YMMV / Damsel

• Accidental Aesop: The dragon eventually comes to feel remorse for killing the princesses — but only after Elodie reveals that most of them were unrelated to the Aurean royal bloodline, implying that the dragon would have been completely justified in murdering young women for centuries if they had actually been descendants of the man who ordered the killing of her babies. This essentially changes the story's moral from "killing innocent people is wrong" to "killing innocent people is wrong, as long as they're not distantly related to the source of your pain is fine. Killing the distant descendants of the people who caused you pain is wholly justified, though."
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Elodie's motives for trying to reason with the dragon and ultimately saving her in the final act: was it because she sympathized with her or was it out of pragmatism? Elodie already reasoned that escaping from the dragon was useless and even if she did the Aurean royal family could easily throw her and her sister back into the cave to pacify it, so by revealing the truth behind the royal family's deception, Elodie could gain a powerful ally against their mutual enemy: the Aurean royal family, as well as keeping further innocent woman from being sacrificed. Alternatively, the fact she had the clear opportunity to slay the dragon, which would have not only dealt with a real threat but may have made the royal family grateful to her, her choosing to instead spare/heal the dragon seems to confirm the sympathy interpretation.
• Broken Aesop: The film tries to present a message along the lines of "If you have been unjustly wronged, it doesn’t make it okay to take out your anger on innocent people who had no involvement in causing your suffering". However, the message ends up being confusing or outright contradictory because of the emphasis on the Aureans tricking innocent young women into becoming dragon sacrifices to spare their own women; while the royal family's hands aren't clean for this and and the dragon's children were unjustly murdered by the original king of Aurea, she's still in the wrong for demanding the deaths of the king's descendants given their only crime was being related to the person who wronged her. Consequently, the message ends up sounding more like "It's okay to kill innocent people as long as they're related to the original perpatrator". Some viewers have also pointed out this contradicts the film's feminist angle, given it unintentionally suggests it's okay for women to be punished for the wrongdoing of a man.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Many viewers guessed the plot twist that the dragon had been demanding the sacrifice of three princesses every generation out of revenge over her own three children being unjustly killed, and that it was the Aureans who were the original aggressors. Viewers pointed out that the dragon always demanding three princesses was oddly specific; some of the intended foreshadowing around the midway point is also pretty unsubtle, including Elodie's dream where a previous sacrifice states that Aurea's story about the dragon is "a lie" and the dragon bluntly stating that "Three were taken. Three must be given".
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Elodie has defeated the kingdom that is sacrificing women to a dragon. However, it seems her own kingdom, especially with their king dead, will still be suffering from an apocalyptically harsh winter and famine. Elodie's wedding and sacrifice was a bargain struck to avert such disaster, only for the king to attempt to back out at the last minute. Aurea is also in total chaos, with the extermination of its entire ruling royal family. Real world history teaches us that is not a recipe for stability.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Game of Thrones fans, or better said, with Daenerys' fans. There is war on TikTok between the two communities, as the fans of the movie (and Millie Bobby Brown's fans at large) started to call Elodie the new mother of dragons or Dragon Queen, and in response, the other side started to make videos calling Elodie a cheap copy of Daenerys.
• Fan Nickname: A lot of fans online have taken to calling Elodie the "New Mother of Dragons".
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: When the teasers were released, people seemed to be rather annoyed at the fact that it yet another Fractured Fairy Tale movie subverting the Damsel in Distress trope, which has been done to death in the past decade, which never banished when the film proper released, as it didn't really do anything new with the trope that other films have already done and, in many people's eyes, much better.
• Nightmare Fuel: The scenes where Elodie is crawling through tight underground passages she can only just fit through are pretty uncomfortable and nail-biting, especially for viewers with claustrophobia. There's an especially horrific moment where Elodie slips headfirst down a narrow vertical passage and gets stuck upside down, with her panic and helplessness being downright palpable. It also brings to mind the nightmarish real life Nutty Putty Cave tragedy.
• So Okay, It's Average: A common consensus is that the film has some nice-looking sets, costumes and special effects, and the first half is an enjoyable and suspenseful dark fantasy/survival horror with Elodie trying to escape from the dragon’s lair. However, the larger plot received criticism for being underdeveloped or nonsensical in places (particularly by the movie's second half), certain plot twists resulting in muddled messages and some characters lacking depth and/or screentime. Overall, it’s thought the film’s writing wasn’t polished or clever enough to truly make the most of its premise, but if you don’t think about the story details too much it makes for a decent fantasy flick.
• Tear Jerker: Elodie discovering the names of all the women who died before her etched into the cave wall. To really make it hit home, there's a montage of several of these women throughout the years, some of whom barely look like adults, huddled in the cave; some are sobbing and praying, some are trying to tend to their wounds or start a fire, and some just look plain exhausted and out-of-it. All of the women who made it to that cave had the same realisation that they were far from the first to end in up here, and others will inevitably follow after they die.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Prince Henry is shown to have some depth beyond being a one-note villain; he's not as accepting of Aurea's sacrificial practices as his mother, appearing uncomfortable and resigned at best, and outright apologising to Elodie before throwing her into the caverns. His mother comes off as a controlling and verbally abusive parent, while his father is an ineffectual Useless Bystander Parent. He begins standing up to Isabelle more, including refusing to take part in sacrificing Floria. It's also left ambiguous if he knows the true origins of the dragon's wrath and how he'd react to learning this. Unfortunately, the scene with Floria is the only time we see any kind of defiance and character development from him, and he remains a largely passive side character throughout the film despite there being potential for him to become an ally to Elodie against Isabelle.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The Dragon is clearly intended to be seen as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds with the sacrifices being payment for the unprovoked murder of her children and Elodie taking pity on her when she discovers this, healing her wounds and teaming up with her to defeat the Aurean royal family. The problem is that she's also a sadistic Serial Killer who's been taking her rage out on fully innocent girls for centuries without a flicker of remorse and only minds that she didn't kill the 'right' girls. She gleefully tortures and butchers utterly helpless people including Elodie's father and the members of his party (though most certainly under the assumption that they were Aureans, possibly even thinking Bayford was the Aurean monarch). The closest she gets to comeuppance is losing one of her eyes to Elodie and it's even debatable if this is really comeuppance, as the dragon seems to have both eyes when she burns the royal family, implying that Elodie healing her undid all the damage she did in their fight.

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