Headscratchers / Wreck-It Ralph — Turbo

• Was King Candy's loopy personality just Turbo being himself, Turbo acting very hard, Turbo purposely changing his own personality in the code, or Turbo actually having gone insane?
  • This troper's money is on "gone insane."
    • This troper doesn't really see the difference between Turbo being himself and Turbo having gone insane.
  • Or just being a popular character in a popular racing game makes him happy enough to enjoy the persona he crafted.
  • He keeps the loopy personality even after his cover's blown, so I'm going for "gone insane". As for how, I imagine being in a game while it crashes into unplayability isn't very good for one's Sanity Meter.
    • That would also be compatible with the "Turbo being himself" hypothesis though. We never saw much of Turbo's personality before he crashes his own game, after all.
• Where was Turbo between his game being unplugged and his taking over Sugar Rush?
  • He was probably in hiding. A lot of the video game universes are enormous, so he probably sneaked into one of them and hid out there while plotting his next destruction/takeover of a game. Also, we know he made it to "Tapper's" at least once to learn the secret of hacking; the Konami Code he used was scrawled on a bar napkin. Somebody out there taught Turbo the secret of reaching the code layer... ooo, possible plot seed for next movie! 'Scuse me, off to WMG.
  • My bet is that Turbo became a social exile for somehow managing to fuck up TWO arcade games. He probably was left begging for food in the Station like Q*bert but no one could give him charity because of what he did and he was probably banned form other people's games to keep him from doing it again. People intentionally ignored him, then when he suddenly disappeared (coincidentally around the time Sugar Rush got put in) they all just figured "Good riddance."
  • From Rich Moore's AMA: "he escaped Road Blasters before it was unplugged, lived in the bowels of GCS growing more and more bitter, learned a thing or two about code, saw Sugar Rush plugged in and made his move before anyone played the game. That's our story and we're stickin' to it."
  • His antics could very well have been the reason for Surge Protector to begin with.
  • It's possible there were other racing games in the arcade, so Turbo, with his knowledge of code hacking as someone above mentioned, found his way to them and hid there over the period of less than 30 years until Sugar Rush came along. He could've also hacked his way into becoming a playable character in other games and no one noticed.
    • Probably not, as in that case, there'd have been no reason for him to ever leave. Sugar Rush wasn't anything special to him, it was just the first racing game he saw a chance to slip into.
  • The only problem with the theory of him hiding out in GCS is that Road Blasters (a real arcade game) was released in 1987, so the incident with Turbo crashing both games must have happened sometime shortly after that. Sugar Rush, on the other hand, didn't come to the arcade until 1997. So... how could Turbo have hidden out in GCS for ten years without anyone knowing it? Felix and Ralph obviously weren't aware that he was still alive (when Felix relates the story to Calhoun, he is obviously under the impression that Turbo didn't survive)- and since Turbo was so infamous, you'd think that gossip would travel quickly that he was seen around GCS. Did Ralph and Felix simply never go to GCS or talk to anyone else in the arcade at all during those ten years? That seems unlikely. I find it more believable that he was squatting in another game world during that time.
• When Ralph let go of Cybug!Turbo at the end of the movie, why didn't he just catch him again? He had to know that once Ralph hit the Mentos that he would have some kind of chance of saving the day, so why didn't he stop Ralph?
  • Or, he might not have been able to. We don't know anything about a CyBug's maneuverability or top speed, and even if a regular CyBug could have caught him, the hybrid form might not. Or Turbo might not have figured out how to use his new form to its fullest extent yet. Or any number of reasons.
  • OP here. Even still, the final fight could have used WAY more boss tropes...
  • There was no real good reason for him to catch Ralph. From Turbo's point of view Ralph just committed suicide and outside his game which equals permanent death. While the audience was aware of the bonus level (Diet Cola Mountain and the Mentos Stalactites), clearly Turbo wasn't. What's more is he was also unaware of how the beacon worked, if he wasn't when he saw the others traveling the same direction he would have closed his eyes or stayed facing the opposite direction. That's how close he came to victory, had he known his own limitations and where he was he would have won.
    • Closing his eyes or looking the other way wouldn't stop him. His Cy-Bug programming kicked in while he was facing away, and it's programmed within every Cy-Bug to automatically look at and fly toward lethal bright light.
  • King Candy could have thought to stop holding Ralph directly above the caldera he was trying to destroy, just saying.
  • One thing Turbo really seems to want to see in the ending is both Ralph and Vanellope dead, since they're the ones who came close to taking away his power as King Candy. So when he sees Ralph dropping back toward the volcano, even if he knows what's inside it, all that tells him is that Ralph's dead for sure now since there's no way he'd be able to survive the ensuing eruption. As for Vanellope, Turbo has no idea she's comfortable enough with her glitching to use it then, and the Cy-Bugs are shown to be right upon Felix and Calhoun, well past where Vanellope was standing, when Diet Cola Mountain erupts and they're drawn to the makeshift beacon. So Turbo didn't stop Ralph because he thinks both he and Vanellope will be dead within seconds anyway.
• The whole backstory about Turbo and Road Blasters raises one of two questions. Road Blasters is a real game and, as the name suggests, it directly involves shooting the other cars dead along the way. When the player's car crashes, it respawns shortly afterward with no major cost aside from gas and score multiplier. So if this is the case, how did the fateful collision cause the game to freeze up and get considered out of order and subsequently removed? Or, if the incursion actually did change the game mechanics so that the driver in his own game was deceased, how did Turbo survive?
  • Faking the Dead. It's very possible that Turbo's attack on Road Blasters would have been his first attempt at taking over a game. He sends his car out to distract others while he attempted to take over the code. Thus, when his car crashed into the Road Blasters car was when he attempted to manipulate the code, but was foiled by the fact he did it in front of everyone.
  • Normally, crashing into another car wouldn't do much of anything, but Turbo probably messed with the code and screwed it up, causing the game to crash when the cars collided. Crashing the game doesn't harm the characters, only renders it unplayable - but since he messed with the code, it would remain unplayable forever, eventually getting unplugged - and that would mean death. Once he realized what he'd done, he fled the game before it got unplugged.
  • The game probably crashed because he didn't hack the game's code. The game detected a collision with a character that didn't exist in the code and crashed. This would explain why Turbo used a King Candy skin, which probably already existed in the game's code, rather than race as himself.
• When Turbo appeared in Road Blasters, he was still 8-bit and 2D when the game was 16-bit and using "Mode 7" 3D^note When a 2D sprite shows the "back" of the avatar, making it seem "3D", like this.◊ In that case, shouldn't Ralph looked 8-bit to the player when he appeared in Hero's Duty?
  • Think about why they're doing it. Turbo went into that game deliberately trying to be himself, because he felt he was better than that game was. Ralph went in intending to blend. In addition, Road Blasters, though it uses more advanced graphics and better perspective tricks, still relies on a series of sprites to create the illusion of movement. Ralph jumped from his 8-bit game to a full 3D-rendered game.
  • Also, remember that Ralph took Markowski's armor. It effectively 'hid' him/gave him a new appearance.
    • The theory about the armor doesn't really hold up, though. When we see the characters on the screens of Tapper's and Pac-Man, they all fit in to the game aesthetic.
• During the climax, why does Turbo briefly change into his 8-bit self? Isn't this look supposed to be seen only from the players' point of view?
  • Vanellope did it with her glitch.
  • He changes into the game world version of his 8-bit self, which is what he always looks like. Presumably he modded his appearance, but his original code was still intact.
• Why does being eaten by a Cybug cause Turbo to merge with it? Wouldn't he have just died from being eaten outside his own game?
  • Because they assimilate what they eat.
    • Then wouldn't the exact opposite of what happened in the movie be the case? It looks more like Turbo assimilated the bug, and was in complete control, minus a few bug instincts, not the other way around.
    • Keep in mind that the bug incorporates the code of the character they eat, and during the programming scene, you can see that the "King Candy" code is way more dense than any other character... it was at least five times the size of any other character's code box. His code may have been dense enough to render it the larger part of the bug's code.
    • Another possibility is that King Candy was designed to be a puppet character for Turbo to control. This property probably got passed on to the [CyBug] that ate him.
    • I had interpreted it that he really did die—the Cybug, however, inherited his personality, appearance, memories, and voice, essentially making it his successor.
    • The way I see it, Cy-Bugs take in the code of what they eat and integrate it into their bodies. So because a Cy-Bug ate Turbo, it took in Turbo's data, which is pretty much the same as effectively fusing with Turbo since he's basically a data character anyway.
    • Also note what happened when a bug ate Ralph's rifle. Its hands turned into guns. And when a bug ate candy, it became candy coded/coated. The suggestion from that is that the bugs take on the most significant part of a thing and replaces an appropriate part on the bug (rifles for hands, frosting becoming skin/covering/armor). For Candy/Turbo his biggest thing is his head.
    • It could have been like what the deal with Alex Mercer from [PROTOTYPE] is. He was consumed and the Cybug copied him so perfectly that even his memories and personality were completely replicated. Only difference is that, unlike the other person this happened to, he's fully aware of what he is.
    • Another possibility is that the Hero's Duty script might already HAVE sentient characters being eaten by bugs. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them ate one of the Marines and became an Armored Cybug as a boss. Maybe the reason Markowski is as twitchy as he is, is because he's the one that gets eaten every time. I could very easily see the Final Boss being a Calhoun Cybug - especially since the 'Final Medal' script calls for somebody OTHER than Calhoun to award it.
    • He also mentions having become the most powerful virus ever. While the Cybugs are compared to one, he clearly doesn't know much about their biology as the ending shows. It's quite possible that, in order to better take control of games, he modified his data to function as a virus, and in attempting to absorb him the cy-bug was instead infected.
• Is Turbo's personality the standard one? If so, wouldn't there be a string of incidents of racing games mysteriously messing up or Turbo appearing in them somehow in any arcade with TurboTime?
  • It's likely that any game character can develop his or her own personality as time goes own. Litwak's Turbo was shown to have a very big ego which led to him jumping into the new racing game when it got more popular than his own game.
  • It may also be that Turbo's personality, to some degree, was a part of him and this is why his game never took off after the jump from 8- to 16-bit. That is, practically all of his cabinets ended up crashing and so no one ever played them meaning the franchise died.
  • It may be that this is just a case of bad placement. The big issue is that RoadBlasters was set up straight across from Turbo Time, so Turbo could clearly see the game that was "stealing his thunder." Had RoadBlasters been set up in another part of the Arcade, out of Turbo's view, the whole "Going Turbo" incident might not have happened.
• So King Candy's excuse to Ralph for not allowing Vanellope to race was that she was a Game-Breaker and may cause the game to become unpopular, resulting in Vanellope's death. Why didn't he tell her this earlier? He could have just gone up to her and told her that racing could end up destroying the game, and maybe she would have been okay with that. Really, it would have been smarter to have everyone accept Vanellope as a friend, but still prevent her from racing, so that she wouldn't become resentful and tried to race anyway. Unless the other racers were just Jerkasses and would have treated Vanellope like crap anyway.
  • Turbo's just that sadistic.
  • I'm not sure if she would have cared. Given her utter confidence in her abilities, she probably would have wanted to compete anyway, simply saying she'll be so good that no one will care about her glitching. What's more, Van is usually on the run or in hiding, so Candy may not often get a chance to talk to her.
  • King Candy says it flat-out during his speech. "She won't listen to me, Ralph. Maybe she'll listen to you."
  • It could be that he doesn't want to share that kind of spotlight (being different for not racing is special). And perhaps he was worried that being on friendly terms would only cause more trouble. A friendly race around the track or some such and poof! Reboot.
• How did Turbo become King Candy? Did he take over an NPC? Or did Vanellope let him into the source code originally?
  • Who knows? We'll never know because we didn't see how it happened. If he took over an NPC, though, then likely the original would have returned when the code was reset. It seems more likely that he just fiddled with the code to make himself a new appearance.
    • Maybe there might be a short that tells the POV of Turbo between crashing into Road Blasters and how he escaped to Sugar Rush.
• When Ralph gets stuck in the cupcake and is brought to King Candy in his castle, why doesn't King Candy just go to the source code (without Ralph knowing where he went), get Ralph's Hero medal back to him, and tell him to scram and never come back? Aside from ruining the race, King Candy has no grudge against Ralph (at least at that point), just Vanellope. If he gave back Ralph's medal, he'd get Ralph out of his thinning, balding hair forever, and Ralph can go home happy. Ralph has no idea the medal got turned back into code. He has no idea how Sugar Rush works. (That being said, the consequences for this would be Fix-It Felix, Jr. getting an "Out of Order" sign anyway because Felix is now missing, and the Cy-Bugs would overrun Sugar Rush, and possibly the rest of the arcade, with no Ralph present to help.)
  • Ralph had just gone and made a ruckus, caused a lot of damage, delayed the Random Roster Race, and was at fault for giving the glitch the opportunity to buy her way into the race. It didn't help that King Candy was also paranoid that Ralph was going Turbo and trying to take over the game, and even took Ralph's comment that he would "have a little talk with the winner" as a threat. It's doubtful a whole lot of people would be feeling generous in King Candy's shoes.
    • But since Ralph caused all of this, it'd be best for King Candy and all of the racers (except Vanellope) for Ralph to stay away from Sugar Rush for as long as he lives, probably escorting Ralph out of there to make sure he leaves the way King Candy wants. King Candy doesn't want Ralph anywhere near the races. Ralph just wants his medal back. King Candy giving the medal back to Ralph would solve both of their problems. It's not about generosity; it's about being smart about it and acting on the simplest and easiest solution. Then again, King Candy seemed to blow his top so much that he didn't realize (or care) that he could recover the medal.
    • Exactly. Candy's not thinking logically yet. He's royally pissed off and highly suspicious of Ralph's intentions. He just wants Ralph dealt with as quickly as possible, which is seemingly to simply banish him under punishment of eternal imprisonment in the Fungeon. He's not feeling the need to do any favors for someone he sees as a troublemaker at best or a usurper at worst, and as far as he knows, giving Ralph the medal may not get him out of his thinning, balding hair or the game anyway, assuming that thought even crossed his mind in the first place. His views aren't correct, of course, but at that moment, Candy's temper and paranoia are getting the better of him, and likely for a good reason; because he's doing everything he's accusing Ralph of.
    • As we also later learn in the movie, King Candy is far from well-balanced.
  • Another possibility comes to mind: Candy only obtained the medal to bribe Ralph after he saw Ralph and Vanellope together. Prior to that, Ralph was, in Candy's mind, a nuisance to be punished. After seeing Ralph and Vanellope joining forces, Ralph had become a credible threat that needed to be eliminated, seeing as he could fight off Candy's forces and get Vanellope into places Candy didn't want her to be. Hence Candy only at THAT point making an effort to get rid of Ralph in a way that ensures he won't come back.
  • Also, when Candy does go into the code to retrieve the medal, he's visibly uncertain if it'll work at all. I doubt he comes down to the code-vault a lot, since (as everyone who ever tried to mod a video game knows) messing with the code is dangerous business.
• Was Turbo always a batshit insane megalomaniac? He was clearly unhinged even as King Candy, but he still seemed lucid and clever enough to be content with the status quo. By the time he goes One-Winged Angel and becomes King Candybug, he's pretty much out to Take Over the World. Was this the real Turbo, or did merging with the cy-bug destroy what was left of his sanity?
  • Considering he crashed both his own game and a rival out of nothing more than sheer jealousy, I think it's safe to say he wasn't exactly running on all cylinders from the start.
    • True enough. It's likely that he'd have kept game jumping anyway when Sugar Rush became obsolete and a new racing game came out... but now that he's a proper and very powerful virus, he wasn't bound to just racing games anymore.
• How does Sour Bill know that King Candy changed the code? I mean, if King Candy locked up all their memories, why not go the extra step and also alter Sour Bill's memories of him going into the code room in the first place? Hell, why do it where Sour Bill can see him?
  • King Candy obviously needed something to tether him and pull him back out of the code ether. Sour Bill was obviously a loyal toady enough that he trusted him enough to pull him back. Not to mention that Sour Bill could see him do it, and could easily pull him back if he saw his own code being fiddled with. All about King Candy extending just enough trust to use him.
  • He locked up the "racers' memories" and "civilians' memories" boxes. Perhaps Sour Bill is neither a racer nor a civilian (a race official, perhaps), which didn't occur to Candy, so he totally forgot to lock that box up, especially since it clearly wasn't next to the other two.
  • It could also be a simple logical deduction by Bill. Say Candy tricks Bill into being a tether for him and hacks all the code including making Bill forget. Bill's 'first' memory is now standing outside the code holding onto Candy's life line. Considering there's little reason to go in there except to change the code, Bill can easily surmise that Candy has changed something, even if it was something like fixing a glitch.
    • His memories might be of King Candy, not Vanellope. King Candy hacks Vanellope and locks everyone's memories. Sour Bill's memory of Vanellope is locked. However, his memory of King Candy savaging the code is still there, because that is a memory of King Candy, and he is later able to deduce the information. King Candy doesn't lock Sour Bill's memory of him doing what he did because he doesn't necessarily know Sour Bill knows, therefore he has no reason to delete Sour Bill's memory. Meanwhile, Sour Bill is too passive and terrified to do anything except give King Candy the snark he gives everyone.
• King Candy's "I'm Turbo, the greatest racer EVER! And I did not reprogram this ENTIRE WORLD..." rant. He had no clue there was a cy-bug invasion taking over his kingdom, so why did he straight up admit to everyone (supposedly) watching him on the big screen that he was actually an alien usurper who had fucked with the code of their game?
  • People knew how it probably went the moment he glitched, and...he wasn't probably thinking straight.
    • He is a massive attention whore, after all. Probably could only repress it for so long.
  • He may have simply figured, right then and there if not later on, that once he'd taken care of Vanellope and won the race, the first thing he'd do would be to go back to the castle and revert everyone's code to before they'd seen him confess to what he did over the Jumbotron. At that point, as far as he knows, the other racers are still on the track, so the only ones who would've witnessed what he'd said would be the sponsors - a handful of anthropomorphic honey grams, Jolly Ranchers, and peppermints who probably wouldn't be able to do much to keep him from reaching the castle and fixing everything. (Although I'm sure Ralph wouldn't have let him get away with it, but he may not have known about his involvement then.)
• Turbo's plan is pretty clever within the game, but kinda falls apart outside the fourth wall. Sugar Rush must surely be played elsewhere than that one arcade. If Turbo simply hasn't usurped the identity of an existing character, and even then, odds are someone is going to notice that this particular console doesn't follow the basic plotline of others of its make. It's not just that Vanellope is absent as a racer, she's outright absent as a character when she's on the console artwork.
  • You have to remember that the game only has 9 racers on every given day, and they get changed up daily. Someone that played Sugar Rush at another arcade would assume that she just didn't get picked that day at that particular machine.
  • Also, there were arcade machines that could be re-programmed/updated with new code via flash ROM, and later, there were arcade machines that could be hooked up to landlines for remote updates. And some arcade machines were time-locked; it would take months for a new character to actually appear. And, given the age of Sugar Rush, at some point, only the die hard fans would really start nitpicking.
  • More likely, wouldn't people who have played Sugar Rush in a different arcade notice that this copy has a completely new character? King Candy does not exist in any other copy of the game, so players would be more likely to notice the strange addition than the absence of another character. And if this console was the only one with a "unique character" it would have garnered a lot more popularity and attention for the arcade because of its rarity, which we didn't see in the movie.
    • Sugar Rush has been in Litwak's arcade for fifteen years and still has people lining up to play it literally all day long. I think we did see the "popularity and attention" in the movie.
  • Plus, if you never noticed, in the commercials it explicitly states that these games are only available at Litwak's arcade.
  • Also, in real life, there had/have been some Easter Eggs and hidden secrets that have remained so for over a decade. So it's possible.
  • They'd also wonder why no other Vanellope uses the kart she has at Litwak's.
    • If the bakery mini-game is meant to be played by a real player, then everyone may assume that some previous player created that kart. Vanellope's custom outfit is more suspect.
• Although in many respects Candy/Turbo is quite The Chessmaster and Manipulative Bastard, he seems rather Too Dumb to Live in one way—not following his plan through to its logical conclusion. If by joining with a Cy-Bug he became a virus that could spread to other games, he could certainly conquer and control every one of them in the arcade. Based on Turbo's backstory, all this would accomplish is getting ''every'' game shut down for being glitchy/hacked, which would either get everyone (including him!) killed when the games were all unplugged, or leave them all homeless if they managed to escape the games before they were unplugged. Either way, his great plan would ultimately end in him losing. Unless he thought he could somehow escape the arcade and get into other arcades/home systems/PC games/the Web...
  • At this point he is likely quite insane. And if that Cy-Bug had even the slightest effect on his personality, then it's quite probable he couldn't think beyond that motivation.
  • Assume he was sane enough to deduce the implications of his Take Over the World plan based on what happened last time. He wouldn't care. If he can't be the greatest, most popular character in the arcade, there'll be no arcade! If you can't rule it, destroy it! But it is more likely his Attention Whore personality just made it easy for the Cy-Bug's kill-and-multiply instincts to override his capacity for higher reasoning.
• Before Turbo gets incinerated, he starts glitching between his regular persona and the King Candy persona. The Candy one is drawn to the light, but the Turbo one is trying to pull himself away. Is it possible that if he had stuck to being Turbo the whole time, he could've consciously gotten himself out of there?
  • The Cy-Bug-hybrid resembles King Candy more than Turbo. The King Candy head/persona could be the default appearance of the hybrid, and thus be linked to the Cy-Bug programming, while the Turbo head/persona is still independent. So the Cy-Bug linked King Candy would be attracted to the makeshift beacon, and Turbo wouldn't.
  • The real Turbo died when he got eaten. The final boss wasn't Turbo, it was a Cy-Bug that thought it was. Thus, it was still a Cy-Bug, and still beholden to its fondness for pretty lights.
  • Not entirely beholden.
• Turbo was shown as having the Konami Code written on a Tappers napkin. He used it to game-jump and wreak all kinds of havoc, to the point where only blind, dumb luck stopped him. Now, here's the question - where did he learn that code in the first place? Does someone else have that code, destroyed another game (or several other games), and just managed to avoid detection by not being a complete Attention Whore?
  • It's possible that Turbo guessed the code, through trial and error, and he has been messing up racing games for some time. He got lucky and found the perfect game to infiltrate at the same time that he finally figured out how to hack the game's code. Or there could b another character out there who has "gone Turbo" and passed on the code to Turbo. Which means it is also possible that more characters may have that code. And there are more characters pushed to the side like Vanellope.
  • Or alternatively, nobody gave him the code. Maybe Turbo heard two characters talking about say, someone had started glitching when previously hadn't and other one suggested taking a peek at the code, giving the code. Turbo overhears them talking and writes it down.
  • IIRC Game characters can hear what the players are saying. Turbo could have overheard a couple of players discussing the code and trying it out, and remembered it.
    • Which means, be careful — anyone you share cheat codes and gaming secrets with online could actually be an evil character who can use it to TakeOverTheWorld! They're watching you...
• Even if he'd succeeded in smashing Vanellope against that pillar in the tunnel...Characters respawn perpetually so long as their inside their own game, so wouldn't Vanellope have just appeared back on the track and finished the race anyway? She wouldn't have won, sure, but I don't see how Turbo could've stopped her from crossing the finish line.
  • But there is a possibility that her 'glitch' status would have prevented her from respawning.
  • If that were the case, King Candy would've warned Ralph about it instead of lying to him about Vanellope getting the game unplugged with her glitching. Ralph wouldn't have let her race at all if she were to disappear from the game forever should something go wrong on the track.
  • Turbo was probably just being cruel and gloating about the unpleasant head injury Vanellope was about to receive. (Or else he, being a racer who possibly would die if killed in Sugar Rush, wasn't thinking about the respawn feature.) In Vanellope's case, she not only wants to win but probably knows that she's under a time crunch and can't afford to waste time respawning. As it is, the finish line gets destroyed before she can reach it even with the glitch-shortcut.
• This is probably just water under the bridge, but why doesn't King Candy repaint the inside of his castle? Aside from it taking away from his image, aren't the lesser amount of things there are to remind him of the one who was better than him there were, the better? Or are we just to assume that he likes it that way?
  • It's possible that the racers would have noticed if it was a different color; the inside of the castle could feature as part of the "attract" screen or a menu screen.
• How was it possible for Turbo to have merged himself into Sugar Rush's code? I'm no expert on this, but whether King Candy was already a character or not, wasn't Turbo's own code still contained inside the Turbo Time console when it was unplugged? How could a game character create a new code for themselves in an entirely different game?
  • I always have thought that King Candy was a dummied out character in Sugar Rush. Turbo must have somehow acquired access to the codes for that character and combined them with his original codes to create his new identity. At least one fanfic I've read runs on that idea.
  • Turbo wasn't in his game when it was unplugged, so maybe his code went with him.
• If King Candy knew how to erase the memories of the other characters, including Vanellope, why did he bother making her a full-out glitch who was trapped within her home game? He was supposed to have taken over before anyone had a chance to play Sugar Rush, so if he would've just wiped her memory (and transferred the required royal regalia from her code to his, if need be), he could've had her captured and dumped out in Game Central Station. Vanellope wouldn't have known which game she'd came from, she wouldn't serve as a hindrance to his rule, and it also increases the risk of her disappearing permanently if she happens to venture into any game not her own.
  • I think someone would've deduced from Vanellope's appearance that she belonged in a candy-themed game and in trying to return her to her game would've connected the dots about what had happened, summoning reinforcements to get the whole mess cleaned up.
• Why was it that Turbo (as himself) could resist the effects of the beacon, whereas King Candy was more susceptible to the Cy-Bug's programming? No matter the persona, they were both part of the Cy-Bug already, weren't they? Why would it matter what form he was in?
• King Candy's explanation why Vanellope can't be allowed to race sounds reasonable enough for Ralph not to question it, and Ralph also doesn't know that Candy is spearheading the other racers' horrible treatment of her...but he could be doing more to prevent them from bullying her. If Ralph thinks Candy is a Reasonable Authority Figure, why doesn't he ask him to step in and intervene in Vanellope's situation or do something to make her tormentors back off?
  • Maybe Ralph just didn't make the connection that someone else in good with the racers speaking up would ease matters (he never asks that of Felix in respect to the Nicelanders in his own game, after all.) That or he was under the impression, because of that explanation, that the bullying from the other racers was out of fear and that nothing much would help that. King Candy didn't spend a whole afternoon talking with him, after all.
• King Candy's appearance as a Mad Hatter like person from the original Disney animated movies as opposed to a young looking chibi character the others are is supposed to be one of the many hints that he doesn't really belong in the game. Since this is a noticeable difference, why hasn't anyone in-universe comment on that?
  1. It's not obvious enough of a difference to be worth mentioning. It's a subtle hint that he's not as he seems, not something that's meant to give the whole mystery away.
  2. He's been in charge of Sugar Rush for as many as 15 years by the time Ralph goes there. There'd be no reason for anyone within the game to bring it up now. Ralph is the only person from outside the game who ever meets him, and he wouldn't be savvy enough to recognize the aesthetic differences in King Candy's design versus the other racers.

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