Broken Base: ABSOLUTELY. The third book, Emily's Quest - and how! First, there are the fans (a big chunk as well) who cannot stand that Teddy/Emily is official and Dean/Emily is not. Second, there are the Teddy/Emily fans who hate how little screen time Teddy gets as well as how there is hardly any Teddy/Emily interaction, while there is a much larger focus on Dean/Emily and Dean in general. Then there are those Teddy/Emily fans who dislike how only in the final two or so pages, their ship finally happens as well as Teddy hardly appearing in the book and getting very limited (if any) character development or screen time. And then, there are those fans who wanted much more of a focus on Emily and her writing career rather than all the romantic shenanigans - these fans also tend to want Emily to remain single.
Not to mention the fans who complain of "character decay" in terms of Ilse's character, who appears very shallow and flippant in the third book (though the signs were there since the second installment). Or the fans who hate Dean's infamous scene with Emily's manuscript. Or Emily herself, especially concerning certain fans at least, her cruel breaking off of hers and Dean's engagement and the permanent breaking of Dean's heart. Or the fact that pretty much nothing is known about Teddy or his actual personality.
And finally, there are those who complain that the writing in the third book is too vague, lacking in description and poorly written with far too much focus on melodrama, brooding and depression. Whew!
Fan-Preferred Couple: A good chunk of the fandom favours Emily/Dean over Emily/Teddy.
Emily/Perry is easily the most popular ship for the live action series, over the canon Emily/Teddy pairing. This is most likely due to Teddy being a recurring character with little story involvement, while Perry is a main character and appears in nearly every episode alongside Emily.
Moral Event Horizon: In the live action series, Cousin Isabel teams up with Laura's wicked husband to have her father committed for insanity, in a scheme where the two of them could get New Moon and leave Emily and Jimmy out in the cold. While this is standard fair for Ian, the fact that Isabel would throw her family, including her own father, under the bus for financial gain, ruins any sort of goodwill she had left with the cast. From that point on, she's firmly seen as a villain and stops receiving a sympathetic portrayal.
Nightmare Fuel: In Emily Climbs Emily is accidentally locked inside the church at night during a thunderstorm...with a madman who has mistaken her for his long dead bride.
Tear Jerker: Try getting through the first few chapters of the first book without your eyes stinging. And it doesn't stop there.
Values Dissonance: Notably appears in concordance with Cursed with Awesome: Emily occasionally shows psychic powers, which have been known to save lives and solve decades-old mysteries? Great! Except that she is ashamed and afraid of them and keeps them a secret, because of the stigma around insanity and all unexplainable phenomena in the Victorian era.
Miss Brownell's teaching methods, while they were likely considered commonplace in the Victorian era, absolutely would NOT fly in modern times. She's extremely strict to the point of being downright cruel, has no qualms about degrading Emily for her lack of education and etiquette every chance she gets, humiliates her in class, and at one point, outright slaps Emily in the face for disrupting class. Furthermore, she reads Emily's poetry in front of class in chapter 16 just to humiliate her, steals the rest of her writing from her desk, accuses her of plagiarism based on no evidence except Rhoda's word, and attempts to burn them all. Granted, Emily didn't do herself any favors by writing poetry during arithmetic lessons, but even for all those things, a modern reader would agree that Miss Brownell's actions would have gotten her fired on the spot if such a thing happened today.
The Woobie: Several characters could qualify, including young Emily and possibly Dean, but Mrs. Kent deserves special mention as a Jerkass Woobie who is in desperate need of several forms of therapy, who deliberately wrecks the happiness of people around her, but Montgomery takes plenty of time out to say, she had it rough.
