Jawbreaker

Jawbreaker is the friendship between Vanellope von Schweetz and Wreck-It Ralph from the Wreck-It Ralph fandom.

Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
Ralph first meets Vanellope when he crashlands in Sugar Rush after taking a medal from Hero's Duty to show the NPCs from his home game that he can be a hero despite being programmed as a villain.

His Hero Medal ends up stuck in a sugar cane tree and he starts to climb it, but suddenly, he hears a little girl's voice calling out to him from above. Vanellope is lazing about in the tree and starts asking him if he's from Sugar Rush, having never seen him before despite living there. Ralph lies to her about being from a "construction company" to do "routine tree trimming" and points out the medal on top. Vanellope gets excited thinking that the medal is a gold coin and challenges Ralph to a race for it, getting the "coin" since Ralph struggles with the rules of her world and running off with it. Ralph meanwhile ends up falling into minty sludge and chasing after her looking like a big green monster.

As Vanellope sneaks the gold coin into the machine right under the noses of King Candy and the other racers, the King was just about to disqualify her for being a "glitch", but Ralph shows up and causes mass hysteria across the racers with his fearsome appearance and completely diverts all attention from Vanellope. Ralph ends up arrested by King Candy's guards, but he tells the king that he wants nothing more than his medal back after the "brat" stole it. King Candy tells him that the medal is part of the code now and it can only be retrieved when it's won fair and square and tells Ralph to go home or be send to his "Fungeon" for disturbing the peace. Ralph chooses neither and escapes the king's palace by smashing through the wall, getting the idea of teaming up with one of the racer kids to get them to win the medal for him.

As he wanders around aimlessly through the forest, he stumbles across Vanellope trying to fix the junk cart she built herself, but the other racers arrive to prevent her from ever entering the race. Ralph watches the racers destroy Vanellope's cart while mocking her "glitching", calling her an "accident waiting to happen". Ralph gets more and more sympathetic to Vanellope the more insults they throw at her, but he finally snaps when they insist that she will never be more than what she already is and push her into the chocolate mud, having the same thing happen to him every single night in his own game. He chases the racers away and watches as Vanellope gets up by herself, with her rudely asking him what he's staring at, which causes him to snap a "You're Welcome!" back to her. Ralph then chews her out for stealing his medal, but she said that she planned on giving it back after winning the race, with winning races being the only way to retrieve coins in the first place by King Candy's rule. However, she points to her destroyed kart, making her point clear. This only makes Ralph even angrier than he already was, but he starts wrecking the scenery around him to blow off steam. Vanellope starts mocking him trying to break an indestructible jawbreaker, but then gets very impressed when he actually manages to do it with nothing but his fists. Vanellope quickly figures that Ralph might be strong enough to break her into the kart factory to make a proper kart and they make a deal that Ralph will get his medal back if he will help her make a kart.

At the factory, Ralph and Vanellope sneak past Beard Papa as they make their way to the locked door King Candy set up to keep Vanellope out. As Ralph sees a "No Glitches Allowed" sign with a caricature of Vanellope's face on it, he realizes that Vanellope is practically a wanted criminal in her world. She doesn't even try to deny this, but reminds him that he won't get his medal back if he doesn't help her. As the factory activates a minigame of building your own car in a minute, Ralph helps Vanellope by hijacking the machine and preventing her from messing up too much. However, when it's time to decorate, Ralph's strength backfires and the decorating tubes break under pressure, causing the kart to be completely covered in all kinds of decorations and coming out the other side as an aesthetic nightmare. Ralph frantically apologizing for ruining everything, but Vanellope loves the kart, she doesn't care how bad it looks because it's hers. She then takes turquoise and red tubes of frosting and gets Ralph to sign the kart with their respective names. However, Beard Papa catches sight of her on the security cameras and immediately alerts King Candy, causing Ralph and Vanellope to flee on her new kart. During the escape, Ralph finds out that despite Vanellope's dreams of being part of the racing roster, she has no idea how to actually drive, leading to Ralph needing to row the kart to Vanellope's hideout with his arms.

Vanellope glitches through the wall of the cola volcano and shows Ralph around her hideout, some kind of unused bonus level that used the volcano as an obstacle, with Mentos stalagtites causing eruptions when they brittle into the searing hot cola. Though they are safe for now, Ralph can't believe that Vanellope seriously expected to win without being able to drive, mocking her thinking that she can just magically win by believing in it really hard. When Vanellope asks why Ralph wants the medal so badly, Ralph tells her his whole story, he's seen as the villain in his home game and getting the Hero Medal was his only chance to show that he's more than that. Vanellope completely understands how he feels, but Ralph takes a few seconds to calm down. Vanellope then uses the opportunity to show Ralph around her "home", with her outright comparing her living situation to a "little homeless lady", using stray pieces she found as furniture and candy wrappers as blankets. Ralph is already aware that the other racers look down on her for her "glitching", but Vanellope tells him that she's trapped in Sugar Rush, since she wasn't meant to exist, she is tied to the game and can't even game-jump like Ralph. She confesses that she hopes people will finally respect her when she gets to win a race for once. This causes Ralph to start using his wrecking abilities to thrash the area around her home, initially upsetting Vanellope, but Ralph explains that he's building a race track for her. He then gives Vanellope an impromptu driving lesson, telling her that even he knows how to drive despite never needing to and Ralph ends up blowing up Vanellope's confidence in herself to the point where she starts glitching while near the stalagtites and nearly causes the Mentos to fall into the cola in a way that could've killed Ralph. Before they head out to the race, Ralph reminds her to try and control her glitching next time.

Before they could go to the race, Vanellope tells him to wait while she goes back for a minute to get something. During that minute, however, Ralph gets an unwelcome visit from King Candy. Ralph has grown so attached to Vanellope that he won't tolerate King Candy's torment of her any longer and starts throwing fists at him. King Candy however explains that he came to warn Ralph of what will happen if Vanellope wins the race and becomes a playable character. According to him, Vanellope will glitch out when selected and someone may report Sugar Rush to the arcade owner as broken. Sugar Rush might get unplugged and not only render hundreds of racers and citizens gameless, but also leave Vanellope trapped, since her nature as a glitch means that she would stay behind when the game is unplugged and be erased from existence. Ralph is quick to dismiss King Candy's theory, but the king shows him the Hero Medal he retrieved from the game's code and bribes him to never let Vanellope race. Ralph doesn't really care about the medal anymore, but it does convince him that Vanellope's life might genuinely be at stake. So when Vanellope returns with a heart-shaped medal she baked for Ralph, Ralph feels genuinely conflicted about what he should do. He ends up telling Vanellope about King Candy's words, but she dismisses them, leading to Ralph making a decision for her own good, he hangs Vanellope on a tree by the hood of her sweater and then wrecks the kart they made together while Vanellope pleads for him to stop. Vanellope ends up falling down from the tree, broken-hearted and sobbing and tells Ralph that he really is a bad guy. She then runs away before Ralph could apologize.

Ralph is so ashamed that he makes a turn and leaves Sugar Rush to return to his own game, but he only finds Gene the Nicelander there waiting for him to come back. When he asks where everyone else is, Gene tells them that they all left, Fix-It Felix Jr. does not work without an antagonist, thus the arcade owner declared it Out of Order and about to be unplugged very soon. Gene nonetheless keeps his half of the promise and tells Ralph that the entire apartment complex is all his for as long as the game is still plugged in. Ralph realizes how little he actually wanted this and throws the keys to the building against the Out of Order sign in frustration. However, as the sign moves a bit, it reveals something: A picture of Vanellope on the side of the Sugar Rush cabinet. Ralph takes a moment to think about this, but then wastes no time returning to Sugar Rush once he figures it out.

Once he gets to Sugar Rush, he finds King Candy's subordinate Sour Bill cleaning up the destroyed kart and throwing it into the trash can. He interrupts the cleaning session to ask Sour Bill why Vanellope is on the side of the cabinet if she was never meant to exist. Sour Bill only talks when Ralph threatens to put him in his mouth, saying that Vanellope used to be a real racer until King Candy started messing with the game's code and removed her from the roster. Sour Bill can't tell Ralph why, since King Candy had also locked up the collective memory of Sugar Rush, merely telling Ralph that Vanellope crossing the finish line will reset the game. He also tells him that both Vanellope and Ralph's heroic counterpart Fix-It Felix are currently locked up in King Candy's "Fungeon". Ralph takes the remains of the kart and breaks Felix out of the fungeon, convincing him to fix Vanellope's kart by promising him to never game-jump again. He then frees Vanellope, who only accepts his apologies when he admits that he really is all of the bad things Vanellope had ever called him. The three of them then make their way to the race track, with Ralph telling Vanellope that she will be a real racer if she manages to win this race.

Once the race starts, Ralph gives Vanellope a headstart and she manages to enter the race without a gold coin. Ralph then cheers Vanellope on, but then Sergeant Calhoun from Hero's Duty interrupts the race and reveals that Ralph inadvertendly let a Cy-Bug enter Sugar Rush, which then multiplied and could end up being a real danger to not only Sugar Rush's inhabitants, but also the entire arcade. So Ralph has to stop Vanellope from crossing the finish line to save her from the Cy-Bugs, but when Ralph tries to drag her out of the game, she protests that he's only hurting her, being unable to move her from the spot. After evacuating the rest of the world (with King Candy being eaten by a Cy-Bug), Calhoun tells Ralph that they need to make a Beacon to destroy all Cy-Bugs at once. Ralph realizes that the cola volcano would be perfect for that and puts his own life on the line to save Vanellope by destroying all mentos stalagtites in one fell swoop. However, his destroying gets interrupted by King Candy, who had fused with the Cy-Bug and now has zero reason not to kill Ralph and Vanellope directly. Ralph evades King Candy's attacks and manages to set off the eruption, fully aware that it would kill him, but he doesn't care since at least he gets to die a hero. Vanellope however can't watch her friend throw his life away like that, glitching around the Cy-Bugs, she steals a kart and rams into Ralph's path, knocking him out of the danger zone and into a puddle of mud chocolate. The makeshift beacon ends up killing all the Cy-Bugs, including King Candy, Ralph ends up pushing Vanellope's kart across the finish line. The game starts resetting and Vanellope is revealed as the true ruler of Sugar Rush. Before he leaves, Vanellope offers him a place to stay in her palace, promising him that nobody will ever call him a villain again or toss him into mud. Ralph however realizes that his game can't survive without him and gently turns it down. They end up saying goodbye with a fist bump, a hug and tons of insults.

In the end, Ralph and Vanellope are invited to Felix and Calhoun's wedding as his best man and her maid of honor respectively. Ralph ends up looking with fondness at his job as a villain, since he reassures himself that he can't be that bad if that little girl willingly wants to be his friend.

Fanon
Support of Jawbreaker was weird in the early years of the fandom, as people had started shipping Ralph and Vanellope as soon as they heard that Ralph would interact with a female character of that name, thinking that Vanellope will be his love interest.

Support for the romantic version of the ship took a nosedive once the trailer revealed that Vanellope was a little girl. Most shipping between them focuses on a platonic father/daughter, brother/sister or uncle/niece bond, with Ralph adopting Vanellope being fairly common. With Elsa from Frozen or Yesss of the second WiR film serve as the mother of this family. The rare group that prefer to have Jawbreaker as a het, however, tend to make Vanellope older and closer to Ralph's age, so it wouldn't be attacked by haters.

Fandom

 * FAN FICTION