YMMV / The Pixar Theory

• Broken Base: There’s considerable controversy over whether or not the Pixar Theory has been debunked or not and, to a lesser extent, which film killed its plausibility.
• Epileptic Trees: The theory was very much a case of Wild Mass Guessing since the beginning but some offshoots of it tend to be these.
• Hype Backlash: Criticisms of it tend to be based on the idea that it has unwarranted popularity.
• Squick: Some versions of the theory have humans and talking animals breeding to create the Monsters.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring:
  • This was one of the many reasons Bobsheaux gave for opposing the Pixar Theory. The fact that some parts of this theory undo happy endings for some characters across the films has made them too grim for some people to follow. For the theory to work as written, it requires multiple offscreen genocides to occur^note At the absolute least, the dinosaurs since they're never seen after The Good Dinosaur and oil/gasoline are mentioned in multiple films, suggesting they all died and their remains went on to create fossil fuels; the cars, since they're not in Monsters, Inc. and no remains of their civilization seem to be left; and the machines responsible for the Robot War that's an essential part of the theory's interpretation of events leading up to WALL•E, for the same reason as the cars. In particular, the idea of WALL•E's hopeful ending leading directly to Monsters, Inc. is hated, because the world seen in that film is a heavily industrialized capitalist society that heavily resembles the modern world, and is on the verge of a major energy crisis, implying that the monsters failed to learn from humanity's mistakes and are headed towards the same hyper-capitalist dystopia that destroyed the Earth once before.
  • On a smaller scale, the idea of Boo becoming the Witch is similarly controversial, since it means the end of Monsters, Inc. that shows Mike and Sully have found a way to visit her never actually happened. The experience of being abandoned by "Kitty" leads to Boo being unable to live a normal life, becoming obsessed with door portals until she becomes a time traveling witch who dedicates her entire life to finding Mike and Sully again - which she seemingly fails to do, considering that she's an old woman by the time of Brave and still hasn't found them yet. Earlier versions of the theory even have her experimentation with magic be the thing that leads to animals and robots becoming intelligent, dooming the entirety of human history just because she wants to see her friends again.

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