YMMV / The Hollow

• Adorkable: Mira when she becomes dehydrated in Apocalypse. She runs around like an excited child, and it's adorable.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Midway through season 1 Adam turns down Mira's advances. Many reasons for this were put forward by fans: Was Adam leaving room for Kai, was the show trying to deconstruct the Locked in a Room, or is he simply not interested? Season 2 confirms the last one by revealing that he's gay.
  • Are Gustav's actions in Season 2 as benevolent as they appear? On the one hand, he clearly takes a risk in saving the gang by sabotaging Hollow Life and allowing them to live there in peace. On the other hand, he could've easily kept them around for their novelty as self-aware programs, something that would be quite valuable to any gaming corporation and worth keeping around to at least study.
  • The nature of Season 2's reveal gives the gang's family members a lot of leeway for interpretation, given they are not their real families but projections of what the Hollow players perceived them as in the real world. Mira's brother Miles in particular vacillates pretty significantly, as he comes off as a Big Brother Bully around Mira and a Jerk with a Heart of Gold around Kai.
  • Given season 2's reveal that Adam and Reeve were former friends who had a falling out after Reeve thought Adam wanted to throw him out of their Hollow-team, is Reeve's overly antagonistic behavior towards Kai and Adam in season 1 just Amnesiac Dissonance at it's worst or is it actually him subconsciously letting out his anger over Adam talking about replacing him and Kai having taken his place on Adam and Mira's team?
• Base-Breaking Character: Kai. While some people think him profoundly annoying and unsympathetic when compared to his teammates more level headed and nice nature, others claim that he is the only one to go through Character Development and seems to have much more depth than the relatively generic Mira and Adam.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Kai goes through some Butt-Monkey shenanigans deservedly for ignoring Adam's advice to just grab the Ishibu and save a girl which he had a crush on who left them to die earlier. He gets trapped on an iceberg and has to dive in the freezing water to recover their map after doing that.
  • After the trio stab the other kids in the back and leave them to die, the other team starts noticing the glitch and Skeet is freaking out, understandably. Mira then trips Vanessa in the mud and sets a Zerg Rush set of crows on her. Adam then tricks her into crashing into Reeve, retrieving the staff and forcing Vanessa to plead for mercy.
  • In Season 2 Kai calls out Vanessa for her behavior in the previous Season such as trying to kill him twice. After trying to say that she would never do such a thing in real life, she finally admits that it is her fault they're trapped in the game and confesses that her cheating made them all get stuck. When she confesses this to the rest of the team, they react with a collective What the Hell, Hero?, with Reeve bluntly asking why she risked her teammates' lives just to win a game.
• Crossover Ship: Adam and Benson from Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts since both of them have been open out on being gay.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The ending to season 2. After the kids convince Gustav that they have feelings and deserve to live despite being digital, he agrees to cut off Hollow Life, the simulation of their home they were placed in, from the web so they can live in peace. Season 2 ends with the kids happily reuniting with their digital families. However, where do they go from there? As previously mentioned, the kids are all digital avatars. And their families and friends in Hollow Life are based solely on their memories of them. Which, as Adam's Blank Book - moment in episode 1 has proven, can only create incomplete digital copies of their real lives at best. Will the kids ever even age? Add to that the fact that they're the only self-aware avatars in Hollow Life, which will inevitably make them outcasts sooner or later, since their parents, siblings and friends will never be able to see the world around them as they do. And on top of that, The Stinger implies that whatever Gustav did to separate them from the rest of the Hollow didn't work. How long until the gang has to fight a giant monster for their life again?
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Despite Kai's Canon interest in Mira and Vanessa, a noticeable amount of fans ship him with Adam instead. It helps that Adam is gay.
• Fanfic Fuel: Season 2 reveals that The Hollow game is a huge Roguelike. Just imagine the kind of world mash-ups that could result with each new game.
• Friendly Fandoms: Starting Season 2, there is one with another Netflix animated show, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, coming from the similarities between Adam and Benson; specifically, both being open about being gay.
• Growing the Beard: Season 2 was considered an immense improvement over season 1, which was considered generally just OK by most people's standards. Season 2 was much better received with a lot of character development all around, a more interesting and high stakes plot and getting rid of much of what fans disliked in season 1.
• Ho Yay:
  • In episode 3, the strange man seems oddly close and touchy-feely to Death, who even seems flustered about it at one point.
  • Reeve and Adam in season 2. Their interactions often make them come across as bitter exes, rather than friends who had a falling out and Kai compares their bickering to that of his parents' several times. Not helping is the fact that they get a whole lot closer after resolving their argument in episode 7, work together like a well-oiled machine and stick together for pretty much the entire remaining season.
• I Knew It!: The fact that Adam is gay was a pretty widespread fandom theory, and is confirmed early in season 2.
• So Okay, It's Average: Some people love it, some loved it but hated The Reveal, others thought it had a good premise but wasted it or were otherwise underwhelmed even without the twist, and the fact that it's aimed at younger viewers means that many consider it good for the target demographic but mediocre at best for older viewers; unless you fall into one of the extremes, the show is generally considered this. It's telling about the lukewarm reaction that the show took six months to get another season confirmed.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some people think that The Reveal was too simple an answer for the mystery aspect of the plot. While not necessarily a bad one, some people think that other explanations would have been better, especially since the series went out of its way to lampshade and joke about many other common "reveal" tropes such as It Was All Just A Dream and Dead All Along.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The new antagonistic team for Season 2 composed of Nisha, Tyler, and Iris look very realistic and highly detailed which makes them look like they came from a very different show. Especially Iris, whose head resembles an Easter Island statue.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: The costumes for the teen characters and Weirdy look tacky, particularly during the live action scenes but Mira has it the worst thanks to the neon colors she’s dressed in and an awkward layered haircut that looks like it was styled that way by mistake.

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