Emperor's New Groove, in our extremely important, prestigious and not-at-all humble opinion, is one of the most underrated Disney movies ever. If you haven't seen it, stop being an adult and go watch it immediately.
That being said, holy s--t this theory about Emperor's New Groove is dark and depressing! … Anyway, happy movie-watching!
Like most crazy but still logical theories, it started on Reddit, with a thread titled "Overlooked murder in Emperor's New Groove?" Dibs on that title for the morbid direct-to-DVD prequel we're writing, by the way.
Reddit user lish_94 said they were watching this movie the other day because they are clearly living their best kind of life and noticed that Kuzco watching a fly get eaten by a spider might not have been just a mere act of nature. You might remember that the fly screams out "help me, help me!" before its life is snuffed out by the jaws of a spider. Throughout the movie, the only animals we see that are able to speak are ones that used to be human (Kuzco, the guards, Yzma in cat form) so does that mean…?
"My theory is that the fly was originally human. This would explain why Kuzco is able to understand its cries for help, but then it gets brutally eaten by the spider and Kuzco is left mortified," they write. "Whether or not if he realized the fly was in a similar situation to him (having been turned into an animal/insect) is up for debate still."
Did Kuzco watch a human being get murdered in the most horrifying way imaginable? Or, another theory is just that the writers of Emperor's New Groove were paying tribute to the 1958 sci-fi film The Fly, which has a similar scene. That would make the scene less scarring and more just silly.
And it's important to remember that Yzma's original plan for Kuzco was to turn him into a flea, and then put him in a box, and put that box in another box and then ship it to herself so she can smash it with a hammer. But she decided to poison him instead to "save on postage."
So we know Yzma isn't against turning people into small creatures to punish them. One redditor pointed out that the fly could have been the peasant from the beginning who was begging Yzma for food. She ordered him to be taken away…perhaps to be turned into a fly?
Damn, Disney! You're slipping some deep, dark stuff into your films! Childhood memories now forever altered!
Or we're all reading way too much into this. Either one.