YMMV / Love, Death & Robots

• Adaptation Displacement: The average viewer might not even be aware almost every short is an adaptation. Furthermore, the adaptations themselves are usually from less-known works of given writers, too.
• Awesome Art: From lifelike, game console-esque graphics to highly stylized art styles reminiscent of various painters, everyone can admit the show is definitely visually appealing (and not just in reference to the Fanservice).
• Best Known for the Fanservice: A series of sci-fi animated shorts dealing with various high (and low) concepts of Speculative Fiction, along with a hefty dose of Mind Screw in them, all served in a variety of forms and styles? Nah, it's that show with lots of gratuitously nude chicks. Taken to the extreme with The Witness.
• Complete Monster: The Governor in "Good Hunting" is a vile politician with a penchant for machines. Unable to become aroused by regular human beings, the Governor decided to drug and capture Yan. Afterward, he had several surgeons operate on Yan, cutting her body to pieces all while she was still conscious. Once all of Yan's flesh was gone, the Governor had his surgeons turn her into an android, and promptly used Yan as his personal Sex Slave.
• Critical Dissonance: Critics were more mixed to positive regarding the series (with a 77% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) citing a few issues with some of the stories and criticizing the apparent misogyny in some of the shorts. Audiences, however, loved it; to the point where it's on IMDb's top 100 highest-rated shows, despite IMDb's internal scripts preventing hype from affecting their charts.
  • Volume 2 received similar dissonance with its reception, but in the opposite direction. Critics were far more positive to the second batch of episodes (with an 83% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), but audiences were far more critical (47% Fresh).
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Black Mirror fans due to both show's anthological formats and dark looks at science fiction. Plus, many saw this show served as a substitute while Black Mirror fans waited for the new season.
  • A few shorts from the first season are particularly popular among tabletop game players, due to fitting into the lore of their game of choice. In particular, Warhammer 40,000 fans got their treat with "Suits", "Lucky 13" and "Beyond the Aquila Rift" and "Swarm", while Delta Green fans enjoyed "The Secret War" and "In Vaulted Halls Entombed", the last of which even features a creature which is a dead-ringer for Cthulhu.
  • Bad Travelling was lovingly compared to Dishonored by its fanbase because of its similar art and character design, mood, and world-building elements. It also goes well with Fallen London fandom, for overlapping with its gloomy, high-sea, 19th-century-but-not setting. And lets not forget about Blades in the Dark playerbase, who are off-shots of the previous two groups.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!:
  • Some critics felt that the brief runtime of some episodes prevented them from reaching a real narrative conclusion or from fully exploring and fleshing out their central themes. And in the case of an adaptation, things can feel rushed, with often hectic pacing.
  • Volume 2 got this complaint as it only has 8 episodes and only two of them are 18 minutes long. Some however defend that the first volume took 5 years to be completed and they had to do the second volume during a pandemic.
• Nausea Fuel: The series is very gore-happy, and a lot of bloody violence happens onscreen. For example:
  • "Good Hunting" gets the entire mileage out of Robosexuals Are Creeps with just how plain creepy the Governor and his intercourse with Yan are.
  • "Lucky 13" has one of the grunts being turned into a liquid splat after being hit by a high-caliber round, splashing everyone around. It's neither played for comedy nor over-the-top horror, it just is, in a notably gore-free short.
  • "Secret War" has the soldiers rummaging through the village previously attacked by the ghouls and all the dead, frozen, half-eaten bodies are still there - and rarely in single piece.
  • "Sucker of Souls" not only has Gary blow off Dracula's nards, but gives us the loving detail of his testicles unraveling from his breached scrotum.
  • "Snow in the Desert" has Snow slowly regrowing his blown-away hand, which is out of proportion with the rest of his body and moving weirdly, while also looking like constantly oozing something.
  • "The Drowned Giant" has the giant slowly decomposing and then its body being cut into pieces, some even taken as a Creepy Souvenir.
  • "Bad Travelling" sees a bunch of bloody corpses get pulverized and the thanapod uses a half-eaten body as a speech puppet. Said body has blood oozing from the mouth and rots more and more with each appearance.
  • "In Vaulted Halls Entombed" has one poor troop survive getting eaten to a pulp by parasites only to fall apart like melting ice cream with each step.
  • "Mason's Rats" has rats getting disintegrated by laser bullets, leaving only a head which is dumped in a pile of rat heads.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The show was originally conceived as an adaptation of Heavy Metal magazine, specifically a remake of the 1981 feature film, but it fell into Development Hell for long enough that, by the time Netflix pulled it out of such, David Fincher and Tim Miller had lost the rights. Undeterred, they simply produced an original animated sci-fi anthology series heavily inspired by the magazine.
  • As a sci-fi anthology built around standalone stories that often feature twist endings and commentary on the relationship between humans and advanced technology, it can also be seen as this to its Netflix stablemate Black Mirror.
• Spoiled by the Format:
  • The title of the anthology is meaningful. While "robots" tends to just mean "sci-fi", the other parts are literal. You can expect all three elements to show up in each story, which sucks up an element of surprise from some of them.
  • Given the nature of the anthology, it's pretty much expected each episode will lead to something nasty happening or have at least a Twist Ending. At the very best the bad things are played for laughs, but they are still there.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: More photorealistic CG-animated episodes may cause that reaction in the audience. Particularly anything animated by either Blur themselves or Digic.
• Win Back the Crowd: Volume 2 was quite divisive because, "Pop Squad" notwithstanding, the episodes were significantly Lighter and Softer than the first volume and not terribly memorable. Reception of the third Volume has been much better with the episodes more in line with the first, especially with the fan-favorite episodes "Bad Travelling" and "Jibaro".

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