Love Never Dies/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Author's Saving Throw: Due to the less-than-favorable response from both critics and die-hard Phans, the show was substantially rewritten to "tighten it up" before debuting on Broadway. The soundtrack is thus out of date, as the reworked version premiered in the West End in late 2010. Reaction ranged from "It's much better now!" to They Changed It, Now It Sucks to "They Changed It, and It Still Sucks". As for the Broadway production, that never happened, but the revision was the basis for the Australian production.
  • Awesome Music: Despite the show's many, many flaws, "Till I Hear You Sing" is one of the strongest songs in the show. Given how often it gets reprised (about 5 times in total), clearly ALW knew it as well.
    • There isn't a specific category for Terrifying Music, but the reprise of "Bathing Beauty" is absolutely eerie.
  • Badass Decay: The Phantom. Dear Lord, the Phantom.
  • Contested Sequel: Oooh boy, is it ever.
  • Die for Our Ship: Or, rather, be derailed and become The Alcoholic for our ship. And all for nothing, too...
    • As well, Meg, popular among fans to pair with Erik, is also derailed to become a psychopathic bitch who stands in the way of Erik and Christine's "true love" and kills Christine in the end.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: Due to the above Contested Sequel trope.
  • Foe Yay: The first instance of Devil Take the Hindmost is incredibly homoerotic. This troper would consider the relationship between Raoul and the Phantom the true love story of this play. Or at least the true hate sex story of this play.
  • Les Yay: Christine and Meg. Even more so.
  • Narm: "Beneath A Moonless Sky" can be this -- the sheer seriousness borders on ridiculous. And it goes on, and on, and on...
    • Love Never Dies could basically be renamed Narm: The Musical.
  • No Yay: The Phantom and Gustave during "The Beauty Underneath"; see Unfortunate Implications below.
  • Pandering to the Base: Specifically, to Phantom/Christine shippers by reviving the possibility of their becoming the Official Couple.
  • Painful Rhyme: From "'Til I Hear You Sing" alone -- "The moments creep / Yet I can't bear to sleep", "And music, your music, it teases at my ear / I turn and it fades away and you're not here", and in the choruses, rhyming floor, door, core and for with more.
  • Ruined FOREVER: Lots of Phantom fans had this reaction, in no small part because the sequel turned the Phantom's heartbreaking I Want My Beloved to Be Happy / Love Redeems ending in the original into an Ignored Epiphany.
  • Ron the Death Eater: Raoul and Meg, canonly!
  • Sequelitis: Oh so much. This may or may not have to do with the fact that Lloyd Webber is the only significant member of the original's creative team involved in this one. Word of God is that he was suffering from cancer while constructing it; a mixture of this, twenty years between installments when a writer's creativity to sure to change, Pandering to the Base, and a whole bunch of other shit... Something's bound to go down.
  • Shipping Bed Death: A lot of E/C shippers were turned off by the improbable circumstances under which the two got together.
  • Tainted by the Preview: Especially after the preview performances started in London and plot details came out...
  • Unfortunate Implications: "The Beauty Underneath" does not sound like the sort of thing a grown man should be singing to a ten-year-old boy -- who turns out to be his son, no less.
    • Not to mention that Christine wasn't "looking with her heart" when she turned down the Phantom, whom she knew to be a deranged killer. Plus, "Beneath a Moonless Sky" implies that they could only have sex when she couldn't actually see him properly -- so much for looking with your heart.
    • This could qualify as implications of sexism, or just a grasp at keeping Christine a sympathetic character, but: Raoul becomes an abusive alcoholic, essentially to give her an excuse to get back together with the Phantom. But Christine was the one whose heart wasn't in the marriage, and she's the one who cheated on him on the night of their wedding and had the Phantom's son. You would think that she's the one causing the problems in the marriage. Yet somehow it's written so that it's all Raoul's fault that their marriage deteriorated.
      • Along the same lines, the Phantom and Christine's reignited relationship, with the show making him even more of a romantic figure than its predecessor did. Even if you ignore everything he does to her the first time around, he still deceives her, blackmails her into doing what he wants by threatening to take away her son, uses her as the stakes in a wager with her husband, and eventually gets her killed by grabbing onto the Idiot Ball with both hands when trying to talk down Meg (who he'd driven crazy through negligence in the first place). Yet Christine is the one who apologizes to him for all the grief she's caused.
  • What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?: The London production offered free tickets to children at one point. Hmm, let's see. Alcoholism, stripping, infidelity which allegedly produced a son, a song with arguably pedophilic undertones and murder. Yep, this is definitely for kids.
  • The Woobie: Meg Giry is possibly one of the few sympathetic characters in the show, also qualifies as a mild example of a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds after she kidnaps Gustave and then unintentionally murders Christine, hurting her beloved Erik in the process.