History YMMV / TheMartian

* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: Rich Purnell is intended to come across as a BunnyEarsLawyer with a quirky disregard for social norms, but instead comes across as a {{Jerkass}}. Not knowing your boss's name is arrogant enough, but his AsYouKnow demonstration about the Ares III gravitational maneuver around the Earth contrives to make it look like he considers himself to be SurroundedByIdiots... ''at NASA''.

* NotSoCrazyAnymore: Mark compares the stripped-down MAV to "launching me to space in a convertible". In [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy_test_flight February 2018]], [=SpaceX=] launched an ''actual'' convertible, a Tesla Roadster, into a solar orbit for the maiden launch of their Falcon Heavy rocket.

* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: Rich Purnell is intended to come across as a BunnyEarsLawyer with a quirky disregard for social norms, but instead comes across as a {{Jerkass}}. Not knowing your boss's name is arrogant enough, but his AsYouKnow demonstration about the Ares III gravitational maneuver around the Earth contrives to make it look like he considers himself to be SurroundedByIdiots.

* ShipsThatPassInTheNight: Mark Watney/Mindy Park has a surprisingly large following, considering that they never interacted with one another at any point (outside of Park tracking Watney’s movements with satellites.) Part of this likely stems from the fact that neither character has a canonical love interest, making it a case of PairTheSpares. However, they ''are'' both science geeks who work for NASA, so it wouldn’t be terribly implausible for them to get together.

* SciFiGhetto: Despite the positive critical reviews and commercial success, the film still fell headlong into this. It was pigeonholed into the 'Musical or Comedy' categories at the Golden Globes, and Ridley Scott even raised his eyebrows and said "comedy?" as he accepted the award. While the film ''is'' fairly light-hearted and has more than a few funny moments, it was marketed as a drama.

** The film has a fairly diverse cast with some very talented actors of color like Chiwetel Ejiofor, Donald Glover and Michael Peña. Some critics have speculated that this might have been in response to the intense backlash ''Exodus'' received over its MonochromeCasting and [[RaceLift whitewashing]].

* SciFiGhetto: Despite the positive critical reviews and commercial success, the film still fell headlong into this. It was pigeonholed into the 'Musical or Comedy' categories at the Golden Globes, and Ridley Scott even raised his eyebrows and said "comedy?" as he accepted the award. While the film ''is'' fairly light-hearted, it was marketed as a drama.

* UnfortunateImplications: A single open letter from the "Media Action Network for Asian-Americans" [[http://variety.com/2015/film/news/the-martian-white-washing-asian-american-ridley-scott-1201614155/ criticized the film for it's casting of Mindy Park and Vincent Kapoor.]] It takes specific issue that Venkat/Vincent Kapoor was an Asian-Indian character who is a Hindu in the book yet embodied by black actor Chiwetel Ejiofor and renamed Vincent. It also complains that Mindy Park is Caucasian rather than Korean-American (which is how Weir envisioned her even though her ethnicity is never defined in the book).

** The film is being seen as one for Creator/RidleyScott, after having a rather damaging DorkAge over the past few years, with negative reviews for ''Film/TheCounselor'' as well as ''Film/ExodusGodsAndKings'' and ''Film/{{Prometheus}}''.

*** The reason the crew isn't there to welcome him is because they have stuff to do as they slingshot around Mars. Also, Mark stinks to high heaven, so they don't ''want'' to be near him until he gets cleaned up. Both are ignored in the film.

* FanPreferredCouple: Several of the crewmates have spouses back on Earth, but it’s fairly common for fic writers to break up their marriages in order to pair them with other people. The fact that the aforementioned spouses never appear in the story outside of short video calls, while the crew members spend virtually every waking moment together and appear very close, probably has something to do with this. Lewis/Watney is a particularly popular pairing, despite Lewis having a husband back home; expect said husband to rapidly become an ex-husband, or be forgotten about completely.

* FriendlyFandoms: But of course, there's also the much more positive community that's happy to see so many space-set films on the (relatively) [[MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness harder end of the SF scale]] being so successful.

* FanPreferredCouple:
** Several of the crewmates have spouses back on Earth, but it’s fairly common for fic writers to break up their marriages in order to pair them with other people. The fact that the aforementioned spouses never appear in the story outside of short video calls, while the crew members spend virtually every waking moment together and appear very close, probably has something to do with this. Lewis/Watney is a particularly popular pairing, despite Lewis having a husband back home; expect said husband to rapidly become an ex-husband, or be forgotten about completely.

* UnfortunateImplications: A single open letter from the "Media Action Network for Asian-Americans" [[http://variety.com/2015/film/news/the-martian-white-washing-asian-american-ridley-scott-1201614155/ criticized the film for it's casting of Mindy Park and Vincent Kapoor.]] It takes specific issue that Venkat/Vincent Kapoor was an Asian-Indian character who is a Hindu in the book yet embodied by black actor Chiwetel Ejiofor and renamed Vincent. It also complains that Mindy Park is Caucasian rather than Korean-American (which is how Weir envisioned her even though her ethnicity is never defined in the book). Oddly, the letter completely ignores that the movie featured Benedict Wong playing Bruce NG or Eddy Ko and Chen Shu playing the CNSA executives.

** At one point Venkat promises another employee some ''Franchise/StarWars'' merchandise out of gratitude for a breakthrough and the guy says he doesn't want anything [[TakeThat that isn't from the original trilogy]], to which Venkat says "of course." This was just a couple of years before the announcement of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, which proved even more alienating to fans of the original movies than the prequel trilogy.

* FanPreferredCouple: Several of the crewmates have spouses back on Earth, but it’s fairly common for fic writers to break up their marriages in order to pair them with other people. The fact that the aforementioned spouses never appear in the story outside of short video calls, while the crew members spend virtually every waking moment together and appear very close, probably has something to do with this. Lewis/Watney is a particularly popular pairing, despite Lewis having a husband back home; expect said husband to rapidly become an ex-husband, or be forgotten about completely.

** All of Mark's crewmates to some extent but especially Commander Lewis.

* CrazyAwesome: Most of what Mark, the Ares III crew, and the people at NASA do over the course of the book qualify for this trope, but the craziest of them all was the first proposed plan to rescue Mark: The Ares IV crew, when they reached Mars, would land their [[DropPod Mars Descent Vehicle]] (MDV) near Mark's hab, pick him up, and then [[CrazyEnoughToWork use the MDV for an overland flight to the Ares IV landing site 3,200km away]]. Rockets used for overland flights on Earth are more commonly known as ''missiles'', which have a tendency of, y'know, exploding when 'landing', and these maniacs wanted to use one like they were picking Mark up from daycare. Teddy vetoes this plan immediately (partly due to the insanity, partly because Mark would need to survive 4 years for Ares IV to reach him), which bums out the [[HotBlooded Ares IV astronauts]] and [[MadScientist JPL techies]] (though he does tell them to keep working on it and find a way to subtract some of the crazy).