YMMV / Major Grom

• Adorkable: Dima Dubin. His Badass Bookworm traits, earnestness, and admiration for Grom put him squarely in this category.
• Growing the Beard: The first arc of the series was criticized for its harsh art style, excessively simple, clichéd plot and dialogue, and two-dimensional characters (with Igor in particular described by some critics as an emotionless, crime solving "machine"), as well as its overly sexualized portrayal of female characters and heavy political undertones. Fans and critics both agree that the series improved drastically in the arc's Epilogue (Issue #10), which put fan favorite Anastasia Kim's gorgeous watercolor artwork on display, removed the political undertones, reduced the sexualization, and fleshed out the main characters — delving into Igor's private life and fears, and Sergey's backstory and psyche, respectively. After this, the series continued to improve with every successive arc, and truly hit its stride with "The Game" arc.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In Issue #5 ("Plague Doctor"), Igor accuses Deputy Mayor Kemenny of being The Citizen, reasoning that Kemenny wanted revenge on (among others) Dr. Zilchneko for causing the death of his son^note by failing to cure his cancer. In the conclusion of "The Last Case", Igor learns that his own unborn child died along with Yulia, and that he himself has been committing murders under the guise of Ilya Kosygin after losing his sanity from grief.
  • To make this worse, it later turns out that like the deputy mayor, Igor is innocent and being falsely accused.
• It Was His Sled: Most people who are even vaguely familiar with Major Grom know that Sergey Razumovsky is the Plague Doctor, and that he once burned a man alive.
• Memetic Mutation: The Plague Doctor is non-binary.^note In Issue #5 ("Plague Doctor"), Grom speculates that multiple people might be behind the Plague Doctor's crimes: "[w]hat if it's not 'he', but 'they'?" This lead to jokes amongst Western readers that Sergey Razumovsky is actually gender non-binary.
  • Grom's modesty boxers.^note When the "Plague Doctor" comic arc went up on WebToons, the censors edited blue boxer shorts onto Grom's nude body during the Garden of Sinners scenes. This has led to jokes about modesty boxers being added to other risqué Grom-related artwork (including fan art).
• Stuffed into the Fridge: During "The Game" arc, Yulia Pchelkina is killed by one of Sergey Razumovsky's bomb collars, for little reason other than to cause Igor angst and rage. Notably, while Oleg Volkov receives an emotionally comparable death during the same arc, it's later revealed to be a fake out; Yulia gets no such reprieve.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: One common complaint about Major Grom is that Dima Dubin — a competent martial artist who is both street smart and book smart, with an interesting backstory and a close bond with his mother and sister — is terribly underutilized. He's mostly a side character in "Plague Doctor"^note save for the short story "Butterflies In the Stomach" in Issue #7, which gives him A Day in the Limelightand "Just Like A Fairy Tale", is almost completely absent in "St. Patrick's Day", and (most egregious of all) spends most of "The Game" in an apartment taking care of Razumovsky's pet raven (while the rest of the cast is in the thick of the action). This was remedied in Igor Grom, which saw Igor forced into retirement and Dima forced to take Igor's old post.