Vanellope: You Were Never the Glitch
There is something about Vanellope von Schweetz from Wreck-It Ralph that I think is easy to miss beneath all the candy colors, racing, and humor. When we first meet her, everyone calls her a glitch. She doesn't fit the way the other racers do. She disappears and reappears unexpectedly, she can't leave her game, and she has been told over and over again that there is something wrong with her. She isn't simply excluded from racing. She has been convinced that she doesn't belong there in the first place. Watching her story as an adult, I think there is something incredibly powerful about a person discovering that the thing everyone told her was wrong with her was never the truth about who she was. Vanellope has spent her life on the outside. The other racers make fun of her, exclude her, and make certain she knows she isn't one of them. What makes it especially painful is that they don't simply dislike her. They have accepted an entire story about why she doesn...