Talk:Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2/@comment-26918266-20170205151600/@comment-24353761-20170514100616

@Dan1394:  Whoa, needlessly hostile much? Moving along now....

@Hey1234:  Good points, good points. We do appreciate the card-carrying villains more for their personalities, even if they and their misdeeds tend to be more blatant or obvious. There may be some misses along the way; I never cared much for Jafar's personality myself, as aside from bungling the occasional name, he strikes me as being a bit too bland,  And after beholding the magnificence that is Tamatoa and the silent slapstick of the Kakamora, Te Ka feels a bit flat underneath all that screeching, lava-throwing scariness (but seeing as Te Ka isn't so much a character as she is a force of nature, that's probably something to be expected). But by large, the card-carrying villains do indeed tend to give us personalities which we enjoy booing and despising.

And they may hold the solution for the plight of the stealth villain: Just have the stealth villain pop the big reveal earlier in the movie, then give us time to explore the stealth villain's real personality. If you didn't have Tron: Legacy spoiled for you, CLU follows this example quite nicely. At first, Rinzler brings Sam before him, the helmet comes off and we might start to think, "Hey, that's Kevin Flynn from the prologue!  What's he doing at the head of this regime?" Then Sam starts talking with CLU, and Sam believes that CLU is his father Kevin, and we're led into believing it too. "Maybe Kevin has lost his way.  Maybe he needs Sam to bring him back to a more righteous path." Then CLU drops it on us with "I'm not your father, but I am very glad to see you." But by that point, we're still left with the better part of an hour before the movie ends, so the movie shows us more on what really makes CLU tick:  A vague directive with an impossible endgame. The arrival of a new self-creating species which CLU views as an unacceptable flaw in the system yet which his creator holds as an ideal. A rebellion and a hostile takeover after deciding that the creator himself is irreconcilable with the directive. A renowned champion taken from the creator and repurposed into CLU's enforcer, deepening the rift betwixt creator and creation. A creator whom he despises for placing him in that impossible position, yet still reveres for the simple fact that without the creator, CLU would have never existed.

So instead of being consigned to the ranks of the shallow stealth villains, CLU is molded into a tragic villain, a new iteration of Frankenstein's Monster. We're led to hate CLU, yet hating CLU leaves us feeling a bit empty because it's so easy to sympathize with him, even unto the final confrontation at the Portal, where we see the disappointment and betrayal in CLU's eyes as Kevin proves one last time that even CLU -- a metaphorical son to Kevin -- must take second place to Kevin's own flesh and blood, a son for whom Kevin would lay down his own life and end CLU's existence in the same stroke. And in the end, I'm always left feeling like CLU never had a chance at success and fulfillment, that he was created to fail, that he would have been better off if Kevin had never created him at all.

So that solution might end the stealth villain's curse. As we see with Prince Hans, the problem is that, for most of the movie, the villain gives us a false personality for us to grow attached to, and once the big reveal is sprung, the villain's personality is shown to be false, it dies as any illusion would, and our attachment to that personality dies with it. So give us a new personality -- the stealth villain's real personality -- for us to grow attached to, and we might come to appreciate the stealth villain for both his personality and for his skill at acting and subterfuge.

(Turbo simply happens to be a more extreme example of the stealth villain's curse.  His false personality takes on a life that's completely all its own, down to having its own mannerisms.  And it's so endearing that we're willing to cling onto King Candy even after we're shown that King Candy never really existed at all, that it was a disguised Turbo all along.  But all the same, we're not given a whole lot of time to explore Turbo's true personality, or if we are, it's so mingled with his King Candy personality that it's difficult for us to tell where King Candy ends and Turbo begins.  We can thank Vanellope and the Cybugs for that.)