Preliminary Poll
Vanellope von Schweets
Submission reason:
Ralph Breaks The Internet was a fucking awful sequel in almost every possible way, including how it characterised Vanellope. In the first movie, she's a spunky, brave, gutsy lil kid who desperately wants not just to be a playable character, but to be accepted. Seen as a 'glitch', she is literally not accepted as human by the other characters in the game. She can also be a bit of a pill, but that's understandable given her FIFTEEN YEARS of exile and ostracisation in her own home. Also unrelated but her 'glitch' not being 'fixed' by the end, but instead her learning to accept and even embrace it as part of herself and the other racers accepting her as she is - amazing. (curing disability trope my beloathed) Jump-cut to the sequel, where six years have passed and suddenly her fifteen-year dream is... too... boring for her? What? Where'd that come from? So her solution is to build some fun shortcuts and extra tracks and whatnot in the game - okay, sure, but then she starts going against the player and taking control to use those shortcuts while being played, in broad fucking daylight, which - oh, shocker - leads to the game getting unplugged. Indirectly, but still! Then she and Ralph (and believe me I will make an entire separate post for him because they BUTCHERED him) go to the Internet - again, in broad daylight while the arcade is open. Isn't... isn't leaving their games in the middle of the day exactly what almost got Ralph's game unplugged in the first movie? Huh? Nothing much to add for most of the movie. Vanellope just acts like a brat the entire time, which does not remotely make sense for her as a character. But then. The ending happens. Oh fucking gee guvnor I wonder how they could possibly fuck up the ending that badly - OH LET ME TELL YOU. So like in the movie they go into this multiplayer apocalypse car-jacking game a la Fortnite, and Vanellope decides within less than a day that this game is totally the coolest place ever and she should totally stay here forever. And she. she does. she stays in Slaughter Race forever. this is presented as the Right Thing To Do because she's Following Her Dreams and isn't it great NO! NO IT ISN'T! She's the president of Sugar Rush, and yet she's fully prepared to drop her responsibilities and go off to live somewhere else without a second thought. This isn't 'following your dreams'. This is a nine-year-old kid acting on impulse. And the movie paints her as being in the right! I'm not at all saying Ralph WAS in the right (again, we'll get to him) but even if he was well-written I'd still expect him to be concerned with Vanellope's decision here. Oh and then there's the fact that SHE'S PRETTY MUCH DOING EXACTLY WHAT THE VILLAIN IN THE FIRST MOVIE DID. What it was supposed to be a cautionary tale AGAINST doing. Heck, Vanellope was hands-down the person hurt the most by Turbo's actions, and yet she brushes it off with "I'm one of sixteen racers, who's going to miss me?" Sure, but aren't you a little concerned that the players might miss not only the main character of the game, but also the most popular character by far? Or maybe even the other racers? Who have supposedly been your friends for six years now? None of them would miss you? And it's never even brought up! Turbo and the negative effects of his actions are never even mentioned, by either party. I can even imagine something with this plotline working in a better written movie - again, Vanellope was the person hurt the most by Turbo's actions, so it should be her call after all. They could have spent longer making sure this decision was the right one, shown Vanellope doubting it and eventually deciding it's what she truly wants, gone through the whole process of making sure this move won't hurt anyone, all the other characters coming to terms with it, they could even make a case for how all the trauma Vanellope endured in Sugar Rush kind of tainted it for her and that's why she's so dissatisfied with her life there - but no, none of that. It all feels staggeringly out of character and makes barely any sense.
(And don't get me started on how the Slaughter Race crew just magically happen to find the original code for a twenty-one-year-old arcade game character, snip it out and plug it into an online game. I know the movie about videogame characters coming to life isn't exactly famed for having realistic representation of how coding works, but this is some absolute bullshit and it just gets immediately swept under the rug.) So yeah they well and truly massacred my girl Vanellope and the sequel is non-canon in my mind. Thank you and goodnight.
Propaganda:
Not sure if it counts, but I wanted to just mention it. There's this really really good fix-it fic of the sequel on fanfiction.net called It's A Slaughterful Life. Go read it. It's amazing.
