Star Wars: The Force Awakens/YMMV


 * Base Breaker: Rey. It's impossible to find any sort of middle ground on her, and as the years have passed she has become one of, if not the most divisive character to date. For this movie in particular, she has fans split into two camps: those who hate her for being too "perfect" and are of the opinion that she should not be as insanely skilled as she is as a pilot, duelist, and force wielder. The other camp defends her by saying that the whole point of her character is that she's an enigma, and that all her skills are likely to be justified once more of her backstory is unearthed. Once that did happen in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the divide grew bigger than ever.
 * Contested Sequel: Not many people think it's an outright bad film, but its quality is hotly contested. Fans view it as a great return to form after the prequels alienated a lot of long-time Star Wars nuts, while critics lambasted it for being too similar to A New Hope and praise the prequels for trying something different. Not helping matters is that as time passed, the prequels started getting Vindicated By History while the divisive sequels that follwed led to this movie being looked at under heavier scrutiny.
 * Ensemble Darkhorse: The hot-blooded baton-wielding Stormtrooper who screams "TRAITOR!" at Finn became insanely popular overnight, and he's a rank-and-file Stormtrooper who looks no different than any other of his brethren. This is thanks to both his hammy tendencies mentioned above as well as his fight scene with Finn, where he took on a man wielding a lightsaber and nearly won.
 * Evil Is Cool: Much like his grandfather, Kylo Ren became an icon thanks to his unique lightsaber, awesome voice, kickass armor, and strength in the force.
 * Fanon Discontinuity: Attracting this kind of response was unavoidable since it overrides Return of the Jedi's triumphant ending, but detractors especially hate how Han and Leia's relationship has fallen apart with Han falling back into smuggling once again. It certainly plays into a lot of detractor's wishes for the sequel trilogy to be de-canonized, though it's nothing compared to certain events that would transpire in episodes 8 and 9...
 * Franchise Original Sin: Some criticized the casting of black actress Lupita Nyong'o as Little Orange Woman Maz Kanata, as she is one of the few women of colour in the franchise and they used a Motion Capture technique to portray the character. However, black women have usually been cast in the role of aliens in the Star Wars Franchise, including Femi Taylor as Twi'lek Dancer Oola in Return of the Jedi, Gin Clarke and Lily Nyamwasa as Tholothians Adi Gallia and Stass Allie in the Prequels. But these alien characters in the older films were much more minor characters, and were also portrayed by actresses in prosthetics and makeup rather than in CGI. Maz is just the first main character to be an alien portrayed by a black woman.
 * It's the Same, Now It Sucks: One of the biggest criticisms is that this movie feels like a scene-for-scene retread of A New Hope. The Empire/First Order is searching for a cute beeping Droid who has information that they can't afford to let fall the Rebel Alliance/Resistance's hands, the main character lives on a crappy desert planet before they get swept up into the main conflict, Han Solo gets them off said crappy desert planet, the heroes are pitted against a giant spherical planet-killing weapon, and the elderly mentor character dies on the station at the hands of the black armored villain he has a history with. Later movies would make sure to shake things up, but that opened up its own can of worms.
 * It Was His Sled:
 * Mary Sue: Rey is considered one by a great number of fans, mainly because she gives off the impression of a very poorly-written character whose every defining moment seems like an Ass Pull. She has access to the Force without having ever trained, operates and fixes the Millennium Falcon better than Han Solo, and effortlessly defeats a much more skilled and experienced Kylo Ren in their first battle.
 * Member Berries: Practically the trope codifier due to being the butt of the jokes in the South Park episode that is the trope namer.
 * It matches the visual style of the old trilogy much more closely than the prequel trilogy did despite more time passing between the OT and Episode VII than between the OT and PT.
 * It features as many actors as possible from the OT reprising much older versions of their characters, but in supporting rather than leading roles.
 * It copies plot points and settings almost exactly from A New Hope, all the way down to Rey being an orphan living on a desert planet that looks exactly like Tatooine.
 * Moral Event Horizon: If you thought the Death Star destroying Alderaan put Tarkin over the line, Starkiller Base destroying the entire Hosnian System sent Hux and Snoke catapulting over it.
 * They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: After going through all the trouble to cast Gwendoline Christie as Captain Phasma, giving her unique chrome-plated armor, and hyping her up as a huge threat, what does she get to do? Spend a minute barking orders, selling out the First Order, and getting thrown down a garbage chute. She was promised to have survived and would be getting more screentime in The Last Jedi... aaaaaaaand then she was hit with this status. Again. Probably the most damning aspect of this status is that in terms of popularity, she's greatly overshadowed by the memetic "TR8R" who is a generic stormtrooper!
 * On a similar note, they actually got the legendary Max von Sydow on board, only for his character, Lor San Tekka, to croak a little over a minute into the movie.