Inside Out 2’s Lance Slashblade was inspired by a real-life secret video game crush
Pixar Animation Studios’ Inside Out 2 takes the audience back inside the mind of a young girl named Riley, expanding beyond the scope of Pete Docter’s original 2015 movie. The sequel, directed by Onward’s Kelsey Mann, takes Riley into her teen years, adding new emotion characters and the physical manifestation of her sense of self as she navigates major changes in her life.
But outside of the drama Riley experiences around her friends and her social ambitions, the new Pixar movie also has one of the best video game character gags since Tron.
[Ed. note: This post contains some spoilers forInside Out 2.]
About half an hour into the movie, Joy (Amy Poehler) and the rest of the original Inside Out emotions — Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness — wind up in a deep, dark vault of secrets, where they confront the manifestations of some things Riley has locked away inside herself. This includes Bloofy, a Bluey-type character from a children’s cartoon Riley still secretly, shamefully likes, and a large, shadowy character known as Deep Dark Secret.
But more importantly, the vault contains Lance Slashblade, a melodramatic video game character Riley knows from the in-universe equivalent of Super Smash Bros. Riley has a big ol’ crush on him, but he’s locked away in the vault because, despite his debonair good looks, Lance has one of the lamest power attacks in his game, which makes Riley embarrassed about liking him so much.
With his pixelated anime-style hair, huge sword, and comically serious voice (provided by veteran video game voice actor Yong Yea), Lance looks like he could fit right in with a lineup of Final Fantasy characters. And he’s absolutely the sort of character a 13-year-old would have an embarrassing crush on, after only knowing him from a team-up game. (That was Marth in Super Smash Bros. Melee for me.) According to director Kelsey Mann, Lance was the brainchild of story artist McKenna Harris.
“They came up with this great idea of having a crush,” Mann told
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