Nate's sexual orientation is a hot debate among fans due to the very ambiguous subcontext sprinkled throughout the series. Depending on who you ask, Nate is either:
Gay and forcing himself to pretend he's attracted to women;
Bisexual and suppressing his same-sex attraction by overcompensating for his attraction to girls;
A straight guy who is attracted only to women but is also extremely sexually confused due to his father's toxic lessons of masculinity and his own internalized homophobia.
Maddy telling Cassie that "this is just the beginning" in the season 2 finale has garnered some varying interpretations. Is Maddy warning Cassie that her suffering is just beginning and that she is still to take her full anger out on her? Is Maddy warning her that Cassie's relationship with Nate will become as on-and-off and unhealthy as hers? Or maybe even both? Is there also the possibility that Maddy can empathize with and want to help Cassie now that she not only apparently got all her anger out? Could that be because Maddy knows that she's been there herself, too?
Does Cassie become so attached to Nate after sleeping with him (and continue a relationship with him) because she thinks that when Maddy inevitably finds out, she’d never be forgiven and lose her anyway— and would rather have Nate and lose Maddy than lose both of them?
Was Maddy’s boss merely trying to befriend and mentor her, or was she attempting to groom Maddy?
Was Maddie genuinely shocked about Nate and Cassie’s secret relationship when Rue exposed it to everyone or was she aware about it long before it was revealed to everyone?
Base-Breaking Character: All of the characters provoke a lot of debate, as even the most sympathetic characters are flawed to some extent.
Rue is the biggest one for the fandom, owing a lot to her uncomfortably realistic actions as a drug addict. Some fans find her to be sympathetic, and argue that she's trying her best in her struggle to get clean — a struggle not made easy with the death of her father, her unstable relationship with Jules, and her myriad of mental health issues. On the other hand, her worst moments — gaslighting Gia, insulting Ali completely unprovoked, and physically assaulting her mother — have caused some fans to stop sympathizing with her altogether.
Cassie in Season 2. Some sympathize with her due to her feelings of insecurity that stem from being sexualized her entire life, a thing that many girls find relatable, while others became turned off by her constant deceiving of her best friend while dating her abuser and her refusal to take responsibility.
Lexi as of the Season 2 finale. Is she a sympathetic underdog who has finally gotten her moment to shine, or a shallow, bitter person putting the trauma of her loved ones onstage without a care for their feelings?
Best Known for the Fanservice: The show's become rather infamous for the large number of attractive young actors appearing in explicit sex scenes.
In "Shook Ones: Part II," Cassie takes molly and then gets on the carousel with Daniel, who she kisses, before she suddenly starts dry-humping the carousel horse and has a loud orgasm in front of the very large crowd of people around. Apart from her kiss with Daniel, this scene is never addressed in the show, despite a large part of Cassie’s storyline dealing with the slut shaming she gets.
While it does finally get referenced in Lexi's play during the second season's finale (it being shown to be Cassie's Rage Breaking Point), it's still baffling how there was virtually no mention of it prior to this.
In "The Theater and Its Double," while Cassie is talking seductively to Nate, Kat is randomly seen dancing sexually in her room, with her face mask that she had during her webcam sessions in the season prior.
Directly after, there is a scene where Nate faces away from a mirror to view Maddy on the bed getting undressed, only for her to turn into Cassie once she comes over to give Nate a hug.
Watching Nate get the shit beaten out of him by Fez in the Season 2 premiere, after all the abuse he's put people through, is absolutely wonderful.
The amount of suffering Rue goes through once she's exposed as lying about being clean — which leads to every person she goes to in hopes of having her drug use enabled abandoning or rejecting her, nearly getting caught by police after an extended, intense, and destructive chase for breaking into a house to steal stuff and forced to face the possibility of Laurie making her a sex slave to pay off her debt — becomes cathartic when it all leads to her realizing that she has absolutely no choice but to finally go home and accept the right kind of help by the literal end of the day.
After her abhorrent behavior throughout the second season, seeing Cassie finally get beat up by Maddy after she tries to hijack Lexi's play is immensely satisfying.
Character Derailment: Kat spends S1 discovering her confidence, gets into camming, and gets together with Dogged Nice Guy Ethan. This was a divisive plot point anyway, but it's become hated by how it's handled in S2. Namely, Kat is almost entirely Demoted to Extra, and the little screen time she has is devoted to her cruelly breaking up with Ethan. The final scene of Kat is of her thinking about camming in the S2 finale, but it's not clear if she's returned to camming or is just remembering.
Crossover Ship: Due to her Face–Heel Turn, there are times Cassie is shipped with Yuri from Girl from Nowhere. As both are women who become the main villains in Season 2 of their respective shows where they represent revenge and pride after going insane from the abuse and bullying they suffered and want to cause chaos and destruction for the female heroes (Maddy or Lexi and Nanno) and play the victim despite their horrible behaviour. Since both of them have a penchant for tormenting and abusing their enemies and seeing themselves as the perfect definition of "victims" these two would get along.
Crosses the Line Twice: The show's humor definitely qualifies as this, featuring many moments of insane Black Comedy that go all out on being offensive. Examples include:
Rue daydreaming of murdering Nate by shooting him while he's tied to a chair and on fire. Jules' reaction to this?
Jules: What a fuckin' pussy.
A brief flashback to the first attempt Maddy made at earning money before she got hired as a babysitter.
Receptionist: I'm sorry, but 17-year-olds can't donate eggs.
Maddy: That's fucking retarded.
Diagnosed by the Audience: Some fans of the show believe that Cassie may have Borderline Personality Disorder due to her emotional instability and her abandonment issues, both of which are heavily emphasised in season 2.
Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Drug addiction is a big part of the show and is shown in a negative light, but there are still many scenes where characters look cool doing it. Whether or not one wins out over the other is a heated debate.
Most viewers are completely aware that Nate is a monster, but can't help but admit that he's gorgeous even when he's doing horrible things. Some play this straighter, theorizing that the persona Nate uses online and the one Jules hallucinates in the club is the "real" Nate under all of his "darkness."
Many Cassie fans downplay her actions in Season 2, and use her Freudian Excuse of being sexualised from a young age to justify it. This blatantly ignores her deliberate callousness of repeatedly sleeping with her best friend's abuser and flaunting their relationship in Maddy's face despite knowing how heartbroken she is.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Select characters have struck out with notable followings among the show's fanbase.
BB, a friend of the girl's group, has amassed a lot of popularity for being a hilarious comic relief. It helped that she relentlessly cheered for Maddy when she finally attacked Cassie during the latter's attempt at ruining Lexi's play.
Epileptic Trees: The theory that Rue actually died from her overdose, and is narrating the series from beyond the grave. Sam Levinson has outright denied this, despite continuous implications otherwise…
Foe Yay Shipping: Some viewers ship Nate and Jules even after the terrible things he did to her, due to the actors' excellent chemistry. For what it's worth, the show itself demonstrates in her club hallucination that she wishes he was his alter ego (who she sincerely fell in love with) while also wanting to humiliate and punish the real Nate.
Harsher in Hindsight: In the second episode, Fezco declares that he doesn't deal in fentanyl because of how deadly it is. In real life, actor Angus Cloud died of an accidental overdose that included fentanyl.
While the entire main cast has been widely praised for their acting in the show, Zendaya's performance as Rue is considered by far to be the best and most impressive (especially due to this being her first leading role as an adult). While never considered a bad performer, critics and viewers have been blown away by how versatile her acting has been in the series, seamlessly being able to switch between the show's absurdist comedy and dead-serious drama on a dime. Her surprise Best Actress Drama Emmy victory backed up her amazing work.
Jacob Elordi also got this reaction from portraying the detestable yet complex antagonist Nate, due to his only major role prior to the show being in the infamous Kissing Booth movies (along with how much of a polar opposite he is from Nate in real life). Nate's terrifying meltdown at the end of "And Salt the Earth Behind You" especially shows off his range.
Angus Cloud had no prior acting experience when he was scouted at a restaurant for the role of Fezco. He gained routine acclaim for the personality he brought to the character of Fez, culminating in near-unanimous praise for his acting chops in the season 2 finale, "All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned for a Thing I Cannot Name," when Fez begs and screams for the police to spare Ashtray during the shootout.
After mostly playing a stoic and vulnerable Satellite Character to Rue and Cassie throughout season 1, Maude Apatow puts in a series of excellent performances through the second season as Lexi, expanding her character by showcasing her growing independence and assertiveness.
Rue and Nate are mortal enemies on the show, but Zendaya would end up dating Jacob Elordi in real life.
Following the debate regarding whether Jacob Elordi's character Noah from The Kissing Booth should be considered abusive, seeing Elordi playing the much more unambiguously abusive Nate in this series can be funny in a meta-sense as accidental Typecasting.
More than a few posts couldn't help but to compare Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in the 94th Academy Awards to Maddy chasing around and slapping Cassie during Lexi's play in the Season 2 finale. The fact that Zendaya was in the crowd just like Rue makes it even more hilarious, as did the fact that Smith's slap happened exactly a month after the episode aired. Life Imitates Art indeed.
Hollywood Pudgy: Kat is considered a "fat girl," and a lot of her arc is based on it. Yet, the fact that she sticks out for her size would be questionable in an average high school scenario.
Hype Backlash: For as much acclaim and attention the show has received for its unprecedentedly gritty teen content, it's also been subject to heavy criticism online. As it's gained more popularity over time (particularly around the time the second season began airing), the show has also gained a noticeably large following of detractors who accuse it of trying way too hard to be provocative, relying too much on graphic sex and explicit drug use to tell its story, as well as the characters barely acting like high school students to begin with even by the standards of the genre. Things only doubled down after the release of TheIdol, a show that was also headed by Sam Levinson which received harsh criticism due to its graphic content and misogynistic writing, and a lot of fans started looking back at Euphoria and re-evaluating it through a much more negative lens. Despite the third season being announced underway as of 2024, a lot of viewers are less enthused, with a majority of them wishing for the show to be canceled due to the negative reassessment it's gotten.
Les Yay: While Rue and Jules are canonically attracted to each other, there are other pairings that fans see as having romantic or sexual tension:
In Season 1, Lexi really comes across as having a crush on Rue, with some implied jealousy towards Jules.
Maddy and Cassie, who were said to be practically inseparable. Maddy even calls Cassie her “soulmate.” Turns into Foe Yay Shipping after Season Two, with the chemistry still being very strong.
"Euphoria High School" note A meme that made the rounds when the second season came out which pokes fun at how outlandish the show is compared to the average high school experience, such as how the teens wear inappropriate outfits to school, barely seem to be doing actual schoolwork, are too frequently drinking/doing drugs, and don't wear backpacks.
A common format of "going to Euphoria High School" on TikTok has a person walk out in regular clothing to a Squidward line ("And why aren't you in uniform?"), turn around, and come back out in a skimpy outfit.
Maddy's "Bitch, you better be joking" line to Cassie has also become very popular.
Turning "you better be joking" into "you better be Joe King," and later, "You’re lying" into "you’re Lai Ying," has also become a meme.
"Put [insert character from another show/movie here] in a room with Nate Jacobs."
"Wait, is this fucking play about us?" note Said by Maddy when realizing the nature of Lexi’s play, often used to joke about characters or real people realizing a piece of work is about them. Examples include the characters from Avatar: The Last Airbender watching the Ember Island Players play of them, the Founding Fathers watching Hamilton, and so on.
"Euphoria glamorizes addiction." note A claim made by several critics against the show which has been made a joke in the fandom for how inaccurate it is, as the show goes out of its way to portray Rue's addiction as an awful experience for everyone in her life.
Elliot's song. note In the season 2 finale, there's a scene where Rue visits Elliot and thanks him for telling Jules about her drug use, as it indirectly led to her getting clean, after which Elliot plays her a song on guitar. The song was heavily ridiculed on social media due to fans believing it to be overly repetitive (it uses the same few chords and a lot of the same lyrics) and way too long, taking time away from other crucial arcs in the episode that were still unresolved. To his credit, Elliot's actor Dominic Fike took the ridicule in stride, reposted some of his favorite memes about the song and, upon its official release, jokingly made it a selling point that they made the song shorter.
Joking comparisons with the infamously gruesome hentai visual novel of the same name are somewhat common.
Never Live It Down: The reputation the show has accrued for its subject matter has led many outside of the show's fanbase to assume that it contains nothing but teenagers doing drugs and having explicit sex.
One True Pairing: Fexi (Fezco x Lexi) has been welcomed near-universally in the fanbase since the Season 2 premiere, for being an Ensemble Dark Horse duo and likely being the healthiest pairing in the show thus far. Their scene in "A Thousand Little Trees of Blood," in which they watch Stand by Me, sing the namesake Ben E. King song and even hold hands, was met with a mass Squee from viewers.
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: While Maddy wasn't outright hated in Season 1, some found her Unintentionally Unsympathetic due to her immaturity and constant poor decisions. The show responded by making her Out of Focus for much of the second second, and given substantial character growth. Finally breaking away from Nate's toxic influence, more of her positive traits were explored and she showed some interesting growth. Consequently, she was much more positively received in Season 2.
Jules. While she is, like the rest of the cast, a flawed person, much of the fandom goes over the top to view all of her actions as malicious and selfish.
McKay, due to being mostly Out of Focus even in his centric episode and also being a Flat Character with all his scenes and storylines being about Cassie. He also comes across as the least sympathetic in his conflict with her from the middle to the end of season 1.
Elliot, for only existing just to cause problems between Rue and Jules. His having a whole segment in the final episode dedicated to him playing a song containing the same few chords over and over again doesn't help matters.
Ships That Pass in the Night: Cassie/Ethan, despite never interacting on screen. Fans want them together so that Cassie can for the first time be treated kindly by a good man as a boyfriend, so Ethan can have a girlfriend who’s actually into him and nice to him after the disastrous relationship with Kat, and so that Ethan’s friendship with Lexi can help mend the Howard sisters’ relationship. Many fanfictions treating Cassie/Ethan as a Beta Couple to Lexi/Fez have been written.
Explicit sex scenes, full-frontal nudity, violence (especially against women) are frequent in this series... about teenagers in high school.
One specific egregious example is when an underage character has sex with a significantly older man while on vacation, and the narrative justifies it by...stating the underage girl was in control of the situation.
In the first episode of season 2, Maddy wipes herself off with a hand towel after peeing and tosses it into the bathtub, directly onto the face of a hiding Cassie.
Stoic Woobie: Lexi, according to her actress Maude Apatow, is dealing with her own issues but puts them aside to be the caretaker to her sister and her childhood friend Rue. Lexi clearly grew up in the same household as Cassie, bearing witness to the dysfunction of their parents (their father being a flakey frug addict and their mother being an alcoholic). While Lexi's mom does care about her, she's often shown poking fun at her and is clearly closer to Cassie. It's likely that she's more reserved because of this, in addition to seeing the consistently horrible decisions made by her sister and friends.
Strangled by the Red String: Elliot and Jules is universally despised. It causes Jules to become more unpleasant after devoting herself to Rue and declaring her love for her at the beginning of Season 2. It also completely disregards Jules saying she's no longer interested in men in her special. Elliot is also perceived as a Flat Character and The Scrappy.
Trapped by Mountain Lions: Kat's storyline. Season 1 ends with her camming future uncertain as she and Ethan get together. They are then barely featured until Kat breaks up with Ethan in a very jarring way, gaslighting him about a non-existent brain tumor that she blames for her behavior. Other than some very ambiguous implications that she's quit doing it during the relationship, her camming is not mentioned at all until after the breakup when Kat is briefly shown to have resumed it during a montage in the penultimate episode. And that's about all Kat gets to do for the whole of Season 2. Considering that Barbie Ferreira left the show right after Season 2 ended, it can be assumed that we'll no longer see anymore of her.
Maddy in the second half of Season 1; while it's agreed upon that she doesn't deserve to be abused, there were a lot of fans who found it hard to sympathize with her considering the fact that she helped Nate ruin an innocent stranger’s life in order to escape the consequences of her own terrible decisions. This sentiment faded away come Season 2, mostly due to the Tyler storyline being abandoned.
Jules. In the first season, a lot of fans, sometimes to exaggerated levels, disliked her apparent flakiness towards Rue, seeing her as leading Rue on. This wasn’t helped when Jules seemingly cheats on Rue, tells her face-to-face that she loves Anna, and then questions Rue's attraction to her, before leaving Rue at the station and running away. However, this was alleviated after Jules’ special told the story from her perspective, revealing her personal struggles and clarifying that Rue and she were never actually in a committed relationship, leading to many fans who disliked her changing their minds… only for Season 2 to have Jules act bizarrely jealous when Rue befriends Elliot, accuse them of being attracted to each other and wanting to cheat, and then cheat on Rue with Elliot herself.
In the pilot, there is a trippy sequence in which Rue wanders through a house party while stoned, and the room spins underneath her feet, with the other patrons in the house still fixed to the floor.
The third episode has a well-shot split-screen sequence of Jules texting a catfishing Nate as they go about their respective days.
In the final scene of "Shook Ones: Pt. II", the bed Rue and Jules are in rotates around repeatedly, and each time the underside of the bed is shown, there is a scene of their friendship, and each time that the bed comes back around, they are closer to the Big Damn Kiss.
Rue can't catch a break. She's a teenage drug addict with suicidal ideation and her addiction is warping her personality to the point that she says she can't recognize herself anymore either. The destructive consequences of her addiction drive people away, leaving her with no support system or guidance when she gets into horrifying situations like Laurie very obviously plotting to traffic her in Season 2.
The remaining female main cast can also count, but Jules wins by a landslide. She hated herself from a young age due to dysphoria, and her own mother had her institutionalized. After transitioning, she starts hooking up with random older men — with some situations, such as with Cal, turning scary and violent — not out of desire, but just to feel as though she's "conquering femininity." She then languishes in the suburbs, and though she does love Rue, she's constantly under stress and pressure that she's the only thing keeping Rue from overdosing and dying. Then add the fact that Nate catfished her into loving his false identity, not only leaving her hurt and confused, but also making her the victim of blackmail that forces her to ruin the life of an innocent man lest Nate reports her, and she ends up in jail or on a sex offender registry.
Tyler, the ordinary college student whose life was completely wrecked by Nate out of sheer pettiness and cruelty; after Tyler had sex with Maddy at a party while she was broken up with Nate, Nate broke into his home one night and beat him within an inch of his life (accusing him of raping her) before blackmailing several weeks later into falsely confessing to a crime Nate had committed.
Maddy and Lexi end up being this in Season 2 due to Cassie's betrayal of them. Once Rue tells her about the affair, Maddy ends up crying over losing Cassie to Nate and feeling heartbroken that she has abandoned her before eventually Maddy leaves her house when it’s clear she won’t own up to what she did and then few days later she ends up being tortured by Nate with a freaking Russian Roulette game, regardless of Nate saying it's unloaded. And then Lexi ends up having a lot on her shoulders as she has to deal with Rue's drug relapse and Cassie's unstable and volatile nature getting worse, the latter of which reaches a breaking point when Cassie begins to hate her and cut ties with her because of the play.
Character Derailment: Kat spends S1 discovering her confidence, gets into camming, and gets together with Dogged Nice Guy Ethan. This was a divisive plot point anyway, but it's become hated by how it's handled in S2. Namely, Kat is almost entirely Demoted to Extra, and the little screen time she has is devoted to her cruelly breaking up with Ethan. The final scene of Kat is of her thinking about camming in the S2 finale, but it's not clear if she's returned to camming or is just remembering.
, and it's often hard to distinguish who's meant to be the "pretty one" out of the pair.
