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Rumi is such an amazing character. It’s rare that I connect with a character so deeply, but the way she’s written — raw, flawed, and painfully real — hits hard. Her insecurities and weaknesses don’t just weigh her down; they completely shatter her self-confidence, to the point where she literally loses her voice. It’s heartbreaking. Céline’s “education” didn’t make her stronger — it destroyed her self-esteem.

She cant accept her demonic heritage because it’s ugly, dangerous, a mistake. But it’s also part of her and her journey to accept that part of her that she hates so much comes with Jinu. He gives her a new perspective on her marks on who she is. That those marks don’t define her as a person but are still part of her identity.

But it also comes with Zoey and Mira. They both suffer from different issues but are also the victims of Céline lessons. They learned to be strong but at the cost of their mental health, their self esteem and even their relationship with each other.

And when you really look at it, Céline is just continuing a cycle of psychological abuse. One that probably started with the 1st Huntress. A legacy where self-sacrifice is everything. Where saving the world comes before your feelings, your mind, your life. But what makes this story so powerful is watching them finally push back. Watching them choose healing over duty. Watching them say, “We deserve more.”

It’s beautiful, it’s heartbreaking, it’s real.

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I've seen maybe four or five different animatics for Would You Fall In Love With Me Again from EPIC now and all of them have been wonderful and beautiful. I'll link them all under the cut at the end.

BUT, I do have one little gripe with all but one of them. It's just a nitpit honestly as all of them are great, but it bothers me just enough to bring it up.

All but one of them design Ody and Penelope's wedding bed as a literal tree. It's beautiful and very creative, but it defies the entire purpose of the scene.

The bed is carved from an olive tree, and is still rooted to the ground, but the point that nobody but Ody knows that is the crux of Penelope's test when she asks him to move it. If he isn't her husband, he won't know just from a glance that the bed is rooted to the ground and can't be moved so easily as she's asking. If he is her husband she knows he'll be outraged by the ask. This is how she cleverly tests him to make sure he's her husband, as she's had a few tricksters come around in the 20 years he's been gone.

Designing the bed to look like a tree with a bed in it makes the test make no sense because anybody could hear the ask, look over, and be like "woman, the tree? move the tree?"

Anyway that aside please watch all the animatics cause they're lovely.

I could only find two, but there are others and they're very good if you spot them in your recommended. People are so creative and talented.

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✨🏳️‍⚧️ A short pride comic, hope you’re all well 🏳️‍⚧️✨

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i think abt the part in the golden compass where it was noted that if your daemon chose to assume the form of a fish or some kind of ocean dwelling creature you could never leave the water again. at best you could dock, maybe walk a bit away from the shore, but that's it. chained to the water because your physical soul form commands it.

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A WALTZ ALONG A RAZOR'S EDGE

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No transphobes allowed, only transborbs.

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my number one woman behavior is saying i’m fine with any pronouns and silently ranking people in my regard based on what they do with that information

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One of the things that makes the family conflict in Lilo & Stitch work narratively is that Cobra is correct in that Lilo and Nani's current situation is non-sustainable. And yes, Nani is not prepared to handle everything by herself. But losing the custody is not the solution either, and to a degree Cobra seems to believe the same (he legit does not want that to happen), but if Nani can't solve the problem, then from his perspective it's the least harmful solution.

And the conflict is solved because what Lilo and Nani need (what they REALLY needed) is a support net. Someone, anyone to be there to take at least SOME of the burden from Nani and give her breathing room.

Which is why Jumba and Peakley joining the family alongside Stitch, and become a constant pressence who share the burden of the household, makes all the difference.

And this does not solve all the problems, because the movie is not about magically resolving those problems, it's about putting the characters in a situation in which they can move forward as a family. And for their desire to be a family and be together as a family, to be respected.

Anyway, someone told me what the remake did for the ending

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Also, with the child cast of HBO’s Harry Potter now revealed, we’ve got to be VERY careful.

Any attacks on these actors is only going to justify JK’s anti-trans ideology as she’ll rewrite any online bullying towards these kids as predatory actions under trans ideology. She’s got the government on her side, so don’t think she won’t go further; maybe advocating for a complete ban of trans-positive ideology from the internet in disguise as ‘protecting children from online hate’.

So please, even though it’s all unfair and disgusting and we’re all mad, DON’T go on the offensive. It didn’t work before. We need to be smart about it this time around.

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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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The Princess Bride is such a funny book to read after ONLY seeing the movie. Like Goldman made up a fake author from a fake country and proceeded to write the book as an abridged version of what the fake author wrote... and then he proceeds to add in notes to the "abridged version" mentioning all the boring world building stuff he skipped because it was boring.

Like shout out to William Goldman, man really did make an entire book that is just "the cool scenes you thought of in your head" and then made up a fake author to abridge so he doesn't have to connect them.

And it slaps

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Disney really has lost the plot more and more over time. At this point they're really not releasing much of value, visiting the parks seems more of a chore than ever, and I don't know that I could be bothered to find a good thing to say about them.

The Lilo and Stitch live action isn't the first thing they've butchered to hell and back, but it really does drive home that they do not understand what made their older works beloved anymore, and they've overshot the societal issues they sought to touch on to just stomp on anything that doesn't heavily reflect them.

It's not the girl boss moment they want for Nani to ditch Lilo and leave for college in California [which, if she went for Marine Biology like I'm hearing is a level stupider since Hawaii is like the holy grail of marine bio schooling]. The whole crux of the original was that yes it was sad that Nani had to give up her promising surfing career to accept the responsibility of taking care of Lilo, but she loved her sister enough to fight to keep her anyway and make their life work. It was a reflection of her values and priorities. By dropping that you take away the commentary on both the tragedy of her having to grow up too fast and the tragedy of her desperately fighting not to lose what's left of her family to the state. You lose the found family she and Lilo do end up building in their new alien uncles, their former CIA uncle, David, and Stitch himself.

At this point the live action remakes have only served to tell the world: no, Disney couldn't have made any of it's classics today, because given what these movies are they would've sucked. It's showing that if any of the beloved classics had been made today they would be terribly written junk and never would've been classics to start with. So at the very least we can appreciate that we got the actual originals when we did, because at the rate Disney is going we're never getting anything that good again.

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houseplant type friend

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please, its 2:30 am, please stop

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Happy Star Wars Day! I’ve decided to make my Skywalker comic into one easily rebloggable post.

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Saw this on Twitter and I obligatory need to share it