Kaleido Star/YMMV

• Crowning Music of Awesome: The third OP, Tattoo Kiss.
• Die for Our Ship: May Wong is really hated by some Leon/Sora shippers. Ken Robbins is not, despite all the Les Yay subtext.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Holy shit, Leon. While he does have somewhat understandable reasons to be the way he is, these do not justify how his fangirls handwave or omit the crap he has pulled on Sora, May and on many others like the innocent partners that he injured just to test their worth.
• Double Standard: According to fandom May is a whore, a bitch, a self centered Jerkass and should be shot to death... but Leon can get away with lots of shit and arrogant stunts and he's just misunderstoooooooood. Specially bad when you recall that Leon was the one who injured May and could have potentially killed her.
• Family-Unfriendly Aesop: Some of the training techniques and behaviors seen in both the Kaleido Stage and the International Circus Festival are not exactly ethical.
• Jerkass Woobie: Leon and May.
• Jerk Sue: In the same way Sora deconstructs Purity Sue, May Wong deconstructs this trope. She does have traits of it, but she then suffers the consequences for it.
  • Leon Oswald, back when he was a jerk, might play the trope straight, though. Though, unlike other Jerk Sues, he does come around in the end.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Sora gets Ship Tease with Ken. And Leon. And Layla. And Rosetta. And maybe even May.
• Les Yay: There's a quite sizable chunk of subtext between several girls of the cast. Sora and Layla, Sora and Rosetta (which crosses the line to Romantic Two-Girl Friendship in the second season), Sora and May (more of Foe Yay for a time, though), May and Rosetta, Anna and Mia, Mia and Katie, Katie and Layla...
  • Arguably, Cathy with Layla and Mia. So much that Sora even gets a little jealous of her closeness to Layla at some point!
  • May's hero worship of Layla counts as well.
• Magnificent Bastard: Leon, until he's defrosted by Sora and Yuri. Surprisingly, he's not hit with Badass Decay.
• Misaimed Fandom: Some fans are so protective of Sora that they peg Kalos, Leon and especially May as Complete Monsters.
• Moe: Sora, Marion and Rosetta.
• Purity Sue: Sora Naegino is a deconstruction of this trope. She has traits that would make her the Ur Example... and yet they work against her. She has to balance her extreme idealism with her experiences in the circus world to keep believing in herself and the rest of the world and not go the Knight in Sour Armor route.
  • Sophie Oswald is a more by-the-book version, but it's a Justified Trope: Being a Dead Little Sister, she didn't last long enough, and Leon would've been OOC if he didn't idealize her due to the terrible circumstances surrounding her death.
• Ron the Death Eater: Oh 'God, May and Kalos. They are not Complete Monsters, fangirls!
• The Scrappy: No matter how much she was redeemed, May is still bashed and gets her share of Character Development ignored or handwaved by Fan Dumb.
• Wangst: Sora's problems in the second season are very valid, but sometimes her angst does get extremely grating. Lampshaded by Fool, who tells her that if she doesn't come around, she'll lose her chance to be the Kaleido Star, and as such she'll stop seeing him. And it happens for a while.