YMMV / The Path

The Video Game

• Awesome Music: This song made by a fan excellently summarizes the feel of the game.
  • "Girl in Red" from the game itself.
  • "Fey Wolf" also has a haunting beauty to it.
• Bizarro Episode: Rose's route. The others are surreal, but Rose's turns it up a notch.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Most of the fan art for the game seems to be pairing up the girls with the human wolves. Carmen's is especially prettified, no longer appearing to be middle aged, bald, and frequently seems to get a Race Lift.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Ruby's wolf is a stand out favourite in the fanbase, being subject to a series of ship art and cosplays.
  • In recent years, Ginger's wolf, due to the rising popularity in the headcanoning of Ginger's sexuality and the true nature of their relationship.
• Epileptic Trees: Loads; this game is an epileptic orchard.
  • Reviewers describe the meaning behind the game as being as subjective as a puzzle of the night sky with nothing but perfectly square pieces. The creators are amused by all the wild interpretations, and have stated, "What you see in the game seems to speak more about yourself than the game."
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: One interpretation is that the Girl in White symbolizes Jesus (white, blood etc), the forest is Purgatory, and Grandmother's house is Hell.
• Everyone Is Satan in Hell: One review savaged this game for its false sense of choice (if you go off the path, terrible things happen... but if you don't, nothing happens) and the therefore (supposedly) implied lesson that women can't deviate from the straight and narrow in life without suffering terrible consequences.
• Event-Obscuring Camera: Normally, the camera follows you from behind, but at certain parts in the forest, the camera will jump to a fixed point, changing the controls from "forward is where the camera faces" to "forward is where the girl is facing". Also, when you run for a few seconds, the camera pans back, giving you a limited view of what's ahead.
• Fan Nickname: "Sephiroth" for Scarlet's wolf.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The girls appear to be very popular with Japanese online artists, which may be due to the fact that they were explicitly inspired by the work of Japanese artist Fuco Ueda. There's also a large and active fanbase in Russia.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: It's a game based off of Little Red Riding Hood and there are two characters named Ruby and Rose. Insert RWBY reference here.
• Les Yay:
  • Ginger and her wolf.
  • In Carmen's livejournal she states that if she were a man, and if Ruby wasn't related to her, she could see herself "liking" Ruby.
• LGBT Fanbase: Of all the sisters, Ginger has one. Her discomfort with the idea of growing up into being a woman, her possibly romantic encounter with her wolf, a girl her age she seems to take a liking to, and her overall rejection of feminine gender norms have all led to many queer audiences relating very strongly to her. Of all the sisters, she is by far the most likely to be headcanoned as gay, transgender, or both.
• Narm: Given the general tone of the game it's hard to take Robin's wolf seriously when she starts riding on top of it like a pony.
  • Overall, the normal endings where each sister safely gets to Grandmother's house and sits in bed with her is heartwarming. Unfortunately, the way Ginger sits on the bed makes it look like she's putting her hand right on her grandma's crotch.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Again, Grandma's house, especially after encountering a wolf.
  • "The Forest Theme" is spooky, but not spookier than the rest of the soundtrack. Then you get to the last minute...
  • The sisters each encountering their own wolf can very easily cross into nightmarish situations. In particular, Robin's, a wild beast that she is too curious to not go near and thus ends up attacking her, Scarlet's, who seems possibly set on grooming Scarlet under the guise of mentoring her with piano playing and Carmen's, an older man who, in Carmen's walk through Grandma's House, is heavily implied to have raped her.
• No Yay: This post of Carmen's, stating boys Carmen's age (17) or even men, prefer Ruby (15) and Rose (11) to her, and that if Carmen was a boy and she wasn't related to her, she would be interested in dating her.
• Paranoia Fuel: From a gameplay standpoint. Despite some references to the wolves possibly attacking you at any moment, they only appear in a specific area for each girl, but, if you don't know where they are...
• Quicksand Box:
  • Though relatively small, it's incredibly easy to get completely lost in the woods and find yourself wandering aimlessly for ages if you try to get back on the path.
  • The map loops in hard to understand ways. For example, Two Best Friends Play found the graveyard, then walked in a straight line away from it. They found it again three more times, even though conciously trying to avoid it.
• Self-Fanservice: All the wolves get this to one extent or another, but Carmen's seems especially prone to it.
• Squick: When the Werewolf walks around, if you look closely, you can see patches of fur falling off him. It still happens after Robin jumps on his back.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Scarlet's wolf.

The Television series

• Retroactive Recognition: It's nice to know that Creb seems to have reincarnated as another spiritually gifted and kindhearted elder in the Meyerists. Both Creb and Kodiak were played by James Remar.
• The Woobie: Sara's brother Russell, husband of Nicole, is somewhere between this, a Bumbling Sidekick (for Cal) and a Straw Loser. When Sara asks him to keep an eye on Cal during a building auction, Russ tries but fails to stop Cal from bidding way over budget. (Sara doesn't quite say "You had one job...!!" but comes close.) Nicole herself treats him this way, but also knows he's good with children, excellent at cheering on the novices and giving Rousing Speech es, and a faithful worker whose exemplary steadfastness has gone unnoticed. She points this out to Cal, who invites Russell to train for 8R, making him a "Higher Rung" devotee and eligible to vote on important decisions. In later episodes he's more of a misogynist Jerkass Woobie and Yes-Man toward Cal. He begins Slowly Slipping Into Evil with his ambition to be an enforcer of "law and order". He ends season 2 likely crossing the Moral Event Horizon (making him downright Affably Evil) if he's the one who tried to kill his own sister in her car. (He wasn't.)
• Write What You Know: Lilith Asan, who as a teen saw the original visions that became Meyerism, has melanoma in her left eye. She has the eye removed, but the cancer returns and metastasizes. This actually happened to Jessica Goldberg's father.

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