#//the books can be found in english on cl.fr for anyone who's interested

[a-queenoffairys]

Why was Waldo Schaeffer unable to materialize himself completely in Lyoko? While not canon I heard that the novels say that the scanners can only properly children. The supercomputer can apparently only form a cohesive avatar for children since they don't have much to worry about in life. Adults having faced the stress of real life and its problems are unable to be processed by the scanners leaving only incoherent digital avatars with only Waldo able to retain his sanity. Your thoughts on that?

I think they’re not so much incoherent as monstrous. Franz’s energy form was definitely a unique case. Some quotes from book 3:

“On the images of Lyoko that I took through the eyes of our soldiers. They had all acquired monstrous appearances. One, for example, was transformed into an immense spider, and another was a child that seemed completely lost and was covered in a yellow substance that seemed like…vomit.” (...) “Yes. It’s difficult for us to face our greatest fears and accept the vision that we have of ourselves. These soldiers have dirtied their hands in all sorts of crime. And when Lyoko forces them to look reality in the face, they crumble and become immobilised.”

The first mention is when the bad guys try to virtualise their soldiers and find they all become frozen in fear. This makes sense because they’re terrorists, people who’ve done a lot of terrible things in their lives. So you’d think maybe this mainly applies to really awful people, but then we hear from one of the people who worked on the Supercomputer with Franz.

“Well, it’s a matter of mental representation, the way that each person imagines themselves subconsciously. Us adults normally make mistakes throughout our lives, and then do things that we regret. Over time, that can cause us to create really terrifying mental images of ourselves. Shortly after having begun our experiments, I myself entered the scanner to test it. I was only on Lyoko for nine seconds, but it took weeks for me to stop shaking like a leaf.”

I think this character was a scientist and not a soldier or a criminal, but this is the quote about adults regretting their many mistakes and that being enough for them to be severely affected by going to Lyoko. The book does seem to offer some explanation for Franz’s unique case though.

“It seems that Hopper is still the only man capable of surviving on Lyoko.” (...) Did he know that by entering Lyoko, the professor had lost his body, transforming into pure energy?

That he somehow lost his body in the process, so he didn’t have a body/monstrous form that could paralyse him like everyone else. The books make an attempt to explain a lot of these sorts of details so it wouldn’t surprise me if at some point they explained why he ended up losing his body, but I couldn’t find anything from a brief search.

It’s interesting he says in the show that he can’t take human form yet because he still has more work to do on Lyoko and it needs to develop more, seeing as he seemed to have all the time in the world. But maybe his paranoia reached the point where he believed he was out of time and had to virtualise them as soon as possible, and keep working on Lyoko from the inside where it was (meant to be) safe. In that case, I pretty much agree with the general assumption that an adult form is more complicated to manifest and he hadn’t implemented that capability yet. I don’t think there’s any one clear answer to the question, really, it’s open to interpretation.