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YMMV / The Simpsons S8 E7 "Lisa's Date with Density"

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  • Alternative Character Interpretation: We see Homer’s auto-dialer call the Flanders several times. Is it malfunctioning, or did he somehow program it to irritate his neighborino?
  • Aluminum Christmas Trees: Skinner says his mother makes him pay for the food he ate as a child. This actually happened to author Ernest Thompson Seton whose father presented him with a bill on his 21st birthday for all his childhood expenses including the doctor delivering him.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: Plenty of people prefer the potential of Nelson and Lisa's Opposites Attract dynamic to the Milhouse/Lisa relationship that would get more emphasis later.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Lisa asks Milhouse to send Nelson a love note from her, but Nelson is led to think the note's from Milhouse himself. Cut to Milhouse being led away in a stretcher to an ambulance, with the paramedics telling Lisa that Milhouse can't hear her.note  It really stops being funny after the highly publicized rash of suicides and murders from bullying, especially anti-gay bullying. The setup of the scene is horrifyingly very similar to the murder of Lawrence King in 2008.
    • Nelson's version of "Joy to the World" (where a teacher suffers a gruesome death by the kids' hands) becomes much less funny to UK viewers in light of a teacher being stabbed to death by a student during a lesson in April 2014.
    • One poster in Nelson's room has the caption "Bomb the Arabs and take their oil," which is pretty much what the War in Iraq in 2003 was accused of being about. This idea wasn't exactly going out on a limb in the late 90s, but it still an unintentional sting.
    • Homer abusing the autodialer becomes all the more real when spambots have become more and more persistent with their virtual numbers (in an effort to trick phone number tracking embedded in smartphones) and frequency. On the flipside, it makes Wiggum's destruction of the autodialer a lot more cathartic.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: With Characterization Marches On, Lisa actually wasn't wrong about Nelson hiding a gentler side that her kindness is capable of bringing out, which kind of retroactively breaks this episode's Aesop but also turns him into a good friend and potential Love Interest for her later on. By "Sleeping With the Enemy" he'll even make up for his quip about how her "butt sticks out" (before kicking it) by helping her get back at some girls who insulted her similarly and caused her to develop disordered eating habits.
  • Ho Yay: Nelson's gang seem to get rather jealous when he began spending a lot of time with Lisa.
  • Memetic Mutation: "NOBODY LIKES MILHOUSE!"
  • Values Dissonance:
    • Jimbo says "That is so gay!" when commenting on Nelson kissing Lisa. Back in the 1990s, it didn't raise any problems. Contrast that with the 2008 "Treehouse of Horror XIX" story that had a giant pumpkin attacking the schoolkids during a Halloween dance, Nelson's line "The Grand Pumpkin is super gay!" was met with backlash from anti-gay defamation groups who set out to stop people from using the word "gay" as an insult for something considered "weak" or "stupid". Of course, in this case, the use of the word as a generic insult is part of the joke in that there is nothing less gay than a heterosexual kiss.
    • By the same token, Nelson giving Milhouse an unusually brutal walloping, necessitating an ambulance, because he thinks Milhouse sent him a love note that was actually from Lisa. This is far more likely to be seen as a Moral Event Horizon-crossing offense to a modern audience, verging on or constituting a hate crime, whereas at the time it was simply of a piece with Nelson's Bully Brutality elsewhere.
    • Marge's speech about women working hard to change men is an awfully toxic message to send to her daughter, and more widely to the audience. Fortunately, neither Lisa or the episode takes it seriously.

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