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Alright folks, this here’s a rant pic; you can tell from the words written up there that this will NOT be fun, so trigger warnings for sexism, ableism, abuse, and misogyny and I wouldn’t recommend reading the end portion while eating, what I’m talking about here is the reaction to anime Angel and how shit people were about not only her, but the anime and by extension the franchise’s female cast. If you’re someone who does the things I’m describing please grow some brain cells, but if you’re not then you have nothing to worry about, because I’m talking about the nasties here who want fanservice and try hiding it and claiming to care about “strong female characters”-these types are full of shit and it’s them who’re going to get reamed here

When I say Angel is a MARINA song, I mean her fans and writers have made her that way not that she actually is

So...in creating Mirror and Sparrow Tears and a bunch of other works involving Angel, I’ve had to rewatch (not really) and rethink her episodes.

Not her series portrayal, her anime portrayals. All three seasons.

This is because there’s nothing there with series Angel; her anime self is far more interesting and developed, and is thus a good source of information on who Angel truly is. I get a lot of my “bad” traits for Angel from this very portrayal and build the “good” traits from them. I’ll admit my version of her is essentially well. Just anime Angel, but I’m at the helm and not the anime, so she’s balanced out considerably, but it’s still just anime Angel.

Part of this involved taking her out from her relation to Stitch and placing her with other characters as well as alone, and in different situations, then building her character based off of the reactions I’d imagine she’d have. It’s weird, but I’ve come to be very protective of Angel as a character over the years. Blame her fanon portrayals for that and how...reflective they are of what’s really wanted and expected of Angel.

See, Angel’s conception was just skeevy; she was a shallow love interest and her execution was fucked up; it was all centered around her as a prize to Stitch and as a result, she was really just a character built off of him instead of being her own. Of course, she did her job well; the fandom loved her, but as a whole, many of them never loved the real “her”-so to speak, they just liked her as a love interest to Stitch and in fanworks, built her up to be a perfectly broken wish fulfillment character for their headcanons despite Angel at her core being a very young, rather annoying and bratty experiment with a penchant for helping others cause destruction. Her real character and purpose within the 6-series is actually very unique and fun to work with, and it’s sad it had to be buried for the sake of being a shallow love interest. It’s like a slightly less horrid version of what happened to Keoni.

There’s a lot of problems with the fandom’s treatment of both Angel and many other female characters, particularly when the spinoffs are involved. Starting with Angel, apart from the high expectations people had made from seeing only about 5 to 10 minutes of her and her status as a love interest, all her baggage from being captured is never even acknowledged, much less worked with. The trauma Angel went through in being captured, lied to, tricked, and abused is almost never respected, much less acknowledged, she has no support system, and no one she can turn to. She’s just a love interest and nothing more. I still feel, to this day, that I was the one of only a few people who took Angel’s abuse into account when analyzing her anime version.

The thing is, most, if not all of what Angel does in the anime can be attributed to her abuse by Gantu and Hamsterviel. Her materialism and spoiled attitude can be linked to how she had nothing while captured and probably had no guarantee of food or water, her capriciousness and distrustfulness can be explained via her situation of working for Gantu and thus being lied to about Stitch (and being abandoned for two years with other experiments who’s captures were from Lilo and Stitch’s apathy and neglect), her being arrogant can actually be from insecurity left over from that time. Angel is a canon abuse victim within the Lilo and Stitch universe, so a lot of this behavior-as one myself-isn’t new. In fact, it’s only logical Angel would act the way she does, especially towards Yuna and Stitch. Of course this doesn’t excuse her, but it does provide context as to why she acts like this in the first place, and I feel people just never considered it, even now. It seems Lilo and Stitch fans wanted the Angel we saw in her first appearance, but that particular version of Angel canonically doesn't-and can’t exist anymore.

Being in the situation Angel was will change you, and I can guarantee that the one from the original episode no longer exists. What does exist now is someone with baggage she needs to work through who isn’t going to act very appropriately, will lash out, will be mean and distrustful, and will make mistakes in trying to move past what’s happened to her. For people to expect the “original” Angel to still exist beyond the two years of manipulation and abuse she went through reveal to me ignorance of how abuse can truly affect someone as well as selfishness and entitlement over how an abuse survivor should behave. Not every abuse victim is a shy or passive person for someone on the outside to “save”-which is what many Stitch fans tend to think of Angel. Thinking of them as such is nothing more than an inaccurate stereotype which will not help when analyzing abused characters like her. Angel is more angry, afraid, and insecure than she’ll ever be passive or reliant, and people need to understand that if we are to get a good portrayal of her in the future.

But speaking of “original” Angel, it is with...great regret (not really) that I must say anime Angel is going to be her peak in terms of characterization.

What do I mean by this? Well, to put it bluntly, original Angel is a complete and utter mess. She was created for marketing of only the most sexist variety; her design is overly girly and intended to be a mirror of Stitch’s, her power is one commonly attributed to Sirens, and her execution in her episode is...gross. She remains to this day the only experiment to be sexualized, which is NOT a title she should have-being only a couple numbers above Stitch, and every last choice she makes revolves around Stitch’s feelings instead of her own. She’s a convoluted, half-baked mess of a character who from her very conception, was nothing but a marketing ploy in the form of a love interest. She’s the least progressive thing the franchise has ever created, and everything about her needs to either be thrown out, or remade.

Anime Angel, despite herself having a dubious conception (the spoiled, bratty and nagging girlfriend), was executed far more coherently and managed to actually be the best version we have so far. Her life, for starters, is her own and separate from her boyfriend, she has relationships outside of him, she doesn’t base her choices around him, and she’s allowed to make mistakes and have considerable flaws-everything the original lacked. She’s far from perfect and certainly quite mean at times, but she has far more emotion and character than the original ever did. An abrasive Angel is better than a flat one.

What upsets me is when people demand for the original, or worse, defend her and say she’s “progressive” and proceed to list useless, shallow things that have nothing to do with who Angel is. It’s not lost on me that many who say this are typically white male Lilo and Stitch fans-many of whom are also the ones who love to attribute “Mary Sue” to Yuna and like the ridiculously flat, one note Ai instead. That this is the demographic that often says to this (and yes btw, fangirls tend to also have this same problem) is to me, very concerning as Angel in the original is extremely sexist and absolutely needs to have a rework. But a rework that adheres to the vapid, degrading, and often sexist and misogynistic tropes these people ask for and praise will only further damage her character and bring the overall quality of the franchise down with it-Angel’s already a sore spot.

The arguments presented for why Angel’s original counterpart is…”progressive” are built off of the mistaken notion that strength is the same as power, and that simply placing a woman in a role typically considered masculine is somehow feminist. It’s not. Original Angel was sexist, not progressive. Her saving Stitch a couple times and turning to good for him don’t matter. What matters is her character and its execution within the story, something that these people do not consider when defending her original counterpart; they’re doing this because really, when it comes down to it, Angel has a disturbing lack of character for a typical experiment. Thanks to the sexist and rather degrading way she’s written, she’s more comparable to a character like Hammerface or Heat, not one like Yaarp or Cannonball or Kixx-where she theoretically would and should be by having her episode revolve around her. In her original episode, we don’t really see Angel apart from Stitch, and when we do, it reveals nothing about her (unless we want to count “being disgusted by getting hit on” anything except a normal reaction). Angel’s personality is built off of her reactions to Stitch; far different from, for example, Kixx, who’s shown interacting with his new environment before he meets Lilo and Stitch. That Angel’s time prior to being discovered isn’t shown is in her case, a detriment to her character and execution further hampered by her status as a love interest-something that experiments like Nosy and Houdini (also only shown interacting with the main cast and not their environment) didn’t have. Not even Heat, Hammerface, Thresher, and Plasmoid had this lack of depth, as the four experiments were interacting with one another alongside Gantu and weren’t focused on a single character like Angel.

Building a character off of another via focusing on their reactions to said other character just makes for an inaccurate portrayal; what we saw of Angel in her episode was just her thoughts on Stitch, not who she was as a person, thus this community has built her character entirely off of said thoughts. Original Angel as how we know her was just one facet of her personality, not the whole thing. She has no meaningful interactions with anyone other than Stitch and for the most part ignores Lilo, Pleakley, and Reuben. She does seem to like Jumba, but it’s rather unclear as to whether it was only for her mission or because she actually does (or was maybe spoiled by him-she is the failsafe for his experiments after all). Because of this, we actually know very little about who Angel truly is.

When Angel appeared in the anime, there was an outcry partially because the image that we’d built of her was inaccurate; we’d only seen her in relation to Stitch, so part of the shock of seeing her behavior partially came from simply not even knowing that part of her existed, or not taking notice of the minuscule signs we’d been dropped in the original. Angel’s always BEEN a bit of a brat. She’s always had a selfish and spoiled streak, and she’s always been rather capricious and distrustful (as of Snafu), it’s just that these things weren’t noticed or were glossed over in the original because of her bad execution. She does and should have a dark side, but where the anime failed was playing up and making fun of that dark side for outdated comedic purposes. As a result, people were shocked and although the anime is (sadly) the best we’ll be getting, they still fell into a decent portrayal ass-backwards in attempting to create what would’ve been essentially a shrew. The anime’s bad intentions for Angel shouldn’t be ignored, but it did thankfully manage to fail unlike the series; instead, it created a gray character who, while decent enough context and empathy is needed to understand her, is still a decent-even good-character with a good amount of agency and interactions with both her environment and those around her. Just because she’s not the nicest person doesn’t mean she’s therefore bad.

The push for Angel’s original self to come back is just simply ableist and in of itself misogynistic; wanting a return to a wildly sexist portrayal built off of inaccuracies and a horrid execution because of a single bad portrayal. This isn’t by the way, ableism because she should be allowed to act the way she does, it’s ableism because these people straight up ignore or downplay her abuse’s role in her behavior. It’s not like characters like She-Ra’s Catra, who’s abuse is acknowledged and factored into her shitty behavior for context, Angel’s abuse is simply ignored or worse-romanticized for Stitch’s gain at her expense. To want this is to want to ignore what Angel’s been through. It’s essentially just wishing for a traumatized person to be “back to normal” because they inconvenience you. This idea of Angel simply going back to who she was before her capture is frankly asinine because it ignores what’s happened to her and that she may need help in favor of alleviating an audience’s discomfort at seeing an abrasive abuse victim prone to lashing out on the screen.

Even worse, this is all done under the pretense and ignorance of feminism and its goals; advocating for a weak, insufficient character that sits on the sidelines to act as a prize for Stitch-like what original Angel was-and championing every little act she does as “progressive”. Saving Stitch is “progressive”. Being strategic in her mission is “progressive”. It has come to the point where some are pushing for Angel to be seen as a potential role model for young girls (because, somehow, Yuna, Ai, Lilo, Obaa, and Nani don’t count I suppose…being amazingly well developed, kind, and well-strong Characters of Color just must not matter to them when there’s a pink alien sitting around).

None of this is progressive. Actions in a story are not progressive except for when the character’s arc involves them and their role itself isn’t regressive and degrading. What does matter is how the character interacts with their surroundings and how their role within the story is handled. Angel saving Stitch isn’t progressive because it’s just a piece of the larger whole of Angel constantly basing all her choices around him and acting as a prize with no agency. Angel’s role removes agency and thus any kind of progressivism from her actions. It becomes part of said role as a shallow love interest.

Speaking of the women of color throughout the franchise, once these people were dissatisfied with Yuna being a so-called Mary Sue (a flagrant abuse of the term on their part-and in itself misogynistic in this context), they immediately moved to Angel, trying to place all the pressure that they’d been putting on Yuna to her. This is why we get people trying to say she should “have a larger role in the story” and “be a role model for little girls”(-again, I’ve only heard men say this and I have yet to hear female Stitch fans actually say anything like this (most of them don’t bother and for good reason)). To me, this is just...telling. Aside from the racism towards Yuna these people exhibited, they also spouted off blatantly sexist and misogynistic rhetoric towards her, her grandmother, Penny, and Tigerlily (last one is legit a bad character, but it comes from her bad execution just like Angel), calling them and Yuna everything from Mary Sue to even things like slut and whore, and implied her grandmother was neglectful among many other things. Yuna was criticized for every little thing she did and said; if she did something good or fought, she was called a Sue. If she got angry or lashed out, she was called a bitch. If she won in the end or-in one case-didn’t get her brains blown out by an experiment (Sparky, Kixx, etc.), she was called a Sue and there were cries for these things to straight up HAPPEN to her to “preserve realism”-or whatever creepy thing these people could come up with to do to a nine year old girl.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but most Lilo and Stitch fans don’t care about or respect the humans in the franchise. This extends to EVERYONE-not just the anime’s human cast. I’ve talked about how Lilo’s humanity is often taken away from her in fanfics and how she’s frequently paired with white saviors, and how Nani tends to be portrayed as overly harsh and even neglectful in fanfictions. Genuine Lilo fans and not just those who like her because they like Stitch are uncommon within the community, and part of this attitude shows in the reactions to the anime and Ai.

The point here is, people love Ai, but hate or dislike Yuna.

This may be less extreme, but people had the same reactions to Lilo in Stitch Has A Glitch as they did to Yuna; there was a subset of people complaining that Lilo was “too loud” and “too annoying”, and saying she needed to be "toned down"-Stitch Has A Glitch’s plot revolved around Lilo; her character, her relationship to her mother and to her new family members, and her friendship with Stitch. Lilo here was at the forefront, and Lilo is one of Disney’s most realistic child characters-and one of its strongest heroines.

You can guess what the reaction to this was like.

Contrast this portrayal of Lilo to the one in the series, who’s character has been exaggerated and reduced to almost a shadow of her movie self for both comedy and drama; she’s selfish, tries hard to “fit in”-something she never used to care for, and won’t hesitate to abandon Stitch for Myrtle and her friends who constantly bully her. Here, Lilo’s behavior isn’t really commented on by fans unless she does something egregious (see Nosy for instance). Because she’s in the background, she goes unnoticed and disrespected unless she does something immoral or unethical-whereupon we get a shitstorm of fanfics about the captured experiments harming and/or killing her for revenge.

It’s similar here. Yuna, for being more in the forefront and for being proactive like Lilo in Stitch Has A Glitch, is labeled a “Sue”-simply for fighting alongside Stitch, having. feelings I suppose, and well...acting like someone her age. See-Yuna’s nearly on par with movie Lilo in terms of characterization; the only problems with her character are either minor, or meta (i.e being a placeholder/successor/replacement-which is really the single point against her in this latter area). She is improperly characterized at times and can and does get very moody and kind of nasty, but that’s how most kids tend to act and a couple slip-ups with her character don’t make her a Sue. Ai on the other hand, while very kind and sweet, is HORRIBLY handled and characterized; she’s Lilo in the series except even more bland and uninteresting. If series Lilo’s character was a shadow, then Ai’s is an empty shell; there’s just nothing there at all and it’s truly sad.

...Not for the people who called Yuna a Sue however. To them, a character like Ai was exactly what they’d actually been advocating for; someone like series Lilo, who stood in the background and did nothing except be the occasional moral mouthpiece and emotional support for Stitch-the character they were really there for.

These people weren’t advocating for a strong female character. They already HAD one-in fact they had five! They had Lilo, Nani, Mrs. Hasegawa, Yuna, and Obaa. There was even Pearl, Myrtle’s mom (who just...props for putting up with Myrtle and raising her as a single mom, holy shit) and Victoria. Hell, even experiments like Bonnie, Yin, Witch, Stank, and aliens like the Grand Councilwoman and Pixley could qualify (if we want to go even further on the villainous side, I’m adding in Delia as well). Even. Nani’s. Middle school. Friends. Can qualify. Simply by what they've done. with their lives. and their friendships with Nani. And what have they done with these characters? Where are their real priorities?

They ignored them. They called them annoying and bitchy. They called them Mary Sues. And they disrespected them.

This wasn’t about making strong female characters. The ones we got were simply ignored and mistreated by the community, and the ideas these people have for the ones that got skipped over for characterization won’t improve them and will only further harm their characters. Ai’s conception proved that these people really just wanted someone who would stay out of the way, and their extreme focus on Angel-an abrasive abuse victim who’s conception is sexist and creepy, reveals their real priorities lie in fanservice. And not the episodic, “beach party” kind, the shallow kind (also potentially going into creep territory if the hundreds if not thousands of works of Angel porn are anything to go by).

If you’re one of those people that demands we get “Original Angel”, I would suggest against it as of now. In my experience, those of you who advocated for this don’t know what a good female character is, and you don’t know what you want. You think you have an idea, but you have it confused with something far different. You’ve built your vision of her off of inaccuracies about who she is, and now it’s gotten to the point where you’ve managed to convince yourselves that the degrading, sexist excuse we got in the original is a good, well developed character with “lots of potential”. You’re not advocating for a good female character, there is nothing here that says Angel “needs” to be a good role model for girls, and after what I’ve seen? You need to stop trying to control this conversation surrounding her. You do not belong to the group that you’re advocating for, nor are you trying to understand or talk to them. You’re talking over them, and it needs to stop. You are doing much more harm than good by demanding we have original Angel and saying that the things that make her the most sexist character in the franchise are actually what makes her “strong”. From what I’ve seen, you don’t have good intentions, and if you do, then you are wildly misinformed and biased about what makes a good character-not even a good female character, just a good character in general.

By the way, if you’re one of the people who started to scream “Mary Sue” about Yuna but loved Ai? Your intentions and how you truly feel about female characters in media shine right through. This was never about good characterization, it was about your fanservice, your control over this franchise, and your personal self satisfaction at everyone else’s expense. And you can start owning that. How dare you hide behind something we need to advocate for for something so utterly harmful.

I would never do what you have done when it comes to my favorite characters. Maybe it’s easier for me since Heat, Hammerface, and Kixx aren’t nearly as popular as Angel, but I don’t even want fanservice of them-not even the Day in the Limelight trope, because all of the series’ writers typically never deliver, and Heat and Hammerface are abuse victims like Angel who-just like her-are often victimized and mocked further beyond their initial trauma in canon. The writers don’t take their status as abuse victims seriously at all, and they’re not going to anytime soon. Heat and Hammerface are comfort characters for me, and I don’t want fanservice of them because I know it won’t be handled well given what’s already been done to them. It would be nice if fanservice was directed at some point, but it can only work within very narrow contexts, and this is Lilo and Stitch’s story, not theirs, so I don’t expect the writers to deliver on much of anything relating to them.

My thoughts are not a Crabs in a Bucket situation. Pushing what’s essentially an inaccurate and misogynistic headcanon onto other people and going as far as to accuse them of abuse apologism towards female characters (something a ranter was stupid enough to say at one point) because you feel upset over what you see as bad characterization is nothing short of selfish and invasive. Angel isn’t your character, and it needs to stay that way.

I would encourage you to think about what it is you really want when it comes to characters like Angel. Do you really want a strong female character? Or do you just want fanservice? Because those are two different things with very little overlap, and the latter is extremely unstable as a trope and often a recipe for disaster in a story. Original Angel was fanservice incarnate. Anime Angel was an overlap, but was far more of a character than the original ever was, and her being mean doesn’t make her a bad character.

Any questions can just be brought to me because I’d sooner eat a turd from my cat’s litterbox than go anywhere near the rants that inspired this thing ever again.

PERSONAL NOTE: I am now at the point where I feel sorry for genuine Angel fans for having to put up with the people I mentioned in here; it must be a fucking nightmare and that's just from someone who doesn't easily trust a lot of fellow Gantu's Army fans for the most part because of how nasty they are to them, when I sit here and see shit like Heat being portrayed as a violent unstable creep or hurt/kill him for cannon fodder or make him want to fuck humans or sexually harass Angel and then look at this shit I actually feel more for the Angel fans who have to deal with the rampant sexism and all around creepiness/horniness of these fucking people, it must really suck, at fucking least with Heat he's a minor character who can avoid most of what the fandom likes doing to him just because he's in the background more than her, with Angel there's just no fucking escape. Heat's portrayals are ableist af and love ignoring his abusive situation to traumatize him but Angel's are just. WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FUCK

I would rather take all the shit I have to sift through with Heat then dip one goddamn toe into what's going on with Angel; I have see glimpses and it is not pretty

Description

Alright folks, this here’s a rant pic; you can tell from the words written up there that this will NOT be fun, so trigger warnings for sexism, ableism, abuse, and misogyny and I wouldn’t recommend reading the end portion while eating, what I’m talking about here is the reaction to anime Angel and how shit people were about not only her, but the anime and by extension the franchise’s female cast. If you’re someone who does the things I’m describing please grow some brain cells, but if you’re not then you have nothing to worry about, because I’m talking about the nasties here who want fanservice and try hiding it and claiming to care about “strong female characters”-these types are full of shit and it’s them who’re going to get reamed here

When I say Angel is a MARINA song, I mean her fans and writers have made her that way not that she actually is

So...in creating Mirror and Sparrow Tears and a bunch of other works involving Angel, I’ve had to rewatch (not really) and rethink her episodes.

Not her series portrayal, her anime portrayals. All three seasons.

This is because there’s nothing there with series Angel; her anime self is far more interesting and developed, and is thus a good source of information on who Angel truly is. I get a lot of my “bad” traits for Angel from this very portrayal and build the “good” traits from them. I’ll admit my version of her is essentially well. Just anime Angel, but I’m at the helm and not the anime, so she’s balanced out considerably, but it’s still just anime Angel.

Part of this involved taking her out from her relation to Stitch and placing her with other characters as well as alone, and in different situations, then building her character based off of the reactions I’d imagine she’d have. It’s weird, but I’ve come to be very protective of Angel as a character over the years. Blame her fanon portrayals for that and how...reflective they are of what’s really wanted and expected of Angel.

See, Angel’s conception was just skeevy; she was a shallow love interest and her execution was fucked up; it was all centered around her as a prize to Stitch and as a result, she was really just a character built off of him instead of being her own. Of course, she did her job well; the fandom loved her, but as a whole, many of them never loved the real “her”-so to speak, they just liked her as a love interest to Stitch and in fanworks, built her up to be a perfectly broken wish fulfillment character for their headcanons despite Angel at her core being a very young, rather annoying and bratty experiment with a penchant for helping others cause destruction. Her real character and purpose within the 6-series is actually very unique and fun to work with, and it’s sad it had to be buried for the sake of being a shallow love interest. It’s like a slightly less horrid version of what happened to Keoni.

There’s a lot of problems with the fandom’s treatment of both Angel and many other female characters, particularly when the spinoffs are involved. Starting with Angel, apart from the high expectations people had made from seeing only about 5 to 10 minutes of her and her status as a love interest, all her baggage from being captured is never even acknowledged, much less worked with. The trauma Angel went through in being captured, lied to, tricked, and abused is almost never respected, much less acknowledged, she has no support system, and no one she can turn to. She’s just a love interest and nothing more. I still feel, to this day, that I was the one of only a few people who took Angel’s abuse into account when analyzing her anime version.

The thing is, most, if not all of what Angel does in the anime can be attributed to her abuse by Gantu and Hamsterviel. Her materialism and spoiled attitude can be linked to how she had nothing while captured and probably had no guarantee of food or water, her capriciousness and distrustfulness can be explained via her situation of working for Gantu and thus being lied to about Stitch (and being abandoned for two years with other experiments who’s captures were from Lilo and Stitch’s apathy and neglect), her being arrogant can actually be from insecurity left over from that time. Angel is a canon abuse victim within the Lilo and Stitch universe, so a lot of this behavior-as one myself-isn’t new. In fact, it’s only logical Angel would act the way she does, especially towards Yuna and Stitch. Of course this doesn’t excuse her, but it does provide context as to why she acts like this in the first place, and I feel people just never considered it, even now. It seems Lilo and Stitch fans wanted the Angel we saw in her first appearance, but that particular version of Angel canonically doesn't-and can’t exist anymore.

Being in the situation Angel was will change you, and I can guarantee that the one from the original episode no longer exists. What does exist now is someone with baggage she needs to work through who isn’t going to act very appropriately, will lash out, will be mean and distrustful, and will make mistakes in trying to move past what’s happened to her. For people to expect the “original” Angel to still exist beyond the two years of manipulation and abuse she went through reveal to me ignorance of how abuse can truly affect someone as well as selfishness and entitlement over how an abuse survivor should behave. Not every abuse victim is a shy or passive person for someone on the outside to “save”-which is what many Stitch fans tend to think of Angel. Thinking of them as such is nothing more than an inaccurate stereotype which will not help when analyzing abused characters like her. Angel is more angry, afraid, and insecure than she’ll ever be passive or reliant, and people need to understand that if we are to get a good portrayal of her in the future.

But speaking of “original” Angel, it is with...great regret (not really) that I must say anime Angel is going to be her peak in terms of characterization.

What do I mean by this? Well, to put it bluntly, original Angel is a complete and utter mess. She was created for marketing of only the most sexist variety; her design is overly girly and intended to be a mirror of Stitch’s, her power is one commonly attributed to Sirens, and her execution in her episode is...gross. She remains to this day the only experiment to be sexualized, which is NOT a title she should have-being only a couple numbers above Stitch, and every last choice she makes revolves around Stitch’s feelings instead of her own. She’s a convoluted, half-baked mess of a character who from her very conception, was nothing but a marketing ploy in the form of a love interest. She’s the least progressive thing the franchise has ever created, and everything about her needs to either be thrown out, or remade.

Anime Angel, despite herself having a dubious conception (the spoiled, bratty and nagging girlfriend), was executed far more coherently and managed to actually be the best version we have so far. Her life, for starters, is her own and separate from her boyfriend, she has relationships outside of him, she doesn’t base her choices around him, and she’s allowed to make mistakes and have considerable flaws-everything the original lacked. She’s far from perfect and certainly quite mean at times, but she has far more emotion and character than the original ever did. An abrasive Angel is better than a flat one.

What upsets me is when people demand for the original, or worse, defend her and say she’s “progressive” and proceed to list useless, shallow things that have nothing to do with who Angel is. It’s not lost on me that many who say this are typically white male Lilo and Stitch fans-many of whom are also the ones who love to attribute “Mary Sue” to Yuna and like the ridiculously flat, one note Ai instead. That this is the demographic that often says to this (and yes btw, fangirls tend to also have this same problem) is to me, very concerning as Angel in the original is extremely sexist and absolutely needs to have a rework. But a rework that adheres to the vapid, degrading, and often sexist and misogynistic tropes these people ask for and praise will only further damage her character and bring the overall quality of the franchise down with it-Angel’s already a sore spot.

The arguments presented for why Angel’s original counterpart is…”progressive” are built off of the mistaken notion that strength is the same as power, and that simply placing a woman in a role typically considered masculine is somehow feminist. It’s not. Original Angel was sexist, not progressive. Her saving Stitch a couple times and turning to good for him don’t matter. What matters is her character and its execution within the story, something that these people do not consider when defending her original counterpart; they’re doing this because really, when it comes down to it, Angel has a disturbing lack of character for a typical experiment. Thanks to the sexist and rather degrading way she’s written, she’s more comparable to a character like Hammerface or Heat, not one like Yaarp or Cannonball or Kixx-where she theoretically would and should be by having her episode revolve around her. In her original episode, we don’t really see Angel apart from Stitch, and when we do, it reveals nothing about her (unless we want to count “being disgusted by getting hit on” anything except a normal reaction). Angel’s personality is built off of her reactions to Stitch; far different from, for example, Kixx, who’s shown interacting with his new environment before he meets Lilo and Stitch. That Angel’s time prior to being discovered isn’t shown is in her case, a detriment to her character and execution further hampered by her status as a love interest-something that experiments like Nosy and Houdini (also only shown interacting with the main cast and not their environment) didn’t have. Not even Heat, Hammerface, Thresher, and Plasmoid had this lack of depth, as the four experiments were interacting with one another alongside Gantu and weren’t focused on a single character like Angel.

Building a character off of another via focusing on their reactions to said other character just makes for an inaccurate portrayal; what we saw of Angel in her episode was just her thoughts on Stitch, not who she was as a person, thus this community has built her character entirely off of said thoughts. Original Angel as how we know her was just one facet of her personality, not the whole thing. She has no meaningful interactions with anyone other than Stitch and for the most part ignores Lilo, Pleakley, and Reuben. She does seem to like Jumba, but it’s rather unclear as to whether it was only for her mission or because she actually does (or was maybe spoiled by him-she is the failsafe for his experiments after all). Because of this, we actually know very little about who Angel truly is.

When Angel appeared in the anime, there was an outcry partially because the image that we’d built of her was inaccurate; we’d only seen her in relation to Stitch, so part of the shock of seeing her behavior partially came from simply not even knowing that part of her existed, or not taking notice of the minuscule signs we’d been dropped in the original. Angel’s always BEEN a bit of a brat. She’s always had a selfish and spoiled streak, and she’s always been rather capricious and distrustful (as of Snafu), it’s just that these things weren’t noticed or were glossed over in the original because of her bad execution. She does and should have a dark side, but where the anime failed was playing up and making fun of that dark side for outdated comedic purposes. As a result, people were shocked and although the anime is (sadly) the best we’ll be getting, they still fell into a decent portrayal ass-backwards in attempting to create what would’ve been essentially a shrew. The anime’s bad intentions for Angel shouldn’t be ignored, but it did thankfully manage to fail unlike the series; instead, it created a gray character who, while decent enough context and empathy is needed to understand her, is still a decent-even good-character with a good amount of agency and interactions with both her environment and those around her. Just because she’s not the nicest person doesn’t mean she’s therefore bad.

The push for Angel’s original self to come back is just simply ableist and in of itself misogynistic; wanting a return to a wildly sexist portrayal built off of inaccuracies and a horrid execution because of a single bad portrayal. This isn’t by the way, ableism because she should be allowed to act the way she does, it’s ableism because these people straight up ignore or downplay her abuse’s role in her behavior. It’s not like characters like She-Ra’s Catra, who’s abuse is acknowledged and factored into her shitty behavior for context, Angel’s abuse is simply ignored or worse-romanticized for Stitch’s gain at her expense. To want this is to want to ignore what Angel’s been through. It’s essentially just wishing for a traumatized person to be “back to normal” because they inconvenience you. This idea of Angel simply going back to who she was before her capture is frankly asinine because it ignores what’s happened to her and that she may need help in favor of alleviating an audience’s discomfort at seeing an abrasive abuse victim prone to lashing out on the screen.

Even worse, this is all done under the pretense and ignorance of feminism and its goals; advocating for a weak, insufficient character that sits on the sidelines to act as a prize for Stitch-like what original Angel was-and championing every little act she does as “progressive”. Saving Stitch is “progressive”. Being strategic in her mission is “progressive”. It has come to the point where some are pushing for Angel to be seen as a potential role model for young girls (because, somehow, Yuna, Ai, Lilo, Obaa, and Nani don’t count I suppose…being amazingly well developed, kind, and well-strong Characters of Color just must not matter to them when there’s a pink alien sitting around).

None of this is progressive. Actions in a story are not progressive except for when the character’s arc involves them and their role itself isn’t regressive and degrading. What does matter is how the character interacts with their surroundings and how their role within the story is handled. Angel saving Stitch isn’t progressive because it’s just a piece of the larger whole of Angel constantly basing all her choices around him and acting as a prize with no agency. Angel’s role removes agency and thus any kind of progressivism from her actions. It becomes part of said role as a shallow love interest.

Speaking of the women of color throughout the franchise, once these people were dissatisfied with Yuna being a so-called Mary Sue (a flagrant abuse of the term on their part-and in itself misogynistic in this context), they immediately moved to Angel, trying to place all the pressure that they’d been putting on Yuna to her. This is why we get people trying to say she should “have a larger role in the story” and “be a role model for little girls”(-again, I’ve only heard men say this and I have yet to hear female Stitch fans actually say anything like this (most of them don’t bother and for good reason)). To me, this is just...telling. Aside from the racism towards Yuna these people exhibited, they also spouted off blatantly sexist and misogynistic rhetoric towards her, her grandmother, Penny, and Tigerlily (last one is legit a bad character, but it comes from her bad execution just like Angel), calling them and Yuna everything from Mary Sue to even things like slut and whore, and implied her grandmother was neglectful among many other things. Yuna was criticized for every little thing she did and said; if she did something good or fought, she was called a Sue. If she got angry or lashed out, she was called a bitch. If she won in the end or-in one case-didn’t get her brains blown out by an experiment (Sparky, Kixx, etc.), she was called a Sue and there were cries for these things to straight up HAPPEN to her to “preserve realism”-or whatever creepy thing these people could come up with to do to a nine year old girl.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but most Lilo and Stitch fans don’t care about or respect the humans in the franchise. This extends to EVERYONE-not just the anime’s human cast. I’ve talked about how Lilo’s humanity is often taken away from her in fanfics and how she’s frequently paired with white saviors, and how Nani tends to be portrayed as overly harsh and even neglectful in fanfictions. Genuine Lilo fans and not just those who like her because they like Stitch are uncommon within the community, and part of this attitude shows in the reactions to the anime and Ai.

The point here is, people love Ai, but hate or dislike Yuna.

This may be less extreme, but people had the same reactions to Lilo in Stitch Has A Glitch as they did to Yuna; there was a subset of people complaining that Lilo was “too loud” and “too annoying”, and saying she needed to be "toned down"-Stitch Has A Glitch’s plot revolved around Lilo; her character, her relationship to her mother and to her new family members, and her friendship with Stitch. Lilo here was at the forefront, and Lilo is one of Disney’s most realistic child characters-and one of its strongest heroines.

You can guess what the reaction to this was like.

Contrast this portrayal of Lilo to the one in the series, who’s character has been exaggerated and reduced to almost a shadow of her movie self for both comedy and drama; she’s selfish, tries hard to “fit in”-something she never used to care for, and won’t hesitate to abandon Stitch for Myrtle and her friends who constantly bully her. Here, Lilo’s behavior isn’t really commented on by fans unless she does something egregious (see Nosy for instance). Because she’s in the background, she goes unnoticed and disrespected unless she does something immoral or unethical-whereupon we get a shitstorm of fanfics about the captured experiments harming and/or killing her for revenge.

It’s similar here. Yuna, for being more in the forefront and for being proactive like Lilo in Stitch Has A Glitch, is labeled a “Sue”-simply for fighting alongside Stitch, having. feelings I suppose, and well...acting like someone her age. See-Yuna’s nearly on par with movie Lilo in terms of characterization; the only problems with her character are either minor, or meta (i.e being a placeholder/successor/replacement-which is really the single point against her in this latter area). She is improperly characterized at times and can and does get very moody and kind of nasty, but that’s how most kids tend to act and a couple slip-ups with her character don’t make her a Sue. Ai on the other hand, while very kind and sweet, is HORRIBLY handled and characterized; she’s Lilo in the series except even more bland and uninteresting. If series Lilo’s character was a shadow, then Ai’s is an empty shell; there’s just nothing there at all and it’s truly sad.

...Not for the people who called Yuna a Sue however. To them, a character like Ai was exactly what they’d actually been advocating for; someone like series Lilo, who stood in the background and did nothing except be the occasional moral mouthpiece and emotional support for Stitch-the character they were really there for.

These people weren’t advocating for a strong female character. They already HAD one-in fact they had five! They had Lilo, Nani, Mrs. Hasegawa, Yuna, and Obaa. There was even Pearl, Myrtle’s mom (who just...props for putting up with Myrtle and raising her as a single mom, holy shit) and Victoria. Hell, even experiments like Bonnie, Yin, Witch, Stank, and aliens like the Grand Councilwoman and Pixley could qualify (if we want to go even further on the villainous side, I’m adding in Delia as well). Even. Nani’s. Middle school. Friends. Can qualify. Simply by what they've done. with their lives. and their friendships with Nani. And what have they done with these characters? Where are their real priorities?

They ignored them. They called them annoying and bitchy. They called them Mary Sues. And they disrespected them.

This wasn’t about making strong female characters. The ones we got were simply ignored and mistreated by the community, and the ideas these people have for the ones that got skipped over for characterization won’t improve them and will only further harm their characters. Ai’s conception proved that these people really just wanted someone who would stay out of the way, and their extreme focus on Angel-an abrasive abuse victim who’s conception is sexist and creepy, reveals their real priorities lie in fanservice. And not the episodic, “beach party” kind, the shallow kind (also potentially going into creep territory if the hundreds if not thousands of works of Angel porn are anything to go by).

If you’re one of those people that demands we get “Original Angel”, I would suggest against it as of now. In my experience, those of you who advocated for this don’t know what a good female character is, and you don’t know what you want. You think you have an idea, but you have it confused with something far different. You’ve built your vision of her off of inaccuracies about who she is, and now it’s gotten to the point where you’ve managed to convince yourselves that the degrading, sexist excuse we got in the original is a good, well developed character with “lots of potential”. You’re not advocating for a good female character, there is nothing here that says Angel “needs” to be a good role model for girls, and after what I’ve seen? You need to stop trying to control this conversation surrounding her. You do not belong to the group that you’re advocating for, nor are you trying to understand or talk to them. You’re talking over them, and it needs to stop. You are doing much more harm than good by demanding we have original Angel and saying that the things that make her the most sexist character in the franchise are actually what makes her “strong”. From what I’ve seen, you don’t have good intentions, and if you do, then you are wildly misinformed and biased about what makes a good character-not even a good female character, just a good character in general.

By the way, if you’re one of the people who started to scream “Mary Sue” about Yuna but loved Ai? Your intentions and how you truly feel about female characters in media shine right through. This was never about good characterization, it was about your fanservice, your control over this franchise, and your personal self satisfaction at everyone else’s expense. And you can start owning that. How dare you hide behind something we need to advocate for for something so utterly harmful.

I would never do what you have done when it comes to my favorite characters. Maybe it’s easier for me since Heat, Hammerface, and Kixx aren’t nearly as popular as Angel, but I don’t even want fanservice of them-not even the Day in the Limelight trope, because all of the series’ writers typically never deliver, and Heat and Hammerface are abuse victims like Angel who-just like her-are often victimized and mocked further beyond their initial trauma in canon. The writers don’t take their status as abuse victims seriously at all, and they’re not going to anytime soon. Heat and Hammerface are comfort characters for me, and I don’t want fanservice of them because I know it won’t be handled well given what’s already been done to them. It would be nice if fanservice was directed at some point, but it can only work within very narrow contexts, and this is Lilo and Stitch’s story, not theirs, so I don’t expect the writers to deliver on much of anything relating to them.

My thoughts are not a Crabs in a Bucket situation. Pushing what’s essentially an inaccurate and misogynistic headcanon onto other people and going as far as to accuse them of abuse apologism towards female characters (something a ranter was stupid enough to say at one point) because you feel upset over what you see as bad characterization is nothing short of selfish and invasive. Angel isn’t your character, and it needs to stay that way.

I would encourage you to think about what it is you really want when it comes to characters like Angel. Do you really want a strong female character? Or do you just want fanservice? Because those are two different things with very little overlap, and the latter is extremely unstable as a trope and often a recipe for disaster in a story. Original Angel was fanservice incarnate. Anime Angel was an overlap, but was far more of a character than the original ever was, and her being mean doesn’t make her a bad character.

Any questions can just be brought to me because I’d sooner eat a turd from my cat’s litterbox than go anywhere near the rants that inspired this thing ever again.

PERSONAL NOTE: I am now at the point where I feel sorry for genuine Angel fans for having to put up with the people I mentioned in here; it must be a fucking nightmare and that's just from someone who doesn't easily trust a lot of fellow Gantu's Army fans for the most part because of how nasty they are to them, when I sit here and see shit like Heat being portrayed as a violent unstable creep or hurt/kill him for cannon fodder or make him want to fuck humans or sexually harass Angel and then look at this shit I actually feel more for the Angel fans who have to deal with the rampant sexism and all around creepiness/horniness of these fucking people, it must really suck, at fucking least with Heat he's a minor character who can avoid most of what the fandom likes doing to him just because he's in the background more than her, with Angel there's just no fucking escape. Heat's portrayals are ableist af and love ignoring his abusive situation to traumatize him but Angel's are just. WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FUCK

I would rather take all the shit I have to sift through with Heat then dip one goddamn toe into what's going on with Angel; I have see glimpses and it is not pretty