YMMV / Imperio de cristal

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Uriel is a (intentionally) completely unlikable character, but he certainly didn't deserve to be run over by Augusto, especially during his daughter's birthday.
• Ass Pull: Cesar being saved from drowning by Andrea's ex-boyfriend, a character that was never introduced before.
• Awesome Music: The opening/intro song, ''Imperio de Cristal'', a haunting piano piece by Bebu Silvetti.
• Cult Classic: It has a very devoted following on telenovela Internet forums.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Claudio, partly due to his status as The Woobie which endeared him to the fandom.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The divorce between Sofia and Augusto is more harsher to look at since their actors (who were married in real life) did divorce 10 years after the telenovela was over.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Cuna de lobos, another series with an Evil Matriarch who favors her villanous son. It certainly helps that they have the same actors.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Quite a number of viewers from the 90's onward saw the series specifically because of Maria Rubio, Rebecca Jones and Alejandro Camacho starring a telenovela again, after the hit that was Cuna de lobos years ago.
• Moral Event Horizon: Despite the fact that Augusto is an power-hungry killer, many still found him likable to an extent. However, when he murdered Octavio and the reveal that he's responsible for Claudio's insanity, people were quite upset. And that was just the beginning.
• Narm: "I'M BREAKING! DON'T TOUCH ME, I'M BREAKING!"
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Cesar wasn't in a particularly happy marriage, and his affair with Elena is portrayed as fulfilment of a destiny, a tragic romance that wasn't meant to be. On one hand, we're supposed to be sorry for him and his lost love, on the other hand, he often displays overly Wangsty behavior towards his children and his cheating of Livia is treated as a good thing.
  • Julio's relationship with Sofia is certainly portrayed as romantic, but at the end of the day, he did leave his longtime girlfriend to be with a woman he knew for a couple of days.
  • Bernal is supposed to be in the wrong when he opposes to Elisa's romance with German. But she had spend many episodes pining for Julio and even guilt-tripping him with suicide if they didn't get married....only for her to leave him at the altar to elope with German at the last moment.
• The Woobie:
  • Octavio, who was manipulated and poisoned by people he thought he could trust. What makes it worse is that he was such a nice guy that he was unaware of how much his stepmother and Augusto wanted him gone.
  • Claudio. Dear god, his life utterly sucks. His parents threw him into a mental institution when he was a child and his brother is a Psychopathic Manchild with a thing for abusing him (which is how he got institutionalized in the first place). It gets even worse after he's manipulated into killing Octavio and develops psychotic episodes in which he believes he's made of glass.
  • Even if you dislike Narda, you'll probably still feel bad for the poor girl; her parents are Married to the Job, was separated from her twin during all her childhood and teenage years and her brothers were too old to connect with her. And she gets disowned by her parents after getting pregnant with Bruno's child. Made worse by the reveal Livia got pregnant with her and Claudio only to keep her cheating husband close.
  • Marco Aurelio. Not only he's unaware that his grandmother doesn't like him, but his father dies in mysterious circusmtances that he never finds out.
  • Poor, poor Antonia, being locked by her own daughter into an insane asylum so she'll kept quiet on her crimes.