American Girls Collection/YMMV


 * Awesome Music: The accompanying background music for the online game "Kirsten's Winter Stars" is absolutely gorgeous. See for yourself:
 * Fan Dumb: Hoo boy.
 * Girls Need Role Models: The books inspired a generation of female history nerds.
 * Heartwarming Moments: In Addy's Surprise, her father is so proud that his daughter can read that he starts crying.
 * Memetic Mutation: At least some of the characters from the series ended up in a number of Downfall parodies on YouTube.
 * Misaimed Fandom: American Girls Premiere, a computer game released in the late '90s that gave players the ability to write and perform plays about the various historical protagonists and their families and friends. It was supposed to be educational, but it was hard to take the game seriously between the creepy robot voices and the strange movements (characters could even float or walk through walls, and even normal gestures were always exaggerated). As a result, way more people used the game for parodies, Downfall spoofs and poop jokes than for its intended purpose, helped along by the game's almost total lack of a word blacklist.
 * Narm: Jiggy Nye beating Penny in the Felicity movie.
 * Nightmare Fuel:
 * In the first Addy book, the slave driver makes her eat slugs off the tobacco plants.
 * In Samantha's movie, a boy working in a factory gets his finger caught in a machine.
 * Periphery Demographic: American Girl actually has a lot of fans who are adult women, often doll collectors. They can often be the strictest fans, especially those young women who got into the dolls as kids and apply the Nostalgia Filter.
 * The Problem with Licensed Games: Both the Julie and Kit games for the Nintendo DS were given scathing reviews. The American Girls Premiere PC game was a different story, though, despite being that it was unintentionally hilarious.
 * They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Whoo boy. Mattel took over from Pleasant Company in 1998, and remodeled the dolls and outfits as well as retiring a lot of items. In some corners of fandom, anything made after 1998 is utter crap.
 * Unfortunate Implications: It's happened a few times, such as the famous incident where Marisol was criticized for moving out of the inner city because it was unsafe and therefore making her old neighbourhood (a real place) look bad. News magazines in 2009 tried to play this up and create a controversy out of minor character Gwen, labelling her "the homeless doll", even though she gets a place to move into partway through the first book she's in, we don't even know she was homeless until The Reveal near the end of said book, and she's not even the main character (that'd be Chrissa).