YMMV / Bad News Ballet

• Les Yay: The characters frequently describe other girls and women as pretty or beautiful. Gwen—thinking herself fat and homely—describes McGee as perfect with pretty long brown hair and big green eyes who doesn't know anything about not being beautiful. Miss Jo is described as elegant with a bell like voice and a long and slender body—beautiful to the point that tough Rocky finds herself not only speaking softly, but behaving when she's admonished just once. While the descriptions aren't supposed to be homoerotic, they do come off as very much like schoolgirl crushes on other girls and female role models. It does not help that we're introduced to Rocky while she's hiding in a closet.
• Values Dissonance: The series constantly has twelve-year-old Gwen made fun of, fretting over, or insulted because of her weight. She's often sucking in her stomach and self-insisting she needs to be on a diet to slim down. This is especially prominent in Blubberina, where she's weighed in front of everyone else in class and told by the head of the academy, Mr. Anton, that she's too overweight to start wearing toe shoes. (He even pokes her belly and says she's clearly been eating too many french fries and milkshakes after school.) This was overlooked in a children's book series published in the late 80s and early 90s as just a Weight Woe plotline that ends with Gwen enrolling in a weight control program and getting her shoes with the others, but nowadays such a plotline and the continued remarks of the teachers and other students around her going unaddressed would be considered hurtful and bullying a child for daring to not be skinny at an age where weight fluctuates for many reasons—and where fast dieting and major weight loss is unhealthy for a growing child. There's also no hard weight limit for pointe shoes; while it's suggested a ballerina weigh less because of needing to hold themselves up in them and doing so is more difficult when one weighs more, it's not a hard limit and readiness for pointe depends far more on mastery of technique, bone ossification, foot, ankle, and leg strength, and strength-to-weight ratio than on a specific number on the scale. In any case, anyone telling a young girl in front of everyone else she's too fat to dance is cruel.