YMMV / Derry Girls

• Accidental Innuendo: In the Season 1 finale, Erin says of Orla "she may be a dick, but she's my dick!"
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • A polar bear really did escape from Belfast Zoo, creating no small degree of concern at the time... though it was in 1972, not The '90s.
  • Playing "Rock the Boat", complete with everyone sitting on the floor and waving their arms around, was and still is very popular at Irish weddings and other large gatherings.
  • The BBC really did dub over Gerry Adams' voice in broadcasts.
• Awesome Ego: Michelle is so shameless that she's fantastic.
• Awesome Music:
  • The recurring use of "Dreams" by The Cranberries beautifully captures the feel of 90s Northern Ireland. Made poignant by the fact that lead singer Dolores O'Riordan suddenly died 11 days after the first episode aired.
  • The gang's performance of "Who Do You Think You Are?" by the Spice Girls in 3.02 shows the main cast to be talented singers in addition to actors, and their choreography routine is simply fantastic.
• Bizarro Episode: Episode 3 of Season 1 is even wackier than the rest, which involves the girls mistakenly thinking a dog peeing on a statue of the Virgin Mary is the statue actually weeping — and a parish priest even believing the story. That said, weeping and moving statues were actually a bit of a fad/mass delusion in the late 80s, after a statue allegedly moving in Ballinspittle triggered a wave of copycat "visions" so they were still in the zeitgeist in 1993/4. In-Universe justifications could be exam pressure (Erin, James, Clare), caffeine overdose (Clare) and being drunk (Michelle)... as well as Mary keeping silent about the dog.
• Broken Base:
  • Some people find Joe's intolerance of Gerry hilarious, while others find it unnecessarily harsh and petty.
  • Similarly is how the Derry girls (especially Michelle) treat James. While some find the jokes at his expense hilarious, others find them cruel and off-putting. Unlike with Joe and Gerry however, this improves in Series 2 and 3 where James is treated more as an equal and genuine friend, though he's still usually the Butt-Monkey of the group.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Most of the series really, considering it's Black Comedy set during The Troubles. But Episode 2 takes the cake, where Michelle accidentally burns Fionnuala's curtains when she's supposed to be cleaning. So their parents try to make it look like they were the victim of a robbery — as one of Erin's uncles had been robbed a couple of days ago. It doesn't work.
  • Clare worries that they'll be expelled for the attempted threatening of a first year on the bus. Michelle calms her down by saying that the school hasn't even expelled a student who's in the IRA.
  • Michelle says of James's existence — her aunt went over to England to get an abortion^note In the '90s, abortion was illegal throughout the island of Ireland and the common option to obtain an abortion would have been travelling to England. Abortion was legalized in the Republic in 2018 and decriminalized in Northern Ireland in 2019. but they only discovered she didn't get it when she arrived home with James sixteen years later. Crossed a third time, when James immediately reveals afterwards that this is the first he’s heard of this.
  • Michelle refers to Clare (after a few hours of Clare going without food for a fundraiser) as "Bobby Sands". Bobby Sands was a member of the Provisional IRA who died on day 66 of his hunger strike.
  • Michelle also sums up the Great Famine of 1845 — where around one million people died of starvation and loads more had to emigrate abroad — as "they ran outta spuds and everyone was raging".
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Sister Michael's sarcasm and no-bullshit attitude has made her one of the most beloved characters by the fandom.
  • Long-winded Uncle Colm has relatively few scenes in the show, but seems to be a hit every time he appears.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: There are some fans who want Orla and James to be together instead of James and Erin, who are supposed to be an Official Couple in the future.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: There are a lot of Hurt/Comfort Fic's about James being beaten up by Irish boys because of his English accent, and the girls patching him up and comforting him afterwards.
• Fridge Logic: Joe's Exaggerated Trope Twerp Sweating approach to any man who shows interest in his daughters. Orla's father. Did something happen there? Is that why Joe's this way — or at least, this way to such an extent?
• Friendly Fandoms: Developed one with Turning Red as both feature similar friend groups of teenage girls (and one boy) who behave like realistic teenagers. The plot of the film also has comparisons to the concert episode of Series 2, down to revolving around seeing a boy band and having trouble with a bear.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: American viewers loved the show, and it proved very popular when it was streamed on Netflix. The actors have also got messages from fans in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq who relate to growing up in the time of conflict. One Colombian fan commented on how relatable it is that even with paramilitary groups around, you're still more scared of the Catholic nuns who run your school.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Michelle's over-the-top tirade in 3x04 where she claims the real reason she doesn't want Erin and James to hook up is that when they inevitably break up, she'll be forced to side with her family over her best friend. This proves darkly prescient for what happens when Erin breaks up with Michelle in the finale: James, as her cousin, is forced to side with Michelle even though he loves Erin.
• He Really Can Act: Tommy Tiernan has developed haters in The New '10s for aspects of his routine that involved mocking people with Down Syndrome, remarks towards Jewish people and the Holocaust that were in very poor taste, a weak defense where he claimed "Irish people aren't racist; they're just having the craic" and from people who don't think his energetic style of comedy is funny. Here he plays the Only Sane Man to perfection, many finding his performance as Gerry funny.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • In the episode "Across the Barricade", the kids generate a Long List of differences between Catholics and Protestants. They range from reasonly accurate religious descriptions (Catholics ❤️ Mary) to completely outlandish (distance between the eyes). The standout, however, was Protestants keep toasters in cupboards, which became a meme fairly quickly after the episode line aired.
  • The announcement of "Welcome to Derry" (a prequel series to It set in Derry, Maine, USA) inspired a lot of jokes about how the cast of Derry Girls would react, including Colm telling an impossibly boring story about Pennywise cutting up all the weans and the girls defeating Pennywise incidentally while in the middle of a Zany Scheme.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • The teens finally getting to the Take That concert, after everything they went through. And it’s implied that they’re not going to get caught, due to Gerry deciding to keep silent about seeing them on the news.
  • In the first episode of season 3, the girls discover that they passed their GCSE exams.
  • James and Erin finally kiss in season 3.
  • Michelle manages to get the gang tickets to Fatboy Slim after they lost them.
• Nausea Fuel: The girls attempt to dispose of Michelle's drugged scones by flushing them down the toilet, but they instead clog it up instead. When the adults find them, they are ankle deep in dirty toilet water, Orla even crawling around in it.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Fionnuala, the owner of the chipper, appears only in episode 2, but is among the more memorable of the side characters. It helps that she's an in-universe Memetic Badass.
  • Conleth Hill as the campy, ham-tastic psychic in Season 3 — who manages to relay messages from spirits in between screaming at his battleaxe of a mother.
  • And of course who else but Liam Neeson as the policeman the girls square up to in the Season 3 premiere?
• Spiritual Successor: The series is easy to view as a Distaff Counterpart to The Inbetweeners. The character lineup includes a bratty leader, an idiot, a fast-talking pottymouth, a posh new kid and an Apathetic Teacher.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The Netflix version of Season 1's finale changed the song Orla dances to from "Like a Prayer" to Take That's "Pray" — which means that her choreography makes less sense.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Uncle Colm is despised by all characters in-universe, but loved by fans.
• The Woobie:
  • James. He's abandoned by his mother (who left Derry specifically to have an abortion while pregnant with him, a fact she kept hidden) to live with his aunt in Northern Ireland, where everybody makes fun of his English accent, thinks he's gay no matter how much he denies it, and belittles him and makes fun of his lack of traditionally masculine traits. To boot, he is the only boy in an all-girl's school because it was thought that he would be bullied even more harshly in an all-boy's school. To top it off, when his mom does return and wants to take him with her, Michelle points out that 1, his mom might ditch him again and 2, she may have only come for him to get him as free labor for her new enterprise.
  • Gerry is never anything but nice to his family, but his controlling wife runs roughshod over him, and he is subject to extremely antagonistic behavior from his father-in-law on a daily basis.
  • Clare, being a Nervous Wreck and (initially) closet lesbian who's as Moe as they come, and seems to be perpetually on the brink of tears. As if it wasn't bad enough, her father Sean had a bad aneurysm and died in the hospital bed in the Series 3 finale.

---