Skimbledankstheradicalcat - Messy

"I can't believe [media] was actually about _____ the whole time!!!"

[one possible interpretation, yep]

[literally the main theme??]

[worst take you've seen in your life]

I haven’t been on tumblr for quite as long as a lot of people but over several years I’ve noticed this interesting gradual sorta,, shift in the general culture? that it went from this mostly depressed, nihilistic outlook where people would regularly joke about hating themselves and being hopeless and depressed, to a wave of vehemence of “STOP hating everything actually the world is Good and you deserve love!!!” type posts, to now, where those aggressive ‘PSAs’ have faded away and instead I regularly see people romanticizing simple things like stars and hot tea and rainy mornings, and waxing poetic about their friends, and just trying to put love out there. and I don’t know exactly what that means (someone who knows more than me could probably say something smart about generational expression and trauma or popular perception of mental health and whatnot), but I do know that it makes my heart very full to see people learn to love the world and themselves by extension, and a whole userbase adopting healthier coping mechanisms, and therefore teaching the younger users to do so as well. I might just be following different people, but I really do think we’ve grown. everyone has grown. five years ago it wasn’t unusual for the next post on my dash to be a scathing commentary on why nothing matters or an anon ripping into someone they barely knew or someone complaining about how pathetic their interests are. now I have mutuals who get excited and spam reblog art of cows and friends I see tagging each other in pictures of frogs and strangers writing paragraphs about how much I matter. it makes me happy. idk. just an observation I wanted to make. I think people are good and everyone’s just trying their best at the end of the day

basically my position is that landlords should die until my siblings aren't forced into soliciting donations online for basic necessities like food and shelter and medicine. i do not consider this any more extreme than the popular position that poor people should suffer and die en masse so landlords can keep getting paid for doing fucking nothing.

apparently no one was paying attention in middle school language arts when we learned what a fucking protagonist was

the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

[id: screenshots of tiktok captions. the images say, “but the only reason we still love princess diana is because she did not have the time to disappoint us.”]

begging queer kids to read up on princess diana’s involvement with the community. yes, she was a rich, pretty monarch. yes, she died young.

but the reason why queer people love her is because she used her privilege during the aids crisis to advocate for sick queer men, when very few others would - much less someone of her status.

diana spent years advocating for the health and care of queer people with hiv/aids. in 1987, at the height of the epidemic, she opened the first specialist clinic dedicated to treating aids patients (the first clinic of it’s kind in the uk).

she also fought public hysteria by hugging and shaking bare hands with aids patients, at a time when aids was thought to be spread by skin to skin contact. not only that, she visited patients in the clinic regularly and even comforted them through their sickness.

and when queen elizabeth told her to try focusing on “something more pleasant”?

diana ignored her and kept fighting.

and this is only her work towards the aids crisis. she publicly called out the royal family, brought attention to numerous world issues, and was known as an advocate for empathy and kindness. she’s known and loved as the people’s princess for good reason

"there are too many fan service cameos in SOTR" babe those are characters. We already knew Haymitch knew them. Just because we recognize their names doesn't make it fan service. There are plenty of new people too.

calling every instance of showing certain emotions "emotional labor" needs to stop. I just saw a post that was like "reminder that you do not ever need to be a good or kind person" like. Yes you DO???

After seeing all the responses to it, I decided to ☠️ the live action Lilo & Stitch to see the damage for myself. Setting aside the common criticisms (no gantu, jumbas... everything, Nani and Lilo's relationship or lack thereof, cobra bubbles/the social worker, The Ending), something that honestly killed the movie in its infancy for me is its pace and its noise.

This movie is allergic to beats of silence or introspective moments, which is bonkers, because that's one of the things that makes the original so strong. Lilo walking home alone after hula practice. Nani sneaking to hear Lilo's prayer. The quiet after the incident at the beach before Lilo says, "You ruined everything." Stitch alone in the woods before he cries out that he's lost. All of these moments so many more are cradled by silence as the movie urges us to look and listen with patience. In the live action, these moments are rushed (at least the ones that are still in it, as not all of them are) and they suffer for it. Hell, even Stitch's escape sequence is undermined by how rapid the pacing is.

So many times, I found myself just wishing for the movie to *breathe*. There are so few moments of quiet introspection, and the ones that are there are still littered with extra things that just clutter the simple, powerful story underneath it. Tack on that almost every single intimate character moment or interaction is punctuated with a joke of some kind. It's like the movie is insecure about its own sincerity, so it buries it under cheap jokes and quips.

What really gets me is that the original is funny in part because of its ability to be quiet. Lilo showing Nani Stitch's record player trick is funny as fuck in the original because of how its quiet. Lilo's deadpan face, Nani's stunned silence, and the pauses when Lilo closes his mouth all service the comedy of the scene. The scene also acts as another reinforcement of Nani's understanding of Lilo in that she simply watches to see what the fuck her weirdo little sister has figured out.

In the live action, they have Lilo talking throughout the whole bit, and Nani just offhandedly responds while only looking at her phone (the movie is so confused as to how Nani feels about Lilo in my opinion) and it just falls flat, even with the read that the scene is meant more to illustrate their strained sister relationship.

It honestly stinks cause the little girl playing Lilo is adorable and doing a great job, especially for her age and for the crappy movie she's in. Her dynamic with Stitch, while altered (she's more of a little troublemaker type in this, sneaking into resorts, freeing someone's chickens, sneaking candy to feed the shelter dogs, etc.), is still well done and very wholesome. I just wish they'd gotten a better movie to be in.

Tldr; the movie lacks dynamic pacing and the quiet moments that made the original movie's simple, grounded (lol sort of) story so impactful.