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  • Alternate Character Interpretation: When Calvin gives Rob a We Can Rule Together offer, is he just trying to ruin the Ghostwriter team or does he actually want Rob to join forces with him and think he's worthy?
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Victor, Rob's friend in "Building Bridges," seems to be very popular in the fandom. The producers must have noticed because he shows up in another episode despite not being particularly involved in the plot.
    • Calvin Ferguson, with both those who Love to Hate him and those who root for him.
  • Fanon: One of the leading theories about Ghostwriter is that he's the ghost of Jamal's great-grandfather Ezra.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: To most fans, The New Ghostwriter Mysteries never existed.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: To Catch a Creep parodies how politicians ran smear campaigns in elections in the United States. Smear campaigns have worsened since the early 1990's.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Ho Yay: There are hints at Hector having a crush on Avatar, the male makeup artist, when the team appears in Lenni's music video. Then there's the guy himself. He's a male makeup artist, and he calls himself "The Fabulous Avatar."
    • The "What's Up With Alex?" episodes had hints of this between him and pot-user Kevin.
  • Jerkass Woobie:
    • Many of the villains are so pathetic that it's pretty easy to feel sorry for them. A good example is Manny Gite from "Into the Comics". He was an awkward twentysomething who lived with his aunt and desperately wanted to be a cartoonist. He was embittered when his first comic was rejected by a comic book company, but refused to give up his dream. So in an desperate attempt to achieve this, he entered a contest for kids (in which the prize was getting to be in a comic book) disguised as his cartoon character Stoopdude and tried to sabotage the other contestants.
    • For all of Calvin's Jerkass tendencies, his genuine devastation at losing his beloved parrot Attila is pretty sad, especially since viewers got to see the real bond they had in previous episodes. He noticeably tones down his jerk tendencies afterwards.
  • Les Yay: In "Lost in Brooklyn, Part 1" Tina meets Safira, visiting from Mozambique. Everyone does rush to see who it is coming to school in a limo, but Tina's the only one who takes one look and says "Oh, wow!" when Safira gets out of the car. By the time we cut to the classroom, everyone else has moved on, but we have Tina looking around the room until Safira is introduced by the teacher, whereupon Tina watches Safira's every movement with a smile until she sits down next to her, while everyone else acts normal. When she gets to say more than hi, she talks fast and rambly, and at one point talks about trying talking to her (a second pitch at being in her video, actually) with lines that sounded like someone trying to ask out a crush. The entire first part is driven by her need to get this girl to be friends with her, and there's master plans and talk of "destiny" that she wound up sitting next to her and on and on and it doesn't end up having to do with the video. There ends up being a picnic in the woods on a blanket, and a Death Glare at Safira's dad until he leaves. The mystery of the arc is introduced only in the closing moments of part one; the rest is entirely Tina positively drooling over this girl and stopping at nothing to get her attention. (Well, that and a few minutes devoted to Hector's introduction, setting up Rob's replacement.)
  • Memetic Mutation: Erica Dansby (Julia Stiles): "Do you know anything about hackers? Can you jam with the console cowboys in Cyberspace? Ever read Neuromancer? Ever experienced the New Wave? Next wave? Dreamwave? or Cyberpunk!?" It's even funnier when you think about Cyberchase, which also airs on PBS stations.
  • Moment of Awesome:
    • Rob snapping at Gaby, Alex, Tina and Lenni to shut up in "Get the Message Part 3" when they're arguing in the park in the aftermath of the accident earlier in the episode. He really came out of his shell. It's a pity he had to move to Australia.
    • Frank tackling the villain who's getting away from the police in "Just in Time."
  • Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page
  • Padding: Take away the slow typing and writing sequences and obvious explanations, and most of the arcs can be reduced by one episode.
  • Replacement Scrappy: For some, Hector replacing Rob on the team.
  • Retroactive Recognition:
    • Julia Stiles as Erica Dansby in "Who Is Max Mouse?" and "A Crime in Two Cities".
    • William Hernandez, who played Hector, was part of the cast of The Real World: Philadelphia and even made mention of his time on Ghostwriter.
  • Rooting for the Empire: Calvin is so entertaining that it can be hard for viewers not to root for him, especially if they find the Ghostwriter team too goody goody. This generally only refers to Calvin after his recast as the first Calvin was more a one-note jerkass.
  • Tear Jerker:
    • Calvin was a Jerkass but his devastation at losing his beloved parrot is pretty sad, especially for people who have also experienced the death of a pet.
    • Alex's friend Kevin selling his deceased grandfather's basketball trophy (his prized possession) to pay for his drug habit.
    • How badly Jamal and Rob take the possibility of the Ghostwriter Team breaking up in the "Get the Message" arc. Particularly Rob since it's heavily implied that the Team are his first friends in a while. Then Rob gets hit again when his dad transfers the family to Australia.
    • Examples from the books
      • In the book "Steer Clear of Haunted Hill", Alex and Leni's reactions to their loved ones (Gabby and Max respectively) having disappeared is positively heartbreaking. The disappearance of Rob isn't any better and might be worse from a Meta standpoint since this wasn't his Leeroy Jenkins getting him in trouble; it was him being Too Clever by Half by refusing to buy that the crooks he ran into were actually ghosts (they weren't but that's not the point).
      • In the book where Alex gets kidnapped in the middle of a magic show, Gabby tearfully blames herself, in part because she and Alex had been bickering incessantly before the incident and also because she got the attention of the 2 stars who Alex witnessed arguing (they were among the main suspects and hadn't noticed Alex until Gabby yelled at him).
    • Ghostwriter's ultimate identity- he was an escaped slave (possibly even Jamal's ancestor Ezra) who had taught himself to read and was teaching other slaves to read, up until slave catchers learned of what he was doing, and they and their dogs killed him. Somehow, his ghost ended up inside a book for 125 years until Jamal freed him in the pilot. And what are some of the first words he writes? Asking if "the children" are all right; said children were likely killed by the dogs as well.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • The Thunderheads from "Building Bridges" only appear in that story arc and never again. Having the Ghostwriter team actually face them as villains in a mystery would have been fun to watch.
    • Some of the defeated villains like THABTO, Mr. Brinker and so on never returned for revenge in contrast to other mystery/crime/detective shows.
  • Values Dissonance: Would marijuana be seen as such a big deal now as it clearly was then?

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