YMMV / Jude the Obscure

• Adorkable: Sue during the sex scene of the film version.
  Jude: You don't have to do this.
  Sue: I want to. But you have to help me, I don't know what I'm doing, I won't even pretend. Do I talk too much?
  Jude: No.
  Sue: I'm doing it all wrong, aren't I?
  Jude: No.
  Sue: I'm intellectualizing.
  Jude: You're not.
  Sue: Kiss me before I start talking again.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Sue's attitude towards relationships implies that she could be a romantic asexual. Hardy himself wrote in a letter that he intended Sue to be frigid, as when she is living with Jude they hardly have sex. He couldn't write it in the book as it would have been immoral then.
• Anvilicious: Jude and Arabella's relationship starts with her throwing a pig's penis at his face.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The film adaptation Jude starred Christopher Eccleston and had a scene where he gets challenged by a drunken undergraduate played by a young David Tennant. So the Doctor is talking to himself. And then there is June Whitfield who played Aunt Drusilla, who also later played an Abhorrent Admirer of the Tenth Doctor in his Grand Finale, groping him.
• Narm: Basically anything having to do with "Father Time". His climactic scene moved the book from a powerful commentary on Victorian divorce laws to WILD MELODRAMA TIME!!!
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: A common reaction to Thomas Hardy novels, and Jude the Obscure is one of the worst examples. It becomes obvious very early on that Jude is going to have his dreams ruthlessly squashed at every turn, and it becomes difficult to feel anything for a character so clearly doomed from the start.
• Vindicated by History: Hardy was proud of the novel and thought it the best he had ever written, but critics and audiences of the day couldn't see far past a portrayal of sex that was frank by Victorian standards, with one critic calling it "Jude the Obscene". Hardy retired from novel-writing for the last thirty years of his life partly in response to the outcry. Public opinion has softened in the years since, and it is now regarded as one of Hardy's masterpieces.

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