Arthur (animation)/WMG

Muffy is a crime-fighting superhero.
Why else is crime in Elwood City so low? Why else are her friends able to wander around town without worry? The whole spoiled, selfish, pampered weakling shtick? It's just an act. Her family gained their fortune by not-so-honest means, so Muffy needed a way to give back to the city without betraying her family as well. And her valet Bailey, unlike Alfred Pennyworth, seems entirely clueless to her secret double life as well.
 * Why Muffy in particular?
 * I disagree with your "not-so-honest parents" theory. Her parents are foster parents. She's the goddamn batman. *cue Dark Knight theme*

None of the main characters are animals.
This is just stylistic. They are all human.
 * In the episode with Ratburn's Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher sister, they had a Flash Back to a substitute teacher who mumbled everything. When Buster asked what she was saying, Arthur replied "your ears are bigger than mine", which would seem imply that Arthur is "aware" of Buster having rabbit ears.
 * Maybe he just has big ears.
 * In the episode in which the class visit a dinosaur fossil site, Mr. Ratburn explains that dinosaurs lived 60 million years before "upright mammals."
 * The latest season seem to support the theory that they are actually humans. For example a rabbit child has an aardvark mother, references to animals, a rabbit character drawing a regular rabbit and pictures that appear to be the outline of humans.
 * Don't buy it. In the episode where Buster comes back from vacation and The Singing Moose (Garfunkel) is referred to by Arthur. "Mom, there's a singing moose outside!"
 * To all the above: Medium Awareness.
 * I guess this would explain away the one you all missed "I'm made of fur, not money!", spoken by Buster after Muffy asks him for club dues.
 * I seem to recall one episode where George offends Buster and Arthur by insulting aardvarks and rabbits.

Ratburn is an Eldritch Abomination bent on causing his class eternal grief.
He is similar to Tigger.
 * He's the only one of the teachers in the school who doesn't confuse the 3rd grade curriculum with that of the preschool/kindergarten set. Knowledge is power, and power corrupts, so he is clearly up to something.
 * Yeah, it's pretty clear all Ratburn is doing is challenging his students. There's an episode when there's an academic decathlon or somesuch between the schools third grade classes, and Ratburn's thrashes the others.
 * Actually, Ratburn's old teacher shows up and thrashes Ratburn's class...
 * Ratburn's old teacher was shown to be cruel and vindictive, as was his class. Besides, it was Arthur who figured out how to pull the sword out of the stone. Ratburn is teaching his students to be more than intelligent.

DW is the Eldritch Abomination feeding off Arthur

 * Thats pretty much self explanatory.

They will make an episode of Arthur about sexuality.

 * They've done a bunch of other tough topics, from cancer to cursing.
 * Yeah, but for a show where the cast is eight?
 * There's a good chance it will only air once.
 * TiVo it, kids. Never forgets.
 * Wasn't there some episode where Arthur started to have feelings towards Francine, but then shrugs it off? It involves a square-dance event.
 * There was also a sequence (in the lice episode) where she successfully passes as a boy when hanging out in the boys' restroom after getting a haircut. I think it would be far too much to expect anything to come of those situations in tandem, though, and considering it will be two to four years before any of them even start puberty, they might simply never bring up sexual attraction beyond "the opposite sex might not be totally icky" no matter how progressive society is by the time Arthur ends. Now, this subject is getting somewhat disturbing, so I'll be over at the Brain Bleach Cafe.
 * Arthur does episodes that the average 7-year old can relate to. A seven year old can relate to bullying, having hard teachers, knowing people with diseases (asthma, allergies, cancer), etc. No seven year old is going to be having sex! Therefore Arthur isn't going to go there!!!
 * Don't underestimate seven year olds. I remember back in elementary two 4th graders were caught having sex in a bathroom. Also, on sexuality. Either relating to the LGBT somehow (an gay character appears?), sex ed, related to sexuality in a vague way, one of the characters has a crush on the same gender, etc. Plus a majority of seven year olds do have an avid interest in sex. Just go to an elementary school and hear the little bugs talk. There was a study using Google and sex, even porn, related searches were in the top five for that age group.
 * Exactly what it sounded like. You guys must not remember elementary well enough. Also, like I said, an episode vaguely based on something sexual related would be plausible. Something innocent enough to get past the radar and that a lot of kids his age experience. Maybe something about sex ed, the LGBT issues, or new feelings.
 * This troper remembers elementary pretty well and most certainly does NOT recall any classmates having something beyond the dimmest idea of what sex is. Talked a lot about kissing, sure, but sex? Hell no. Sex among students was unheard of until middle school. So yeah, rough school district maybe?
 * This troper had sex ed in elementary school, but it was near the end of the school year in fifth grade. Most of the class was eleven; a lot of the girls had started their growth spurts even. Arthur and his class are mostly eight. Huge difference. Just because some 7-year-olds type "porn" on Google doesn't mean sex is an appropriate topic for a kids' show depicting third-graders.
 * I just want to point out that This Troper went to two different schools growing up, one in the suburbs and one downtown. I went to the suburban one for grade 1-5, and there, everything was very happy and innocent. Topics like sex were hidden until you were almost graduated, sexuality was almost non-existent, and swearing was highly uncommon. Halfway into grade 5 I transferred schools to the one downtown and went there for grades 5-8. A harsh reality kinda crashed around me: there was swearing every three seconds from all grades, little kids talking about porn and sex, and sex scandals among the higher grades. I thought the idea of being "gay" was a joke until I went there. What I'm trying to say is that your mileage may vary depending on how your grew up, and that things can differ insanely depending on area or school (just ending the "what kids are like" debate). I don't think they'll do an episode on sexuality though, since kids' TV still doesn't want to admit that girl/girl and boy/boy relationships exist.
 * I kind of had an idea of what sex was (which turned out to be right) when I was seven, and I started swearing then too. I also had crushes on members of the opposite sex, and thought about the bodies of both sexes then. We had learned about stranger danger already, and I had some pretty sick thoughts. But I knew that I was a bit messed up, and I knew nobody like the seven-year-olds the OP (?) described.
 * There's a simple reason why this won't happen, Parental groups would kill it. Look what happened to the episode of Buster's spinoff series about gay parenting.
 * The episode wasn't even about gay parenting. It was about making syrup in Vermont. One of the characters just happened to have "two moms", it was only mentioned once, but people still went crazy and most stations won't air the episode. So yeah, unlikely that there will be a full-on episode about it, seeing as how the mere MENTION of gay people existing in a children's show is enough to piss people off.

For once, could we get an episode from Catherine's Point-of View, or Molly's? We have had views from the main cast (Arthur, Fraince, Binky, Brain, Muffy, Sue Ellen), we've had episodes from D.W.'s, Kate and Pal's point of views, and from a Pen Pal of Arthur's point of view. So why not have an episode= from the "older" side? Eight-year-olds aren't the only one who watch it; older kids watch it too (besides, we could at least get a glimpse of the high school).

All the named characters are being perpetually held back in school.

 * If you look at the background characters from one season to another, they change. Obviously the reason they can have so many end of the year episodes is that Arthur and his friends keep getting held back. The rest of the background characters, however, are intelligent enough to pass Ratburn's class.
 * If this is true, then why don't any of the kids age?
 * And why does Brain keep getting held back if he gets straight A's, and the best grades in the class?
 * Canonically he's been held back.

Arthur's pen pal, Adil, is a Muslim, but the episode didn't show it explicitly.
The hints are that he's from Turkey, and that there were rugs in his house (which is one of the things you need to do the five-time prayer). Also Adil's father is seen with a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taqiyah_
 * Confirmed, he mentions fasting for Ramadan in the episode where Francine is attempting her first Yom Kippur fast.
 * Isn't >90% of Turkey's population Muslim ?

Thora paid the crossing guard to scare Arthur.
D. W. was upset because was Arthur was scaring her by telling her that there were monsters under her bed and sweaters are alive. Thora decided that Arthur needed his comeuppance so she paid Ted the crossing guard to scare Arthur by telling him he had goons and that he had cameras everywhere. Thora did seem to know him pretty well. It just happened to be unfortunate that Brain was with Arthur and got scared by what Ted said as well.

Arthur takes place after The Singularity
Sometime in the past humanity left earth/uploaded into the matrix, and have left behind the "people" we see in the show, who are genetically engineered to be very similar to humans, and so have similar customs and societies. They didn't do this to all animals, so there are still birds, dogs and wild animals, etc. A splinter group of humans are attempting to escape the matrix for whatever reason, and are beaming thoughts out into Buster's brain, which he interprets as aliens.

The entire series is being told by an Unreliable Narrator
Who? Arthur himself.

Many years from now, he has written an autobiography detailing his childhood and his friends. All of the episodes were infact at different points in their lives, before and after the year of third grade (when the series seems to take place). Most of the stories are told from his perspective. Hence D.W being more bratty in some episodes or Mr.Ratburn giving homework that normally be a part of the high school curriculum. Why be unreliable? It would be dull to write what actually happened, so he embellishs it, or maybe he doesn't remember everything.
 * Cousin Catastrophe seems to support this. He warps Molly into a bully as a child, when she was simply playing around.
 * I think that the show was set up like that to connect more with the target audience. I mean, when you were a kid, there was no way in hell that you would say that you were getting, "just the right amount" of homework. In your mind, your younger siblings were always a pain in the butt, you were always given a mountain of homework, and just about everything was over exaggerated/a big deal in your mind. It's just simply telling it from a kid's perspective.

Francine is not Jewish in the books
She's made quite a few references to Santa, and has sat on Santa's lap before. Either that or she likes Santa a lot. Who can blame her?
 * Alternatively, she could just live in North America. My mother works in a daycare, owned by a Hindi woman, where most of the kids are the children of immigrants and about a quarter of the kids are Muslim or from Muslim families. And yet there's an annual Christmas party with a dude dressed up as Santa to give presents to everyone and sit the kids on his lap for a photo. A lot of kids in North America know who Santa is or have sat on his lap, whether or not they are Christian.
 * I'm going to say it's probably her not being Jewish. She's never stated to be Jewish in the books, not even hinted, and the cartoon added this years later.

All the episodes are placed randomly in the span of about one year.
Outside the two 2nd grade episodes in Season 1, all of the episodes in the show are shown in the span of roughly one year. Depending on the setting of the episode, they would either take place during the summer between 2nd grade-3rd grade, during the 3rd grade, and during the summer between 3rd grade-4th grade. Heck, one episode "The Short Quick Summer" is shown to begin with Mr. Ratburn letting them out of the last day of school, and ending on the last day of summer.

Of course this does tend to be problematic when once considers how technology seems to have advanced...

Ceberus is Arthur.
However he forgets his true identity. Arthur's Big Hit is his original personality breaking through.

The two rabbit kids in Arthur's class ARE named Alex and Maria.
Anyone longtime viewer of the show will instantly recognize the two rabbit kids that have been part of Arthur's class, and Season 13's Mac Frensky episode seems to reveal their identities. This is supported by the fact that in said episode, all classroom scenes showcase those two being the only other kids outside of the established characters.

Arthur is The Unfavorite compared to D.W.
This is the only explanation.

All the humans are extinct
The series takes place in an alternative future to where all the homo sapiens are deceased, probably from a nuclear war, and the animals that had managed to survive, were mutated in the waste, and later became super intelligent creatures. They later went to rebuild civilization. The bodies of the humans were later consumed by the evolved animals.

Fern is actually smarter than Alan.
She's pretty subtle and quiet about it, though.
 * She's shown to be pretty intelligent, such as when she shows her deductive skills in one of the few episodes that features her. She's just really shy and quiet.

A future episode will bring back the show's Harry Potter analogy
Ever since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, the show stopped having Prunella/Marina episodes focusing on their relationship linked by the HP analogy, Henry Screever. However, with the movies now done, and Pottermore on the Internet, the writers might bring it back.

Nadine is like Hanyuu from Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni
She's only seen by one character in the entire show (DW), is invisible most of the time and 'hides' whenever someone else comes along, and DW acts like she's there most of the time. She checks up on other people, maybe Nadine's responsible for most of the strange events whenever DW was there with Arthur...

Francine, Muffy, and the other anthropomorphic apes in Arthur are like the apes in Planet of the Apes
They both walk upright on two legs and have humanoid body shapes.