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  • Abandon Shipping: Ludovica and Fiore. While their relationship was always toxic (since he is her pimp), many fans liked them in season 1, when Fiore was more of an Anti-Villain who genuinely cared for Ludovica. However, in season 2 and 3, Fiore becomes more villainous and the show makes it clear that there's nothing positive about their relationship.
  • Base-Breaking Character: Brando is a big one. He he has fans who find him cute, understandable, and ship him with Fabio (it helps that his actor already had several Italian fangirls due to his previous role in the series Braccialetti Rossi) , while other fans despise how unrepetant he often is about completely destroying the reputations of his former victims as well as some things that are unforgiveable namely extorting than later assaulting Chiara that they find him an Unintentionally Unsympathetic portrait of an Armored Closet Gay.
  • Die for Our Ship: Anyone who gets in the way of the Fan-Preferred Couple Chiara/Niccolò, including Damiano, Virginia, and Monica. Some viewers even give Damiano a mild Ron the Death Eater treatment (in contrast to Niccolò's Draco in Leather Pants), since he was supposed to be Chiara's main Love Interest in the first two seasons, but fans only wanted her to end up with the more conventionally attractive Niccolò.
  • Do Not Do This Cool Thing: The show, as noted below, has been controversial for it's fictionalized depicition of the real-life prostitution scandal. Even if it clearly shows it all in a negative light, the stylized and glamorous depiction of their lives as a prostitutes and how they often talk about it as a positive means of escape from unhappy real-world drama, as well as downplaying some of the much more grave traps they can fall into as vulnerable minors (including possibly being internationally trafficked) for some it only re-inforced the negative feelings about it's existience in the first place.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Fans have loved Niccolò for a long time and shipped him with Chiara early on. That's despite the fact that in the first two seasons he has almost no reedeming qualities: he's the Spoiled Brat Big Jerk on Campus who cheats on his girlfriend with many girls, acts like a possessive Crazy Jealous Guy to Chiara and frequently berates her, vandalizes the headmaster's office while letting Damiano take the blame, bullies unpopular students, harasses prostitutes for fun and is often aggressively homophobic and racist to boot... but fans are willing to overlook all of this because he's played by a very handsome actor, and which may be the main reason he got some seriously positive Character Development near the end of the series.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: Chiara and Niccolò are this since the beginning. Even in season 1, when the plot is all about Chiara and Damiano falling in love with each other, while Niccolò is portrayed as a Jerkass and a Romantic False Lead. This is possibly the reason why Niccolò gets much nicer and more geniunely helpful to Chiara in later episodes, and the last season ends with with a Maybe Ever After and Ship Tease between Niccolò and Chiara, after her breakup with Damiano.
  • Friendly Fandoms: With Elite (2018).
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Both Brando Pacitto (Fabio) and Mirko Trovato (Brando) previously starred in another Italian series Braccialetti Rossi. In both series, Pacitto plays a nice character and Trovato plays a rude one. The difference? In this show, they also play a gay couple.
  • Ho Yay: Damiano and Fabio’s friendship, especially in season 1 when they had their bromance moment.
  • Jerkass Woobie:
    • Brando is one of the most openly cruel students at Collodi school. While this doesn't justify all the horrible things he does, he doesn't have the best life. He's deeply in the closet, but he's too afraid to come out due to his homophobic friends and Jerkass father. He gets better.
    • Virginia is an Alpha Bitch and a manipulative Clingy Jealous Girl, but she is desperately in love with a guy who constantly cheats on her, is Prone to Tears, and clearly scared of losing him, which eventually happens. And since she's only a Satellite Character, she never has the opportunity to get better.
    • Ludovica's mother may be irresponsible and even neglectful but she genuinely loves her daughter, and tries to improve her behavior. At the end, she ends up in jail for not trying to stop her teenage daughter from prostitution, so you can feel a bit sorry for her. On the other hand, her real life counterpart was far worse.
  • Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: One of the most hated characters is Camilla, who is introduced as a judgmental but well-meaning girl who later Took a Level in Jerkass after being betrayed and abandoned by the people she cared about (including her best friend). Camilla's brother Niccolò is a villain in the first half of the show, being cruel to everyone just because he can, but he's a fan favorite simply because he's "the hottest guy" and "in love with Chiara". In the infamous bathroom scene, Niccolò was cruelly bullying Fabio along with his friends, while Camilla was just a bystander who didn't even try to defend Fabio: all the comments about that scene are "Camilla sucks! I will never forgive her for that", but not a single criticism about Niccolò, who was the real villain in that scene.
  • Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Chiara gets shipped with Damiano (her main Love Interest), Niccolò (who has his own Ship Tease with Chiara), and Ludovica (the other protagonist who has a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship with her). All three ships have many fans, though Chiara/Niccolò is easily the most popular and seemingly wins at the end of the show.
  • Les Yay: You have to admit it, Chiara and Ludo's friendships seems to be more than that, it feels like they're a platonic couple.
  • No Yay:
    • Almost all the viewers cringe when Niccolò hooks up with Monica, considering that he's a minor and she's a married adult woman. Ludovica/Fiore is an even more inappropriate relationship but they have some fans who ship them, while everyone hates the Niccolò/Monica scenes.
    • Some viewers think some of the Camilla and Niccolò scenes are creepy and almost Brother–Sister Incest, especially in the one where they are cuddling in bed. However, there's no real subtext between them, and for Europeans it's more normal to show physical affection to family members, even siblings.
  • Overshadowed by Controversy: The series has been criticized for "glamorizing teenage prostitution" ever since its announcement.
  • Ron the Death Eater: Damiano got hit with the Designated Villain tag in season 3, which again likely has a lot to do with the reasons mentioned above, mainly in those who blamed him for getting Chiara and Ludovica publicly outed despite the PI leading him to believe he could safely get them out of Fiore's control by helping them spy on his secret apartment without it going public... while they explicitly don't tell him when they use the photographic evidence to extort Chiara's parents, which is what sets off the chain of events to Ludovica and eventually Chiara's involvment in the prostitution ring going public. He still takes flak for that, despite it him being naive rather than intentionally malicious.
  • The Scrappy:
    • Camila was unpleased by fans for her behavior such as being fake, careless, childish, and overall cruel, especially in season 2. Even less vocal detractors thought she lost all of what made her at least somewhat interesting (including her sometimes-tense close friendship with Chiara in Season 1), and even wondered why she was brought back after her early absence in Season 2 (studying abroad) in the first place.
    • Chiara's Mother was more sympathetic early on with her Awful Wedded Life and still being a caring mother to Chiara, but by season 3 her sudden It's All About Me political aspirations turned many more viewers off and lost nearly all good will after she sold out Ludovica to be publicly outed as a prostitute to save her family's reputation.
  • Seasonal Rot: Season 3 got more divisive, a lot of it having to do with the writing especially in regards to how it treated some of the cast, with some more contrived plot-lines as well as characters who became either too inconsistient in their motivations or seemed to be rewritten entirely for the third season (Camilla and Chiara's mother (as well as some would say Chiara herself) definitely suffered from this).
  • Squick: Much of the sex in the show intentionally evokes this, considering a majority of it is older clients soliciting underage prostitutes. More controversial, though, is Niccolò's and Monica's affair.
  • Strangled by the Red String: The last season introduces a new girl named Aurora who has the only purpose of being paired with Damiano. This was probably done to make it even more clear that Damiano and Chiara will never get back together as permanently Star-Crossed Lovers, and Chiara may have her Maybe Ever After with the fan-favorite Niccolò.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: In season 1, Camilla starts out as Chiara's best friend, who is flawed but not a completely negative character, and has a prominent role. In the following seasons, she's much more Out of Focus, her personality is inconsistent in her very few scenes, and doesn't even get a closure like the other protagonists. She's not even in the final.
  • The Woobie: Chiara and Ludovica are portrayed as unhappy and vulnerable teenagers who want to escape their normal lives, and are manipulated into prostituting themselves. Even sadder is that they are based on real people.
    • Ludovica comes from a poor family, is ostracized at school, and lives with her unstable single mother. Over the course of the show, she's sexually molested and almost raped by one of her pimps Saverio and is manipulated by her other pimp Fiore, who is dangerously obsessed with her to the point that he pays one of Ludovica's clients to stalk her and terrorize her. After she finally learns to be happy with herself and decides to quit prostitution, the truth about her former double life is revealed at school. Her mother, who had recently started to become closer to Ludovica, ends up in jail for being a Secret-Keeper, and Ludovica is no longer able to see her best friend Chiara.
    • Chiara has some issues as a Stepford Smiler with neglectful parents during a marriage crisis. Her double life as a prostitute constantly causes her trouble with her boyfriend Damiano, who ends up breaking up with her at the end of the show. After one of her classmates films her while she's having sex with a client, he starts blackmailing Chiara and forces her to be his girlfriend, even to point of raping her. When the truth about her double life is revealed, she ends up alone in a group home and loses almost all her friends, including Ludovica.
    • Damiano. His mother recently died, has trouble fitting in at the new school, he suffers some racism for being half Arabic, is blamed for things he didn't do, and when he tries to help other people (Ludovica, Natalia), he gets in even more trouble. And after finding out that his girlfriend Chiara has a secret life as a prostitute, he's devastated.
    • Fabio, due to being the target of homophobic jerks in his school. In the infamous bathroom scene, you can even see him crying after being cruelly humiliated by a Gang of Bullies.

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