YMMV / Hans Christian Andersen

• Designated Hero: "Little Claus and Big Claus": Little Claus starts the conflict by basically irritating Big Claus to his wit's end, and over the course of the story he proceeds to scam people using a horse's hide and his grandmother's corpse. Granted, Big Claus isn't too sympathetic either, but still.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: In "The Cripple," a paralyzed boy manages to drag himself out of bed and attempts to walk so that he can save a caged songbird from a cat creeping up on it. Everyone celebrates the child's improved state, but in true Andersen fashion "the bird, of course, had died of fright."
• Harsher in Hindsight: One of Andersen's lesser-known fairy tales, "The Little Green Ones," is about a large constantly multiplying army of small soldiers in green uniforms who invade a rose bush and are puzzled, offended, and rather hurt that humans hate them so much and give them such revolting names (wood lice). A Norwegian editor, who printed the story in a magazine, was sentenced to prison during the German occupation.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • "The Fir Tree" is about a fir tree that dreams of being a Christmas tree because of the honour and the glory. Getting cut down hurts like getting your legs cut off. It has one evening of Christmas glory... then it is stuck in the attic to slowly die, like Christmas trees do.
  • And the literal nightmare in "Aunt Toothache," featuring the Anthropomorphic Personification of aforementioned ailment, who has drills and tongs and similar implements for fingers. It is possible to go on...
  • Pretty much the entirety of "The Rose Elf." Between the heroine's evil brother stabbing her lover to death and cutting his head off, to her exhuming his head and burying it in a flower pot with a jasmine plant on top, to the brother being killed in his sleep by the flower's spirit, it's understandably not a very common bedtime story.
  • "Little Claus and Big Claus" is the story of two men with very little morals, with Big Claus being a Small Name, Big Ego Ax-Crazy Stupid Evil miser with Gold Fever, while Little Claus is a Manipulative Bastard Con Man who is extremely ruthless in trying to make money and brings about the death of three people.
  • "The Bishop of Børglum Cloister and His Kinsmen." The first thing we hear of the title character is: "There is a shipwreck on the coast. The Bishop of Børglum's men are already on the beach, and those sailors who survived the merciless sea do not survive the bishop's men." Later there's the equally nightmarish aftermath of Jens murdering the bishop and his servants. And the falling action leaves it not entirely clear whether Børglum is haunted by ghosts of vengeance or it's just the wind.
• Values Dissonance: One of the people Andersen lionizes in "The Thorny Path" is Christopher Columbus. The view Andersen presents was common in Western histories in most of the 19th and 20th centuries, but is now commonly criticized as glorification of an imperialistic colonizer figure.

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