama Odie have had a variety of different characters designs across development and production but in a few instances, they both seem to have green eyes. For the current design of Mama Odie, we can't see her eyes but one concept art suggests that she apparently keeps them in a jar, perhaps the same jar we finally see in the movie, where they appear green
And in concept art for Dr Facilier, there have been some designs with green eyes (which could have been his original eye colour before he started dealing with the spirits), which would be pretty significant because they would be the only human characters to have green eyes in the movie (apart from Prince Ralphie)
~ But hey it's just a theory, A FILM THEORY