YMMV / Clamp School Detectives

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Some believe Nokoru is actually aware of Akira's double life as 20 Faces and is just choosing to ignore it due to their friendship. The fact that someone as smart and analytical as him is not even a bit suspicious of Akira's behavior and absences during the Fake 20 Faces case is suspicious by itself.
• Base-Breaking Character: Idomu Yudaiji. He is either a very competent and sympathetic adversary for the detectives, or an unoriginal Evil Counterpart to Nokoru with incredibly flimsy motives.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The Chairwoman doing a random Dramatic High Perching scene in the anime's opening. This kind of act is associated to villains and superpowered characters, yet she's (seemingly) neither.
  • The anime-exclusive treasure hunt episode ends with Nokoru and the Chairwoman staring at the Tokyo skyline during the sunset, just as the episode's enigma told them to do. However, while Nokoru is looking at the Tokyo Tower, he suddenly sees a somewhat deformed (crumbled?) vision of the tower and is shocked for a brief moment before turning away and forgetting it. In ample context, it might be a premonition of the events in X1999, a manga in which an older Nokoru makes a cameo, but in the anime continuity it has virtually no meaning and is never explained (Nokoru doesn't even appear in the anime adaptation of X, which was made by a different studio and replaced him by a Suspiciously Similar Substitute).
• Die for Our Ship: Utako is generally liked for her relationship with Akira, but Nagisa is LOATHED by many Nokoru/Suoh shippers, who see her as an obstacle for the potential relationship between both.
• Ho Yay: Nokoru and Suoh. Suoh knows every detail of Nokoru's life over the previous three years. Both boys are seen as loners to those who know them well, and the people around them initially express surprise when they take interest in one another. Physically, they could almost be seen as the template for many other CLAMP pairings - The tall dark (or blue...) haired guy with the shorter blond guy - sound familiar? Retroactively, the two draw some very close comparisons to Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-'s Fay and Kurogane, right down to the scene where Suoh holds Nokoru after he's been shot. It closely mirrors the aftermath of the Eye Scream incident in the Acid Tokyo arc. There's also a Say My Name moment, although not much attention is paid to it. Add to that the massive emphasis put on telling the story of how Nokoru and Suoh became friends, compared to the nods they give to Suoh's relationship with Nagisa. And of course, there's all that stuff about Suoh and the person who will determine his destiny. Suoh is very protective of Nokoru and talks about "staying by Nokoru's side" and "choosing to follow him" in a manner that suggests Nokoru is more to him than just a friend. The anime-exclusive baseball episode has the two of them wind up extremely focused on each other.
• Narm:
  • The fact that all the girls in the school drool over the three leads can be passable (if a bit creepy) in some moments. The fact that the series shows the girls drooling over the detectives in literally every scene with them, on the other hand, not so much.
  • The decision to have the Chairwoman obscuring her face with her fan at all times can be understandable for copyright issues as mentioned in the main article, but it becomes unintentionally ridiculous when she is shown casually holding high the fan in the exact spot needed for hide her face in just every camera shot. You would think it would have been way easier to just show her from the back or using any other camera trick to avoid showing her face.
  • The Spanish dub contains a couple oddities, like the strange translation choice of not calling Akira's job the Spanish word for treasurer, but an informal expression meaning "the one who keeps the account". The honorifics are also translated very literally, meaning that, if it's admittedly a very refined school, it's really jarring to see these 90s grade-schoolers seriously calling each other "mister" and "miss".
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The conflict between Akira's identity as a master thief and his job as a CLAMP detective is barely addressed in either the manga and the anime, to the extent that his personal arc in the latter takes very twisted routes to ensure his partners never get to suspect anything of him - which leads to the question of why would CLAMP put a previously established thief character in a detective club series only to do nothing with him. A lot of people would have loved to see how the series explored this matter, as pitting the CLAMP School Detectives against 20 Faces for a battle of allegiances would ensure both drama and awesomeness. The feeling gets stronger with the mixed reception of the Idomu Yudaiji anime arc, as many believe that one focused on 20 Faces would have been a lot more powerful and appropriate to end the series.
• Toy Ship: Kinda inevitable when you have three cute and chivalrous grade-school kids out to help older women, and when you have two with canon love interests. The anime opening has hints of this too, in between Generic Cuteness.
• Values Dissonance: Nokoru's repeatedly stated "feminism" can be a bit jarring for how easily it can be seen instead as a very Victorian paternalism towards females.