YMMV / New Gods: Nezha Reborn (2021)

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• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: At the beginning of the movie, Li Yunxiang breaks the fourth wall as he talks to the audience while he races. Since he doesn't do this again, the moment comes across as not only confusing but also jarring.
• Common Knowledge: Despite being released shortly after Nezha, the film is not a sequel. This movie follows more closer to the original mythology where Nezha and Ao Bing are enemies and the latter does not go under a Heel–Face Turn. It's even produced by a different studio.
• Foe Yay Shipping: While the studio made it clear that they were going to tell the original Nezha myth where Ao Bing and Nezha are sworn enemies, that didn't stop fans in the least. Doesn't help that for one of the teasers, as Ao Bing is chasing down Nezha who manages to evade him at the last moment and shows him a heart sign as he flies over his car.
• Iron Woobie: Li Yunxiang. He gets his best friend's leg injured to the point it needed to be amputated, the cat he saves is killed by Ao Bing, his brother gets hospitalized after angering Ao Guang, loses his father after the hospital is once again attacked by Ao Guang's henchmen and is looked at as a monster who brings misfortune to everyone around him. Yet he still pushes himself to improve Donghai by bringing back their freshwater, very clearly loves his brother and father through his roughness and stubborn nature, and doesn’t let Nezha’s checkered past define the misfortune that happens to him no matter what he does or what he’s blamed for.]] Any other outcasted person in his shoes would have likely crossed the Despair Event Horizon.
• Magnificent Bastard: Ao Guang, Dragon King of the East Sea, leads the De Clan who controls the water supply in Donghai City. 3,000 years ago when the young and violent god Nezha rampaged across China and killed his son, the Dragon Prince Ao Bing, Ao Guang created a truce with the other Dragon Kings to force Nezha to pay for his crimes in death. Realizing his spirit was sent back into the cycle of reincarnation, Ao Guang and his allies would kill every reincarnation of Nezha that appeared, and learns the latest is hero Li Yunxiang. Using Nezha's Sky Ribbon, Ao Guang captures several river dragons and two water monsters to drain all of the water from the city's rivers and lakes to construct the Dragon Pearl, planning to use its power to usurp the Court of Heaven and establish order in a chaos-stricken universe. Mourning his son's latest death and backed into a corner, Ao Guang swallows the incomplete Dragon Pearl to fight Li, unleashing the river dragons who create a tsunami powerful enough to destroy Donghai City, forsaking his chance at godhood to try and eliminate the threat of Nezha once and for all.
• Moral Event Horizon: Ao Bing killing the cat that Li Yunxiang gave to Kasha.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Ao Bing was shown a lot in the trailers and opening scenes seem to set him up to be Yunxiang's Arch-Enemy. However, he's ultimately Advertised Extra, as he has a few fights with Yunxiang and even a One-Winged Angel form... only to be unceremoniously killed mid-way through the movie without any further hints of a possible redemption or longer lasting prominence to the movie.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The seeming reveal that the monkey-masked mentor figure training Li Yunxiang in controlling his powers from Nezha is actually not Sun Wukong but the Immortal Six-Eared Macaque who once tried to Kill and Replace Sun Wukong is a pretty brilliant subversion, playing into the film's themes of reincarnated heroes trying to be better people than their past selves and still fits the facts, since the Macaque was almost perfectly evenly-matched with the Monkey King, meaning him serving as a replacement makes all the sense in the world. After that, him just being the Monkey King after all, pretending to be the Six-Eared Macaque as part of some nebulous and confusing gambit to trick the Dragon King to no clear purpose is a bit of a letdown. Even the way these two revelations are handled reflects this, with the fake-out reveal of the Six-Eared Macaque involving a lot of dramatic close-ups and music and the later double-reveal of Sun Wukong himself being significantly more lame and perfunctory.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: If there's one thing that everyone can agree on for this movie, is that everything looks damn gorgeous, especially the fight scenes.

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