Tick, tick... BOOM! (theatre)/YMMV

These things about  are subjective - not everyone will agree with all of them.

Tropes For The Original Play And One-Man Monologue

 * Harsher in Hindsight:
 * Jon mentions that he hears a constant tick in his head, the sense of living on borrowed time. This comes verbatim from the original script. Jonathan Larson in 1995 would suffer a massive aortic rupture, and it was revealed he had Marfan's Syndrome. Welp...
 * Both Michael and John assume that.
 * Heartwarming in Hindsight: Michael reveals to Jon that
 * Retroactive Recognition: Roger Bart, who would later win a Tony for playing Snoopy in You're A Good Man Charlie Brown and play Carmen Gia in The Producers, served as Jon's number two during the original Tick Tick boom monologue.
 * Values Dissonance: Jon maintains that getting a corporate job would be selling out, even for something that suits his passion like writing jingles. Michael convinces him not to give up his composing dreams when admitting that sometimes his job feels meaningless in the face of missing art. You can also see this attitude in Rent. The 2021 movie updates this so that Michael is completely in the right to yell at Jon for the privilege that he flaunts around while acting like a gay Hispanic man has access to the same opportunities. Later, when he encourages Jon to not give up, it's because.

Tropes For The 2021 Film

 * Genius Bonus: People in the film critique Superbia for being too confusing; a Jerkass composer in an earlier workshop tells Jon that the musical doesn't know the story or genre it wants to tell. Even in the present workshop, the actors are confused if there are "aliens" and Rosa says tastefully that the story is too "arty" and expensive for Broadway when no investor shows interest in the musical. When Waiting in the Wings covered Superbia and its different iterations, using the book Boho Days as a source, the points of critique are legitimate. The story is confusing and set on another planet that's not Earth, with cyborgs as main characters. View the annotations here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwCfP3BhFps
 * Harsher in Hindsight: Stephen Sondheim makes a cameo by voice with recording a message for Jon at the end of the movie; that's the real man, not Bradley Whitford, at the end of the machine. Sondheim would pass away a short time after the movie premiered on Netflix. For a musical about creating on borrowed time, that's quite poignant.