Headscratchers / Wreck-It Ralph — Felix

• How come at no point during those thirty years did Felix use his position and influence as a good guy to convince the Nicelanders that Ralph was a decent person? And if he's such a nice person, why did he let Ralph sleep in that brick pile all those years? It's kind of...suspicious.
  • The movie shows that Felix was just Innocently Insensitive, and realizes his mistake when put through a similar situation.
  • I think Felix DOES try and reassure everyone Ralph is a nice guy. It just doesn't do any good. Besides, Felix has a tough job too. Ralph dumps bricks onto his head every day, just as often as Ralph gets dumped on.
    • More so, in all likelihood. Not every game ends in Felix's victory.
    • Yeah, but when Felix does win, he gets treated like he's the best thing since sliced bread. Ralph gets nothing. Literally nothing. He doesn't even get a decent place to live. Felix could have at least done something to make Ralph's living arrangements more, you know, livable. Having a good-natured personality doesn't excuse him from sitting and watching a colleague live in poverty for three decades and never lifting a finger to help him. Felix is just as guilty as the Nicelanders for making Ralph's life miserable.
    • Ralph is also shown being fairly polite and nice himself; during the initial party scene, notice how he does not actually say what he wants. It's only when Felix feels too awkward about the silence that he invites Ralph in. So part of it may be that Ralph is just too socially cumbersome most times for people to realize what he's thinking and (not) saying.
    • Well, if Ralph has been living in the dump for thirty years, since Day One, and has 'never' said ANYTHING about it being a problem... He even says it's fine, even comfortable, during the Bad-Anon meeting. It's just lonely after a while.
    • If the junior novelization has any indication, Felix does get called out for being too "complacent" or too much of a pushover among the Nicelanders to actually do something. Room for possible character development on his part.
    • Think about it. How would Felix know that loneliness and rejection are painful? For 30 years, he's never experienced even a bit of either. Ever. It's bad enough that Ralph never told Felix to his face just how much crap he was going through, but even if he had, Felix still wouldn't have really understood what Ralph was saying. Not until after he'd had even a brief taste of loneliness and rejection himself, at which point he entirely understood just how awful Ralph's life had been all along (as Felix actually is a genuinely nice guy, he just originally started out completely lacking the necessary mental reference frame to be able to empathize).
    • Does the Junior Novelization still keep the game and cameo names, or do they have to change them?
    • ^ No, they changed them. But they kept all the brand names for the candy used in Sugar Rush, oddly enough.
• Why does Felix never even attempt to repair Vanellope's data?
  • For that matter, why doesn't he go around fixing every problem in the video gaming world period?? A device with instantly magical powers is very hard to write in a story.
  • I don't think anyone ever mentioned Vanellope's.... pix-lexia to Felix, so he probably didn't know enough to give it a chance. And by the time he would've seen it himself, there was that whole Cy-Bug problem breathing down their necks.
  • I'm sure there are limits to Felix's ability to fix things. They seem limited to physically damaged objects or people. If he could fix code, he'd be an idol in any arcade with a Fix-It Felix Jr. machine rather than just another inhabitant. That, and by the time Felix met Vanellope, he didn't see her glitch-teleporting as a problem as she learned how to use it to her advantage only moments later.
  • Felix's hammer fixes things inasmuch as it tells the game to put them back together. The game can't alter its own code. To make an analogy, if you get a cut, your body can heal it and put the skin back together, but your body can't rewrite its own genetic code.
    • Building on the above: the characters and their tools all have abilities as defined by their code. Felix's hammer is programmed to fix things that are defined by the current state of their code as "broken." But it can't do anything if the code itself is broken.
• Why does Felix keep saying "Oh my land?" Am I mishearing it?
  • Nope, you heard him correctly. It's a real expression, though a bit old-fashioned.
  • He could be a Malaproper when it comes to swear words because he's just way too polite to even mildly curse. When Ralph asks a cross Felix to fix Vanellope's kart, he responds by saying: "I don't have to do boo." Substitute "boo" for "poo," and you have a more G-rated version for "I don't have to do shit." "Oh my land" could be derived from "Oh my lord," which in turn came from "Oh my god!"
  • If you live in an area with a lot of very religious people who believe swearing is a sin, you'll hear phrases like "Oh my land" all the time. It's not surprising that the extremely clean-cut Felix would "swear" in the same way.
  • Maybe it's a pun on "Oh my world." Worlds (or lands, as in Super Mario Land) are large areas in games separated by levels in games. I always thought that this was a neat pun, anyways.
• Felix mentions that his Q*bertese is a little rusty. Did it strike anyone else as a little odd that he speaks Q*bertese at all? Yes, they're both from classic games and are likely to know each other, but it's odd that the ridiculously clean-mouthed Felix would speak a language composed entirely of Symbol Swearing.
  • Felix doesn't consider it weird because it's not swearing at all. To Q*bert, it's a whole language, and Felix incidentally happened to learn it while talking with Q*bert in Game Central Station, or even in that game, in the process.
  • Q*bertese isn't Symbol Swearing, it's a Starfish Language.
  • Rule of Funny, maybe?
• Why is it that Felix looks around at his eye level before thinking to glance down when Sour Bill opens the door for him? Felix is the second tallest character in his game and the tallest in his apartment complex. Shouldn't he be used to looking down at people?
  • Sugar Rush is a different game: he probably thought characters were taller than him there.
  • But there are also plenty of other game characters his height or shorter. When he didn't see someone right in front of him, shouldn't his first thought have been to look down rather than around?
    • Because it's a joke.
  • It's a really big door, with a knocker that's above his eye level. It would be pretty reasonable for him to assume that the door is scaled to the inhabitants.
• In his game, Felix "fixes" windows by hitting them with a hammer.
  • It's a magic hammer.
    • Could it be a reconstructed throwback to Mario's Hammer-powerup from Donkey Kong?
    • WHY DO I FIX EVERYTHING I TOUCH?!?!
  • Also, aren't maintenance workers required to wear hard hats and safety harnesses while working on windows?
    • Felix isn't a maintenance worker, per se. He's the superintendent of the building. He's not required to wear hard hats or a harness, but he probably should.
    • Most maintenance workers don't have a giant dude smashing the building when they are working on it.
    • Which would only FURTHER necessitate a hard hat and safety harness!
    • There's no time to get them on. He has to fix the building before Ralph completely smashes it.
    • Couldn't he have been programmed to have a hard hat on instead of a cap?
    • It's shown that Felix gets a hard hat as a power up.
    • Shouldn't they stop Ralph first, instead of trying to repair the building while he's still destroying it?
    • That might be why Gene was thrown off the building during the intro to begin with. He tried to stop Ralph, but he's the biggest character there. They're powerless.
• Felix was in a jail cell in Sugar Rush, with bars clearly made of chocolate. Why didn't he just eat his way out?
  • If the chocolate bars are strong enough to resist being broken with his hands, they're probably strong enough to resist breaking with his teeth, and he likely didn't have the time to melt them by licking them.
  • The Wreck-It Ralph Wii game (of questionable canonicity) states that Felix is lactose intolerant, so maybe he couldn't eat the chocolate without making himself sick?
  • A Missed Moment of Awesome: Sugar Rush is made of sweets. Felix gets an energy boost from pies. Why didn't they include a sequence where Felix was exhausted and ate a gigantic piece of pie in Sugar Rush so he could do awesome shit!? Probably too obvious.
    • Only the Nicelanders' pie will do?
    • Shouldn't Felix have thought to bring some power-up pies to help him survive any deadly encounters? Perhaps they would have been too cumbersome to carry, or Felix considered them redundant when his hammer repairs injuries, or there was no time to wait for a pie to bake, but it seems like something worth considering.
    • Nope. If the defictionalized game is any indication, pies either give him more points or just makes him repair faster. So unlike Sonic's rings, it wouldn't do him much good. Besides, he's also not the most worldly of characters - it wouldn't occur to him to be that prepared.
  • It's also possible that they planned on using the pie connection, but they just couldn't find a way to work it into the film and chose not to even try wedging it in somewhere and risking it coming off as forced. The same thing happened in Up, with Kevin's inescapable maze and the effect Carl's hearing aid has on the dogs - the filmmakers intended for both of these to come up as part of the climax but wrote themselves into a corner and couldn't figure out a place for them.
• If Q*bert can understand English, as we see when Ralph chats to him, why does Felix bother with his "rusty" Q*bertese?
  • Maybe Felix doesn't know Q*bert can understand English. Or perhaps Q*bert doesn't understand English. Ralph gave Q*bert a Pac-Man cherry the first time; even if Ralph was speaking Latin, free food is free food. And the second time, Ralph ran off to Hero's Duty. Q*bert may not have understood what Ralph said, but he can connect that Ralph was game-jumping.
  • Felix is a very polite person. It's more polite to speak to someone in their native language if you can, so he does because that's the kind of guy he is.
  • He's also a little bit of a show-off (not that that makes him any less nice or polite). It's more impressive to speak to someone in their native language in front of folks who can't understand it.
  • Besides, Q*bert seemingly can't speak English even if he can understand it, so at least half of the conversation would be in Q*bertese anyway; Felix probably just figured it would be easier for the entire conversation to be in Q*bertese.
  • Also, it's not crystal-clear that Q*bert actually can understand English. He could've just understood the gesture of Ralph giving him and the others one of his cherries, and he'd seen Ralph dressed in armor that's typically worn by characters from Hero's Duty and probably saw him go into the game, as well. Neither case would've required him to understand what Ralph had said to him.

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