Wang Daiyu (王姨妈) is a character from the Chinese animated series Stitch & Ai, a spin-off of the Lilo & Stitch franchise. She is the aunt of Wang Ai Ling and her sister Wang Jiejie. She desires to take Ai away from Jiejie and the mountains they call home in order to provide what she feels will be a better life for Ai in the city.
Role in the series
Daiyu is an uptight socialite who tries to make herself the responsible authority over her young niece Ai's development a year after the deaths of Ai and Jiejie's parents. She is also highly mysophobic to the point of borderline irrationality; she believes the mountains are filled with germs (even though germs are found everywhere on Earth), wears gloves in double layers, asks "Ai" (actually a disguised Stitch) to cough away from her in the car, carries a disinfectant spray with her, invested in a fumigation company and brings a high-tech fumigation device with her to clean Ai and Jeijei's home without their permission, and in one episode, she freaks out and faints over breathing "filthy" mountain air (even though fresh mountain air is much less polluted than city air).
Her goal in the series is to move Ai from her family's mountain home to the city, where Daiyu can redevelop her niece into a "proper lady" despite the free-spirited Ai's staunch dislike of the city. She was so dead set on doing so that she was planning to cut Jiejie out of Ai's life. Daiyu actually starts out the series nearly succeeding in this goal, as she was forcing Ai to begin packing up her things to bring to the city in the first episode. Jiejie doesn't seem to bother trying to stop her aunt then, and in the following episode, she tries and fails to convince Daiyu that Ai is already living a good life and getting a quality education in the mountains. This changes after Stitch, whom Daiyu finds to be very ugly, enters Ai's life. He helps Ai stay in her mountain home by tricking Daiyu twice. He pretends to be Ai at the end of the second episode by dressing in heavy amounts of clothing during their car ride to the city, then at the end of the fourth episode, he gaslights her into thinking that Ai turned into him before the girl was supposed to board a train to the city by hiding in Ai's hoodie and putting his head in front of hers. In the ninth episode, Daiyu tries to persuade Ai that the city is better by bringing her cousin (Daiyu's nephew) Bao and trying to get him to tell her how fun the city is, only for him to go on an adventure with Stitch and Ai during the visit, which ends up convincing him that the mountains are better, much to Daiyu's dismay. By her last appearance in "Nuo Opera", she has seemingly given up on her goal, as she makes no attempts to take Ai with her to the city.
She does appreciate the arts, however. After Jumba's "naughty creatures" destroy the town's nuo opera's sets and costumes, Daiyu, in her one sympathetic moment in the show, pledges to have her foundation donate the funds necessary to rebuild them. She later attends the nuo opera as an audience member alongside the locals, Jumba, and the now-behaved creatures.
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