Candy Candy/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Adaptation Displacement: ... Wait, Candy Candy was originally a novel?
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Just how much does Eliza actually believe her own spiel about how Candy creates trouble wherever she goes and was responsible for Anthony's death and Terry leaving for America? Has she actually convinced herself that Candy is the true Problem Child and that everything bad that befalls her is her fault rather than Eliza's own? Or is she faking her grief over such events while really only fixated on tormenting Candy to make her life miserable For the Evulz and is just making a excuse for why she does so to say in front of others? She doesn't end up looking good either way, but it's left ambiguous enough that it's hard to determine if she has a legitimate mental illness/personality disorder or if she's just a Jerkass for no real reason
  • Angst Aversion: Combined with some Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy. More than one watcher/reader ended up getting tired of all the relentless, neverending, borderline ridiculous melodrama surrounding Candy's life and, as a consequence, dropped the series.
  • Base Breaker: The Regan family, mainly Neil and Eliza and their Hate Sink status. Some viewers find them to be Love to Hate characters and good antagonists for the series while others just flat out despise them in a way they can't even have fun with, as they feel like their perpetually two-dimensional portrayal and constant cruel bullying of Candy drags the show down. And while no one can deny that they're unlikable characters, a few might find the vilification they're given by the narrative to be unwarranted. See Unintentionally Sympathetic.
  • Die for Our Ship: Susanna is clingy, but she still doesn't deserve half the shit that fandom throws at her.
  • Ear Worm: That blasted Mitsuko Horie theme song!
  • Fanon Discontinuity: The Italian fans hated the Bittersweet Ending so much that they pretty much forced the Italian editors to make them a sort-of Gecko ending where Candy and Terry got together again
    • And the French broadcasters just didn't want Anthony to die. The french dub made him "fell from his horse and lost the use of his legs". And disappeared, of course. How rude, Candy. Two of the episodes were edited later to fix the problem, but elements of the fake story remained in some other episodes.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: In Latin-America, the Candy X Terry couple seems to be the most popular one, with lots of fanart and fanfiction (and lot of backlash towards their separation, leading to the creation of several FixFic stories where they became a couple again and get married)
  • Family-Unfriendly Aesop: "Be good, end up happy... but without a love interest" Unless you count Albert as a possible Second Love in the future.
    • Arguably, it can also be seen like this: "As long as you work hard and love what you do, you can give yourself a break and not need a romantic relationship to define your stance on life".
    • There are several instances of the manga that hinted towards Albert/Candy's romantic relationship. Considering that Candy fell in love with Anthony because she thought he was the Prince of the Hill she met and with Terry because of his resemblance to Anthony and thus to the Prince, at least in the beginning in a Loving a Shadow situation. All the time she has been looking for him and he is really Albert. It seems to me the series is giving full circle with ambiguity: the Prince was her innocent childhood love, Anthony her first love, Terry her teenage passion while Albert is her future, a mature kind of love that will be always be with her, so the manga ends with her realization he's the Prince and reunion, but go tell that to the Terry/Candy shippers who completely ignore it and keep harping on how Terry and Candy are So Destined Together.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: VERY popular in Latin America, and in France where it was the very first shojo ever seen.
  • Misaimed Fandom: Considering that Candy Candy is a Shoujo manga from The Seventies, it had pretty revolutionary 'messages': "Be honest to yourself", "Don't throw away your own beliefs", "Work hard to earn what you get in life", "Don't give up on your purposes", "Romance is important, yes, but not the end and be all to a life". The fandom, however, ignores almost all of them only to focus on the romantic part of the plot, and specially on loudly complaining because Candy and Terry didn't end up together. Even older fans in their 30's and 40's, who should know better, fall into this trap.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Neil's Scarpia Ultimatum to Candy; and just as we were led to think there might be some hope for him. And specially considering that after said ultimatum, he insists that he loves Candy more than anything. Uhm, Neil, things don't work that way.
    • Eliza has several moments of dog kicking, but her worst action was framing Candy and Terry to get Candy expelled from St. Paul School (though Candy and Terry's gullibility did them no favors there, see What an Idiot! below), threatening to send a hospital bill she's fined Candy with to Pony's Home (where she knows the people there aren't wealthy enough) should Candy not get enough money to pay the fine in time, and scheming with her mother Ruth to get Candy's reputation smeared because after she takes the amnesiac Albert into her household. Geez, what a spoiled little bitch!
    • Ruth also crosses the line by getting the hospital Candy works at to fire her or she'll have their funding cut.
  • Misaimed Fandom: Considering that Candy Candy is a Shoujo manga from The Seventies, it had pretty revolutionary 'messages': "Be honest to yourself", "Don't throw away your own beliefs", "Work hard to earn what you get in life", "Don't give up on your purposes", "Romance is important, yes, but not the end and be all to a woman's life". The fandom, however, ignores almost all of them (and specially the last one) only to focus on the romantic part of the plot, and specially on loudly complaining because Candy and Terry didn't end up together. Even older fans in their 30's and 40's, who should know better, fall into this trap.
    • Unintentionally Sympathetic: Eliza and Neil are this to a few, being the products of a toxic, spoiling, enabling upbringing by their mother yet are positioned as being almost Ultimate Evil within the story despite being little more than bratty children who, unless pushed to doing worse, usually resort to simple cruel pranks.
  • Ship-to-Ship Combat: The cat fights, scuffles and screaming matches between Candy/Terry and Candy/Albert shippers subsist to this very day.
  • Tear Jerker: Anthony's death and Stear's death.
    • "Separation on a snowy day" (A.K.A the episode that definitely sinks the relationship between Candy and Terry) is this for many viewers. It's so well done that even those who don't ship Candy x Terry are moved.
  • Values Resonance: A shoujo manga from The Seventies that isn't necessarily centered ONLY on romance and tells people that they can be whatever they want to be in life, as long as they work hard for it? HELL YES!
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Charlie Sanders in episodes 81 and 82. We're meant to feel for him and view him as a Jerkass Woobie, but the fact that he's hiding from the law and gets Candy to harbor him in his hospital room thanks to having faked being Terry, his constant belligerence, his willingness to want to commit murder (even if his targets to be would be Asshole Victims), and the reveal that he physically assaulted his own mother before leaving her do a lot to negate any sympathy viewers could feel for him.
  • What an Idiot!: Candy is rather naive, yet rarely displays active stupidity. However, the time when she and Terry sneak outside the dorms to meet up with each other on the grounds of having supposedly received letters from one another, without actually checking on any sources AND despite clearly knowing the school's incredibly strict rules, completely reeks of this trope. Eliza sure must've been thrilled to see her plan to get them expelled succeed even better and easier than even she'd expected.
  • The Woobie: Annie, Patty, Anthony, and Susanna if you're charitable to her.


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