Discussion WesternAnimation / RalphBreaksTheInternet

I certainly didn't get that vibe when I saw it. I would've added the trope myself a long time ago if the movie felt like it was parodying the trope.

It's not an example. Darkest Hour involves more than just one character feeling at their lowest.

... not going to lie, I have no idea what the movie was going for with that scene. It seemed inevitable given the subject matter, but at the same time it wound up feeling forced and overall irrelevant to the movie as a whole.

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Adding my two cents late, but according to Darkest Hour, it can involve just the protagonist (as Gilgamesh's Darkest Hour mostly involves himself), and given the entire sequence leading up to it was mostly lighthearted parody of Disney cliches, it feels like a mockery of it.

^ If you refer to my comment, I was not implying it's about the number of characters but the situation itself. It must be a specific moment in the story that the creator marks as the point where all seems lost and characters notice it. I cannot find that moment in this movie. It's a string of things going worse and worse but there is not this scene.

I'd say both Vanellope and their host (whose name I forget) trying to help them both notice and draw attention to it.

I'd argue that it meets the requirements. Specifically, this example listed on the Broken Aesop page:

Distorting the moral into "It's only wrong if someone else does it" or "only if the bad guys do it."

The movie basically says game jumping is horrible when Ralph and Turbo do it, but perfectly OK when Vanellope does it.

Ralph arguably did want to leave forever, at least initially. In the Bad Anon meeting, he explained that he didn't want to be the bad guy anymore (which drew incredulous reactions from those present, including Zangief's "You can't mess with the program" line). He clearly was unsatisfied with his current role in the game, much like Vanellope became unsatisfied with hers.

And while Vanellope's situation is obviously different than Turbo's, it still puts both games at risk. Vanellope was, by all accounts, a super-popular racer - an extended absence puts Sugar Rush at risk by having people question whether her not appearing could be a result of a programming error (after all, assuming all racers have a roughly equal chance of appearing on any given day, the odds of Vanellope not showing up for a *week* are less than 1%, nevermind a longer absence). More to the point, the sudden appearance of a chibi candy-themed girl from a 90s-era kart racer in the Real Is Brown Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 game that is Slaughter Race will immediately draw eyeballs just for how much she stands out (especially since she's running with Shank, who - based on what we see - is a common target for players to challenge), which could lead to the developers thinking the game has been hacked/infected and attempting to patch Vanellope out or otherwise alter the game in ways that could be harmful to the inhabitants.

In essence, Vanellope's decision to move games puts both at risk, as well as herself. The fact that she isn't doing so maliciously proves nothing. Ralph's decision to temporarily leave his own game in favour of another one is ample proof of that - he had the best of intentions in mind (much like Vanellope, he was just following his dreams by trying to earn a medal and prove he was more than just a Bad Guy) and was neither trying to harm his own game nor Sugar Rush or Hero's Duty, yet he nearly caused Fix-it Felix Jr. to be unplugged, messed with a player character in Hero's Duty, and unwittingly unleashed the psybugs into Sugar Rush, which nearly destroyed the entire game. That's exactly why the Bad Anon characters came down hard on Ralph - not because he intended to maliciously invade and hijack a game the way Turbo did, but because the mere act of game-jumping is so dangerous to everyone involved.

Let me drop my two cents on this:

• I'd argue that Ralph's actions are much more severe than Vanellope's because Ralph is the main antagonist of a game where The Villain Makes the Plot - because of his disappearance, Felix has nothing to fix, making the entire game unplayable, thus threatening it getting unplugged. Vanellope, meanwhile is just one playable character of many possible ones - her disappearance still keeps the game playable.
• Regarding the math: it was calculated somewhere else that since, according to Litwak, Sugar Rush makes less than 200 dollars a year, it is played roughly 15 times a week assuming the game takes quarter coins. Since it's unlikely that it's always the same people playing, or that all players always want to play Vanellope, her disappearance can get below the radar for quite a long time.
• There have already been not one, but two cases in the arcade's history when a playable character disappeared from Sugar Rush: first when King Candy took over, turning Vanellope into an unplayable glitch, and second when King Candy got defeated and disappeared from the game. Neither of these two resulted in the game getting unplugged.
• This is WMG, but maybe to keep consistent with Slaughter Race's tone, Vanellope dresses up as a Creepy Child when the game is on?
• Isn't Broken Aesop a within-story thing (i.e. the events of a story not supporting its intended moral), instead of two instalments in a franchise having contradicting morals?

It would be nice if this got sorted out, because the page is locked now and other tropes cannot be added.

Is it locked? I was able to open the edit page no problem.

Anyways, a couple of responses:

• Vanellope is one racer out of several, sure. But then again, so was Turbo.
• On a related note, yes, historically Vanellope would have been removed from the game and replaced with King Candy, then the reverse would have happened, and no one noticed (or at least, didn't draw attention to it). However, that doesn't mean it wasn't a risk (and the game characters clearly agree - hell, they named the whole idea of permanent game jumping after the guy responsible for that mess).
• Even if Vanellope does dress up, she's still an element in the game that wasn't deliberately added there by the developers. If she is noticed - and given Shank's popularity, I would imagine that's only a matter of time - the developers are presumably going to respond.

But this is all kind of missing the forest for the trees. Broken Aesop notably covers morals being applied selectively, and that's exactly what seems to be happening here. As previously mentioned, one of the specific examples the Broken Aesop page lists is Distorting the moral into "It's only wrong if someone else does it" and it's hard to argue that that isn't what's happening here.

The first movie makes it clear that game jumping of any kind is highly frowned upon, even the temporary kind that Ralph did to win a medal (note King Candy's reaction when Ralph said his medal came from Hero's Duty). What Vanellope decides she wants to do in this film is a step beyond that - to use the lingo Felix uses in the original movie, she's "abandoning her game", not dissimilar to the way Turbo abandoned his and it's entirely possible it could lead to similar results for either the game she's leaving or the one she's joining. It's a major messaging discrepancy and it's never really addressed as to why what Vanellope is doing here is substantially different from what Ralph wanted to do in the first film.

Edited by darkknight109

Well, it's been ten days, so unless there's any other further discussion I'll go ahead and add this in.

Yeah, fine. Ok.

Just write it tastefully.

The Sorrowful Kitten painting that Ralph and Vanellope see on Ebay. The quote under the Brain Bleach example on the main page only happened in the trailers, but doesn't happen in the film itself.