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Happy Moon Day!

Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?

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there’s been a really bizarre trend in the past couple years of TERFS/radfems getting pissed off about biology posts. posts about the bilateral gyandromorph cardinal (one half male, one half female), posts about older hens beginning to crow and act like roosters, posts about animals being animals. and it’s hilarious because they interpret these posts as some kind of agenda. no! these are animals not choosing any gender identity or sexuality but being born into bodies they have no control over. weird how that happens in nature huh

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in all seriousness i better not see a single gif of that fuckass harry potter show on this hellsite.

don't make them, don't post them, don't reblog them. just don't give free advertising to a millionaire giddy over stripping trans people of their rights.

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i like rocky horror picture show idk

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joking that an adult character who acts childish doesnt know what sex is will never be as funny as saying the same thing about a big tough murderman videogame protag

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I meant to make this meme ages ago when pride month was still on but yeah gé (pronounced gay) is the Irish for a goose.

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you are 16. you are talking with a gay man in his 50s or 60s, a friend, huge and gentle with a scarf and short fluffy curls of gray hair, who has directed you in two plays staged in your mid-size artsy town. (he has not yet asked you to be in his production of The Laramie Project which will change your life. this conversation will also change your life.)

he is talking about theatre. he is talking about theatre when he was younger. he says, "of course, it was AIDS then." in the pause, you ask him. clumsy and quiet and 16 and "straight," you ask him. what was it like.

he takes a moment in which his face is not like a person's face. "there was a time," he says, "i'm not sure how long, years. when i went to a funeral every weekend." he tells you about two funerals in a day, and choosing between friends when you couldn't make it to both. he does not look at you, he looks at them. his wet grey gaze is so clear that you start to see ghosts. it will be years before you understand why it feels like your grief too. why the ghosts call you family.

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when i was a tiny baby queer (aka a 24-year-old), i went to my first pride festival probably three months after i kicked ex-gay therapy to the curb and came out to my parents. being the people they are, my parents came with me. they weren’t really sure about this whole gay thing, but they loved me and wanted me to be safe and happy and wanted to be involved in what was important to me, so they came along. (i also think my mother still might have thought i might get drugged or murdered or beaten by a protester of which there were plenty.)

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

“…it’s a cock and a pussy, Jules,” she says flatly, and that is the story of how i died at the age of 24 while attending my first pride festival.

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anyone else's brain at any given time: (anything else)

my brain, afflicted and cursed: eating alfalfa seeds gives monkeys lupus-like autoimmune disease. eating alfalfa makes lupus mice sicker. eating alfalfa can really fucking hurt humans and cause immune system problems resembling lupus. or can worsen lupus. alfalfa. alfalfa seeds. alfalfa sprouts. an ingredient that you put on sandwiches and buy at the store. alfalfa, the plant with a friendly name. medicago sativa. funny how it is called "medic" when it can make someone need a medic. also called lucerne. the same name given to a city in switzerland, in the german-speaking portion of switzerland. do they know? do they know what alfalfa does? how do they feel about alfalfa? alfalfa, the perennial flowering plant in the legume family fabaceae. used to feed livestock since the era of ancient greeks and romans. it has a tetraploid genome, did you know? I know this now because if alfalfa can be so dangerous and I have gone so many years without knowing, what else is alfalfa fucking hiding? aside from its extensive history of harboring salmonella and e. coli. I already knew that. the L-Canavanine content is higher in seeds than in sprouts. but it is in sprouts too. alfalfa can interact with blood thinners, birth control pills, estrogens in human. it can reduce fertility in sheep and cattle. and it is not even just alfalfa with that awful amino acid. the mung bean. the green gram. the vigna radiata. used as a popular plant-based protein substitute like beyond meat and just egg. the delicious mung bean, sprouted in such a perfect way that it usually just gets called bean sprout. the bean sprout. the one delicious bean sprout, which I have loved for many years. a love that I find out now was betraying me. I used to sprout mung beans. I would watch video after video on mung bean sprouting. I did it many times. it was easy. bean sprouts become more robust when you add weight on top of them as they grow. I would eat handfuls of long and thick bean sprouts at a time. I have always asked for extra bean sprouts in my meals. they take sauce so naturally, so easily. and not one single resource on sprouting mung beans ever said that eating a ton of mung beans could ever be bad. that there are diseases where you should avoid eating mung beans. diseases that can be worsened by eating mung beans and alfalfa. I never knew. I never fucking knew. this information has been in my life less than a week and it is already taking over my brain. how many other common foods are hiding dangerous secrets? how many other common things at the store, common ingredients on a sandwich, common ingredients in a delicious bibimbap, common ingredients in plant-based protein and egg substitutes and meat substitutes can send someone to a hospital without them ever knowing why? we live in such a scary world. and all along I have been telling people that sprouting mung beans is fun and easy and safe. I had no idea. I contributed to the false sense of security with mung beans. I have been part of the problem. I just stubbed my toe writing this post. this is my punishment for sharing my love of bean sprouts with the world. I need to tell everyone. I need to tell everyone that mung beans and alfalfa can cause autoimmune activity. I need to tell everyone that mung beans and alfalfa can cause a human's immune system to attack its own body. eating alfalfa or mung bean sprouts might even help trigger autoimmune disease in people with genetic risks for autoimmunity. and avoiding eating mung bean and alfalfa might reduce someone's chance of developing autoimmune disease. how vile. how repulsive. make no mistake. canavanine toxicity has killed people. it likely killed christopher mccandless, the subject of jon krakauer's book and subsequent movie into the wild. he ate seeds of the alpine sweetvetch, which also contains this awful amino acid. when sprouted the roots taste like young carrots. where can I even fucking go from here. I thought I had a friend in mung bean, I thought I could trust alfalfa, I thought there was no harm, and it was all a lie. it was all a big fucking lie.

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Last day of May!!!

I have no idea where I found this but I’ve had it on my camera for like 9 months

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rotating john gaius in my head and how he is both a coloniser and a victim of colonisation and how, when presented with the opportunity to rebuild all of society from the ground-up, chose not to model it after his own oppressed culture, but instead after an aesthetic VERY CLOSELY ASSOCIATED WITH WHITE SUPREMACY (neoclassicism), and how his daughter is the only thing in his entire, expansive empire that he named in his language in ten thousand years, and how he perpetuates the cycle he himself was a victim of. tearing my hair out tazmuir WHEN I GET YOU

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i love you forehead touches taking the place of big damn kisses i love you forehead touches in lieu of goodbye kisses i love you platonic affection that is treated with respect and given the same emotional weight in the narrative!!!!!!!!

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I wonder what Hikari would think about the reveal of why his dad REALLY adopted Kage. Those feelings are gonna be complicated as hell.

anon ur in luck ive got 11 pages worth of comic about how EVERYONE reacts to it.

(for context if anyone missed it, we're talking about this samurai jack AU here where when the emperor makes Aku he goes "well this thing is my son now" and takes it home, at which point This Thing ("Kage") promptly decides that Jack ("Hikari") is his twin brother.)

They're not finding out that the emperor didn't want to make Kage and was just trying to rid the land of evil until they're teens, at which point Kage's gotten more than a decade and a half of:

try to look less scary. no, even less scary. can you just look like your brother? look like your brother

don't tower over people, it's weird for a three-year-old. PLEASE stick to a human height. okay yes that's a human height but standing a foot over the guests intimidates them, don't do that.

new rules: when your brother is here don't be taller than him; when he's not but others are, don't stand taller than the shortest of your superiors or the tallest of your equals and inferiors. it's polite.

keep your claws to yourself. and your fangs. and your eye lasers. and your undead minions—just don't do necromancy in public ok.

do not start fights with people. stop fighting. NO FIGHTING.

why did you run instead of fighting that insolent bully who accosted you outside the palace

(making jack (and aku) look 17 is hard. we don't really get any good references for jack's transitional looks between 13-ish and adult.

making aku sound like a whiny teen while maintaining his canon born-talking-like-an-old-man-in-an-ancient-epic-poem speech patterns is hard too.)

(Aku: "sunshine /sarcastic")

Hikari is, of course, still a Good Guy. and being a Good Guy means Loyalty To And Respect For Your Family. In some of the dominant philosophies of the area/time—Confucianism, for instance—loyalty to your family, even when they're in the wrong, is a higher virtue than doing what would otherwise be the "right" thing.

and to him, his father and his weird shadow brother are equally his family, and he's watched them be at each other's throats for years, playing the unwilling referee like "okay but kage you WERE a jerk" / "father don't you think that was maybe a little harsh"

there's no neutral zone on this issue though. dad said "i didn't want to make you, i was just trying to destroy evil and instead got you." Maybe canon Jack would be sympathetic to the difficult position his father was in, but canon Jack isn't a teen who's viewed The Evil Shapeshifting Wizard Aku as his brother his whole life.

He's had to watch for years as their father's reprimands wore down this demon for whom being good—never mind good enough—is so difficult it's almost painful. Typically loyalty to your father is supposed to come before loyalty to your brother, but there's only so much an adoptive twin can take.

I think there's a lot of ways the emperor could end up revealing the truth—a deliberate confession to try to clear the air, or blurted out in anger during a fight—but however it happened and however the emperor meant for it to be taken, the end result's the same:

Kage runs.

history lesson! along with a set of several other classics, Confucius's teachings on politics/etiquette/philosophy/religion formed the backbone of Chinese culture for millennia—and leaked out to have a lesser influence on neighbors like Japan and Korea—and for 1500 years you couldn't get a government job in China without studying these texts for the imperial examination. the better a job you wanted the more & harder exams you took. imagine if ever since the middle ages, nobody in europe was allowed to be a lord, duke, senator, prime minister, anything, unless they had a PhD in plato's writings, and that's very roughly how china worked.

which means: 1) these exams are a big deal; 2) you're a very smart and important person if you pass even a few of the exams, much less all of them; 3) it takes a LONG time to work your way through all of them; and 4) there's absolutely no fucking reason for a Japanese prince to take them unless he wants an impressive-sounding excuse to get the hell out of the country for a decade.

also i basically made this whole post as an excuse to draw Aku sneering "filial piety" with as much venom and sarcasm as possible.

They don't know what they're doing. They're 17 and stupid.

But they're a package deal, you can't separate them. Except maybe with contrived plot events that force them apart in order to put them through unnecessary pain, grief, and character growth. Forget I said that last sentence.

Ever since they were born, Kage has had to live in/as Hikari's shadow; if Kage has to run away from home, Hikari will return the favor and shadow him. And besides, Hikari's a little bit fucking furious about this situation. Filial piety goes both ways; and if father won't respect one of his sons then he doesn't get the other one either. (he's kind of making up his understanding of filial piety as he goes.)

"hey puff why are they 17 years old?" asked nobody.

okay! so in canon we know Aku attacked when Jack was eight years old; and the talking dogs dated Jack as coming from 25 years before Aku's conquest, so I'm taking that to mean he's 25 years old; so that's a gap of 17 years that Jack spent training.

Aku is only a day old when the emperor traps him in that Hexxus-looking tree. He attacks the kingdom the same day he's unleashed, and rules it til Jack comes back.

So that means—both in canon and in this AU—Aku is 17 years old when he gets stabbed through the heart.

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D/s and Emotional Needs

This post is basically a transcript of a speech I give to newbies to the D/s scene all the time IRL. I figured it might be useful not only to people curious about kink IRL but also to smut writers here on the smut writing website.

For the purposes of this post, I am sending specific physical acts out of the room. Right now they don't matter, because you can meet an emotional need through any number of physical acts. So when I say that there are many ways to dom and many ways to sub, I am not referring to many kinds of physical acts. I mean that there are many emotional needs that doms and subs bring to scenes, and those can change the scene more than the choice of physical acts that will occur in that scene.

I say this to newbies to the scene because they tend to have a narrow view of the motivations and needs that bring people to D/s, biased by both the newbie's own preferences and the depictions of D/s they've seen in media. The same is true of people who write kink fic. Kink fic is very biased to a narrow subset of the wide range of emotional needs that people might bring to this kind of play.

It's really important to understand this in D/s IRL because a mismatch or miscommunication about these needs can lead to a bad scene. For example, let's take the approaches of sub-as-beloved-pet and sub-as-object. If a dom treats a sub as a beloved pet when what they really want is to be treated like an object, then a sub who went into a scene needing to be ignored, or at the very least the illusion of being ignored and disregarded, is suddenly in the spotlight of a lot of intense attention and affection. Again, I will note that both of these scenes could potentially involve the same physical acts, just approached differently. Let's say it's a service submission scene where the sub is naked and cleaning the room for the dom. Sub-as-beloved-pet would get frequent praise and lots of patiently repeated instructions, while sub-as-object would get one detailed instruction at the beginning and no reinforcement except a punishment if they get part of the instruction wrong.

I'm going to go through a bunch of different styles of dom and sub, with the emotional needs that underlie them. This list is not exhaustive. I'm sure there's more I haven't thought of or encountered, so feel free to reblog with additions. It may also be a bit dom-biased because I'm a dom, but I think that might be for the best, because the emotional needs of doms are generally less understood than those of subs.

Various consensual kinks discussed below. Kinkshamers in the notes will be blocked with extreme prejudice.

Dom-as-control: This may seem obvious or even trivial, but it shouldn't be dismissed: many doms are motivated by an emotional need to have some part of their life where they have total control over what is going to happen. Something that I love about this style of domination is that I always know exactly what will happen next (except if there's some emergency, safeword, or other issue to address.) There are no wild cards in a controlled D/s scene except for those I explicitly allow (like if I ask a sub to choose which whip I'll beat them with.) This is also a reason why I personally have a very hard time switching; I have difficulty with the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen next. It should be noted that this style of domination is fairly incompatible with the bratty style of submission, as the brat is constantly throwing wild cards into the scene.

Sub-as-blankspace: The other side of this coin is the sub who needs to not have to think anymore. They've spent all day deciding what to wear and what to eat and which toothpaste to buy and they just want to stop. This is a very common motivator. This sub needs specific and clear commands from a dom, without too many steps, or else needs to have a well-established protocol of kneeling and service that they can do by pure muscle memory. This sub does not want the dom to offer them a choice of whips they can be beaten with, because that forces them out of the blissful blankspace of not needing to choose.

Dom- or sub-as-service: The same emotional need can sometimes motivate domination or submission! Many people dom or sub out of a desire to please their partner. It's about taking on a defined role that you know will meet your partner's needs. It feels good to be needed, after all. This motivation for D/s is generally the best understood by the public, especially as a motivation for doms. It's generally more socially acceptable to want to control and torment people if you're doing it selflessly in order to please them. A big part of my motivation for making this speech to people, and for writing this post, is to point out that this is far from the only style of domination, and pleasing their subs is far from the only emotional need that doms might have.

Dom-as-whumper: I'm using this terminology because of the website I'm on. I'm not into whumpfic, but I recognize in people who have a visceral need to see their blorbos whimpering and bleeding the same need I have to tear apart a cute kitten with my bare hands, or to crush a sub beneath my booted foot. It's the cuteness aggression approach to domination: sometimes your sub is so cute your hands itch with the urge to destroy them. This is where domination and sadism bleed into each other; this style of domination does not work well for the sub who wants to submit without being hurt or humiliated.

Sub-as-object: Subs who like to be treated as furniture, robots, or objects are often motivated by a need to enjoy a sexual or kink situation while being free of attention and scrutiny. Obviously, some baseline level of attention is needed for BDSM safety; the dom needs to be able to notice if the sub is injured or upset. But beyond that baseline, it can feel very freeing for a sub to be turned on, blissed out in subspace, crying, drooling, whatever, without anyone closely watching or listening to them, so long as they fulfill whatever their purpose as an object is.

Sub- or dom-as-flex: Both doms and subs can be motivated by a need to feel competent. I definitely feel awesomely powerful and competent when I do a style of domination that requires specialized skill, such as hypnosis. Submission can also provide a feeling of competence: look how long I was able to stay kneeling on the hard floor! Look how perfectly I cleaned the room, exactly as Mistress told me to do it!

Dom-as-troll (or mad scientist): The sibling to this kind of dom is the writer who thinks "wouldn't it be fucked up if....?" and then writes a freaky nasty little horror story about it. A great thing about D/s is that you can have a thought like "wouldn't it be fucked up if I tied up my sub and then ate their favorite snack right in front of them?" and then you can just do it (provided you know your sub likes to be tied up and tormented.) Then you can find out how your sub would react to your terrible ideas and laugh evilly at the results. The emotional need being served here is the goblin part of your brain that wants to break things just to see how they shatter. All you need to do is find someone who wants to be broken.

Sub-as-brat: Brats are often discussed as a single type of sub, but in my experience, there are two rather different emotional needs that drive brats. Some people are brats because they need the assurance that they can act out all they want, and it won't derail the action; the dom is strong or skilled enough to subdue them no matter what nasty tricks their goblin brain gets up to. Other people are brats out of a need to live in a predictable and fair moral universe. Those brats want a very clear system of rules and punishments for those rules. Then they test the rules, and they get meted out exactly the punishment they were promised. Within the world of this scene, the world is fair, and the same misbehavior will always face the same consequences, something that rarely happens in the real world. These types of brats are rather different, because the first kind of brat doesn't care as much if the consequences of their misbehavior are inconsistent, while the second kind cares a lot.

Sub-as-beloved-pet: Or beloved child, if they're an ageplayer. I find that subs that like to be a beloved puppy are driven by an emotional need to be loved, treasured, and supported unconditionally, even if they make mistakes, even if they behave messily or clumsily, even if they look silly, because that's how a good pet owner should treat a pet. There might be discipline involved, but the discipline is very supportive and patient.

Dom-as-nurturer: Some doms are motivated by a need to be in a nurturing role that their non-D/s life may not allow them to fulfill. For example, a man who wants to express affection and tenderness to his partner but has a hard time doing so because of the way he was raised may be able to unlock that ability if his partner plays a sweet puppy and he's playing the puppy's doting owner. Basically, the D/s scene creates a little world and a set of roles in which it's expected and normal for the dom to be nurturing, even if that's not true for the dom outside of that scene.

Dom-as-enfant-terrible: The other side of the coin is a dom who needs to be in a role where they can be unreasonable, demanding, and selfish, a role that their non-D/s life may not allow them to fulfill. For example, a mother who spends all day thinking about her family's needs may relish the opportunity to center her own desires without worrying if she's being "too much." She can be impatient and fussy and demand the sub do things over and over until she's satisfied, all of which she can't do when she's working as a teacher or other caring role.

Dom-as-artist: I think this is a hugely under-appreciated motivator for doms. Many have a need to be creative and imaginative that they fulfill through domination. I've been to workshops and demos at kink conventions where I've been awed by another dom's fiendish creativity. I once watched a hypno dom with a sub who got off on being afraid, and he hypnotized her and crafted an extremely elaborate horror scene in the room, filling it with menacing shadows and phantasms. This is where I'm contractually obligated to link A Dom DM because this is where domination overlaps a lot with game running and game design.

Sub-as-aesthetic-object: The flip side of this coin is that many subs enjoy being an aesthetic object or canvas for a dom's art. Very often these are subs chasing a need to feel beautiful, or at least enjoyable to look at. Subs who want to be aesthetic objects may enjoy wearing special outfits during scenes, or being posed in sexy or appealing positions. Subs in this kind of scene may enjoy letting go of worrying about whether they look good to the dom, because the dom is shaping them to their own preferred aesthetic, whether that's via poses, makeup, shibari, or something else.

Sub-as-sexual-creature: A lot of subs enjoy being called sluts, offered up for free use, or otherwise being hypersexualized. Why is that? Well, our society has a lot of shame and repression around sex, and it can feel much easier to relax and enjoy sex if it's couched in the fantasy that you have no choice because you've been reduced to a purely sexual creature. The sub has an emotional need to give up responsibility for choosing to have sex and be sexual, because that responsibility is a heavy weight to carry.

Dom- or sub-as-taboo-breaker: This is a huge motivator for both doms and subs. We all live in a society, and sometimes we feel a need to break the rules of that society. Both domination and submission provide opportunities to do so. It's taboo to piss yourself as an adult, but a watersports scene creates a space where it is acceptable or even desirable for a sub to break that taboo. As a dom, I personally get a huge taboo-breaking thrill from slapping a sub across the face. There's something about the sheer disrespect of it, and the memory of being scolded for doing it as a child, that fills me with impish glee.

Dom-as-hunter/sub-as-prey: For the hunter to catch the prey, there must first be a chase, or at the very least an ambush. This need not be a literal chase (we sent physical acts out of the room, remember?) but it is a dynamic to hunter/prey-flavored BDSM: the hunter has to earn it. This fulfills an emotional need for both dom and sub: a dom who struggles with feelings of unworthiness can feel like they've earned their partner's submission, and a sub can feel that the dom cares enough to put in the effort to catch them. Hunter/prey also allows dom and sub to explore some pretty dark emotions within the safety of consensual kink, such as fear, obsession, and consumption.

Dom-as-shadow: I mean shadow here in the sense of shadow work. Many doms take inspiration from people who bullied them in school (and many subs enjoy re-enacting scenes of childhood bullying in a safe and consensual context.) There is a real emotional need served by claiming the power of those bullies for yourself. Those childhood cruelties can be utterly transformed by the change of context. For example, the catty whispers and sneers of straight girls who bullied me for being queer comes out very different when I perform those same catty sneers as a genderfucky adult.

Sub-as-lesser-being: While some subs like to be beloved pets, and others like to be disregarded objects, some like to be pond scum. There can be a real freedom that comes from occupying a role of being disgusting and horrible. Nothing good or useful can be expected of you, and nothing you do will ever earn praise, and so you're free from worrying about or pursuing any of those things. Sub-as-lesser-being is also a space to explore difficult emotions like shame and humiliation in a safe context.

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Fuck it, I didn't want to make a post on this but it's bugging the hell out of me so let's exorcize the thought.

Lilo and Stitch is an extremely good children's movie. I've been working at a daycare for over five years now, and out of all the children's movies I've shown to an auidence of twenty or so school-age kids (i.e. between the ages of 5 and 12), the only movie that's held their attention as well as Lilo and Stitch is The Emperor's New Groove, and the only one that's held it better is An American Tail. Of those three, Lilo and Stitch has won the vote of "what movie we will watch" the most. It not only entertains kids, but emotionally captivates them from start to finish, because it very thoroughly understands how to engage children on their level. It's a smart, tightly written children's movie.

The feat of story-telling genius it pulls of lies in its ability to reach both where children's imaginations want to go and where their lived real-world experiences lie - most children's movies focus on one or the other, but Lilo and Stitch dives deep into both. On the imagination side, there's Stitch's whole plotline of being a little alien monster being chased by other weirdo aliens onto earth because they want to stop him from running amok and causing havoc (which, of course, happens anyway in fun cartoony comedy/action spectacle). On the real-world side, you have Lilo's plotline of being a troubled little girl who has an abundance of very real problems that, like an actual child, she struggles to comprehend and deal with, as well as the many adults in her life that care about her to some degree but all struggle to fully understand her. Kids want to be Stitch and run amok and cause cartoony havoc. Kids, even the least-troubled kids, relate to Lilo, because all of them have been in a similar situation as her at least once in their lives.

Balancing these two very different stories, with very different tones and scopes to their respective conflicts, is a hard writing task, but Lilo and Stitch manages to do it in a way that seems effortless with one very powerful trick. The two plots are direct mirrors to each other, complete with the characters involved in each having foils in the respective plot. To break it down:

Stitch, the wild and destructive alien gremlin who everyone has labeled as a crime against existence, is Lilo, the troubled young girl who's viewed as a "problem child" by all the adults in her life. In both plotlines, Stitch and Lilo are facing the threat of being "taken away" from the life they know because they act out, and in both plotlines, we see that this is an unfathomably cruel thing to do to them and will not actually solve the problems they have.

Dr. Jumbaa, the mad scientist who made Stitch because making monsters is what mad scientists do, and who had no intentions of ever being nurturing or parental to anything or anyone in his life, is Nani, Lilo's older sister whose parents died when she was young and now is forced to act as a parental substitute despite not being mentally or emotionally prepared for that responsibility yet. Both Dr. Jumbaa and Nani are trying to get their respective wild children in line with what society wants them to be, and both are struggling hard with it because they in turn have a lot of growing to do before they can actually accomplish that.

Pleakley, the nebbish alien bureaucrat who ends up being assigned to help Dr. Jumbaa despite being mostly uninvolved in creating the whole Stitch situation, is David, the nice but mostly ineffectual guy who's crushing on Nani and wants to help her but doesn't really have much he can provide except emotional support. Ultimately Pleakley and David prove that said emotional support is a lot more helpful than it seems on the surface, as they give Jumbaa and Nani respectively a lot of the pushes they need to become better in their parental roles.

The Grand Councilwoman, who runs the society of aliens that is trying to banish Stitch forever for his crime of existing, is Cobra Bubbles, the Child Protective Services agent who is in charge of deciding whether or not Lilo needs to be taken away from her home forever for, ostensibly, her own good. Both are well-intentioned and stern, with a desire to follow the rules of society and do what procedure says is the most humane thing to do in this situation, but both lack the understanding of Stitch/Lilo's situation to actually help until the end of the movie.

Finally, we have Captain Gantu, the enforcer of the Galactic Council who is a mean, aggressive, sadistic brute but is viewed as a "good guy" by society because he plays by its rules (well, when he knows can't get away with breaking them, anyway), who is the counterpart of Myrtle, the mean, aggressive, sadistic schoolyard bully who is viewed as a "good kid" by other adults because she plays by the rules they established (well, when she knows she can't get away with breaking them, anyway). Both Gantu and Myrtle are, in truth, much nastier in temperament than Stitch and Lilo, but are better at hiding it in front of others and so get away with it, and often make Stitch and Lilo look worse in the eyes of others by provoking them to violence and then playing the victim about it - in fact, both even have the same line, "Does this look infected to you?", which they say after goading their respective wild-child victims into biting them.

The symmetry of these two plotlines allows them to actually feed into each other and build each other up instead of fighting each other for screentime. The fantastical nature of Stitch's plot adds whimsy to the far more realistic problems that Lilo faces so they don't get too heavy for the children in the audience, while the very real struggles of Lilo in her plotline bleed over into Stitch's plot and make both very emotionally poignant. When both plotlines hit their shared climax, they reach children on a emotional level few other movies can match - the terror of Lilo being taken away from her family, and the emotional complexity of that problem (Cobra Bubbles pointing to Lilo's ruined house and shouting at Nani, "IS THIS WHAT LILO NEEDS?" is so starkly real and heart-breaking), is matched and echoed in the visual splendor and mania of the spectacular no-way-this-is-going-to-work chase scene where Stitch, Nani, Jumbaa, and Pleakley all team up to rescue Lilo from Gantu.

The arcs of the characters all more or less line up. Nani confronts her own failures to be a guardian and parent to Lilo and resolves to do better and learn from her mistakes. Jumbaa, who through most of the movie protests to be evil and uncaring, nonetheless comes to not only care for Pleakley, but more importantly for Stitch too, and ends up assuming the role he never wanted but nonetheless forced himself into from the start: he is Stitch's family. Hell, the moment that reveals this is really clever - Stitch goes out into the wilderness to try and re-enact a scene from a storybook of The Ugly Duckling, hoping, in a very childish way, that his family will show up and love him. Jumbaa arrives and, coldly but not particularly cruelly, tells Stitch that he has no family - that Stitch wasn't born, but created in a lab by Jumbaa himself. But in that moment Jumbaa is proving himself wrong - because Stitch's creator, his parent, DID show up, and did exactly what happens in the story by telling Stitch the truth of what he is. It can't be a surprise, then, that later in the movie Jumbaa ends up deciding to side with Stitch, to help him save Lilo, and to stay on Earth with his child.

David and Pleakley go from being pushed away by Nani and Jumbaa respectively to essentially becoming their partners in the family. The Grand Councilwoman and Cobra Bubbles finally see how cruel their initial solution of isolating Stitch and Lilo from their family would be, and bend the rules they are supposed to enforce to protect and support this weird found family instead of breaking it apart. Gantu and Myrtle are recognized for the assholes they are and face comeuppance in the form of comedic slapstick pratfalls. And most importantly, Stitch and Lilo both get the emotional support and understanding they need to thrive and live happy lives as children should be allowed to do. It's like poetry, it rhymes.

It's a very precise, smartly written movie. It's a delicate balancing act of tone and emotions, with a very strong theme about the need for family and understanding that hits children in their hearts and imaginations. It's extremely well structured.

...

So it'd be kind of colossally fucking stupid to remake it and start fucking around with the core structure of it, chopping out pieces and completely altering others, with no real purpose beyond "Well, the executives thought it might be better if we did this."