Little Women/YMMV

• Die for Our Ship: Poor Amy. To this day there are still people invested in demonising her for preventing Jo/Laurie.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Jo married a professor 15 years her senior, whereas Laurie settles for marrying Jo's younger sister Amy. Many fans were not happy. In Alcott's defense, she told the fans from the get-go she wasn't their slave and wouldn't put Laurie and Jo together to please them. Fritz is at least given some Backstory, a sympathetic personality and a few chapters devoted to him, along with a touching proposal scene under a Together Umbrella.
  • At least the current film version makes Prof. Bhaer rather handsome (come ON, it's Gabriel Byrne!). And to be fair, Jo is quite happy with him, and he obviously adores her. Plus it doesn't hurt that she enjoys the idea of teaching a house full of young people, same as him.
• Fair for Its Day: The series was actually comparatively feminist by the standards of its day, but the most feminist thing about the novel isn't anything in the book itself -- but the fact that Louisa May Alcott defied every feminine standard of the day by fully supporting herself and her family financially with her pen after most publishers told her to "stick to your teaching."
  • The fact that Jo supports a woman's right to work and support herself if she wants to while viewing marriage as something that can be optional is VERY damn feminist. Annie aka Nan is portrayed as a capable and independent woman who, despite caring for Tommy, views him bringing up their Childhood Marriage Promise as a total "what the HELL" moment, and in the end is single and happy because of that, while Daisy's own choice to marry her Victorious Childhood Friend Nat is also seen as valid and worthy of respect.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Jo and Laurie -- and no, this is not a case of Values Dissonance. The original 19th century fandom also shipped them.
• First Installment Wins
• Heartwarming Moment: The very end of the 1994 film:

Bhaer: But I have nothing to give you! My hands are empty!
Jo: (taking his hand) Not empty now.

• • "I know I shall be homesick for you, even in Heaven."
• Hollywood Homely: Most, if not all, of the movie adaptations cast very beautiful actresses to interpret the self-described "plain" Jo March, leading to the unintentionally hilarious moment when Jo has her hair cut off and Amy cries: "Jo, your one beauty!". The Winona Ryder version even has her declare that she is "ugly and awkward". At least Katharine Hepburn in the most famous earlier adaptation isn't a classic beauty, and manages to make young Jo coltish and a bit clumsy.
• Narm Charm: Little Women plots a course through Mary Sues, wildly extravagant and sentimental prose, Aesops (some of them rather questionable) in nearly every chapter... and comes out as a gripping romantic drama with a deserved place in the highest pantheon of American literature.
• Purity Sue: Amy grows from a vain, spoiled, pretentious, tantrum-throwing little girl into the unabashed epitome of tact, taste, beauty and gentility as a woman, with next-to-no warning. Partly understandable when you realise she was based on Alcott's own younger sister, who died after the book was published and left her daughter, Louisa, to be raised by Alcott. Amy is kept deliberately in the background of the sequels, and is described as someone who doesn't seem to age.
  • Or Beth, except for the low self esteem and genuinely crippling insecurity, due to Creator Breakdown. Her real life counterpart died, too.
  • Daisy is described as Beth incarnate in the end of Little Women and reminds Jo of Beth again in Little Men.
  • The "Princess" Bess in Jo's Boys, which none of her fellow characters would ever try to deny.
• Shipping: Called "lovering," in those days.
• Shipping Goggles: Jo puts on her Beth/Laurie shipping goggles in the chapter "Tender Troubles."
• Tear Jerker: Beth trying to "wean herself" from life when dying from the effects of scarlet fever.
  • Louisa May Alcott is very good at these. Just read "My Beth" and "In the Garret".
• The Woobie: Beth, and Jo up until the last four chapters of Little Women Part II
  • Billy, Dick, and Nat from Little Men.