[Questions about "university".]
Honestly when I said "university" I wasn't meaning university in modern terms, I just meant "whatever school he went to". I mean, we don't even know whether Sweden has compulsory schooling at all, much less a public school system like we have now. My assumption was that everybody who
does go to school learns the same subjects regardless of age or level of previous knowledge--they just dump them all into a lecture hall together. Emil would've been the oldest kid in most of his classes, and would've been way ahead of the class (and bored) in some but way behind the class (and drowning) in others. But again, that's just my assumptions, there's no hard info about it in the comic that I recall.
You forget 
Emil is the kind of person who thought it was impossible to get bruised on YOUR FACE. The sentece "reasonably-intelligent kid" flies right out of the window XD
Plus his conversations with his aunt and uncle and the way they treat him imply that he makes a lot of stupid mistakes very often.
They may not have meen overbearingly attentive, but they still might have coddled him. "Our son is the best, even if we hardly spent any time with him. Allow him to do whatever he wishes!" Or: "Our son HAS to succeed, so MAKE SURE he'll get the best grades or you're fired!" Or even: "We don't give a sh*t about our son, let's just pay someone to tutor him and if his grades aren't good we'll just get another tutor." [...]
*snort* I'm talking "reasonably-intelligent" in terms of actual intelligence--I didn't say he has the slightest bit of
common sense, because he clearly does not. In terms of intelligence I've got him pegged for slightly above average: he's clearly quite articulate in his native Swedish, and demonstrates a broad vocabulary and an ability to retain a lot of random information (as when he's playing tour guide for Tuuri). Plus he
enjoys reading and academics, which is not something you enjoy if you aren't good at it. He's not near as bright a spark as, say, Tuuri, but he can keep up.
And oh yes, I've no doubt that his parents coddled him in one way or another--and all of the examples you gave would fit with Emil's personality and the very little we know about his parents. They just strike me as... hmm. Peculiarly neglectful. The two can--and often do--go together.
I was thinking that his parents would be embarrassed by their loss and became recluses, too. They're probably not cold people - they might be very shallow though. Emil has a shallow nature, but he also seems to try not to be so shallow - like he has some knowledge of morals. I assumed that Emil's shallowness was because of the shallowness of his parents, that it was something Emil was just exposed to growing up, and can't help but be a little offensive sometimes because he grew up around people who were shallow and judgmental.
Also, I always hear that rich people's children have less contact with their parents than average children who go to public school because they'll just be thrown with a tutor or a nanny (when they're young), leaving the parents to do what they please. I think Emil just never had a lot of contact with his parents. (And maybe he'd be more shallow and offensive had he spent more time with them...? I dunno.)
This is more or less what I was thinking. I live in an area with an embarrassing amount of embarrassingly rich people in it, and many of them are excellent parents--but those who aren't tend to be bad parents in
particular ways. One of the most common of which is assuming that you can have a perfect fairy-tale parenting experience without all the bad parts if you just throw enough money at it.
FWIW, my impression (based on nothing canonical and subject to change) of Emil's parents is that they were probably warm and cheerful toward Emil when they were around. But they were terribly impractical and somewhat immature people, and they didn't want to deal with the nitty-gritty of raising a child. They had their own lives, and those lives just... didn't include being parents to their son. Or helping him through the hard times in his life or the various bumps and scrapes of growing up. It was so much easier to just
give him things and enjoy his excitement--and leave him be the rest of the time. They couldn't buy him friends and companions, of course, so when he showed an interest in books and science they jumped on it and got him a tutor. My assumption is that Emil feels warm but ambiguous towards them--and avoids them wherever he can, without quite knowing why. He'll never say a negative word about them, or allow anyone else to do so while he's around, but if he's in trouble? He'll
scramble to make sure he doesn't have to get them involved. He'll go to his aunt and uncle (which he would hate) for help before he so much as tells his parents what's going on.
(Alternatively, instead of keeping them at arm's length, he is
still trying to reach out to them and they are still just not really responding, and he's hiding it where he hides all negative emotions--behind a wall of haughty arrogance. While throwing himself into one suicidally dangerous situation after another in an attempt to get them to pay attention. But that just makes my soul want to shrivel up and die, so I'm not going with that one. o_o)
*shrug* So they weren't flat out lying to Emil's face about how great a pupil he is, but simply didn't do their job (because even if they all agreed that Emil was going to be a scholar for the rest of his life, it'ld still be virtually mandatory to put Icelandic language into his curriculum so that he can even communicate with his peers-to-be other than in a one-on-one-and-please-use-my-language fashion, and when it comes to learning languages, there's a substantial penalty for delaying it). Can't say that that makes me think that much better of them.
Oh agreed, somewhere along the line one or more of the adults in his life were really not doing their job--his parents, his tutors, or both. There's really no excuse for not teaching Icelandic to a kid who wants to be an academic in this world ffs! (And to me this comes down to his parents more than his tutors--hence my speculation about them above. Either they actively instructed the tutors to only teach him what keeps him happy, thus crippling him for real-world work as an academic, or the tutors were shirking their duty and his parents didn't pay enough attention to notice. Whichever it is, it says nothing good about their parenting skills.) What I really take issue with is the idea that this is somehow Emil's fault, or that the whole thing indicates that he's dumb, not as smart as he thinks he is, or used to receiving praise no matter what he does. None of that actually appears to be the case.
