YMMV / Hemlock Grove

• Base-Breaking Character: Second season character Miranda, going by comments on the show's Wiki. She's either an interesting and sympathetic Naïve Everygirl, or an annoying snoop who sticks her nose into things that aren't her business. Her detractors also aren't a fan of her more sexually active lifestyle in contrast to Letha.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Peter and Roman might be the leads but Shelley, Lynda and Destiny have their own strong fanbases.
  • Alexa and Alyssa Sworn are fairly well-liked for providing some decent comic relief and undergoing more Character Development than most of the tertiary characters.
  • Michael Chausseur has his fans for his arc in season two and being an ultimately reasonable Hunter of Monsters.
• Ho Yay: Peter and Roman. In spades.
  • Roman slips Peter a note saying "Can I watch?" — he's talking about the transformation from human to wolf, but the subtext is practically text.
  • In the novel, when Olivia questions what Roman and Peter were up to in Roman's room, Roman answers, "homosexual acts".
  • Roman also states that watching Peter transform back to human is "beautiful".
  • Throughout the novel, the narrator interjects with various statements that play up the Ho Yay.
  • In the third season, Johann admits to Roman that he has wondered about his relationship with Peter. Roman objects (a little too fiercely for one's liking), but Johann points out that it's not an unreasonable assumption.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Olivia is a terrible person, no doubt. She'll screw over anyone for her own gain, including her own children. But several episodes in season 2 seem to give her a more sympathetic side. Roman doesn't buy it, but it's vague whether Olivia is being manipulative or if she's trying to change for the better. However, the event that puts her past the point of no return, that cements forever more what kind of character she is is when she devours the artificial body that Shelley was having her mind transferred into, dooming her to her deformed body forever.
  • Roman crosses it in season 3 when he actively starts hunting for victims to feed on.
• Narm Charm: Christina trying to become a werewolf by drinking from a muddy paw print was just silly. But silly or not, it worked. And this is based on actual folklore.
• Nausea Fuel: The series has some of the most graphic and disgusting werewolf transformations in any media, which consists of the person's teeth, eyes, and other bodyparts being pushed out the body as the wolf quite literally bursts from the human carcass, even eats the shed remains of their human form. For the wolf to turn back to human, the same process where the human literally bursts out of the wolf.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Peter's first on-screen transformation in the TV adaptation definitely qualifies. It includes Peter's flesh being flayed off, his teeth falling out and then his wolf form proceeding to eat some of the flayed off flesh. Suffice it to say that Netflix did not skimp on the special effects.
  • And then there was the part where Christina (in vargulf form) ate Peter's face...
  • Baby Nadia's Psychic Powers.
  • Olivia eats Chasseur. Well, most of her. Even with most of her skin flayed off and her neck broken, she's still alive enough to know what's happened before she's put out of her misery.
• Retroactive Recognition: Bill Skarsgård portrayed Roman Godfrey, a few years before his Star-Making Role as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in It (2017).
• Squick: As if the vargulf eviscerating its victims wasn't bad enough, it had to go out and attack the victims by ripping apart their vaginas first.
• Tear Jerker: The second half of "Birth" is nothing but Break the Cutie and Break the Haughty wrapped together into one giant ball of sadness.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Just when we were starting to know a great deal of information about Dr. Chausseur and the people she works for, she up and gets mortally wounded by Olivia and is forced to be Mercy Killed by Dr. Pryce. Olivia even told Pryce that she wounded her simple because she felt like it.
  • The Sworn Twins. One of them dying but the other getting away could have still pushed Sheriff Sworn into Knight Templar territory while giving the survivor an Angsty Surviving Twin arc. It would also have been interesting to see one or both them reacting to finding out their friend Christina was behind the killings, especially with Character Development they'd been getting in the previous episodes.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Most of the characters in the series are already hard to sympathize with (being either criminals, monsters, assholes, or hypocrites), but a big problem with the later seasons in particular and perhaps a major contributing factor leading to the show's cancellation is the increasing hopelessness for everyone involved, as major characters keep getting killed off in brutal ways, and daily life for the rest of them gets progressively crappier with trauma and angst piled on top of more trauma and angst, almost to Deus Angst Machina levels.
• Ugly Cute: Shelley may be disfigured, yet somehow she manages to be adorable. It helps that she's The Woobie.
• The Woobie: Shelley and to a lesser extent Peter. Both of them get far more hate than they deserve considering they are generally good, helpful people.

---