YMMV / Great Pretender

• Adorkable: Makoto, full stop. He's a clumsy wannabe con artist with a sympathetic backstory who serves as the moral compass of the group.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Dorothy, due to her Small Role, Big Impact status giving her a lack of screen time, is often hit with this. In particular: Did she truly love Laurent as much as he loved her, or was she just taking advantage of his love to stage an enormous con? Did she truly intend to marry him after the con, only to be nearly killed but miraculously survive, or did she fake her death to get out of her promise of marriage? And is her Easy Amnesia in The Stinger for real, or is it all faked?
  • The movie makes it clear that Dorothy (or rather Xiang Xiang, as she is now known)'s amnesia is indeed legitimate.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: It's not uncommon to find fans of the show who viewed the final two episodes as disappointing. Reasons range from viewing the idea of the crew re-creating an exact replica of a building for the scam as too unbelievable, the crew's previous targets all joining in on the con without any signs of holding a grudge, and Dorothy suddenly turning out to be alive the whole time.
• Awesome Music:
  • No, your ears don't deceive you, that's the Freddie Mercury version of "The Great Pretender" in the end credits.
  • The jazz-centric soundtrack by Yutaka Yamada has drawn favorable comparisons to Cowboy Bebop and Baccano!, bringing an upbeat energy fitting for a heist anime.
  • "Our Love," the R&B ballad that serves as the theme for the crew's more heartfelt moments. It's a triumphant Award-Bait Song, and it suggests that despite Abbie claiming "We're not friends, and we're not family," they do genuinely care about one another.
  • "Someday," the melancholy yet beautiful ballad that serves as the Leitmotif for Cynthia's backstory.
• Common Knowledge: Laurent never bothers to correct anyone who calls him French, so many viewers walk away with the impression that he is French. The fourth arc, however, reveals that he's actually Belgian; he grew up in Brussels. Some of this can be attributed to viewers who haven't gotten to the fourth arc and some to those who regard this information as a twist (though it's never indicated that Laurent purposefully hides his nationality), but in some cases his Mistaken Nationality persists in the real world.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Clark Ibrahim has a surprisingly large fanbase for an arc-exclusive character. This is probably due to the fact that, while he starts out as one of the arc's marks, he ends up being a genuinely decent guy who is serious about his sport and who always regarded his rival, Lewis, as a Worthy Opponent.
• Fanon:
  • Many fans believe that "Abigail Jones" isn't Abbie's given name, both because she's Iraqi and the fact that "Jones" is a name commonly associated with aliases.
  • Many fans also headcanon that Abbie is asexual—she's the only member of the main cast to never show any sincere sexual attraction to anyone else, and though she participates in honey traps, she seems to exclusively play hard to get.
• Friendly Fandoms: Great Pretender has proven quite popular among fans of Ocean's Eleven and other heist movies, as well as the similarly-premised Leverage.
• Funny Moments: When the sushi restaurant is going to be closed down in case 3, the owner sadly tells Makoto he should head home to Korea.
  Makoto: DUDE! I'M JAPANESE!
• Ho Yay: Laurent flirts so often with Makoto that it can sometimes be difficult to tell which of his actions are deliberate flirtation and which are accidental. Him asking Makoto to share his umbrella? Clearly intentional. Him squeezing the stick shift on a car after talking with him? It could be intentional Visual Innuendo, or it could be foreshadowing of the fact that his plan is finally being set in motion.
• LGBT Fanbase: The show has a large number of LGBT fans, in part because it's a Criminal Found Family story (which often have an LGBT fanbase) and in part because one of its leads, Laurent, is canonically bisexual. It helps that Laurent's flirtation with Makoto is played largely as genuine Ship Tease, with the relationship between the two deliberately leaning into Romance Arc tropes. And since Makoto's other Implied Love Interest is Abbie, it makes him Ambiguously Bi as well.
• Love to Hate: James Coleman is often considered the most fun mark to hate. Eddie Cassano is a bit too despicable in his actions, Sam Ibrahim doesn't have the same charisma, and Suzaku straddles a fearsome line between being utterly evil and being frighteningly sympathetic. James, however, is a pompous, self-absorbed git of the kind most people have met at least once in their lives, and watching him get his comeuppance is extremely gratifying.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Laurent Thierry is an elegant con artist seeking revenge on the human trafficker, Liu Xao, for seemingly killing his lover. Establishing a crew of con artists in pursuit of his goal, Laurent deceives Makoto Edamura into accompanying him before forcibly ensnaring him into his crew. Throughout the series, Laurent deceives several corrupt and wealthy folk into bankruptcy. When Makoto announces his intentions to leave the crew, Laurent uses his connections to get Makoto to unknowingly work for a human trafficking group so that Makoto will help the crew out in their final scam. After getting Makoto to reunite with his father, Laurent and Makoto trick Liu Xao and his rival, Akemi Suzaku, to meet in a fake building created by Laurent's crew, before making off with their finances and stranding the traffickers on a deserted island. Having a near limitless supply of tricks up his sleeve, Laurent gets away with everything he intended to collect before going on to continue his life as a con artist.
  • Cynthia Moore is a brilliant, money-hungry con artist in Laurent's crew and one of the few who can keep up with him. Introduced disguised as an FBI agent, Cynthia manages to bankrupt their mark ostensibly for immunity before leaving the mobster at the mercy of the police. In later arcs Cynthia continues showing her charm and ingenuity: at one point scamming her old friend's abusive boss into losing all of his money and later doing the same to a corrupt art critic who had in the past taken advantage of her ex-boyfriend, setting up an entire fake auction house to do so.
  • Seiji "Oz" Ozaki was a brilliant con artist and successful lawyer who connived to be arrested with a tarnished reputation to give himself a reason to work for the Suzaku Group traffickers. Secretly in league with Laurent, Oz fakes his death at his own son Makoto's hands to secretly reconvene with Laurent after serving as the Suzaku Group's translator in trafficking children. In truth, Oz helps set up their complete defeat while saving the children, repairing his relationship with his son in the bargain.
• Memetic Mutation: "Meanwhile, in America..."
• One True Pairing: So far, the heavily ship-teased relationship between Makoto and Abbie seems to be the most popular among fans.
• Signature Scene: Makoto strung up by his feet, dangling upside-down from the Hollywood sign. It's the closing scene of the opening, and the silhouette of this scene is used in lots of the merchandise, usually to represent Makoto.
• Superlative Dubbing: The English dub's actors not only dub their characters speaking multiple languages (in contrast to the Japanese dub, which used voice doubles for some of the non-Japanese dialogue), but even got to improvise and alter some of their dialogue on the fly—a rarity in dubbing. This makes the dub both technically impressive and extremely lively, and lead to it being praised for its high quality.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In the first episode of the second arc, the crew pulls off a "mini-con" that involves tricking a Corrupt Corporate Executive with a secret all-female underground fight club, all while helping out an employee of his whom he sexually harassed. The whole thing is resolved in half an episode, but would have made a fun arc on its own.
• Unpopular Popular Character: In-Universe, nobody in their right mind trusts Laurent. Fans and critics, however, gushed over his Lovable Rogue qualities.
• Woolseyism: In order to better convey the series' sense of Translation Convention, the English dub keeps the Japanese dialogue for part of the first episode, only transitioning to English once the characters themselves are canonically speaking it.