YMMV / New Warriors

• Base-Breaking Character: Robbie Baldwin. There are some fans who love his light-hearted Speedball persona while the other portion prefer his Penance persona for his more powerful Penance powers and dismissing Speedball as "lame".
• Complete Monster—Vol. 1: Protocol is one of the big bads of this run, introduced as the leader of a sinister organization named Undertow. Protocol preys upon the Rwandan genocide, stealing medicine meant for sick children and massacring a group of over 600 refugees in just a few instances, all for a profit. Every member of Undertow is a tortured slave kept in line with implants, a fate Protocol deigns for one of the heroines.
• Crazy Is Cool: Night Thrasher who fights crime with a skateboard. Carol Danvers describes him as "Sherlock Holmes meets Tony Hawk".
• Cult Classic: While the team has never been a huge or well-known part of the Marvel Universe, they still have their fans and some individual members like Nova have gone on to become bigger stars.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Aracely in 2014 New Warriors, for being adorable and having funny lines. Many fans were saddened after the series was cancelled and she has the most fan demand for her return or even cameo in any future comic book.
    • Aracely did eventually get that cameo - in Champions (2019) #6. Unfortunately though, she missed out on a reunion with New Warriors teammate Nova, who was away stealing back his confiscated helmet at the time.
  • Richard Rider as Nova in general. He was originally a C-list version of Green Lantern before Keith Giffen and the duo Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning turned him into a major character in the cosmic side of the Marvel Universe and gained a cult following among Marvel fans. For both classic New Warrior fans and Nova solo series fans, Richard Rider has the most fan demand for his return.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • This conversation between Speedball and Night Thrasher in an annual issue becomes a lot less funny after Civil War.
  Night Thrasher: Robbie, the purpose of this session is to find ways of effectively using your Speedball powers in combat.
  Speedball: Well, Dwayne... how 'bout attaching humongous spikes to my spandex? That way I could totally impale all the bad guys!
  Night Thrasher: Spikes, huh? [Walks away, looking contemplative]
  Speedball: Uh, that's a joke, Thrash...
  • Issues #34 and #35 of the original series have Speedball and Nova respectively joking that causing a lot of property damage makes you an official superhero. These days, the New Warriors are infamous, both in and out of universe, for getting numerous people killed and causing massive property damage in Civil War.
  • Issue #52 begins with Asylum accidentally killing a black kid named Darius Clements because he mistook his toy gun for a real one. Two decades later, a 12-year-old African-American boy was killed by a police officer for similar reasons.
    • In the very same issue, Night Thrasher says that Asylum's actions showed him that even the New Warriors could hurt an innocent while trying to do the right thing. Sadly, this lesson was not kept in mind during Civil War. Night Thrasher also says that Asylum will have to live with the guilt of his actions for the rest of his live, which is prescient of how the Stamford incident has haunted the New Warriors ever since.
  • Issues #58 and 59 have the New Warriors fighting against Israeli super-agent Sabra, who has been brainwashed to attack then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in order to prevent him from signing a peace treaty with Syria. Less than a year later, the real-life Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli terrorist over his support for the Oslo Accords. Consequently, the two issues were not reprinted or collected until 2024.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The "Forever Yesterday" arc shows a reality in which Magneto and Emma Frost are lovers. In the 2000s, Emma began dating Cyclops whose Darker and Edgier personality change led to fans making comparisons between him and Magneto.
• Ho Yay: In the recent years, it's Justice and Speedball. They are seldom seen apart in Avengers Academy and in 2014 New Warriors. Whether they are more than just best friends, it is up to the reader.
  • One such example from Avengers Academy issue where it has this exchange between them when they were preparing for the road trip:
  Justice: Said your goodbyes?
  Speedball: All but one. What's this I hear about you leaving too?
  Justice: Guess you're a bad influence on me, still. I've been thinking. I always thought after college I'd take some time off...Just get in a car and go. See America, stuff got in the way.
  Speedball: Yeah. I had that idea too. That's kinda what our reality show was supposed to be. Go to places that didn't have heroes and show how we could help. It all kinda went out the window when they switched on the cameras.
  Justice: So...no cameras. You and me, for real this time. What do you say?
  Speedball: [Smiles broadly]
• My Real Daddy: Speedball was created by Steve Ditko and Tom DeFalco, but was considered a gimmicky character and a poor man's version of Peter Parker. When Fabian Nicieza wrote him in New Warriors, Speedball had turned into an interesting character with a well-rounded personality.
• Never Live It Down: The team being held responsible for the Stanford, Connecticut incident that kicked off Civil War.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The title's purpose, given its tendency to spotlight C-List Fodder.
• The Scrappy:
  • Hindsight Lad, who started off as an obnoxious fanboy, but later dropped the "Lad" and actually became a fairly competent supporting cast-member, before outing the identities of the surviving members of the group following the destruction of Stamford at the start of Civil War.
  • The New Warriors in the fourth series as a whole, following Civil War, as it had nothing to do with the original New Warriors by having former mutants wearing Powered Armor and were led by Dwayne Taylor's brother posing as Night Thrasher. Time has healed wounds, though, and many said they were looking forward to the Marvel NOW team.
  • The characters from the proposed 2020 relaunch are a rather extreme example of this: not only were they unanimously hated immediately upon their reveal, but this response led to the comic never seeing print following Marvel's hiatus in 2020 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. A detailing of the characters and their disastrous reception can be found here. They are as follows:
    • Screentime, a "meme-obsessed teen" who was exposed to "experimental Internet gas" that turned him into a walking smartphone, with his powerset including abilities such as "can instantly Google any fact". Widely derided as a Totally Radical attempt at pandering to the smartphone generation.
    • Safespace and Snowflake, twins (the latter being nonbinary) with embarrassingly insulting names derived from common putdowns used by older conservatives against progressive-leaning youth^note The former, "Safespace" is a common term used by the youths to describe a place that is safe and free of judgement, criticism, or harassment. "Snowflake", however, is an insulting term, used to describe youths, often as "Special Snowflakes" to refer to non-traditional lifestyles; usually relating to LGBT or mental health.. Attempts by Marvel to justify the names as the two "reclaiming" the terms did not help the backlash.
    • Trailblazer, an indigenous Mexican teen with a magic backpack she can pull anything out of. Not only is her name offensive, calling back to historical atrocities against native peoples such as the Trail of Tears, but the backpack caused many to make unflattering comparisons to Dora the Explorer.
    • B-Negative, the least disliked of the group, is a vampire who drains plasma from people through suckers in his hands. Many drew comparisons to the infamously narmy, Bowdlerized version of Morbius from Spider-Man: The Animated Series. Whether or not this makes him the most interesting member or simply the least terrible one depends on the person.
    • The reception was so extreme that bashing the characters has become a staple of in (often reactionary) YouTube videos and TikToks about "why modern comics suck", even years after the fact, while often pretending the characters did see the light of day. So the characters quite literally only exist as targets of hate, to the point you could say its less "beating a dead horse" than it is beating a horse that died in the womb, while insisting it's alive.
• Seasonal Rot: After Fabian Nicieza's run ended with issue #53. By editorial mandate, about half the team were abruptly dropped from the series and replaced by new characters. Notably the dropped characters included Night Thrasher, who led, founded and funded the team; also, Scarlet Spider was only added as a team member to bring the series closer to the other books under the Spider-Man editorial office at Marvel.
• Too Good to Last: The Marvel NOW series was ended after only 12 issues despite being beloved by fans and critics (though unfortunately that did not translate to sales). Even worse it was ended alongside the equally-beloved The Superior Foes of Spider-Man, meaning fans felt twice the pain.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Entire first volume of the New Warriors series is filled with cultural touch stone on 90's.
  • Many characters’ civilian costumes in the first volume had 90's Grunge aesthetics to the point of being seen as Totally Radical in its day but seen as unintentional homage to that era's fads.
  • Entire 58 and 59th issues were based on contemporary geopolitics of Middle East—though from a western perspective—with Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) being treated as the major terrorist organization in mainstream consciousness before Hamas and Hezbollah took the spotlight, Yitzhak Rabin as the then-current Prime Minister of Israel, Syria being shown as state actor before its devastation from civil war since 2011, President Assad being assumed as Hafez al-Assad instead his successor/son Bashar who assumed power in 2000, and general optimism for Oslo Peace Accords after 1993 conference.
• Wangst: A particularly infamous case, as Speedball took on the identity "Penance" and altered his suit so that he would be stabbed whenever he used his powers. Fans quickly nicknamed him Bleedball. A lot of the Marvel writers also disliked the development and went out of their way to portray him as a pathetic Emo Teen, most notably an appearance with Squirrel Girl where she keeps pointing out the flaws of his new outlook until he just yells “You don’t get it, I’m deep now! And that means I do things like this! (headbutts a brick wall)”.

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