YMMV / Dear Children

• Abandon Shipping: Candace rejects Aaron's romantic advances, and later explains that she thinks they're Better as Friends. But her rejection isn't very thorough (in part because Aaron doesn't know the right questions to ask, and it's obvious that she still loves him as a friend. So is his suit hopeless? Maybe, because Aaron, Candace or both may be an Armored Closet Gay , and if even one of the pair is, it really is hopeless.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Aaron may be an Armored Closet Gay, inin denial about an original attraction to Devin. This would explain both hias initial violent hostility, and his hostility to both Cail and Josh, two characters to whom Aaron might plausibly suppose Devin to be attracted toward.
  • Cail may well be a Death Seeker. She's suffering from gender dysphoria (which can make people suicidal) and at least playfully likes the idea of dying and becoming a ghost.
    • More mildly, Cail's over-the-top Cloudcuckoo Lander behavior, coupled with her occasional sharp Cuckoo Snarker comments, could mean that she is thoroughly aware of how loony she acts, and is obsessed with ghosts to distract herself from her gender dysphoria.
  • Devin displays a tendency to think about, and even have sex with, inanimate objects. At first this is simply treated as a Running Gag, but we actually see him ogle the Perkovich lawn gnomes, and Cailin appears outright angry at Devin for doing this in front of Whitney. Has Devin turned to inanimate objects because — unlike Aaron — they can never turn on him and betray his friendship? (It's notable that the guy to whom Devin is really attracted — Josh — is exceptionally sweet and kind, and would never treat him so cruelly).
  • Is Gabe misunderstood for his love of anime girls, or is he in truth a Covert Pervert?
  • Are the misogyny and paranoia Wesley expresses in the final pages of his Dream Journal, as he starts to suffer serious Sanity Slippage, solely due to the baleful influences of the Big Bad? Or did he always have strong misogynistic and paranoid tendencies to begin with? Or did he merely have slight tendencies towards misogyny and paranoia which the Shadow exploited to take control of his mind? It's far from obvious which is true.
• Audience Awareness Advantage: It's easy to forget that the Journalism Club doesn't know that they're in a horror story, let alone a Cosmic Horror story set in Lovecraft Country. When any fan of H. P. Lovecraft sees Wesley's Miskatonic University shirt or hears Isaac discuss detecting transient wormholes, coupled with the apparent ability of the creatures to appear and disappear from areas at will, he has a good idea as to some of what's going on. This is not true of the story characters.
• Moral Event Horizon: Aaron crossed this when he pushed Devin into the lake because he found out Devin was gay and leaving him when Devin thought he was going to drown.Then he outed Devin to the whole school, causing him to get bullied.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Aaron is a serious Jerkass, who was committing petty crimes in his early teens, betrayed his former best friend Devin Xue when he found out his friend was gay, and is angry at his current best friend Candace for rejecting his romantic advances. This is aside from the fact that he harasses the Journalism Club and even goads Devin to fight him, and is also a Politically Incorrect Villain. No one in-story aside from his mom, and Candace and the other two members of the AV Club, really seem to like him. However, he really does care for Candace, and he's Cute but Troubled enough that he has a fandom.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Dear Children is a more realistic version of a Scooby-Doo scenario, with a group of mostly-innocent teenagers riding around in a van in pursuit of supernatural mysteries. However, aside from all the dirty language, the comic touches on themes of variant sexuality (three out of the six main characters are confirmed LGBT), twisted romantic relationships, pornography and serial killing — and that's before we get to the Cosmic Horror.