YMMV / An Inspector Calls

• Hilarious in Hindsight: A girl's suicide and the culprits who drove her to it having their dirty laundry aired, one by one? Eva had five reasons, Hannah had thirteen.
• Hollywood Homely: Sheila is pretty, but she’s insecure. She apparently has a very tall figure that has led to her struggling with her appearance.
• Iron Woobie: Good sweet lord, Eva Smith. From getting fired from two jobs simply because a) she wanted a small pay rise to have a slightly better quality of living and b) a customer was jealous of how much prettier she was - to being treated as The Mistress by an engaged man and ending up pregnant as a result of a drunken mistake. That being said, any description of her suggests she tried to get on with her life as best she could.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Sheila is the least evil of the play's characters, as her part in Eva's death was to get her fired from her second job over insecurities about her own appearance. As petty as this was, once she realises the full extent of what Eva had to go through, she's horrified. She owns her mistakes even at the end of the play, and it's clear that she's going to be affected by the event forever.
  • Eric may have been a drunken idiot and a thief to boot, but he discovers that his unborn child has just died partly as a result of his own actions. He actually did offer to marry Eva and save her reputation, and the money he stole was solely to help her on her own when she refused.
• Values Resonance:
  • The play depicts and mercilessly deconstructs the every-man-for-himself individualism of the bourgeoisie as represented by Mr. Birling, with the central Aesop being that all people are connected and that the rich and powerful must take responsibility for the impacts of their actions on others: "If mankind will not learn that lesson, then the time will come soon when he will be taught it, in fire, and blood, and anguish." Written in the 1930s and set in 1912, and still extremely resonant in Conservative-governed Britain in 2015, when 6 million people tuned in to a BBC TV film adaptation.
  • The play's attitude towards Eva's suicide is also quite resonant in a world that understands mental health struggles even more than when it was written. Eva is not Driven to Suicide by just one incident, but rather an entire life of being screwed over by a world that couldn't care less. It arguably contains the same message that modern works like 13 Reasons Why, All the Bright Places, Carrie and Heathers talk about.
  • Sheila knowingly getting Eva sacked from her employment by demanding it from her manager has become shockingly recognizable with the rise of the "Karen" meme. It's a social phenomenon of upper-middle-class customers demanding to speak to management so as to make outrageous, often untrue, claims about an employee in an attempt to get them fired. The play shows how remarkably petty someone with that attitude would need to be and how devastating loss of employment can be on their victims.

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