YMMV / Amanda the Adventurer

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Sam Colton adopted Rebecca then made her the star of a TV show that ended up becoming wildly popular. Is he really a Good Parent or a Stage Dad? One argument against this interpretation is how he tried to put a stop to Hameln's "dynamic voice reaction" training session. Also worth noting is that it was a low budget, open access show, which wasn't expected to be popular or overwhelm Rebecca.
  • Is Wooly really allergic to apples? Is Grandma really a vegetarian? Are these real issues that Amanda is pushing aside as Foreshadowing to her true nature or is Wooly making these up, hoping to subtly discourage her and the player from getting to the Downer Ending?
    • In the full release, a sizeable amount of people have found Wooly to be far more suspicious than his pilot self for various reasons.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Wooly devolving into a non-anthro sheep against his own will? Horrifying. The derpy grin he makes once the transformation is complete and he's supposedly suffered Death of Personality? Tragic, yet also worthy of a chuckle.
• Cry for the Devil: Amanda may be an Uncanny Valley Creepy Child who does despicable things, like killing Wooly when he defies her and luring other children into getting trapped in the show, but it's difficult not to feel sympathy for her when you learn she was once Rebecca Colton, an innocent little girl who had a father that loved her very much, but lost him and was forced into her role as Amanda thanks to Hameln Entertainment. And that not only is she self-aware of what has happened, but also that she can feel her own dead body decomposing and can do nothing about it.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Due to how she was described by Sam, seemingly being a little girl that is fixated in her own little world, some fans of the game believe that his adopted daughter Rebecca is autistic.
• Fan Community Nicknames: A-fan-das.
• Fan Nickname: Some fans refer to the Director as "Mr. Hameln", or some variant spelling of this, due to him presumably being the head of the company.
  • By Japanese fans, Wooly and Amanda are called Ringo-chan (Cute Apple) and Momo-kun (Peach). Another popular nickname is Amanda-chan and Wooly-kun, with chan and kun being suffixes to refer to younger children.
• Friendly Fandoms: Given the nature of the game, being a sort of escape room-esque puzzle game with horror elements, the game had naturally attracted the attention of fans from other franchises with dark subject matter:
  • Unexpectedly has one with Popee the Performer. This appears to be because of how both center around a violent human main protagonist from a "children's series", that regularly tortures their "friend", a timid, anthropromorphic animal.
  • Surprisingly has one with Cult of the Lamb due to both games having a sheep main character. There are AUs where Wooly joins the cult and befriends the lamb main protagonist. Amanda will also be present but not be a member of the cult.
  • A sizeable number of people in the Welcome Home fanbase also appears to be drawn to this game, as both feature the setting of a children's program that is not all as it at first appears.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Thanks in part to its official Japanese translation, the game is very popular in Japan. Most Japanese fans love Wooly due to his cute but simple design.
  • The game also saw success in Latin American. Fitting as the game was inspired by Dora the Explorer.
• Moe: Rebecca Colton, Amanda's voice actor, is described to have various traits that encapsulate this. She is a joyous little girl said to find adventure even in her backyard, despite the hard life she had prior to being adopted, and her performances in Sam's original show were often described to be outright adorable. What eventually became of her thanks to Hameln adds onto this significantly.
• Moment of Awesome: In Pilot Episode, the very moment Wooly snaps at Amanda, putting the safety of the viewer above his own just to warn them to outright destroy all of the tapes. This resonated very well with the fans, becoming an Establishing Character Moment for Wooly, which makes what happens next even more upsetting.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Pilot Episode-Specific:
    • Amanda crosses this in episode two. She states that she and Wooly are going to the butcher so they can get meat for Grandma, despite Grandma being a vegetarian. Once you click on the meat store, she asks them to tell the meat man what they need. You desperately try typing a four-letter word other than meat, but on the third try, she forces you to type meat! Once the meat man starts cutting up meat, Amanda stares at Wooly as he starts to panic. The third tape's opening shows Amanda standing next to a piece of Wooly.
    • The secret tape shows what really happened. At the end of it, Wooly desperately tries to tell the viewer to burn the tapes as Amanda closes in on him to kill him for good. What follows afterwards is the player trying to start a fire to destroy the tapes. After two type-ins on a seemingly unknown five-letter wordbox, Amanda proceeds to force the player to type in "watch" so he can watch it anyway, showing that she won't give up on making you watch the tapes and killing you. What's worse? We saw Wooly possibly get killed in episode two, which implies that Amanda wouldn't let him die unless she actually finds out that he was trying to protect the player.
  • Full Game-Specific:
    • While Amanda bullies Wooly a lot, he's also a lot more morally ambiguous and is implied to be deleterious to Amanda's mind in some way, making her come off as more lashing out at the most obvious source of her misery. Even if he turns out to be just nice, it's heavily implied Amanda isn't in control of her actions a lot of the time, but the demonic entity - how much free will she has to avoid bullying him is suspect.
    • Depending on who you ask, the public statement that Hameln representatives had shared over the news can be considered as one for the company as a whole. Not only were they allegedly responsible for Sam Colton's disappearance, but they also try to tarnish Sam's reputation by claiming that he "abandoned" both the company and his daughter, leading to all of the problems that concerned parents are dealing with, despite all of the evidence that he loved her very much, and how he was the one who adopted her in the first place.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • The static silhouette Amanda leaves behind in Pilot Episode is creepy... until you realize how eerily similar it looks to Mickey Mouse. Some players have taken it further and tried typing Mickey's name in the following textbox. Without giving too much away, they only get as far as "Mick".
  • Amanda's true form is scary, but there's also the fact that it still has her big hairbuns on its monstrous head. Or if you go by the bit above...
    8-BitRyan: Mickey Mouse-looking douchebag! (See the clip here)
  • In the "In Your Neighborhood" tape in the full game, when Amanda and Wooly are in the bakery, the tape briefly glitches. It's pretty scary, until you notice Amanda looking like she's throwing up.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Even if his innocence is fairly dubious, especially in the full game, quite a lot of fans love Wooly due to his Adorkable personality, and his cute design.
• The Woobie:
  • It is very difficult to not feel bad for poor Wooly in Pilot Episode, who is trapped in the crazy world contained within the tapes as Amanda's sidekick and clearly wants desperately to get away from her. And, at least so far, it is heavily implied that he never gets the chance to escape her, as he is heavily implied to be butchered by the butcher in the butcher tape and is killed off-screen by Amanda herself in the treasure hunt tape when he finally works up the nerve to defy her and warn the player.
  • Amanda herself becomes one in the full game. Going through all routes and finding all tapes reveals that she's a victim of a more malevolent entity. It's also heavily implied that she's possessed by the ghost of her voice actor, the adopted daughter of the missing show creator.

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