YMMV / With Pearl and Ruby Glowing

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • A few commenters have presented the idea that, in Rapunzel's focus chapter, Gothel knew the entire time what the true purpose of the Palace was (Rapunzel having lied that it was an art club), but still allowed Rapunzel to attend meetings to make her even more afraid of men and leaving the house.
  • With how much of a known Sadist Rattlesnake Jake is in this story, it's up in the air how much he actually believed in God's Will First's mission versus how much he just wanted an excuse to rape and torture people.
  • During the Soyal holiday special, Sans makes a Captain Obvious comment about how deprived and nasty the comments on the video got. Was this him being a Troll or was it him trying to point out to everyone that they need to tone it down?
  • During the Sing chapter, it's never made clear just how okay Buster is with everything Jimmy is forcing everyone to do, leaving it up to the reader's interpretation if he's okay with it because his theater is getting funding or if he's not, but is keeping his mouth shut out of fear of losing the money as well as becoming Jimmy's next victim.
• Angst Aversion: The fanfic series is all about characters from Disney films and shows (and eventually other characters from series that are aimed at children) suffering realistic sexual abuse; ableist, homophobic, and otherwise prejudiced actions are committed violently, several Palace members are blamed for their own ordeals, and innocent people suffer while their tormentors get away with it. Needless to say, the subject matter is understandably not for everyone.
• Anvilicious: The fic, and the characters in it, spend a lot of time explaining the different ways sexual abuse can manifest, the various reasons it is committed, and the different trauma that can manifest from it. Additionally, the fic takes a strong stance against bigotry, so if a character is queer, non-white, disabled, or otherwise marginalized, they (or the narration) will make it clear how that factored into their treatment, especially in stories involving the police and the cult. While these messages are important, and the bluntness is often justified in-universe when they're explaining a new identity to other Palace members (such as Riley explaining their nonbinary gender identity), it's sometimes easy to tell when these explanations are more for the readers' sake than the in-universe audience's sake.
• Bizarro Episode: A number of chapters will mess around with the traditional format, but "Water of the Womb" stands out for every chapter so far doing something like this and for being even trippier in some places than even the standouts in previous parts. For instance, Soren and Claudia's chapter involves her talking and his Inner Monologue, and the Flim Flam brothers have a narrative that actively lies to the audience in a weird inversion of Unreliable Narrator.
• Catharsis Factor: Anytime a rapist gets what's coming to them, such as Kaa getting murdered by Mr. Bigg on a favor from Mr. Crosswire, Ricky and Vicky getting exposed, complete with Ricky getting sent to Green Lake, and the corrupt police getting reamed out by a pissed off Toph.
• Crack Fic: One of the rarer examples of crack being played dead seriously. Kind of given in that it's a fic about beloved cartoon characters suffering horrendous trauma, but it becomes stranger as the story goes on, adding in more canons and character relationships leading to things like Kate Barlow being Nick Wild's mother, Ratigan feeding Pyrrha to Felicia, Squirrel and Hedgehog characters marrying Littlest Pet Shop characters or the implication that Puss in Boots killed Francisco Franco.
• Creepy Cute: Going by some of the comments Vitani is considered this to both the readers and writers alike. She's a Creepy Child who threatens other group members with cannibalism and has a surprising amount of Pet the Dog moments, especially concerning Boo.
• Crossover Ship: Many examples, including Wallace/"Mr." Tweedy (Wilhelmina), Mrs. Tweedy/Victor Quartermaine, GIFfany/Monika and Buttercream Sunday/Geumsaegi.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • It's a little hard to read about the Drake & Josh chapter in "Water of the Womb" after Drake Bell's conviction of child endangerment and accusations of sexually assaulting a minor.
  • Boo's Friends includes a section about Nuka, and how Boo hopes she can stay friends with him even when he becomes an adult. Unfortunately, Nuka is killed before Part Four, never getting a chance to grow up at all.
  • Amity and Luz's shattered relationship become even harder to read following the series finale of The Owl House, where they both get happy endings and stay together, even four years down the road.
• Iron Woobie: Penny Polendina was born sickly and almost died, only being saved because her father donated some of his organs and stemcells, with one procedure going wrong and leaving him paralyzed as a result. As a child, she was bullied in school for her odd behavior and later for her Transgender status and, as a teenager, she was able to befriend Ruby, but was later caught in a White Fang train bombing (which she survived but damaged both arms and legs) and was then raped by one of the members. Despite all of this, she remains positive and is pretty upbeat even when she goes up on the Palace stage.
• Just Here for Godzilla: The authors seem to encourage this. Every chapter is labeled with the series it's based on so readers are free to pick and choose (though many chapters call back to others).
• Moral Event Horizon: Most of the villains cross the line by deciding to rape people. There are a few exceptions, though, such as Minty and Jubileena's unintentional abuse of Dewey and Mertle attacking Lilo, because they were all too young to know what they were doing.
  • Basil's father blaming him for Ratigan's assault.
  • Goob definitely crossed the line when he raped Wilbur in a case of Revenge by Proxy.
  • The main drama in the story concerns Darla framing Danny, but she really crossed the line years ago with the murder of her parents.
  • Several traitors invaded the Palace, actively harming the safety of the group. In fact, multiple traitors assault Mirabel and manipulate her into thinking nobody will believe her or Sherlock.
• Narm: Most of the work manages to convey the horror effectively, but the Drake & Josh story about Megan, seen in the Cat Out of the Bag and Water of the Womb stories, stands out as unintentionally funny. Most of the antagonistic characters are written with nuance, especially the children, while Megan is just a straight-up murderer who resembles her Memetic Psychopath persona more than anything, coming across as more of a joke despite the other chapters being played seriously. Water of the Womb in particular depicts her as a metaphorical monster, which includes a scene of her eating a cat in the woods — even as symbolism, it's quite an image to anybody who grew up with the show. This was rectified during Part Four, where she was given a bit more nuance and explained her side of things a bit better, making her as fleshed-out as other antagonists and bringing her character back around to Narm Charm.
• Quirky Work: "Water of the Womb" is full of trippy, format-breaking chapters that are often more difficult to parse than other sections of the work. Many sequences are dreamlike and almost comparable to an acid sequence, "The Party Crashers" literally is one and it's still not as weird as some of the other stories.
• Squick: The mere thought of Disney characters (and later characters from other child-friendly media) being sexually abused is nasty for some people, and the actual actions in-story are not graphic but it's clear enough what's going on to be horrifying.
  • While again not graphic, it is strongly implied that the actions of Glomgold's assailants in prison included forcing him to eat shit.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: In spite of one of the conflicts of Mirabel's plotline being how everyone believes her NPD makes her dangerous, the Flim Flam brothers never show up, in spite of them being aware of the fact the disorder doesn't make someone a bad person due to their experience with Trixie, which could have given Mirabel another person in her corner.
• Unexpected Character: While Max and Ruby were not out of the ordinary for this series, what is was Max being a Composite Character with the one from Sam & Max, since at that point, video game characters had yet to appear (any Pokémon characters who appeared at the time were the anime versions), and no one had been a composite of two different series yet.
  • This version of Max is specifically the one from the Adventures of Sam and Max cartoon from the 90's.
• The Woobie: Almost everyone at the Palace (and a few people who aren't) can be considered woobies in some flavor or another. Most of them are rape victims so it comes with the territory. Special mention goes to Danny who managed to become a Woobie after Darla's chapter before he even had a speaking role.

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