I saw Wreck-It Ralph in its opening week and loved it. Chuck Jordan's review of Wreck-It Ralph is well written and mirrors many of my own thoughts on the film. Now that a few weeks have passed I decided to clean up and repost some of my spoiler-filled overly analytic thoughts left in a comment to that review.
Wreck-It Ralph leaves some questions about the internal consistency of the character Vanellope Von Schweetz. I thought Vanellope's character made sense within the world building we see in the film, and can be explained with just a little bit of presumption and reading (possibly what isn't actually there) between the lines of the film. First of all, clearly even a Princess in Sugar Rush isn't going to try to race in a dress [1] and it makes sense that maybe Vanellope's racer outfit was always a bit "low key" compared to her "official dress".
But the deeper analysis that made sense to me as I watched the film: I figured early on in the film that Vanellope's power was always the "glitch" or pixlexia as she calls it. All of the racers seemed to have an individual "power up" or "special power", and Vanellope's "glitch" fit exactly in with the sort of thing you might expect from a candy-coated Mario Kart-esque game. Admittedly, on a game screen it would probably be called something cooler than "glitch" like "hyper dash" or what have you [2], but definitely the kind of thing you could imagine seeing as a "Special Power" of the character. It's also the kind of potentially over-powered Special Power that you could see making the character a player favorite, and more importantly: a perpetual winner. Given the hyper-competitive design of the entire game, I wouldn't be surprised, and felt implied, if rather than a hereditary monarchy Sugar Rush's "natural" (as programmed, pre-Turbo) queendom followed something closer to a meritocracy. [3]
I think that is why Turbo/King Candy can and does target Vanellope: her special ability in the game does make it easier to ostracize her as an unintended "glitch" (even if it was intended) in the game once he disconnects everyone's memory of her (and subsequently the nature of the nobility as a meritocracy, which admittedly would be tied up with her code). More interestingly, I think this tells us why Turbo particularly targets her and seems to hold so much animosity to her: it's not because he wants control of the monarchy (that's clearly incidental), instead it's because he still wants to race in a popular game in the arcade and at his core he doesn't understand the shift in arcade racers in the 90s (when the simulationist and real physics racers briefly jumped to PC before making their way to home consoles) and Vanellope would very much personally represent all that was wrong with modern arcade racers to Turbo. Vanellope's very own special power is clearly a cheat to Turbo's old, old school style of racing, just as Turbo likely would have been confused/angered by race track shortcuts, [4] and all of the other sorts of cartoonish obstacles and "anyone can come from behind to win" game mechanics in a game like Sugar Rush.
I'm probably over-thinking all of that, but that's certainly the impression I got from the film.
| [1] | Take that Mario Kart! |
| [2] | Or maybe it would be called "glitch": given the vaguely Asian origin of Sugar Rush it also seems like the kind of thing the manual might overzealously call "Super Glitch Power, Yeah!" because that sounds cool. |
| [3] | Unfortunately that somewhat weakens the declaration that she should be called "President" instead, because clearly in the hyper-competitive Sugar Rush the Presidency would likely remain a meritocracy based on racing results (albeit possibly more susceptible to outside influence of individual player fickleness, skill, and spare change) than the presumable monarchy programmed around developer knowledge of the relative balance/OP-ness of in game character skills the game would reset to... |
| [4] | Though not made explicit in the film, I'm also willing to bet the volcano was merely a high-risk/reward shortcut that King Candy disapproved of and thus attempted to block. That would also explain Vanellope's strong familiarity with it. |