YMMV / Marco Polo

• Critical Dissonance: Viewers tend to have much more positive views of the show than professional critics, who have given it scathingly bad reviews. On Rotten Tomato, the difference between the critic's score and the audience's score is a whopping 63%^note 30% and 93%, respectively.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Mei Lin is often pointed out as having by far the show's best character arc, with a great performance to match.
  • Hundred Eyes is also loved, for basically being the biggest badass on the show.
  • Michelle Yeoh's enigmatic Song loyalist who goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the Mongols in Season 2, and is the only person who provides an equal match to Hundred Eyes.
• Growing the Beard: Season 2 is quite an improvement on the first, with a more interesting Morality Kitchen Sink lacking any simplistic evil villain like Jia Sidao, and Marco himself actually getting to do something besides be a passive Token White observer.
• Ho Yay: Jingim toward Marco. There's a scene where Jingim skips having sex with his wife because he's thinking of Marco (It Makes Sense in Context).
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The fact that there was enough of a market for a child prostitute that Mei Lin was able to make a living for herself and Sidao by whoring herself out.
  • The Mongols create the pitch for flaming projectiles by butchering thousands of screaming prisoners and rendering their body parts in a giant cauldron.
• One-Scene Wonder: Gabriel Byrne as Pope Gregory X, Badass Pacifist nemesis to Kublai.
• Rooting for the Empire: Within the Marco Polo fandom, you might actually find people (albeit quite a minority) who are actually rooting for Jia Sidao to eventually prevail over the Mongols (historicity be damned), if only because despite his very large character flaws and ambition, he is still ultimately trying to keep Song China independent of Kublai's imperialist designs. The fact that he subverts being a Sissy Villain into actually being Rank Scales with Asskicking helps him a bit, lasting long enough against series-wide badass Hundred Eyes—both times they fought.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: A very common view is that if you can muscle through the rather dull first four episodes, the rest is worth it.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus is that it's fun to watch, but not particularly groundbreaking except that it has an almost all-Asian cast.
• Tear Jerker: The Death of Zhaoxing also qualifies. He's just a scared little boy who doesn't want to die, and Kublai clearly feels like shit.
  • Yusuf's death
• Vanilla Protagonist: How some fans see Marco. Some have said that the show should have been called "Kublai Khan".

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