Chapter 32: Wedding Cake Caper
Tropes That Appear In This Chapter:
- Affectionate Parody: Of the Whodunnit. Instead of a Murder-Mystery, the question is "Who Ate the Wedding Cake?"
- Amateur Sleuth: When everyone accuses Camilo of eating the wedding cake, Mirabel and Hiccup agree to help clear his name, using a popular series of Children's Detective Literature series as a framework.
- An Aesop: Being of service to your community doesn't mean you should be taken advantage by people who demand more than they should.
- Breather Episode: Coming after a series of emotionally charged and canon-relevant chapters, this chapter is much more lighthearted and ridiculous, the highest stakes being Camilo being grounded for supposedly stealing wedding cake.
- Bridezilla: Deconstructed. The Bride is infamous across the Encanto for being an Attention Whore, so when planning her wedding, she takes the Drama Queen act up to eleven, making demands and throwing tantrums over the smallest of things. It gets so bad, pretty much everyone drops everything and quits by the end, recognizing that she is making it about being the center of attention rather than being married to another person.Pepa: If anything is out of place, Senorita Dramatica will kill us all. Today was my off day, why'd I sign up for this...
- The Butler Did It: It was the Groom that stole the cake!
- Call-Back: When Hiccup tries to question Osvaldo, the man brings up the events from a few chapters ago where Hiccup and Mirabel became a sort-of couple. Hiccup asks him how he knew about that before changing the subject.
- Continuity Nod: When Pepa chews out the Bride for making the wedding ceremony all about her, she points out that even though she and Felix got married in a hurricane, her wedding day was the happiest day of her life because she was marrying the person she loved the most, a sentiment Felix shares from the movie.
- Disaster Dominoes: After Hiccup ran to the forge to get extra nails, the bride yelled at Pepa for it not being sunny enough. This made her angry enough to unleash a storm on the wedding party. Said storm blew away most of the wedding decorations (including Isabella's flowers), and the lightning scared Antonio's coatis, causing them to crawl all over everyone. During the chaos, someone ate the wedding cake.
- Fair-Play Whodunnit: The chapter establishes early on that the groom tends to stress-eat, and since the culprit is never the obvious one, the likelihood of Camilo or any of their first suspects are obviously supposed to be Red Herrings.
- Foreshadowing: Hiccup notes at the beginning of the chapter that the poor groom is a stress eater due to his snacking after the bride yells. Thus, its not much of a surprise at the end when he admits to eating the cake when the tornado hit.
- Genre Savvy: Hiccup, Mirabel and Camilo use Detective Valdez, the protagonist of a Children's Detective Literature series, as a framework for their investigation. Mirabel tells Hiccup that most of the stories end with the culprit turning themselves in out of guilt, something that actually does happen when the Groom comes forth with stealing the cake.
- Good Parents: Pepa is one of the first people to believe that Camilo ate the cake. But she lets the kids attempt to prove his innocence, yells at the bride when she tries to threaten Camilo, and is quick to apologize when the true cake-eater is revealed.
- Laser-Guided Karma: The bride spends the whole day yelling at everyone, crying over the smallest imperfection and declaring once an hour that someone is trying to ruin her wedding. In the end, she ruins her wedding, as the townspeople got fed up with her drama and all quit, leading to the wedding being called off.
- Red Herring: Camilo, Antonio, Isabella, and Osvaldo Ortiz are all considered suspects, but all are proven innocent after the groom confesses.
