The end of GS and beginning of Unleashed can't be reconciled to your POV.
Yes, her mother says Brigitte has to start thinking for herself, but that line alerts the viewer to one of the points of the film: Brigitte was thinking for herself by the last quarter of GS. She was doing it compassionately to rescue her sister.
Just analyze some of the decisions she made: she scorned Ginger in the school hallway; then she backtracked and chose to infect herself solely to regain leverage over Ginger; she went into the house to get her sister back. She followed a trail of blood into the basement with nothing but a syringe in her hand, and still she scorned Ginger-wolf again, and--after begging and cajoling Ginger-wolf--Brigitte kills her. Yet she waits until the very last second before Ginger-wolf would have killed her. (And she definitely stabs Ginger. You can't see it, but you can hear it, and it's after they've hit the floor.)
That was only some of the decisions she made on her own to rescue Ginger. She was making all kinds of independent decisions at the end.
Yet, you could still argue that Brigitte's first adult decisions failed miserably and perhaps she lost her confidence because of that. However, that doesn't quite work because Brigitte doesn't act under-confident at the beginning of Unleashed. The girl who's lonely, but who still freezes out a boy making advances is not someone who needs anyone to guide her. The girl who's shooting a concoction that makes her sick every day, and who cuts herself the test for changes, can't be the same one who you say never learned to think for herself. She wasn't some junkie getting high. This medicine made her suffer. Lastly, the girl who's looking desperately through libraries for solutions to her fate is not acting helpless.
So, I'm sorry, but I can't buy what you say in the least. Not only doesn't it fit with so much of Brigitte's other behavior at the end of GS and the beginning of Unleashed, but it undercuts a key part of Brigitte's tragic irony: things went horribly wrong exactly when she began to think for herself. And a lot of it was just bad luck. It seems that independence is no guarantee.
But to me, Brigitte rocks. She's not a weak character; she has will of solid iron.
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