The way Lilo & Stitch is explicitly about compassion in response to children who lash out due to trauma and the hot take is that Lilo is "a brat" and should have been symbolically abandoned (???) to teach her a lesson https://twitter.com/SquigglyDigg/status/1246984685567143942

This take is so close to getting it because Stitch clearly is supposed to be a parallel to Lilo. But he's not symbolic of her anger, he's symbolic of just the whole child. There's even a scene where she calls him "their baby."

In the same scene she doesn't get mad at him for misbehaving, and outright says that his behavioral issues are because he's sad.

It's wild to me that the hot take is pro-abandoning Stitch to teach Lilo a lesson, when the movie directly addresses the idea of abandoning Stitch, and Lilo directly makes it a parallel to herself to convince Nani that they shouldn't.

I guess in production they stood at a crossroads where they could have made the lesson be "don't pull people's hair," and instead made a movie about family love being unconditional, and Lilo and Nani understanding each other better by "parenting" a new third party.