I Actually Feel Terrible For The Kids Who’ve Only Seen The Live Action Lilo & Stitch. Imagine Being

My latest hot take is that Warrior Cats and Yellowstone, while vastly different media with vastly different target audiences, appeal to their respective audiences for the exact same reasons. Similarities include:

- the beauty of nature is a major theme and the expansion of cityscape is treated in both with the exact same level of narrative grief

- gratuitous violence and dysfunction

- readers/viewers vicariously live a power fantasy

- territorial disputes of a kind that no one else in their respective worlds engages in

- characters who are undeniably badass but all their ambition stems from their intense self-loathing

- oaths of unbreakable loyalty

- constant existential doom

- strict hierarchy enforced by violence

- murder plots that go off without a hitch

- murder plots that absolutely do not go off without a hitch

- lies about who your family is

- adoptions, but they’re a really weird dynamic

- lots of doomed romantic relationships

- “their death was all your fault”

- jaded antiheroes who can’t actually believe in the future they’re striving toward and sabotage it every time they get close by aiming for something imperfect (the best they think they can get/deserve)

The only fear death holds for me is that, even if I find myself in Heaven, I’ll have to explain to jirt that I posted LOTR fanfiction and edited his poetry to suit the plotline I had in mind. It could be worse, though: I could be Peter Jackson having to look Tolkien in his eyes and explain why Christopher Lee played Saruman.

As soon as I get a grave, the first thing I’m gonna do is start rolling in it.

Countless children’s media misled me with their emphasis on the dangers of quicksand, but VeggieTales was spot-on with their emphasis on the danger of the public veneration of material goods.

Snow says it’s better for Haymitch to die than to live long enough to have his heart broken by Lenore Dove. If he really thought Lenore Dove was going to betray Haymitch the way (he thinks) Lucy Gray did to him, he wouldn’t have needed to poison Lenore Dove. Just sayin 👀

You, a fanfiction author: “I don’t know if this fic is any good. Maybe I just won’t post it. Probably nobody would like it.”

Your top commenter, eyes enormous: “You hide the fic? You hide the fic in WIPs? Oh! Oh! Jail for author! Jail for author for one thousand years!”

I know it’s been said a million times, a million different ways, but Dumbledore was crazy right out of the gate with the whole Philosopher’s Stone ordeal. Imagine approaching your longtime acquaintance and saying, “Hey, pal, can I borrow your life support? I want to lure a genocidal maniac in so I can test an 11 year old against him in combat. I’d like to do this on school property, while in session.”

Rings of Power and orcs. I get wanting to show that villains can be redeemable, but that’s possible if and only if said villain wants and pursues redemption and recognizes where they’ve been wrong. LOTR and every related work prior to RoP consistently showed us orcs who firmly believed it was their right to torture and eat people. Saruman’s main obstacle in using them was that they couldn’t get along; they were killing each other for the opportunity to dismember and eat Merry and Pippin. There’s a lot of work to do before you can make people sympathize with orcs and RoP was not equipped to do even a fraction of that work.

Not to mention it didn’t need to be done. LOTR was already full of nuanced race relations, redeemable villains, and characters making themselves better or worse via their own free will. I would venture a guess that this is why Tolkien made the orcs so intensely reprehensible in the first place—in a world where Gollum, who attempts murder onscreen multiple times and explicitly states his desire to eat more than one of our beloved protagonists, is a sympathetic and redeemable character, you need a very concrete reason to see orcs as consistent, clear-cut villains. I would say we definitely have that. The orcs engage is gruesome violence and they like it that way; we never see an orc who wants to do things differently, therefore by their own choice, none of them have been redeemable.

Gollum is very nearly the same, except for a few moments where he shows disgust for what he’s become and a desire for something good and lovely, like sharing a meal with friends. It only takes a little bit to make him redeemable and it’s a clear picture of how real-life redemption can be accomplished from the measliest of starting points.

But you have to have that starting point, and I don’t think it’s unrealistic or in any way bad to have characters who don’t embrace that starting point, especially when there’s another character right next to them showing that their actions could have been forgiven if only they had any remorse.

the reason "robot racism" is often a really stupid metaphor is the same reason that like. discrimination against demons or vampires or whatever doesn't work, is because there's often a pretty justified reasons humans are scared of vampires or robots or whatever, in a way that doesn't apply to real life minorities, like a fantasy author will be like "the reason vampires are discriminated against is because most of them and kill and eat people for fun and pleasure, and so humans respond by trying to kill them, isn't that so sad" and like no that's a perfectly fine reason to not trust vampires i think.

One thing that bothers me about the ending of the Lilo and Stitch remake (among the other things people have already rightfully complained about) is how it acts like Nani has to go to college NOW or she's lost her chance forever.

As someone who was raised by a young mother that didn't get to go to college, because she got 2 kids at 18-20, but then went to college in her early/mid 30s when me and my sister were old enough to be left home alone, it just feels really insulting.

It really adds to the harmful mindset that someone's life, especially that of women, is over if they haven't "got their life together" yet before the age of 25.

There would've been no harm in Nani delaying college for like 5-10 years, instead of abandoning her sister during the most vital years of her development only 2-3 months after already having lost her parents. Animated Nani would never.