Riley Andersen

Riley Andersen is a central character of Inside Out Parodies. While she is not a memorable character on her own, her mind is an extensively developed location and the main setting of the parodies, with her emotions, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, ultimately doing everything to further her and not themselves.

In Inside Out
When Riley was 11, her family moved from Minnesota to San Francisco. This caused a crisis internally in Riley, and at one point, she even considered running away from her parents and back to Minnesota. However, she had a last-minute change of heart.

Riley's primary interest is hockey, and she has played for both the Minnesota team Prairie Dogs and the San Francisco team Foghorns. She has also taken piano lessons, although she was visibly bored by them and has forgotten a lot since she last took them.

Riley is usually upbeat and happy-go-lucky. However, she absolutely abhors broccoli, being disgusted by it, and during her first days in San Francisco, she was visibly angry with her parents over their decision.

In Parodies
Riley's mind is seen extensively in parodies, and is the parodies' primary location, similar to the Third Reich in Hitler Parodies. Except for "Riley's role", all the following sections concern her mind, including its characters and sub-locations, and not the outside world. In fact, many Inside Out Parodies, with the notable exception of the main Andersen's Mind series, choose to exclude Riley entirely, in turn implicitly rejecting the reality that her emotions are controlling someone, instead assuming that they are simply living their own lives in a vaguely described, almost childlike country.

Emotions
In the Inside Out universe, each character's mind is controlled by five emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. They treat controlling the character whose mind they are in as work, and are usually very serious about it. However, in parodies, the emotions have a much more relaxed work ethic, often going on holidays and adventures unrelated to taking care of their host.

As Riley's mind is the principal location of Inside Out and her emotions are its principal characters, they preserve these roles in parodies, to the exclusion of other characters in Riley's mind.

Joy
Joy is the main protagonist of Inside Out and Riley's lead emotion. In parodies, her role as such is generally preserved. Furthermore, Riley's mind under her rule is insistently described as a dictatorship, making her the Adolf Hitler counterpart in Inside Out Parodies, especially with regard to her planning.

Anger
Anger's role in Inside Out is fairly minor, mostly limited to taking over as the leader of Riley's emotions in Joy's absence. However, due to this role, parodies show him as a much more major character and a serious threat to Joy's leadership, as well as a counter-planner.

Sadness
Sadness is the deuteragonist of Inside Out and the foil to Joy. Originally, she and Joy are rivals, and Joy establishes her dominance, not allowing Sadness to use the console at any time. However, during Inside Out, Joy eventually discovers Sadness's true purpose: in order to move on from certain memories, one must feel sad about them. In addition, Sadness in other people's minds is the main source of sympathy.

In parodies, in the very least in Riley's mind, Sadness's original role as Joy's chewtoy is preserved, therefore assuming that Joy did not learn her lesson from Inside Out at all. In addition, Sadness may take on the role of objector, like Alfred Jodl does in Hitler Parodies, but unlike Jodl, who almost always makes Hitler mad due to his objections, Sadness is not generally able to change Joy's attitude.

Disgust
Disgust is a supporting character of Inside Out at best, with her characterization limited to keeping Riley from being "poisoned", both by supposedly disgusting foods such as broccoli and by more social cues, such as bad fashion trends and inappropriate friendships.

However, in parodies, she takes on a much more principal role, due to the relatively large number of lines in relation to details about her character known. There, she is both Joy's and Anger's yes-man, similar to Joseph Goebbels in Hitler Parodies. However, due to this two-faced nature, she also has a lot in common with the Hitler Rants Parodies depiction of Otto Günsche.

She also, in addition to broccoli in canon, has an antipathy towards the gay community. This was first suggested in an Imgur comment prior to any Inside Out Parody, and while broccoli was not replaced with the gays in the actual Russian dub, such a replacement did occur in Andersen's Mind.

Fear
Like Disgust, Fear does not get significant appearances in Inside Out. His characterization is limited to keeping Riley safe; however, he does exhibit a number of irrational fears, as well as listing potential scenarios with very small odds of ever happening.

In parodies, Fear has various depictions. During Joy's plan, he is typically the henchman of the plan who does the considerably harder work. However, unlike Felix Steiner, his Hitler Parody counterpart, he is present in scenes and converses with other characters. In addition, he can be more like the embodiment of his name, thinking that plans, especially those of Anger, have the potential to go wrong.

Bing Bong
Bing Bong is Riley's imaginary friend. He is introduced late into Inside Out (despite getting cameos in the very beginning), as a sort of guide for Joy and Sadness in Riley's deep mind. However, in parodies, he takes on a much more major role; while his nature and home prevents him from appearing in any of the scenes commonly used for parodies, his reactions are parody-worthy in general, and therefore, he holds the distinction of being the first character to speak in Inside Out Parodies in general.

He and Joy keep a good relationship, both in Inside Out and in parodies. In the latter, it is to the detriment of the other emotions, who assume that Joy values him more than her co-workers.

Other characters in Riley's mind
In addition to the emotions, there is also another type of employees in Riley's mind, named the Mind Workers, who usually have the resemblance to brightly colored potatoes. Their jobs vary; for example, the very first parody introduces the Forgetters, whose job (erasing old and unreliable memories) is compared to the work of Recdep in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Dream Productions, whose employees have the job of staging and then broadcasting dreams that Riley has.

Some other examples of citizens of Riley's mind include various figments of imagination, such as the Imaginary Boyfriend and Cloud Town residents (yet to appear in parodies), as well as many more professions taken on by the Mind Workers, such as manning the Train of Thought and activating/deactivating Abstract Thought.

Locations in Riley's mind
The principal location of Riley's mind, as well as the living place of all her emotions, is Headquarters. In this respect, Headquarters is the equivalent of the Führerbunker in Hitler Parodies, with characters rarely, if ever, leaving it. However, as a major arc of Inside Out is about Joy and Sadness leaving Headquarters and exploring the rest of Riley's mind, this is preserved in parodies, with them frequently going "on vacation".

Locations deep within Riley's mind include the Islands of Personality, Long-Term Memory, Abstract Thought, Imagination Land, Dream Productions, the Subconscious and the Memory Dump. The most reliable and quickest ways of transportation in Riley's mind are the Train of Thought, designed for various cargo, and the Recall Tubes, designed for memories. Both of them, however, can be repurposed to transport characters such as the emotions.

Riley's role
Riley herself is very rarely seen in parodies, given that they mostly focus on her mind and not the outside world. Nevertheless, she has two primary characterizations: predominantly upbeat (when all her emotions are present at Headquarters and Joy is in charge) and predominantly mad (when Joy and Sadness are absent from Headquarters and Anger is in charge). She is also depicted as very sympathetic (owing to Sadness), crying over the fact that her mean attitude towards Adolf Hitler was uncalled for and that it may have pushed him to commit suicide.

Riley usually keeps a good relationship with her parents, with her mother serving as her informer. Her father is generally more absent from his life in Inside Out, and therefore only gets rare appearances in parodies; in fact, his first appearance in parodies was in the AGK series parody, eighteen videos in, when all the characters described above were already established and characterized.

In addition to being a hockey player and a piano player as in canon, in parodies Riley is established to be an avid coder, specializing both in web design, as seen in Joy plans to code a language learning website, and creation of spambots, as seen in Riley is informed about the FCC's vote on the Restoring Internet Freedom act.

Trivia

 * Her inspiration in real life is Elie Docter, daughter of Inside Out director and writer Pete Docter. Like Riley, Elie also had a happiness crisis when she was 11. Also like the Andersens, Pete moved from Minnesota to California; though, he did so during his university years, before he had a family.
 * The neighborhood the Andersens move to is based on the real-life Russian Hill in San Francisco. However, it is only a coincidence, related to ASBusinessMagnet's own geography, that Inside Out Parodies primarily use the Russian dub. Furthermore, the Russian Hill in San Francisco does not have a significant Russian minority.