maxivermismind

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man, The Character really strikes me as someone who would struggle with Same Problems I Have, for no apparent reason

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“He would not fucking say that” except its the badly written source material so he did, in fact, say that

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i can’t stand “it’s not that deep” attitudes like even if it really really isn’t that deep just PLAY WITH ME. just fucking PLAY. have a meaningless but deep analytical conversation with me. just like think about shit for fun. does anyone else like to think about stuff for fun. it’s so lonely

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Being autistic is like screaming through a megaphone “please don’t overwork me, i WILL explode” and everyone responds like haha well. You’ll get used to it over time :)

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you have gotttt to communicate your gripes with chatgpt and ai without being demeaning to people who yknow. actually can't write a 600 word essay or write a grocery list. and I'm NOT writing this as a defense for using ai. it's not even primarily disabled people using ai, its prevalent among the general public and I know that your "intended target" is people who use it because its the path of least resistance. but man your rhetoric sucks and I don't know why you feel so comfortable tying intellectual ability with inherent worth! I don't know why you're so comfortable leaving people with intellectual disabilities in your warpath or why the thousands of ppl that shared those posts do also. It's so egregious to me. Yeah ai sucks it's not a good tool in general and if you use it to not actually participate in your own education you suck. yeah. we agree. struggling to write an essay, is not something worthy of demeaning.

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put three f/f ships you like in the tags. doesnt matter how obscure or embarrassing the media, go for it. and no, your m/m ship doesnt count as women

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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."

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is that good

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"Kill them with danmaku" wrong. CURSE OF RA 𓀀 𓀁 𓀂 𓀃 𓀄 𓀅 𓀆 𓀇 𓀈 𓀉 𓀊 𓀋 𓀌 𓀍 𓀎 𓀏 𓀐 𓀑 𓀒 𓀓

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I kinda love watching some really cliche fantasy media unsubtly foreshadow how their protagonists relate to The Prophecy like damn I wonder if this suspiciously color coded friend group has any connection to the legend of the color coded dragons

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We need happy and wholesome nice queer representation to remind us that being queer doesn't doom you to a short life of loneliness and misery and we need fucked up and toxic queer representation to remind us that queer people are human beings who are messy and complicated and are not required to be beacons of moral goodness

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it’s so frustrating like i don’t mind depiction of incest i genuinely think more work out there needs to exist about incest bc it is such a deeply isolating experience and bc so many people feel alone and afraid to speak and cannot imagine having lives going forward and are crushed by all of it. there is so so so so much value in having fictional stories about processing it and real accounts and memoirs and open discussion and all that stuff. it is genuinely beyond important that incestuous abuse no longer be relegated to the darkness of secrecy simply because it makes people uncomfortable bc people living with the hell that is incest trauma deserve better than to be forced into isolation and silence. i will always ALWAYS advocate for these topics being discussed frankly. people go decades thinking it is their fault and that they are alone. it’s horrifying the way people who have lived through this become an afterthought and that needs to end.

so like i said like. it frustrates me, then, that the current discussion (where there is one) feels so weighted toward an exploitative and voyeuristic view and where cultural output about incestuous abuse is often like really offensive and clearly framed as being titillating and/or shock value. people joke freely about it in ways that are incredibly denigrating to survivors, there is still a culture of victim blaming and this idea of mutual deviance or dirtiness that makes it extremely difficult to come forward for fear of being not only blamed but fucking castigated for your own sexual abuse, you risk setting off a nuclear bomb in your already fucked up family, people don’t understand you. all the while there’s this air of fucking flippancy, and if you criticize that you’re a prude or a puritan or whatever the fuck else.

like, i get it. i can’t tell people what to do, what to like, how to process their own trauma. but treating it like a joke is not acceptable under any circumstances and that shit is fucking vile. be fucking respectful, be conscientious, you actually do owe it to the people around you and one day you will undoubtedly face social consequences if you continue to be cruel and thoughtless. it’s not even the writing at this point that makes me angry so much as the culture surrounding it where it’s so deeply fictionalized that incest itself gets turned into some sort of little game for people. i just saw people tagging an excerpt from the incest diary, a real human being’s memoir of abuse, with their ships. frankly if hell is real that’s where that kind of ghoulish behavior ought to send you. it disgusts me that i have to rant and rave and beg on my knees for scraps of human decency for myself and my fellow survivors who cannot or will not open themselves to this kind of Sisyphean debasement.

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have realized that while i am not a fan necessarily of "people meet and immediately fall in love" i am a fan of "people meet and are immediately obsessed with each other." the love can come later but the absolute fixation should be immediate

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got me good with this whole email address thing. you make email account as child for one purpose neopets.com and now all this. bait and switch. not nice.