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"Boy I sure wish there was a character who functions like me who's still made it somewhere in life!"

Commander Sir Samuel Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch:

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You know I used to find it funny that Jack immediately started imitating Dean and not Sam but then I realized that Jack saw into Castiel's mind and probably picked up on the "profound bond" read marriage between them. Jack saw that and said if Castiel is my father and Dean is his husband then that's my dad 2.0

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TOTK - Eternal (part 1)

part 2 here

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what he said

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You mean what would he have responded to in that moment had he had the time? That’s interesting because I have an answer for that, and I had an answer for that in the next setup, camera setup after Castiel was taken and Dean’s on the floor and puts his, I put my head in my hands. In that moment I did that not because I just lost, well because I lost Cas but also because I didn’t say anything, I didn’t give him anything. And what I had in my head was I should have said, ‘I love you, too’ and hugged him.

-Jensen Ackles

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Disney prince medley from Jeremy Jordan’s concert today in California 😍

(LET ME MAKE YOU PROUD!!!!)

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...Sam's cancelling his next Enochian lesson.

Happy belated Pride (convention season has delayed me a lot this year), with my most sincere apologies for this stupidity.

(Please don't repost, but reblogs are great!)

My kofi | My Patreon

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Sometimes I hyperfocus so hard on something, I forget I’m a person until someone interacts with me. I feel like some wild animal seeing a human being for the first time. I’m like “oh yeah I’m supposed to speak and stuff”

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I realized I hadnt posted the birth of the sun here, the very beginning of the Celestial Somebody story! The first few pages are very scruffy and the colours change midway lol.

Welcome to the Universe, Sun!

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Every person need to be taught disability history

Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.

Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.”

Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.

Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.

Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.

Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”

Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.

Teach about us.

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Please forgive me for ranting, but...I am so tired of AI. Just so tired. I don't want Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini, or Meta AI, or whatever other energy-sucking, water-wasting, mediocrity-spewing LLM is currently being thrust upon me. I just want to be left alone to create in peace.

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Creatives have always fought to have representation in their projects. Even under a company like Disney, if the team has something they want to show, they'll find their way around whatever the suits and sales execs forbid (especially for non-theatrical releases/media, where they might be able to get away with a bit more).

It got me thinking about an episode of Lilo & Stitch: The Series! that I've mentioned before, the one about Pleakley's family wanting him to settle down with a wife. I thought about this episode specifically because Jumba and Pleakley may have been shipped by the writers through bits and jokes and one-offs throughout the show, but in this episode they really tried to do the most official, "We ship these characters," as they possibly could without actually getting in trouble with the higher-ups.

Here's the setup for the episode if you're unfamiliar:

Pleakley's mother wanted him to finally marry a girl, or else she would find a girl for him back on his home planet. Pleakley ends up lying to get out of the arrangement, saying that he already has a woman he's engaged to on Earth. Just a minute later, when he answers the door, he realizes he's only made the situation worse: his family's there on the doorstep, saying they immediately "hopped a wormhole" to be there before his supposed wedding day.

He begins to stack lies on top of lies and claims that Nani is his bride-to-be. Nani is only convinced to go along with it after being reminded that, if Pleakley left, the only remaining adult to supervise Lilo would be Jumba.

Both Pleakley and Nani don't enjoy the charade they have to put up with for the next few days. Nani begrudgingly plays her part up until the actual wedding day, where she finds out that a real ordained minister was hired, meaning she would be legally married to Pleakley, which is where she draws the line. Nani refuses to be a part of the lie any longer and leaves just before the ceremony begins.

Here's where the Pleakley/Jumba stuff begins (and where the creative team had to start tiptoeing around what would force a rewrite from the execs):

Lilo convinces Jumba off-screen to take Nani's place. This way there's no need to write any kind of "ew no I don't want to" joke or have Lilo bribe him or something of the sort to get Jumba to do it. We don't see or hear Jumba's thoughts when he would supposedly be told that he is legally marrying Pleakley. This way the writers are neither confirming nor denying anything about Jumba being interested in Pleakley or not.

During the ceremony, Jumba doesn't seem put off by it all. There's no gag that he thinks it's gross to be married to Pleakley, or is "only doing it" because Lilo said he has to, or that he wants to be the groom instead of the bride, or anything like that. When asked for his name, he does claim to be "Jumbina," but that's most likely because Pleakley's family specifically wanted him to marry a girl (and are a very heteronormative bunch; if Jumba walked down the isle as a second groom, they would've been just as upset as if they found out Pleakley wasn't actually engaged). Regardless, I'd say Pleakley looks content-enough that Jumba's the one walking down the isle instead of Nani.

When the minister then asks for the vows, the audience is only given a single line from Pleakley: "Dearest, the day we met, I couldn't take my eye off you." As he says this, the genetic experiment of the episode -who happens to be a lie detector experiment- starts beeping loudly, meaning that was a lie. Which actually makes total sense. That was a lie. If you go back to the day they met, Pleakley was being brought to Jumba's prison cell, where Pleakley was told he'd be shipped off to catch a deadly experiment with this criminally-convicted mad-scientist he just met. These two were absolutely not a case of "love at first sight." I mean, when Pleakley first saw him, Jumba was crazily ripping up and stuffing newspaper into his mouth.

And that's the ONLY vow that we get to hear either of them say at the wedding. The writers explicitly made the ONLY vow a false one so the lie detector could buzz at it. Jumba and Pleakley don't say anything about how much they might actually love each other, because then the writers would be forced to make it a lie so they wouldn't get in trouble for suggesting that the two male characters have feelings for each other. If it was all just part of the joke, it would be super easy for the characters to say how much they "really love one another" and then have the lie detector go off in the background. The writers can't have vows that would imply that these characters are gay, so they instead made the characters not say vows that would imply that they aren't gay.

Now, if you know anything about how the legality of marriage actually works, you know that most fiction gets it wrong: you don't stop someone from being married by interrupting their "I do"s, cutting the minister off before they say "I now pronounce you," stopping the kiss, taking the rings, or anything like that. You are finally "legally married" when you sign the marriage certificate and legal paperwork, which can be during, after, or even before the actual wedding.

So, while the ceremony gets crashed just before the end of it by Gantu trying to grab the genetic experiment, that doesn't actually stop the marriage proceedings unless the signings are postponed. Also, let's appreciate how Pleakley immediately hops into Jumba's arms at the sight of danger, and how Jumba accepts it.

After the ceremony is wrecked and Pleakley explains all of his lies to his family -and they apologize for being hard on him and not understanding- the minister stands up from under the rubble to ask who's paying for the officiation as he holds up some papers, supposedly the legal documents for the marriage. But no one actually responds. The scene ends with a look of newfound-understanding between Pleakley and his mother about their conversation from just a moment ago.

There's no further comment towards the minister about how they don't actually need marriage papers or that the marriage itself is being called off. No one says anything about it in the wrap-up scene just afterwards where Pleakley's family leaves. There's no, "Man, I'm glad I didn't actually have to marry Pleakley," from Jumba or some kind of, "I'm glad that's over," from Pleakley.

From all we know, Pleakley and Jumba did sign those papers for the minister to file with the state of Hawaii.

And this is the best the writers could do. They weren't allowed to canonize/confirm anything, even if they wanted to. They have to try making it as canon as possible by explicitly not stating certain things that would delegitimize it. It becomes a whole assignment to carefully slip past the people holding their paychecks.

As the industry and world have shifted a bit, different kinds of representation have become at least somewhat easier to include than these ever-so-meticulously-crafted inclusions from the past. But, when the people in power have doubts on what might make/lose money, they immediately look to topics like these that polarize extremist audiences. Taking any kind of positive/accepting stance on representation is the first thing they neutralize. So, even when the inclusion has to be as convoluted as this, I still personally see and appreciate everything that the creative teams do.

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So I watched the "Lilo&Stitch 2025" movie...and it wasn't bad or good. It was just ok.

Stitchs animation was actually pretty cute and I liked the actors for the most part.

The pacing was bad at the start and it sadly doesn't do right by the beauty of Hawaii.

My biggest problem with the movie is actually how it made Jumba the main villain. Not just a temporary antagonist, but a villain... sure, a remake doesn't have to be an exact copy of the original, but this.... this is just not good writing.

I think the original version of Jumba is far superior. I mean, come on ⬇️

Pleakley in the 2025 movie is also so watered down... They could've done so much with those two 😞

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Imagine being against gay marriage when it's actually just this

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A glorious 25th of May to all of you.

Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard-Boiled Egg!