YMMV / Princess Academy

• Jerkass Woobie: Katar is nasty, haughty, and selfish, but her mother died giving birth to her and her father blames her for it and hates her in effect, she never had a single friend for the first eighteen years of her life, and she loses what she sees to be her only chance of getting out of her miserable life on Eskel being taken away when she loses out on being academy princess.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The members of the Salon cross it when they contribute money to hire an assassin to kill Britta, to start the revolution. Using Miri's school papers to start dissent was one thing, but they were going to sacrifice an Unwitting Pawn that happened to be Miri's best friend. Needless to say, she severs ties with them.
  • Liana as well for her part in betraying Britta.
  • The chief delegate crossed it long ago when he ordered Queen Sabet's daughters taken from her and raised far away, claiming it was to prevent another civil war.
• Strawman Has a Point: In Palace of Stone, Miri confronts Liana for betraying Britta and threatens to tattle if betrayal happens again. Liana points out that Britta knew what it was like to live in the lap of luxury and didn't tell the girls of Mount Eskel, though she then does herself in by claiming that Britta wanted Steffan for herself. Miri claims that Britta didn't have such intentions, and Britta was in a bad position to say such a thing, but it's hard to ignore Liana's point, especially when the king could cause Mount Eskel to starve.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Written in the early 2000s, the original book's treatment of child marriage (potentially including girls as young as 13) as unobjectionable would likely face harsher scrutiny had it been published a couple of decades later. The princess candidates are more concerned with marriage taking them away from their homeland than with the possibility that they are too young for marriage, and Olana's use of Corporal Punishment is treated as worse than the fact that she's grooming children for marriage.
  • The original book has been negatively reviewed as teaching inappropriate values to children when it allows the girls to get away with cheating on their final exam.