YMMV / Almost, Maine

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Some of the Magic Realism could be one of the parties faking it. Like Ginette might've walked around the world or maybe she just made it look like she did. Lendall could've been telling the truth about having all the bags of love that Gayle also had or maybe he was just going along with what she said to make the nutty girl he loves feel better and sane.
  • Depending on how he is played, Steve's ambiguous disorder can be interpreted as some type of learning disability or neurodivergence, particularly autism
• Big Brother Bully: Depending on how you interpret the context clues in "This Hurts", Steve’s brother Paul could be anywhere from controlling and misguided to downright physically abusive.
• Broken Base: "Seeing the Thing" is the most divisive story. While it does have fans who think it's got the same charm as the other stories, some think Dave's coming onto Rhonda is creepy and that the resolution comes from an emphasis on physical love more so than the emotional kind makes it seem shallow. For what it's worth, John Cariani claims that this is the only scene excluding the epilogue which has a cathartic, joyful ending which the characters earn, which some might find disagreeable, both in terms of that scene's ending, along with the endings of other ones.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Steve, in addition to his congenital analgesia seems to have some sort of learning disability. Marvalyn lampshades this, pointing out he's never gotten an official diagnosis from a doctor and his brother Paul may have ulterior motives for treating him the way he does.
• Jerkass Woobie: Phil and Marci are fairly mean to each other but it's clear both are quite depressed with their faltering relationship and and it's quite sad witnessing the very end of it.
• Narm Charm: The show as a whole for its fans. It can be quite sappy and silly, but if the execution is right, then it can be quite touching and funny as well.
• Sweetness Aversion: How detractors regard it. Even fans can't dispute that the love stories can get awful cheesy.
• Values Dissonance: Okay, it's not like East and Dave abruptly kissing women who they're not dating unprompted was socially acceptable back then, but after the METOO movement, it can be rather uncomfortable.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • East kisses a woman unprompted and without consent mere minutes after meeting her. And then after he apologizes for his behavior, he winds up doing it again. While he is trying to help the clearly not not alright Glory, he definitely oversteps his bounds while doing so.
  • Dave similarly forces a kiss without consent. And unlike East, whose kiss was an impulsive spur of the moment decision that he quickly apologizes for, Dave's kiss is less sympathetic due to being premeditated and the fact that he doesn't even apologize even when Rhonda is clearly extremely upset about it. In fact, not only does he not apologize, he then calls her out for her completely understandable reaction. While he at least asks her before trying to get another kiss and like East is trying to help his love interest, his emphasis on getting physical love from Rhonda can seem forceful and perverted.
  • Jimmy also runs into this issue. After sadly asking a now engaged Sandrine if he can kiss her, he's shot down. He then tries to do so anyway with her stopping him before the lips connect. Luckily it's only in the stage directions this happens, which means some productions can dance around it.
  • Hope can easily fall into this as well, albeit for different reasons than the three guys. While it can definitely be sad to find your ex married to someone else, several people find it hard to feel sorry for her, considering she left him in a truly heinous and cruel manner. When it’s revealed that the man she’s speaking to is Daniel, and he’s Happily Married to someone else, many people have expressed a “serves her right” attitude.
• The Woobie: Given the number of sympathetic roles in romantic stories, and this show having nine different romantic stories, it was bound to have a few examples.
  • Pete says something dumb which causes his his girlfriend to abruptly walk out on him. He then spends the rest of the show sadly waiting for her to come back. The sight of him still sitting alone at the start of the epilogue has been known to get it's share of "aww"s. Thankfully she does.
  • Glory had her husband leave her for someone else which quite literally broke her heart. She's then convinced that her new artificial one makes her incapable of loving anyone back, and also blames herself for his death after her rejection lead to him getting hit by an ambulance.
  • Jimmy was left by his girlfriend and had only started getting lonelier since then. He's revealed to have been beating himself up over this to the point where he got a tattoo to mark himself a villain. And it's not even spelled right. Then when he runs into his ex, he's dealt another blow upon hearing she's getting married the next day.
  • While Sandrine's life is in a far better place than Jimmy's, her reunion with him is still pretty pitiable. She's clearly horrifically uncomfortable seeing her ex again, both feeling guilt for the way she left him and having to deal with his unmistakable advances, with things only getting more awkward when she has to explicitly turn him down.
  • Steve suffers from a condition which doesn't let him feel pain, and likely has other disorders. Because of this, most people brush him aside when he tries to open up. He also has a very controlling brother who belittles him and gives terrible advice for going through life.
  • Marvalyn has apparently lost her home when snow collapsed her roof, and is now stuck in a boarding house. She also has to deal with her abusive boyfriend, who she's constantly arguing with and is all bust stated to be just as controlling as Steve's brother.
  • Lendall applies. Imagine if your girlfriend of eleven years barges into your house, claims things are over, fills your house with bags that she claims are your love, demands you return her love, and then continues to throw an episode when you do so. While he's able to handle the whole situation fairly well and even manages to turn it into a sweet proposal, his enduring of Gayle's freakout still invites sympathy.
  • Hope had left her boyfriend long ago after he proposed, and years later is overcome enough by guilt and desire to come back to him, traveling more than a hundred miles only to see he's apparently left, and has it made clear to her just how wrong she was to abandon him without an answer. That's already bad, but what's even worse is when she realizes she's actually been talking to her old flame the entire time, and right before she tries to answer his proposal, it's revealed he's moved on and married someone else. After this, Hope can only sadly walk away and reveal to herself that the answer was "yes".
  • Daniel. The fact that Hope went away without ever answering his proposal is already sad, but it's even sadder when he speaks in explicit detail about how much worse never getting an answer was compared to the shorter pain of being told no. Not to mention how losing Hope affected him so much that it caused him to go through a major physical transformation, especially bad in the default portrayal of an inexplicable loss of height. And while unlike Hope he's moved on and found love with someone else, that doesn't mean that his reunion with her can't have a very sad longing to it.