YMMV / Rugrats S 3 E 17 Mommys Little Assets Chuckies Wonderful Life

• Catharsis Factor: Both stories have Charlotte and Drew respectively drop their Pushover Parents role and very sternly put Angelica in her place. Especially satisfying in "Chuckie's Wonderful Life" where Angelica pulls one of her cruelest acts in the series.
• Harsher in Hindsight: There are two instances of this regarding Chas:
  • In "Mommy's Little Assets," Drew makes a passing remark about Chas going to see a therapist.
  • In "Chuckie's Wonderful Life," when Chuckie visits the world where he was never born, he sees his father Chas lives in squalor and uses a hand puppet to keep him company. Most of the dream world is over-the-top Nightmare Fuel, but Chas' downward spiral, and his aforementioned need for a therapist, becomes more believable, and heartbreaking, after the Mother's Day episode explains what happened to his wife.
• Realism-Induced Horror:
  • In "Chuckie's Wonderful Life", while the world without Chuckie is horrifying, it also has been exaggerated to the extreme, what with babies destroying the city and Angelica enslaving Stu and Didi, leaving Tommy to eat garbage. However, Chaz's fate stands out as disturbingly and heartbreakingly possible. Basically, without a child of his own (and with, as later episodes reveal, the death of his wife) Chaz became a complete shut-in, complete with mounds of empty pizza boxes littering his house. Worse yet, living alone among the garbage has taken its toll on Chaz's sanity, as he only talks to a sock puppet who is his only friend. Not only does this stick out in the otherwise over blown dark world, but this much like real life cases of people with crippling depression.
  • The "real" part of the episode in-universe leading up to it isn't much better, with Angelica gaslighting Chuckie into thinking he is to blame for an act of misbehaviour she committed and convincing him that the world would be better without him. While Angelica has long been portrayed as a bully throughout the show, she is usually a petty cartoony one. Here however her manipulative and seemingly empathetic nature throughout the whole scene oozes disturbing resemblance to more realistic and dangerous bullies and abusers who try to scapegoat or break their victims mentally.