YMMV / Lover

• Applicability: "Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince" is cloaked in layers and layers of metaphor and it's not clear what exactly it's supposed to mean. Taylor herself says it's political but it can also be interpreted as a love song. She's using metaphorical high school to make a statement about her feeling lost in the age of the Trump administration but finding strength from knowing that one day it will end. However, it can also be interpreted to being about finding strength from your significant other in hard times. Is she herself Miss Americana (which is supported by the Netflix documentary about her Miss Americana) or is it someone else, for example Hillary Clinton?
• Ending Fatigue: The most common criticism of the album is that its final third (which includes the middling-received "ME!" and the extremely divisive "You Need To Calm Down") isn’t as good as what came before and overstays its welcome.
• Fandom Rivalry: Taylor's fanbase did not take kindly to predictions by tool fans that their long-awaited album Fear Inoculum would overtake Lover as the top album on the Billboard 200 chart. Sure enough, it debuted at #1, unseating Lover and prompting even more outrage from Taylor's fans.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Many listeners have noted that had "Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince" come out just a year or so later, you would've sworn it was about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. The details in the chorus are almost creepily accurate, starting with the obvious points of her being an American actress and him being known as the "bad boy" of the Royal Family before he settled down. "They whisper in the hallways, 'she's a bad, bad girl'" sounds like a reference to the truly disgusting way Meghan was treated by British tabloids, and "Voted most likely to run away with you" sounding like it's about their exit from the Royal Family in 2020. Taylor wrote the song before any of this happened, but still, the applicability is a bit uncanny.
  • The entire "Cruel Summer" lyrics are especially unfortunate under the wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic, forcing Taylor to scrap her Lover Fest tour and scrap the release of the song as a single:
    Fever dream high in the quiet of the night
    You know that I caught it
    ...
    I'm not dying
    You say that we'll just screw it up in these trying times
    We're not trying
  • In the wake of Taylor and her then-boyfriend Joe Alwyn - the primary inspiration for the album - breaking up, a lot of the songs in the album about their relationship and how much she valued it (especially "The Archer", "Cornelia Street", "I Think He Knows", "London Boy", "Paper Rings", "False God", "All of the Girls You Loved Before", and the title track) became especially hard to listen to.
    • "Lover", "Paper Rings", and "I Think He Knows" are especially harsh since they are songs about her expressing her desire to get engaged and married to Joe. The lyrics of "You're Losing Me" imply that she wanted to get married to Alwyn but he did not.
• Memetic Mutation: HEY, KIDS! SPELLING IS FUN!^ExplanationA throwaway line in the music video version of "ME!", which is deliberately silly and got a divisive reaction from listeners. It was left off the album version, to the disappointment of people who liked it, leading to joking Tweets and posts saying something along the lines of, "Justice for spelling is fun!"
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The music video for "ME!" is just gorgeous, with exquisite sets and dreamlike visuals.

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