YMMV / WordGirl

• Accidental Innuendo: One episode is titled "Leslie Makes It Big" (as in Leslie pulls off her own Mr. Big-like mind control scheme while he's in prison) and in the same episode while WordGirl is demonstrating to Mr. Big what people might be saying under Leslie's control she says "Leslie is bigger than Mr. Big."
• Adorkable:
  • Becky/WordGirl fits the bill thanks to her love of vocabulary and unicorns.
  • Villainous it may be, but Tobey's crush on WordGirl can be downright endearing at times, especially when he's trying (and failing) to act cool or charming in front of her.
  • Victoria is this on her nicer days. Her attachment to her trophies and how she reacts to them are very endearing.
  • The Energy Monster (or rather, Maria) is this in "Dinner or Consequences", where she temporarily gains the ability to talk and it's revealed that she has the personality of a hyperactive fangirl.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: At least a couple of them.
  • Is Tobey faking his British accent, or is it genuine? Granted, Word of God confirms the latter is true.
  • Is Claire just justifiably angry over Tobey's actions, or is she abusive to him? The former seems more common than the latter, though.
• Angst? What Angst?: You'd think WordGirl would express more sadness over a good friend of hers who wrote the book that taught her what she knows about being a superhero (Dr. Boxleitner) turning into her arch enemy than she does.
• Archive Panic: While nowhere as extreme as certain other examples, the series has 130 episodes that are all about 26 minutes long, meaning it would take you over two days to watch the entire show in one go with no breaks. It'll take longer if you include the 30 original shorts that aired during Maya & Miguel (though thankfully, with them being shorts, they're a breeze to binge-watch) and the comic books.
• Base-Breaking Character: Tobey. About half of the fandom thinks he's cute and well-intentioned, while the other half thinks he's a creep and a stalker to WordGirl.
• Cargo Ship: Lady Redundant Woman and her prized copy machine, though considering she calls it her baby in a few episodes, she probably has more maternal than romantic feelings towards it.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Reginald- in a world that can get a bit too sweet, a snarky guy like him is a refreshing change of pace for many viewers.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Dr. Two-Brains is a mad scientist who quite literally has two brains. He also has a very interesting backstory that earned him a lot of fans.
  • Granny May embodies Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!, plus she is equipped with weapons such as knitting needles that shoot out nearly unbreakable yarn, perfume strong enough to render someone helpless, and blinding stale purse mints.
  • Miss Power can defeat opponents with nothing but cruel words, and has a snake eye underneath her bangs.
  • Tobey is a Child Prodigy who is only in fifth grade, but can create elaborate robots that can destroy the city.
• Fanfic Fuel: What's Lexicon like? What did the characters do after the show ended?
• Fandom Rivalry: The WordGirl and Ready Jet Go! fandoms have butted heads with each other, as fans of the former show think that it got cancelled for the latter show. This sentiment has since died down, though.
• Fanon Discontinuity: "Victoria is the Best... Wordgirl" for some, since it has to lower the intelligence of the characters in order for the plot to work.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Sometimes with Super Why! (another superhero literacy series) and WordWorld, as they are all literacy-based and premiered on the exact same day.
  • In its heyday, WordGirl fans often overlapped with the rest of the PBS Kids Go! lineup, most notably Wild Kratts, The Electric Company, Cyberchase, Between the Lions and Martha Speaks.
  • With the Odd Squad fandom, given that they have tons of lore and can get pretty serious. The WordGirl fandom, particularly on Tumblr, jumped ship to Odd Squad when their show ended.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • It won't be the last time Tom Kenny voices a crazed out Card-Carrying Villain who was originally a well meaning man of science until his mind got corrupted.
  • TJ and Tim Botsford were shown to be outright obsessive male fans of "The Pretty Princess and Magical Pony Power Hour" several years before My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic aired.
  • This wouldn't be the last time an animated show featured a newspaper writer named "Scoops".
  • WordGirl and an evil copy created by Lady Reduntant Woman point at each other as the real imposters. Where have we seen this before?
  • Victoria Best is a blonde-haired, prepubescent Alpha Bitch with rich Abusive Parents who constantly push her to be better than anyone else. Sounds a bit like Pacifica Northwest, huh? For bonus points, she's voiced by Kristen Schaal, who also voices Mabel—Pacifica's main rival.
  • In "The Rise of Miss Power", Miss Power takes WordGirl down into a subway during their fight, much like a certain scene in Invincible. Luckily Miss Power pulls WordGirl back out of the subway before the scene can play out the same way.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Victoria Best, who is mainly motivated by the desire to make her Abusive Parents proud.
  • It's hard not to feel bad for Tobey. He has poor social skills, is terrified of his Fantasy-Forbidding Mother, and is primarily motivated by his hopeless crush on WordGirl. Plus, he seems to be one of the few characters to realize he's Surrounded by Idiots, which is why his only friends are robots.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships:
  • WordGirl is incessantly paired up with almost all the male characters and quite a few female ones. She is basically the center point for all shippings in the show. Don't forget about the monkey!
  • Browsing through DeviantArt, Dr. Two-Brains, possibly the fan-favorite villain, can be seen shipped (both jokingly and seriously) with WordGirl/Becky, Mr. Big, Leslie, Lady Redundant Woman, Steve McClean, Glen Furlblam, Chuck, and The Butcher. Many of these ships even include Dr. Two-Brains's previous identity, Professor Steven Boxleitner.
• Memetic Mutation: "My favorite word is cracker."^note A clip where a boy named Eli says his favorite word is cracker which is often used on Twitter to take jabs at white people when they say or do something that's racially insensitive.
• Moe: WordGirl herself is very cute indeed. Her sparkly eyes and the way she plays with her Pretty Princess toys is just too cute to stand.
• Moral Event Horizon: Miss Power crosses the line in her debut movie The Rise of Miss Power. She severly curb-stomps the villains, and severly taunts them. She then teaches WordGirl to say mean words. She mocks the man who couldn't find the police station to the point where he cries, she manipulates the entire town into bullying each other, she gives WordGirl a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown when her plan for rule the Earth was discovered, and then gives her "The Reason You Suck" Speech. She even removes her star insignia. She throws Becky's mother into jail due to a disagreement that they had, and she tries to murder Dr. Two-Brains. Fortunately, WordGirl arrives just in time, and causes Miss Power to lose her power by not using mean words. She then has a Villainous Breakdown and leaves Earth.
• More Popular Spin Off: Originating as a segment attached to the end of Maya & Miguel, WordGirl ran for twice as long as the latter show and had a more sizable fandom even after its cancellation.
• Nausea Fuel: Any time Dr. Two-Brains touches, pokes, or strokes his exposed brain, which throbs and glows in response to how hungry he is.
• Nightmare Fuel: Right here.
• No Yay: Squickily enough, it's hard to escape the impression that TJ has a full-blown crush on WordGirl. While she's Happily Adopted, which makes it Not Blood Siblings, Becky doesn't find that any better.
• Periphery Demographic: It's a vocabulary-based Edutainment Show on PBS targeting six-year-olds. Plus, it's on the PBS Kids Go! block, which by default targets older children (meaning instead of six-year-olds, nine-year-olds watch it). Also, Word of God has stated that attracting a periphery demographic was entirely intentional. Its decently big adult fanbase is still a rather impressive feat.
• Popularity Polynomial: When it was airing, it was among the more popular cartoons produced by PBS, with a massive fanbase including both young children and grown adults, but after it ended in 2015, the fanbase kinda just faded into the background of the internet, still loved but not discussed much. Then suddenly in 2022, an increasing number of Youtube channels started popping up with the express purpose of posting clips from the show, which revitalized the fandom and got people discussing it again.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: "Invasion of the Bunny Lovers" made those who hated Scoops warm up to him as Scoops learns about Becky being WordGirl and finally deciding to stop exposing who she really is, showing that he is a true friend who will not risk Becky being bothered just to get a report.
• Shipping:
  • There's a lot of shipping amongst the fans of the show (mainly due to the wide range of characters). Most shippings involve WordGirl with any one of the other characters.
  • WordGirl and Tobey, WordGirl and Scoops, WordGirl and Dr. Two-Brains, WordGirl and Huggy, WordGirl and Violet, WordGirl and Victoria Best...
• Self-Fanservice:
  • A few-minute tour of the WordGirl fanart on DeviantArt is enough to notice that some artists portray her as drastically enhanced.
  • Dr. Two-Brains gets drawn as Bishounen levels of sexy.
• Ship Mates: If a fan ships WordGirl and Tobey, it might just as well be required that they also conveniently ship Scoops/Violet. Inversely, the shippers of WordGirl and anyone else are just as likely to ship Violet and Tobey.
• Spiritual Successor: The premise is similar to The Electric Company's short "Letterman" segments, and the Electric Company comics had yet another hero named WonderWord.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: One of the recurring pieces of background music, typically used in montages where villains are on a crime spree, is very similar to the riff from Pink Floyd's "Money". Another piece, used for training montages, is similar to the riff from Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger".
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The show the general has made it clear that the titular hero is an alien from the planet Lexicon, but aside from her origins being briefly explained in "Word Makes A Mistake", the show's rarely if ever, seems to bring this up. As far as we know, WordGirl's home planet was never blown up or destroyed and she never said she was the Last of Her Kind, meaning storylines could have been done relating to Lexicon, and some of the planet's residents. Maybe she's briefly visit her planet for reunion, or maybe some Lexiconians would come to Earth. Why the show never tries this is beyond anyone's guess.
  • Despite Dr. Two-Brains being WordGirl's former mentor who turned evil due to a Freak Lab Accident involving a megalomaniacal mouse, WordGirl rarely tries to view him as her ex-mentor and usually treats him like just another villain. (Angst? What Angst? covers this) You think there would be a storyline about her trying to find or even create a cure for his split personality. Even if it fails due to Status Quo Is God, is would showcase that WordGirl didn't forget about Boxleitner.
    • Or maybe Two-Brains could have changed back into Boxleitner for good in the Grand Finale, with Squeaky being disposed of.
  • "Word Makes A Mistake" has Becky/Word Girl explain her origins about being an alien from Lexicon and her adoption to her (adoptive) father and TJ... but the two of them just chalk it off as her having a serious imagination, neither of them take her story seriously, and moment is never brought up again. It would have been incredible to bring Tim and TJ Botsford into the loop and have them (and possibly even Sally) be Secret Keepers. Then WordGirl would finally be able to stop lying and hiding secrets from her adoptive family all the time. But alas, Status Quo Is God.
  • Tim is the only Botsford to never have an episode where he got tricked by Seymour in Season 2, whereas TJ got one episode and Sally received two.
  • Scoops learns Becky's secret identity in Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers, and then Violet learns it in Rhyme and Reason. How would this affect those two's dynamic? Since the latter was the final episode and we never see them interacting, we'll never know.
  • In "The Best of the Bests", Victor Best manages to steal Wordgirl's superpowers... for about a minute before Victoria tricks him and gives them back to her.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Chuck has moments of being this trope.
  • In "Big and Brent," while he was right about Mr. Big trying to take control of Brent, he himself is no better. He gets butthurt and jealous about Brent hanging out with Mr. Big when he himself doesn't want anything to do with his brother. Him constantly interrupting the two and ruining their activities doesn't help matters.
• The Woobie: Amazing Rope Guy. He's the least successful villain in the entire series and is almost always in jail. Even the other villains, a few of which fail at their crimes, think he's incompetent.

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