YMMV / Laços de Família

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Even fans who hate Camila have cried over her whole plot dealing with leukemia.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Luiza, Edu's jealous and drunk girlfriend from the first few episodes.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Many, many fans prefer to pretend that the second half of the telenovela never happened and that Edu and Helena stayed together and lived happily ever after.
• Retroactive Recognition: Juliana Paes in her first television role, in the secondary role of Alma's housekeeper, years before becoming one of Brazil's most famous actresses and having dozens of performances as protagonist and antagonist in soap operas.
• The Scrappy:
  • Many fans hate Camila for "stealing" Edu from her own mother Helena (although Helena herself has decided to break up with Edu because she realizes the love between them and does not want to prolong the pain for everyone involved). It doesn't help the fact that Helena is an infinitely more interesting character than Camila.
  • Alma also wins the hatred of many fans for all their attempts to separate Helena and Edu and especially for her hypocrisy as she is married to a younger man.
  • Iris for her obsessive and disturbing passion for Pedro and the way she harasses Camila, to the point of looking like a psychopath.
• Signature Scene: Camila, suffering from cancer, shaving her hair while crying desperately, to the sound of "Love by Grace" by Lara Fabian, is one of the most iconic scenes in the history of Brazilian soap operas, having even won parodies on Brazilian humor shows.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The iconic scene of Camila crying desperately as she shaves her hair for treatment against leukemia.
  • Helena's suffering for losing Edu's love for her own daughter.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Luiza, Edu's jealous and drunk girlfriend, with whom he breaks up because of her behavior and his feelings for Helena. The writers could have made a love triangle with more screentime between her, Edu and Helena (she doesn't even consider that Helena could have been Edu's new love interest because of the latter's age). The fact that she has a tendency to scream and Large Ham makes her a much more interesting and fun character to watch than shy and naive Camila. Unfortunately, Luiza appears in only two episodes and after her relationship with Edu ends, she never appears again. She doesn't even find out about Edu and Helena.
• Values Dissonance: Oh, boy... The whole soap opera is focused on the couple Helena and Edu. Helena is 20 years older than Edu in the plot, and their relatives and acquaintances ridicule their relationship and even cast doubt on its future. Edu ends up meeting Helena's beautiful young daughter Camila, and the two fall in love. Realizing this, Helena gives up on Edu and ends her relationship, with Edu and Camila getting married. The big problem is that the soap opera ends with the characters Pedro and Iris falling in love and getting married. Pedro is thirty years older than Iris, and for a long time he has treated her more like a daughter. So, the soap opera's message is: older women cannot date young men, but older men can marry younger women.

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