YMMV / Alice, Girl from the Future

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Alice, for all her well-earned fan favorite status, is subject to this sometimes. Even her fans view her differently – some treat her practically with reverence as a unique near-supernatural creature who can do no wrong, some just see her as a smart and charismatic Badass Adorable (but not without some human faults). There are also less flattering interpretations of her as a Stepford Smiler who couldn't care less about her popularity and wants a quiet happy life with family and friends, or as a cynical girl who has learned that everyone forgives any exploits of hers as long as she fights for a good cause.
  • Pashka is viewed either as an adventurous, idealistic, quick-thinking boy who, for all his minor faults, is the best friend ever, or as an unbearable infantile hothead who only gets others into trouble.
  • The marriage of Alice's parents. Very little is said about it in the books, and the fans are split on whether it's a healthy and loving long-distance relationship or a deeply unhappy marriage where the spouses only stay together for their child's sake and avoid each other as much as possible.
  • There are different interpretations of the Ship Tease between Alice and Pashka. Some readers believe it's a sign the two are meant to be and it will develop into love as they grow up. Some believe it will go nowhere. The latter group is also divided: some of them think Alice friendzones Pashka who is in love with her, others are sure it's the other way round, and there are those who think they are just good friends who only sometimes feel attracted to each other thanks to puberty and have no long-standing romantic feelings for each other.
  • The pirates, thanks to the author's own inconsistencies, have a wide range of portrayals in fanfics, from friendly Lovable Rogues (sometimes with a full Heel–Face Turn not far away) who can and will happily help Alice fight a stronger evil to sadistic Complete Monsters who are bent on destroying Alice and would prefer to do it in the goriest way possible.
• Angst? What Angst?: Alice has many, many close calls with death and/or A Fate Worse Than Death, but she rarely shows any trauma from this.
• Broken Base: Being so popular and long-running, the franchise is bound to have multiple cases of it. These are only the best-known ones.
  • There are fans of the book's Alice, fans of Natalia Guseva's Alice, fans who like both and think they're one and the same, and fans who like both but say they are different.
  • The 2009 animated adaptation of Alice's Birthday. Excellent? Good enough? So Okay, It's Average? Awful?
  • Some fans are excited to see an Alice book adapted to the screen again, and some are firm in their belief that the Soviet adaptations can't be surpassed.
  • Which books (if any) suffer from Sequelitis?
  • Kir Bulychev's decision not to write about an aged-up Alice. Some love it, some don't care, and some hate the fact (especially considering, for example, the Sequel Hook for The City Without Memory).
  • The Villain Decay of Rat and Jolly U. Some fans think that they were much more impressive and believable in their iconic appearances in The Voyage of Alice or One Hundred Years Ahead, others love their Friendly Enemy interactions with Alice in the later books.
  • The Crossover with the author's own Intergalactic Police series. Some fans love the merging of the two continuities, especially Cora acting as Cool Big Sis for Alice, others say that Intergalactic Police was intended as an "adult Alice for adults", so the continuities can't mix.
  • Shipping-related. Is Pashka/Alice the One True Pairing or not? Some fans wouldn't accept the possibility of other pairings, while others don't even think Pashka and Alice are compatible.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Alice's 20th-century classmates only appear in One Hundred Years Ahead, and except for Kolya Naumov, only in the second part. They are among the most beloved characters of the franchise. Justified, since, first, there is the wildly popular adaptation, second, unlike the multitalented, superheroic kids of Alice's own time, the 6B class is more suitable as an Audience Surrogate for the readers.
  • The Three Captains play a crucial part in the plot of The Voyage of Alice but get mentioned in passing at best in the rest of the books. There are, however, heaps of fanfics featuring them.
• Fandom-Specific Plot:
  • Many fanfics have Alice and her 20th-century friends meet again, thanks to a Sequel Hook in the end of One Hundred Years Ahead.
  • There is also a prominent count of fanfics that reveal Alice's utopian future as a Crapsaccharine World.
• Fridge Brilliance: The numerous cases of Continuity Snarl are actually justified, since the stories simply take place in several highly similar parallel worlds. The existence of such worlds is confirmed as canon in the short stories Is It You, Alice? (where the crew of the Pegasus meet themselves from another world) and Alice and Alicia (where Alice and Pashka are forced to have several trips between parallel worlds, thanks to Alicia – Alice's counterpart from one of them – wishing for a butterfly from a species extinct in her universe).
• Fridge Horror: The author liked to drop subtle hints at the… not so funny things.
  • The Voyage of Alice: The Third Captain is continuously tortured for four years, and if it hadn't been for Alice hearing his groans and realizing someone else was imprisoned in the dungeon, he would have been left for dead.
  • The Secret Of the Black Stone, the fate of other children: hundreds if not thousands of them have been killed in the war already, but Alice doesn't dwell on it….
  • Also the children in The Star Dog. The Big Bad kidnaps juvenile delinquents and puts them into a school where he intends to raise them into professional criminals. The subjects in that "school" include not only pickpocketing and fighting, but also, for example, torture of animals. Moreover, at some point all children are brainwashed into blindly worshipping their "teachers".
  • For all that The War With Lilliputians is one of the most cheerful books of the series, it also happens to include the Panchenga clan. Old Panchenga keeps prominent academics captive and blackmails them with their loved ones' lives to make them work for him. Panchenga Skuliti is a pirate. Panchenga Muliti keeps the children of his relatives' captives as slaves on his plantation and treats them horribly (it's implied the elder girls are subjected to sexual abuse), and if they manage to get away (by being handed over to unsuspecting patrons), they are frightened into silence. The Panchengas' crimes disgust Rat and Jolly U (the same ones responsible for the Fridge Horror entry from The Voyage of Alice above).
  • See the separate Fridge entry for The City Without Memory: being set in a rather grim Medieval Stasis world, sometimes the novel drips Fridge Horror.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Related to Angst? What Angst? above. It's a long-running children's light sci-fi series, and Alice is the wildly popular protagonist and a Kid Hero. Can anyone (including her) believe she might die at any point at all? This gets so blatantly obvious with the growing Medium Awareness that Granny Lucretia waits to rescue her from man-eating rabbits until the last second to make it properly dramatic and Rat tells her when she attempts a Heroic Sacrifice that he won't kill her because Kir Bulychev has to write his books about somebody.
• Moe: Alice.
• Sequelitis: Even many of the most devoted fans admit that the plot and writing in the last stories seem forced in comparison to the earlier ones. Understandable, since the utopian future by itself has stopped being interesting (especially with real-life technology's rapid development in the 1990s and the 2000s), and Alice has become so Famed In-Story and gained so many friends and allies that it's hard for her to get into any real danger. The last stories usually have a historical setting or take Alice to a different world just to give her some challenge. However, the point when the decline begins and the extent to which it goes (some fans outright refuse to read the later books, some think them good, just not as brilliant as the earlier ones) are a source of debate (see Broken Base above).

---