The girl that Toby is friends with, I'm really confused about her. At first I thought she was a real synth, then in the episode where he went to her house, there were fruit pastilles in her room, so I thought she was real, then at the end of that episode, she put two in her mouth and chewed them, but then took them out again, like she couldn't swallow them. So is she a synth pretending to be a human pretending to be a synth??!
shareNo she's a human pretending to be a Synth and she's lonely angry and frustrated and from a broken home.
shareShe's human.
It's her way of coping with her situation (ie she's effectively abandoned by her parents and angry about it)....I wouldn't say it's a good way of coping with it.
She's just a kid who figured feeling nothing was better than being sad and angry all the time. Pretending to be a Synth helps her control her emotions and feel in control of something in her otherwise shifting environment. I guess it's like anorexia but on an emotional level.
For every lie I unlearn I learn something new - Ani Difranco
Others have stated the obvious, she's a human who's using pretending to be a synth to deal with her loneliness; her parents are never home. Toby has a thing for synths but doesn't want to act on it since he saw Mia's awakening from being a dead synth, AKA Anita. He wants to get to know the Renie girl because he likes synths and shes pretending to be one. However, he's got the experience with Mia and now is seeing his little sister retreat into a similar pattern of synth behavior. He likely had trouble relating to people because he's a bit of a weird kid. He can relate to her.
In the Swedish series, the Toby character also had an attraction/fixation on one of his older sister's friends who pretends to be a synth for fun. He had mixed feeling about her too.