YMMV / Infinity Train: Court of Cyclamen

• Alternate Character Interpretation: How much of what Chloe claims here is the actual truth, and how much of it is her toxic biases bleeding through? The story does take place before she realizes what a how much of a jerk she's been, and given we only have her word on what she said, it should be taken with a grain of salt.
• Franchise Original Sin: Chapter 9 is nothing but a giant call out by the Author, who's sick and tired of the dark themes featured in this story, a sentiment shared by most readers. However, the Blossomverse has always had excessive dark themes and scenes, with certain rewrites making the stories even darker than they already were, but at least the darkness played some role in the story rather than being there for the sake of it. Court of Cyclamen is arguably the first story in the verse where there's simply no excuse for the excessive darkness involved, especially considering that as an interquel, the darkness is completely irrelevant as we know most people are gonna be okay.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Moving forward, Chapter 8 is gonna be best remembered as the chapter that tried to tie-in to Cherry Bloodlines, only to butcher the scenario so thoroughly that crossoverpairinglover declared it a Disowned Adaptation.
• Salvaged Story:
  • Chapter 6's Chloe scene has her talk to Ash and discusses on the fact as to why she wants to be friends with him, to address complaints that Chloe wanting to be friends with Ash came out of nowhere. It also explains the reason why Professor Cerise refused to take his daughter to therapy and highlights that he's had a tendency to not let her do any activities that she sorely needed to help vent out her frustrations.
  • Mr. Bradbury was never properly called out over all but stating that he was favoring Chloe over his other students to replace the child he could never have. This story features him getting a reality check from Professor Cerise, the very same man he once lambasted and mocked for being a bad parent, who makes it clear that no matter how sympathetic his backstory may be, he's not going to let the man get away with treating his daughter as a replacement.

---