YMMV / Are You Afraid Of The Dark Season 2 The Tale Of The Final Wish

• Esoteric Happy Ending: Jill comes away from her experience learning the lesson that it's time for her to grow up, but at the beginning of the episode, Kristen states that the problem was that Jill doesn't know what being grown up means. And no wonder because she has been trying to follow two different interpretations of grown up: her mother's more reasonable version in that she should be more responsible and independent, and her peers' version that she should give up fairy tales, fawn over boys, and avoid saying outdated phrases. Her attempts to correct her habits might lead her to following her friends' example of grown up could lead her to adopting the vapid behavior of the girls who embarrassed her. Though at least her mother doesn't demand that she change completely.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Considering the popularity of darker fairy tale retellings nowadays, it seems Kristen succeeded in her wish to make people appreciate them more.
• Informed Wrongness: Loving fairy tales is a sign of immaturity? Except Jill making her mother late for work or having nightmares has nothing to do with that. The nightmares are in fact real, since her brother is going out of her way to scare her. Possibly this is the Intended Audience Reaction, since Kristen is telling the story to convince Frank to change his mind about fairy tales.
  • Jill's mother is mostly concerned because (she thinks) Jill stays up all night reading fairy tales instead of sleeping, and that's what makes her chronically late in the morning. As she later implies with her heartwarming advice for Jill not to give up her youth completely, she doesn't want Jill to give up fairy tales so much as she wants Jill to get enough sleep and get up at a reasonable time. Her brother and the girls at school are just jerks.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: The Sandman is the episode's antagonist, but Jill's tormentors are far more loathed. First of all, we have her bullying brother who goes to extremes to terrify her (including hiding under her bed while she's asleep). Then we have her apathetic parents who tell Jill she's too immature, while doing nothing to reign in that rotten son of theirs. And finally there's Jill's two 'friends' who try to embarrass her out of jealousy that the boy they liked talked to her instead.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Evil Queen that offers the poisoned apple in Jill's nightmare has barely a minute of screen time, but her Nightmare Face is a really effective scare, and she arguably could have made a good antagonist in her own right.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some of the fairy tales mentioned in the wraparound segments sound quite interesting for stories in their own right (an old woman framing the queen for murdering her own son!) and despite Kristen's insistence on how they can be very dark - the episode's plot itself is not that heavy on Grimmification. Granted, some of the stuff mentioned by the Midnight Society probably wouldn't be able to make it to air.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Frank is meant to represent the Audience Surrogate in the early 90s - where the best known fairy tales were the Disney versions (and the emerging Disneyesque knockoffs). Dark Fantasy had existed in the 80s but it was very much an underground thing that was considered only for nerds and losers. But starting in The New '10s, revisionist fairy tales and Grimmification became mainstream.
• Values Dissonance: The 90s had parents more lax about dealing with bullying siblings, and instead of correcting the bully, they would often advise the victim not the be so sensitive, with the idea that if the bullied sibling stops getting upset over it, the bullying will stop. While people today rightfully see Jill's parents as neglectful, their attitude about it was pretty normal in their time.
• The Woobie: Poor Jill - a girl who's bullied by her brother, has really rude friends and finds comfort in fairy tales...only to have literally everyone around her demonize her coping mechanism.