YMMV / Flatland

• Fandom Rivalry: The Darker and Edgier Ehlinger-Whalen adaptation versus the Lighter and Softer Travis-Caplan adaptation.
• Fridge Brilliance: The main character is named A. Square, because that's the shape that the character has. However, once one realizes that the author's name is Edwin Abbot Abbot, which for the mathematical types can be represented as Abbot Squared, then it becomes a sly self-reference.
• Misaimed Fandom: Satire of Victorian classism and sexism? Most come to it because of its depiction of higher dimensions.
  • Many people have accused Edwin A. Abbot of misogyny and sexism due to how the women are described by the narrator/main character A. Square. What some people don't realise is the book is a satire of Victorian values and that A. Square is supposed to be a strawman whose opinions the readers are SUPPOSED to disagree with. In fact, later editions were made to explain that A. Squares opinion's do not reflect that of the authors.
  • As well, later editions rewrote it so that the square admits how bad women have it, noting that the only "consolation" is that they can't remember all the injustices they suffer.
  • We might be dealing with an Unreliable Narrator as to how poor women's memories are. The square's wife comes across as sort of, well, ditzy, but she seems to remember things longer than he claims women do. (He does say she's smarter than most, but if women generally were as dumb as he claimed, they'd never remember where they lived or that they had families if they left the house. Or all the laws they have to follow).
• Nightmare Fuel: Much of the imagery in Flatland: The Film is absolutely terrifying, despite the fact that many of the characters are shapes. There's a surprising amount of blood and gore in the film, which definitely isn't helped by the fact that you can see the characters' insides for the whole film, which are depicted as actual guts and intestines. The worst part is near the end when A Square's insides start to collapse in on itself due to gravity.
  • Sphereland depicts mild Body Horror in the form of two-dimensional dogs, with their internal organs in clear display from a top-down perspective.
    • There's also the way the Oversphere beats up Spherius and throws him around violently as punishment for his ignorant closed-mindedness and his abandonment of the Flatlanders. It's a surprisingly intense moment to see Spherius, portrayed in the previous film as a nigh-godlike being, now under the mercy of an even higher power.
• Poe's Law: Abbott's presentation of the sexism and classism of Flatland was intended to be satirical, but that can be lost on modern readers.
• Tear Jerker: Sphereland reveals that Arthur Square has died, likely from grief as his theories were once more rejected and ridiculed, with Hex having been ostracized for her unorthodox research. Near the end, as Hex travels the fourth dimension and sees many, many other versions of herself in different timelines rocketing through 4D in countless spaceships, she sees one whose version of her grandfather alive and well, and sadly ponders for a moment what went differently in that that parallel version of her had a happier outcome.
• Values Resonance: A 3-D sphere tells the hero, a 2-D square, that in his world, men and women are equals. The square finds this unbelievable. The author might have been hinting that in a more advanced world, the sexes would in fact be more equal than in his time.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Despite being an animated film about geometric shapes, Flatland: The Film deals with incredibly mature themes and packs in a lot of gore and horrifying imagery. Despite this, it often gets confused with the much more family-friendly Flatland: The Movie resulting in many kids having watched and been traumatized by the film.

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