Year produced: 2022
Original air date: 2/11/23 (TV), 2/15/23 (Disney+)
Production code: 102
Lunella finds herself targeted by an online troll and her efforts to deal with him threaten to overwhelm her life.
Tropes:
- An Aesop:
- Don't feed the Trolls.
- Also, don't let jealousy cloud your judgment. Everyone is still human with their own emotions.
- Battle Rapping: The fight between Moon Girl and Syphon8r is presented this way, very fitting for a battle of verbal insults and responses. The main difference is that Lunella does not fire back, and instead reinterprets insults as compliments or basically just says he is allowed to think that way.
- Cyberbullying: The specific kind of bullying covered in this episode. A user named SYPH0N8TR harasses Lunella's online Moon Girl fanpage with petty insults about her and Devil Dinosaur's appearances and intelligence. This extends to warping Lunella's response video into a catchy meme to double down on breaking her image.
- Crazy-Prepared: Syphonator's alien "boogers" is a substance that he fired to trap Lunella and Devil. It's nearky impossible to escape but it can be broken down by something acetate. Casey meets up with her and reveals she has an entire make-up kit for her cosmetic activities with the ingredient needed to free them.
- Creative Closing Credits: After asking Mimi to show a dance move that Lunella and Casey learned, the closing credits depicts them doing the mentioned dance move as the show's theme song plays.
- Destructive Savior: A minor example. Moon Girl's battle with Devos destroyed the table Angelo had set up for his possum petiton. No other damage was done, but this was enough to set up Angelo for corruption by the Symbiote.
- Foreshadowing: During the rap battle, Syphonator says that a possum would make a much better pet than Devil Dinosaur. Syphonator is revealed to have bonded with Angelo, the activist whose table Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur inadvertently wrecked in their fight with Devos at the beginning of the episode, with Angelo trying to get help for possums.
- Gone Horribly Right: After being free of the Syphonator symbiote, Angelo reveals that he took advantage of its power so he can make Moon Girl feel small like he did most of his life. Unfortunately, because symbiotes have a habit of taking over more than usual, he didn't realize he was endangering other people.
- Make My Monster Grow: Syphonator grows bigger and stronger the more Moon Girl reacts to his taunts. Moon Girl eventually takes Casey's earlier advice to not let it bother her and shrug off the insults, which causes him to shrink down.
- Not Helping Your Case: When Lunella reads SYPH0N8TR's first comment regarding her head, which they accuse of being too big, she creates a long video that tries to debunk the claim. All it does is allow the troll to twist her video into a meme.
- When she and Devil meet the troll in person, she uses her math to counter another insult, but his constant mocking riles her up and gives him the energy to grow.
- Oblivious Mockery: Syphonator's remix mocking Moon Girl's video gets so popular that Adria plays it at Roll With It, unaware that it's mocking her own daughter.
- Raptor Attack: A silhouette of a Jurassic Park-styled raptor appears during the song sequence.
- Recycled Plot:
- While the particulars differ, the core plot of "Don't feed the troll" was used in another Disney Channel show, Wander over Yonder.
- In addition, this episode aired the same day as an episode of Hamster & Gretel where the title duo deal with an online troll.
- Running Gag: Insult or not, Syphonator isn't wrong about Devil having small arms since he's technically a T-Rex. The rest of the episode has him unable to do much with his limbs.
- Save the Villain: A weakened Syphonator still tries to finish destroying the Williamsburg Bridge but only ends up falling from the high structures. Lunella catches him and sets him down gently, to his surprise. This act of kindness is the last straw in breaking the symbiote's hold over Angelo.
- Soapbox Sadie: Angelo, a teenage community activist who got jealous of Moon Girl's popularity and turned into an internet troll when his table was accidentally destroyed in one of Moon Girl's fights. Thankfully, he gets some recognition when Lunella agrees to help him gain public support for his causes.
- Troll: Lunella deals with SYPH0N8TR, an internet troll who frequently tears down Moon Girl and Devil with insults online. When they met the real Syphonator, he is revealed to be an actual troll, or at least a symbiote-possessed internet troll. After the symbiote's defeat, its host is revealed to be Angelo, a local activist whose table was destroyed in one of Moon Girl's fights with Devos.
- Troll Bridge: Moon Girl tracks the phone of her troll to the Williamsburg Bridge, where she finds the troll-like Syphonator hanging from underneath it. As Syphonator grows bigger and stronger, he attempts to take the bridge down.
- Villain: Exit, Stage Left: The team frees Angelo from the Syphonator symbiote, but it escapes into the river and disappears.
- Voice Clip Song: Lunella's personal response video to SYPH0N8TR, intelligently debunking his claims about her head size, backfires immediately. The troll turns her words into a catchy meme that gets her Lower East Side neighborhood hooked, including her family's roller rink.
- Weaksauce Weakness: Initially subverted when Lunella and Devil try to take advantage of the typical symbiote weakness to sound only results in Syphonator only getting much stronger. However, when they respond to his insults with positivity, it drains him to the point that the symbiote separates from Angelo.
