In Rodrick Rules, Rodrick's poem for history class, "A Hundred Years Ago", makes more sense when taking into account his pastime. He is part of a band that writes music, needing rhymes in the first place!
In The Getaway, why did the girl dump Rodrick for Rodrigo? Rodrick and Rodrigo look really similar. They have the spiky hair, the frown, even the name is almost the same! The girl probably got confused and mistook him for Rodrick. Either that, or she dumped him for his terrible sunburn.
It's likely Rodrick and Rodrigo aren't really Identical Strangers, and that Greg just drew them similarly due to their names, personalities and styles resembling each other. Possible reasons:
The girl dumped him for his ghastly sunburn.
She believed the Heffleys were actually thieves when they were thrown out of the resort, and decided she didn't want to be involved with such a shady bunch.
Her relationship with Rodrick was a cheerful fling rather than how the rocker painted it, so she just moved onto someone else when he left, probably without her knowing how.
She thought Rodrick was just a shallow jerk who didn't even care to bid her goodbye, and decided she had to move on.
In the first book/movie, Greg's popularity dunks to being below even Fregley's level of popularity (which is to say, none) after the play is botched. Many kids in real life can attest to not caring or even outright admiring if their classmate did something like attacking Patty, so either Greg doesn't know that people don't care about what he did or Patty made up some false rumors about him to get back at him.
Doubles as Fridge Awesome and Fridge Heartwarming. In the roller rink opening of the Rodrick Rules film, Holly unwittingly interrupts Greg's Imagine Spot about...well, her by requesting him to move aside so she can go through the exit. But note that after her brief conversation with Greg, Rowley and Chirag, she just turns back and skates away without even leaving the rink for the rest of the scene. Hmm...why? Perhaps she doesn't just reciprocate Greg's feelings in the movies - could it be that Greg was not the only one subjected to Love at First Sight and that Holly was just making an attempt to speak to him?
In the twelfth book, Greg finds himself accidentally ordering breakfast and asks for bacon and eggs. It's likely he hasn't had bacon since his family got a pet pig about six months ago.
It might seem strange at first that many characters are significantly more likable in the movies (the first three, at least) than the books. But remember, the books are entirely narrated by Greg.
But why is Greg also more likable in the movies? Why would he write himself as a jerk?
Why does Greg write the ending of Dog Days as something completely different from reality, unless the movies aren't reality at all?
In the first book, the webcomic and the first film, Greg says once he becomes rich and famous, he'll give his journal to reporters instead of answering their questions. I think Greg makes a lot of stuff up in the books and webcomic so people will be entertained reading his journals and not just read a bunch of mundane, day-to-day stuff. Plus, at the end of The Deep End, Greg says he's looking forward to telling Rowley about what happened but Greg's going to leave out the parts that weren't so great and says "And I might change a few other details here and there, because you should never let the truth get in the way of a good story." accompanied by this◊ thus indicating he makes a lot of stuff in the books up.
In one book, when Greg is scheming to get an invite to a prestigious Halloween party, he tries to convince Rowley to take him along as part of a two-person costume. Rowley is unenthusiastic at first, saying that he was planning on going as a nice Witch. On the surface, the readers are meant to somewhat agree with Greg that it's ridiculous for Rowley - a boy - to want to go as a Witch. But it can also show Greg's ignorance, while Witches are commonly portrayed as entirely female (thanks in part to works such as Harry Potter), male Witches are actually an established concept and Rowley would be perfectly justified in going as one.
It's established that Chirag is the only one of Greg's classmates who gets bullied for being short, yet in Hard Luck, it's revealed that Chirag and Alex are about the same height. So why don't the bullies go after Alex? Well, A.) Alex is renowned for his brains, meaning that the bullies might want to stay on his good side in case they need him for help with an assignment or something, and B.) in most illustrations of Alex, he's drawn with a blank expression. This might indicate that he's The Stoic, and thus the bullies don't bother bullying him, since he won't give them any sort of emotional response anyway.
By a rather obvious coincidence, all four members of Rodrick's favourite band (Metallichihuahua) happened to be attending the Battle of the Bands. Why wouldn't he recognise them? Well, Rodrick didn't recognise the lawyer because of how much his appearance changed - same with the security guard. In fact, note that Rodrick wasn't even there when Greg pulled off that stunt at the pizza place the security guard worked at.
Given that Stewart (the band member that became a lawyer) was there to take legal action against Löded Diper, it's more likely that Rodrick didn't recognise him because he wasn't attending the show at all, and only just walked in the venue the moment Greg noticed him. He was on the job, after all.
While it seems like Susan took a massive level in jerkass in the latest books, it actually makes sense. Greg, Rodrick, Manny and Frank would much rather use technology than interact with anyone else, Greg only likes to watch sports (according to Big Shot, Greg liked playing soccer in kindergarten and when his team finds the sports gear from elementary school, they have a lot of fun playing with the stuff), Rodrick's band plays whenever possible, even when inappropriate and Manny doesn't really pay attention to her anymore. Plus, there's the fact that Greg is an Unreliable Narrator and may be purposefully exaggerating her traits.
In the second book, a random kid named Jeremy Piddle is given the Cheese Touch and vanishes. What if he had to drop out due to becoming a pariah?
In the third book, the Snella family throws a "half-birthday" party whenever their youngest child turns six months old where they have various adults from the neighborhood line up to make the baby laugh. Greg mentions the reason they do this is so they can send footage to America's Funniest Families and win prize money, but since none of the footage they've sent has given them the prize, Greg suggests they'll keep having babies until they get it. (They appear to have no less than six children.) This implies the Snellas are giving birth to babies entirely for profit, which makes you wonder how much they neglect their children who they see more as money-makers than as actual human beings. Also imagine how much self-esteem issues their children would have if they knew they were created for the sole purpose of financial gain.
Keep in mind that Greg is the only person who claims that the chance to make money is the only reason that the Snella family keep having kids. While Greg's conclusion isn't 'that' far-fetched (and for all we know, he could be completely correct, or he could be only scratching the surface of the truth), for all we know, they could be a perfectly loving family who just happen to make a lot of attempts to win prizes.
During the neighborhood snow war in The Meltdown, Greg reads about medieval warfare tactics and comes up with a plan to dump hot chocolate on the Lower Surrey Street kids as they try to scale the snow fort's walls, but Rowley forgets to add hot water to the mix, resulting in the Lower Surrey kids just getting powder dumped in their faces. But if they actually had gotten hot chocolate poured on them, they could have gotten skin burns (depending on how hot the liquid was) or fallen off the ladders and injured themselves.
Even accounting for Greg's Unreliable Narrator tendencies, if this world is even half as bad the events Greg describes make it out to be, it'd basically the Grand Theft Auto universe; full of morons, jerks and apathetic peopleof all ages. What's Greg's life going to be like when there are actual stakes? How much damage could an actually malicious person do with how stupid and apathetic authorities are portrayed as? Would society survive events like COVID-19? Rule of Funny is really the only thing stopping this series from being horrifying on an existential level.
Let's think about Manny, shall we? Everything about how Manny is raised, and how he behaves, suggests he's going to have a horrifying future growing up. So far he has shown highly destructive tendencies, he's been shown knowingly lying in order to get others into trouble for his own benefit, steals, violently attacks other kids his age, steals from others for his own benefit without even caring for their feelings, will quite literally allow people to die so that he can survive a situation (bear in mind said people were his own family), watching them suffer while still knowingly putting them at risk, and will use any excuse, including his age, to get out of trouble, again with full knowledge. He has, so far, proven to be a vicious, manipulative, cruel individual, with no consideration for others so long as he comes out on top. He has even, on occasion, found others' suffering funny. Now, just what kind of person will Manny likely be growing up, with all of these traits in mind?
A politician.
Greg is very much an Unreliable Narrator, but his diaries reveal something potentially horrifying. While he's by no means the most well-behaved person, most anyone else around him (with few exceptions like Rowley and Fregley) isn't any better. When they aren't being stupid or pushing him around, others around him (be they his peers or authority figures) can and will assume the worst and brand him negatively in some circumstances. Even his allegedly "nice"mother would sooner push her beliefs onto her entire family and baby her petulant son Manny than try to understand where he's coming from. Add to that his borderline sociopathic nature and general tendencies could be an indicator of undiagnosed mental illness and no one around him ever seems to point him towards therapy, it seems Greg may not have a bright future ahead of him.
One has to wonder if the people around him are the very reason for one of Greg's defining traits: his Attention Whore tendencies. His parents alternate between ignoring him (whether that means letting Rodrick bully him or neglecting him in favor of Manny) and pushing their own interests onto him while ignoring his own; his brothers usually only pay attention to him for their own selfish reasons; and pretty much every other person in his life that isn't explicitly a nice person alternates between ignoring him completely and treating him negatively. Taking all that account, his desire for fame (or at least, for people to regard him positively) is completely understandable.
Mackey apparently has that robot monkey's hand stuck to his leg throughout the rest of the book. It got stuck in January, and was apparently still there in April. Did he ever take off his clothes? On second thought... don't think too hard.
A minor one but in the Dog Days movie, there is a scene where Greg tries to get Holly's phone number. That doesn't sound too bad but considering that some of the people Greg called were adult men, Greg and Rowley were both very lucky that they didn't accidentally call a pedophile/groomer (or if one of their parents mistook one of the people they were calling for a child molester trying to groom their kids).
Greg claims that Shawn Snella weighs 200 pounds at six years old. Assuming he's not exaggerating, that's a dangerously unhealthy weight for somebody Shawn's age to be at.
◊ thus indicating he makes a lot of stuff in the books up.
