YMMV / Rod Allbright Alien Adventures

• Ho Yay: Grakker and Snout share a room, become very emotional when the other gets hurt, and at one point Snout (who does have telepathic powers) mentions that he is "bonded" to Grakker and is thus able to pinpoint his location. It becomes even more obvious when one realizes that they are blatant Kirk/Spock expies. Snout himself is even colored purple!
• Jerkass Woobie: Elspeth may be a Spoiled Brat, but from the get-go she is plunged into an utterly terrifying situation, being kidnapped by a giant monster and imprisoned in Dimension X. it gets worse. While in Dimension X she and Rod experience several "reality quakes", where reality randomly shifts and people often change into weird things. After recovering from the first reality quake, Elspeth bursts out crying and says it's the worst thing that ever happened to her.
  • Later in the book, she admits that she learned her Jerkass ways from her parents (which prompts Rod to realize that he never heard her parents say anything to, or about, her).
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Aliens Ate My Homework is a great, stand-alone kids' sci-fi story with a good, solid ending. After finishing it, you might not even realize there are three more books. But those three books introduce the ultimate story arc of BKR's master plan, and add in a lot of character development and surprising revelations that manage to outshine the original story.
• Values Resonance: Tar Gibbons is a character who refuses to be identified as male or female, and corrects the protagonist when he addresses it using the wrong pronouns. All this, in a kids' novel from 1994!
• The Woobie: Rod's father ran away when he was just a kid, and his mother never recovered. He also starts out the series getting bullied at school, and it only gets more fun from there...

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