YMMV / The History Boys

• Base-Breaking Character: Hector. Either he's a perverted monster who preyed on his students and should have been sacked years ago, or he's a deeply tragic figure who didn't deserve to be persecuted for his urges. It's only made worse by the intentional Gray-and-Gray Morality of the situation - the boys know about Hector and treat the whole issue as a joke (and don't see it as abuse nor themselves as victims) and Hector himself refuses to include Posner (implied to be the youngest and the least emotionally stable).
• Ho Yay: Everybody/Anyone. It's set in an all-boys school and the whole class has great rapport (and are mostly Pretty Boys), so any ship floats, despite the fact only a handful of characters are explicitly gay.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Hector's funeral, where the boys sing "Bye Bye Blackbird" and Ms. Lintott monologues about what happens to each of them in the future. Crowther and Lockwood are magistrates and Akhtar is a headmaster ("pillars of a community that no longer has much use for pillars"), Timms is a junkie, Dakin is an Amoral Attorney, Rudge is a property magnate, Scripps is a journalist who still hopes to "really write" one day, and Posner is a mentally unstable recluse.
  • Hector's Heroic BSoD moment.
    WILL YOU SHUT UP ABOUT THESE EXAMS! Shut up, all of you! [crying] What made me piss my life away in this godforsaken place? There's nothing of me left.
• The Woobie: Posner. He spends half the film looking like he's about to cry.