YMMV / Degrassi Junior High

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Ms. Avery is interpreted by some as being a lesbian. It doesn't help that in the episode where she was rumored to be gay, it ends with her sexuality still being ambiguous.
  • Some fans have hypothesized that Shane deliberately jumped off the bridge.
  • More recently, some fans on Reddit and Tumblr have interpreted Stephanie as having borderline personality disorder because of her behavioral patterns.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Spike has proven to be very divisive. She is loved by a lot of people, but is also widely disliked and even outright detested because of her treatment of Shane.
  • Kathleen is one of the most unlikable characters in DJH, but she also has a surprising amount of fans for her Trauma Conga Line, her friendship with the lovable Melanie, and how she Took a Level in Kindness in DH. She's also a good foil to Caitlin.
  • Joey is one of the most famous characters and still has his fans, but he also has many haters for being an egotistical Class Clown who always gets his friends in trouble, and his terrible behavior in the movie. Even if he becomes a full-on Nice Guy as an adult in The Next Generation, it's not enough for some fans to forgive him.
  • A lot of people seem to like Wheels but a lot of them hate him for what he did in School's Out and his subsequent Never My Fault attitude towards it. Even in-universe, Wheels is basically dead to Snake. Wheels does end up apologizing in The Next Generation, and patching things up with Snake at the bowling alley.
• Broken Base:
  • The lower production value of this series compared to Degrassi: The Next Generation has its fans and detractors. The detractors feel that this makes it cheesy and borderline unwatchable, while fans feel it adds to the show's appeal, and makes it feel more down-to-earth.
  • Whether it is necessary to watch to "get" Degrassi: The Next Generation. There are those who think it isn't because they feel it is largely separate, and those who think that it helps TNG fans understand the four main adults of that show.
• Common Knowledge: It is commonly pointed out that the cast wore their own clothes, but this is only partially true. A lot of the wardrobe was actually sourced from a Value Village across the road from the Playing With Time headquarters on Queen Street East, and each character had a dedicated rack of these acquired clothes on set. In addition, Pat Mastroianni and Amanda Stepto have said on separate occasions that they were instructed to wear specific outfits and colours for technical reasons.
• Cult Classic: While it is frequently overlooked in the general 80s pop culture sense, it is still regarded as such and continues to have a decent cult following.
• Designated Love Interest: Shane in the television series, due to the fact that we don't see their relationship prior to "It's Late", before the pregnancy strains it. However, both Shane's and Spike's novels both describe how it started and everything that led to Lucy's party.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Spike, evidenced by the media attention Amanda Stepto received in the late eighties.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Along with Degrassi High, a significant part of Australian Gen X nostalgia. Wheels wearing a jumper for the Footscray Bulldogs (an Australian rules football team from regional Victoria), done intentionally as a shout-out to the Australian fanbase, also helped matters.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Wheels' entire character arc starting from the death of his parents to a drunk driver in season three, and a brief moment later in the season when he refuses a drink because of this. Neil Hope had a very troubled life and a bad relationship with alcohol after the end of the show, leading to his death in 2007; while his body was found at the time, his family, castmates, nor the general public had any idea what happened until January 2012, five years later.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Snake running for school president in the first episode. By Next Generation, he is a teacher, and in that show's tenth season, ascends to principal.
  • Spike's mother runs a hair salon, and Spike occasionally comes in to sweep the floors. She is also known for her hairstyle. By Next Generation, she has bought the salon from her mother and has carved out a career as a hairdresser.
  • Caitlin's environmental and journalistic interests eventually combine in adulthood, as by Next Generation she's an established star of an environmental TV series, and later becomes a news reporter and journalist.
  • Alli and Manny in Next Generation both pulled the same clothes-switching tactic that Stephanie did.
• Ho Yay:
  • Arthur and Yick with their long running bromance.
  • Joey and Wheels.
• Informed Wrongness: Some of the morales in this show that end in the kids being wrong have ended up becoming this via Values Dissonance:
  • The Season 2 episode Censored has Caitlin's attempt to defend Spike from getting kicked out of school seem wrong, and while the way Caitlin approached the situation was indeed wrong, Both Sides Have a Point from a more modern lens: Caitlin should have consulted Spike before publicly protesting against the latter's expulsion, but the act of kicking pregnant girls out of school is either illegal or frowned upon enough to rarely occur in Western society these days, so Caitlin doesn't look that weird for sticking up for Spike now.
• Jerkass Woobie: Kathleen is a snooty Jerkass but her life is such a wreck - alcoholic mom, absentee dad, abusive boyfriend, anorexia.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Some Next Generation fans watch this solely for Spike, Snake, Joey, and Caitlin's origin stories.
• Les Yay: Voula takes Stephanie's rejection of their friendship a little too hard.
  Steph (justifying her behavior to win school president): Boys like that sort of thing!
  Voula: So do girls!
  • Caitlin's sudden crusade for Spike's right to stay in school comes off a little as repressed feelings. When Spike chews her out, you can see the heartbreak on her face.
• Memetic Badass: Rick. We only hear about his reputation as a dangerous bad boy. We never see him get into any fights. And the trouble he causes is rather minor. Especially by Season 2 when his kinder side is explored more.
• Narm: For all its groundbreaking qualities, the show very often exudes this, to the point where some fans of the newer incarnations find the show genuinely hard to get into, whether it'd be the show's age, the production values, or the acting performances (though the actors who lasted into High School certainly got better). However, there are just as many people who cite its shambolic nature as why it is great, what makes it stand out, and why it's better than later and 'better'-produced incarnations in many respects.
  • Spike, despite having many fans, is singled out often because Amanda Stepto's line delivery is very often stilted and wooden and doesn't exactly improve over time in comparison to other actors on the show. She is a common fixture of fan discussions of franchise's "worst" actors. It should be noted however that she wasn't an actress before the show, and had little interest in pursuing the career outside of the Degrassi franchise.
  • The physical fights can feel like awkward wresting and grunting.
• Never Live It Down: Spike stresses the point to Shane that he could distance himself from the pregnancy while because she is the pregnant one who is about to have an extremely obvious bump, she has to deal with this.
• No Dress Code: Stephanie's arc concerning her revealing outfits never address the fact that in the 80's in Canadian schools, items like croptops and strapless tops were decidedly not allowed, and Stephanie frequently gets away with worse. She talks about how her mom would never let her wear her sexy clothes, so she changes once she gets to school, but none of her teachers, even the stern Mr. Raditch, ever dress-code her.
• Once Original, Now Common: Pretty much everything about Degrassi Junior High stood out in the late 1980s television landscape; while not entirely unprecedented in being a show about high schoolers, it was one of the first shows to address teenage problems so directly without many of the predictable tropes present in the American media of the time (e.g. depicting teenage pregnancy without a Convenient Miscarriage), it portrayed Parents as People, and it didn't always solve problems at the end of the episode. This has led to many considering it the original Teen Drama, and it is even rumoured that Beverly Hills, 90210, which is also considered by some to be the original Teen Drama, was created in response to it. Now that it's nearly 40 years later, and the television landscape has long been inundated with "raw" and "hard-hitting" teen shows, many of whom have pushed the boundaries even further, it might be hard to see what's the big deal about it.
• Pop-Culture Isolation: Its cultural impact is largely limited to Canada, where it was a prime-time smash hit with a consistent seven-figure viewership, and to an extent Australia. While it did gain an American cult following on PBS, it had nowhere near the exposure of shows like Saved By The Bell and Beverly Hills, 90210. This is rumoured to be part of why scenes of Wheels apologizing were removed from the US version of the Degrassi: The Next Generation premiere episode, because it was thought American viewers wouldn't understand the reference.
  • This Instagram reel comparing Degrassi High and Saved By The Bell's portrayals of caffeine pill pretty much explains it with a dose of Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure, as the comment section mostly consists of American viewers perplexed at why this show they'd never heard of is being compared to Saved By The Bell.
• The Scrappy: Liz is probably the only true example of this, not just of the original generation, but in Degrassi's entire history.^explanationEven widely-hated Degrassi: The Next Generation characters such as Emma and Clare have enough fans and defenders that they're really just super controversial instead. She has gained this status for a multitude of reasons, including her dismissive attitude towards Caitlin's epilepsy because her medication was tested on animals, to her general Jerkass attitude, to her haircut, and it only gets worse in Degrassi High. While eventually in that series she gets a Freudian Excuse ^note She was sexually abused by her father as a child, many fans aren't moved by it at all because of how unforgivable her actions were.
  • Kathleen to an extent, until again her Trauma Conga Line in the next series.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Voula, an interesting character who is well-liked by fans and has a major role in several season 1 episodes (even the first two episodes of the show are about her). However, her character arc is interrupted, as she's never seen or mentioned again after the first season, and we never see her making peace with Stephanie, her best friend in the pilot.
  • Rick, a fan favorite and the first love interest to Caitlin. In season 1, there are episodes that focus on his bad home life and Hidden Depths. In season 2, he's mostly a background character who barely gets any lines except in two episodes, which introduce a potential love triangle between him, Caitlin, and Kathleen. This never goes anywhere, and Rick disappears in season 3 with no explanation, before any Relationship Upgrade with Caitlin.
  • Fans of Spike actually believe her to be an example of this; while being a frequent character with a major plotline, she basically appeared out of nowhere pregnant with little prior development and was given little to do once Emma was born, despite the fact there could have been more storylines to do with her punk fashion and how punks were negatively stereotyped in society (the job hunting B-plot in "Black And White" notwithstanding).
• Unintentional Period Piece: The producers made a point of not referencing Eighties popular culture, instead creating an entire universe full of fictional TV shows, movies, books, and music, as a way to avoid dating the show too much. However, in hindsight, the series still winds up feeling like a period piece, with some of the issues tackled, the fashions, and Mr. Raditch's mustache, putting it firmly in the late eighties.
• Unnecessary Makeover: Stephanie Kaye's trademark clothing switcheroo; she is actually very pretty without the makeup gun set to maximum.
• Values Dissonance: The way Spike's complaints of burnout are treated by Ms. Avery in "Bye-Bye, Junior High".^note In that episode, Ms. Avery tells Spike her grades were poor and that she had to go into correspondence courses. Spike...perhaps obviously...doesn't react well to this, and talks about how she is worn out and doesn't see any point anymore, leading Ms. Avery to snap and tell her "At least you can have a baby. Not all of us are that lucky, you know." Older fans think Spike was being whiny and needed put in her place, but newer fans point out that Avery weaponized her (speculated) infertility to guilt a teenage mother into continuing her education. In fact, this scene is the sole reason that Geek Girl Authority ranked the episode the lowest out of season three.
• Wangst: Wheels runs on it after his parents are killed and is the impetus of his decline.

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