Code Lyoko is one of those shows where you step away for a bit, it comes back to you, and you think “it wasn’t actually that intense. I’m just misremembering, how I felt when I last saw it as a kid that’s all.”
Then you watch it.
And no, no actually, I remembered correctly. They almost drove into a nuclear power plant, a military laser as pointed at them, they team up with the big bad to rob the government, the man characters have a near death experience every day, it’s very much implied that deaths on Lyoko is very similar to the real thing, literal men in black came after Aelita’s family, William lost months of his life, Jeremy was torturing himself to keep his friends safe on the other side of the screen, Odd almost drowned, Yumi and Ulrich were nearly boiled alive.
AU where Aelita is the transfer student delinquent who gets corrupted by XANA while William was the one trapped in Lyoko that the warriors are trying to help escape.
Ulrich is the one that has to say William is his cousin, to the less than convinced crowd