YMMV / Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain

aka: Please Dont Tell My Parents You Believe Her

• Adorkable: The Expert. In 1980, he was just a mechanic who had recently decided to call himself "the Expert." He occasionally got his hands on super-tech, but was too shy and awkward to be a real player in the community. Goodnight notes to herself that once his acne clears up and his voice stops cracking, he'll be able to pull off the "serious businessman" look very well. Apparently, she was right.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Judgment The Dreaded (an unseen but frequently mentioned character) one of the causes of the Crapsack World in the Back Story, or were his Knight Templar activities a response to that world? His victims include the ominous Mad Scientist Plague, supervillains who made perverted comments to the hero Marvelous, and Deadly Flame (who had just killed two hundred people and was about to kill dozens more when Judgment shot him). He also made a failed attempt at killing Nice Guy Bull shortly before the short story "Summer of Lob" and is said to kill anyone the cops can't catch, regardless of how evil they are. However, given how Bull was a major Blood Knight whose powers had incredible destructive potential, it is possible to read Judgment as either a murder addict or a Well-Intentioned Extremist with a "better safe than sorry" mindset toward villains who were too powerful for the cops to bring in. One of the most morally upstanding heroes of the 1970s has no hesitation in denouncing Judgment as a monster and agreeing with a proposal for Mourning Dove to kill Judgment, but Judgment isn't mentioned among the Ax-Crazy anti-heroes who try to violently stop Spider's rules from being implemented and is still alive decades later. Did Mourning Dove try to kill him and fail, or (like with the Inscrutable Machine) did she have a chance to kill Judgment but rightly or wrongly decide he was less bad than people thought?
• First Installment Wins: More than one reviewer has commented that the first book was by a wide margin the best.
• Growing the Beard: Some fans feel that, as solid as the first book is, the series really begins to pick up with either the third book (which sees the Superkids Club formed), or the fourth book (a Darker and Edgier prequel about Spider and Goodnight), due to the new characters, perspectives, and world building in them.
• Les Yay:
  • There are a few scenes where Claire is clearly trying not to look at Penny when she's changing. Penny doesn't seem to notice, and Claire's super-cuteness makes it one-sided anyway.
  • Penny makes one too many comments about how pretty Claire looks, even before Claire's powers have kicked in.
  • In Moon, Claire seems to enjoy the communal gender-segregated showers on Callisto a bit too much.
  • Henchmen:
    • Claire spends a lot of time hugging Penny, laying her head on her shoulder, and staring deeply into her eyes. Penny remains completely oblivious.
    • Cassie, likewise, uses every excuse to get close to Penny, though it's not as obvious because Penny avoids her for being a loony fan. She gets the message when Cassie kisses her, though.
    • Sue and Marcia get some, especially when Marcia's powers go haywire and Sue rushes to help her up.
    • Rage and Ruin actually get basically none, despite the fact that they live together and are raising a child together. Doesn't stop everyone from assuming they're a couple.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The Bad Doctor crosses this multiple times across Spider, but the ultimate action there may well be the revelation that not only is he responsible for kidnapping and experimenting on children he has no intention to stop and worked on Bluejay, a healer barely into her teens, which he turned into Mourning Dove. Further emphasized by making Bluejay a minor supporting character.
  • Mammon stops being a Harmless Villain when he reveals he fully intends to sacrifice Palooka Joe's wife and child. He almost succeeds too.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Marcia is an Alpha Bitch and Hero with an F in Good for the first two-and-a-half books and does nothing but cause trouble and behave insufferably. Then, she touches some magic artifacts that cause her to become an Empowered Badass Normal and a Combat Sadomasochist who is less quick to judge people and becomes one of the best-liked members of the cast in and out of universe.
• Sequelitis: While the second book is not bad by any means, taking the story into space created a very strong sense of disconnect with the events of the first book.
• Tear Jerker: In Moon, Penny's gradual descent into Heroic BSoD as it becomes ever more apparent that her presence and interference was responsible for most of the conflict in the book. It starts with this exchange between Penny and Remmy, following the disaster on Callisto, and only gets worse from there.
  Penny: Fixing things isn't my specialty, but if there's anything I can do to help, I will.
  Remmy: Why would I want help from a meat puppet?!
  Penny: I only wanted to help.
  Remmy: Like you helped everyone on Callisto? By infesting the system with the monsters YOU made, so the Puppeteers could use our weapons against us?
  Penny: I didn't want that to happen any more than you did.
  Remmy: Oh, yeah? I knew those people, Bad Penny! I lived with them after your Puppeteer masters took over Io, until Calvin and I couldn't live with the automatons' stupid, inflexible rules anymore. Do you want the names of the people I saw blasted and set on fire because of you?
  Penny: I'm sorry. If I'd known my inventions would turn on people, I'd have destroyed them myself.
  Remmy: After they fawned over you as the greatest mechanic ever, how could you not know that messing with Puppeteers would get people killed?
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: I Did NOT Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence! could have shown Penny's parents and a lot of their core peers at a low point in their lives while dealing with the Crapsack World of a pre-Spider's rules Los Angeles, but almost all of the heroes and villains to appear or get mentioned in that book (minus a few like Goodnight, Mourning Dove, Bull, Delicious, Winnow, Judgment) are new characters, few of whom are even seen or mentioned in subsequent books written in the main era.