YMMV / RENT

• Accidental Aesop: Never do business with your friends. They may screw you over or vice-versa, and it can ruin the friendship. If you have no choice, at least get a written agreement that will hold up in court.
• Adaptation Displacement: The musical is probably more well-known in some circles than La Boheme, the opera it was based on.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The protagonists — Are they rebellious artists trying to break free of an oppressive system that does not value creativity? Or childish hipsters who can't get over the fact that contributing to society is not the same as selling out?
  • Benny — The villain if one exists, starts to look like the Only Sane Man for coming up with an intelligent and workable way to have a day job and enable creativity on the side. That said, he is taking part in gentrifying the neighborhood, whether or not the protagonists make a convincing case for that, and it is unkind to demand a whole year's worth of back rent from your two unemployed friends without at least giving them advance notice.
  • Mark —
    • A lot of his actions after "Without You" take on an entirely different meaning if the production has him present when Angel dies. If a production goes this route, then him quitting the Buzzline job goes from dissatisfaction with the potential career to finishing his film in a desperate attempt to emotionally recover from watching one of his closest friends die. It also adds a far more disturbing undertone to his line "Angel's voice is in my ear", going from merely missing a friend to outright traumatized.
    • His decision to quit the tabloid can come off as this to viewers. Some see it as being an act that shows how much he's willing to commit to his craft, while others see him as being a bit of a spoiled brat who seem to think he's "selling out" despite having a job most people trying to make a living out of their art would kill for.
  • On a lighter note, everyone and their mother has their own opinion on what Angel's gender identity is. The fact that many different variations of gender and sex are far more well-known and understood nowadays than they were when the show was written has only added to this, especially because the characters are inconsistent with their pronouns (Mark and Roger tend to go male - though Mark "corrects" himself to female at one point - Mimi goes female, and Collins flip-flops but tends to go male). Ironically, at the same time as sexual identity outside of the old binary is better understood, more people become insistent on finding an exact category with rules to fit someone into.
• Americans Hate Tingle: The show was never popular in Britain; the original West End production ran for one and a half years, with small revivals, then the show was heavily revised as Rent Remixed which was a disaster and lasted 3 months, probably damaging the show's reputation in the UK.
• Awesome Music:
  • Finale B. It incorporates several songs from before in an all-out, heartwrenching, and simply awesome finale, with the entire cast. Higher voices get one layer, lower ones get another, and the melodies simply interact with perfection. Heck, Angel even sings in it! This is evident in the Broadway version, as they run out to join the cast in the end. Not so much in the movie, but if you listen closely you can hear them.
  • "La Vie Boheme". Loud, raucous, and infectious, complete with table-dancing, mooning, and "up-yours" gestures. If you're not singing and dancing along by the time Mark hits "To days of inspiration, playing hooky, making something out of nothing...", there's something wrong.
  • Christmas Bells for its almost mind-bogglingly complex harmony, especially starting at about the 5:15 mark - five parts begin to sing at once, all of which are completely independent of each other. Not only that, but it continues to build the characters' various relationships and plot lines simultaneously yet still in a way that's astonishingly easy to follow onstage. It's not a song that can work as a stand-alone, like many in the play, but it's a standout piece nonetheless.
  • "One Song Glory" is incredible, with its pure, raw emotions and great guitar work.
  • "Will I" consists entirely of two lines sung repeatedly—yet it still manages to be one of the most utterly heartbreaking songs in the play.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Angel. Some fans love them for being one of the show's most unique characters and a Messianic Archetype and some fans hate them because of the Christ-like status the other characters give them (that and killing Evita).
  • Maureen. She's either a hilarious Plucky Comic Relief and a super fun role for a stage actress to play with a wonderfully vivacious musical number ("Over the Moon"), or a pretentious Attention Whore who treats her lover like crap. This may have been exacerbated by the movie adaptation, in which several characters were adjusted/toned down for the new medium, but Maureen was played more or less exactly the same, highlighting flaws that audiences were previously more willing to overlook. However, no matter what one's opinion of the character may be, Maureen was Idina Menzel's Starmaking Role.
• Broken Base:
  • The self-important attitudes of the protagonists themselves have been known to cause some viewers to completely disregard the great story and music.
  • The fanbase is rather divided on the movie adaptation. Some love seeing the OBC reprising their roles, and adapting the story in ways that simply can't be done on a stage, while others feel it came years too late and didn't do the stage production justice.
  • Related to the above, Rosario Dawson being cast as Mimi. While some (including her fellow castmates) liked her in the role, saying she was a welcome addition and felt her presence brought more attention to the film than without her being there, others did not feel she was worthy of the role, believing that she was miscast. Also, said fans had a problem with the disproportionate advertising and attention she received over the rest of the cast^note Which mostly didn't consist of Household Names: Jesse L. Martin had Law & Order to his name, and Taye Diggs had Chicago, but Frozen (2013) was eight years in Idina Menzel's future, and Star Trek: Discovery 13 years in Anthony Rapp's, in spite of the musical being an ensemble cast.
  • Similarly, whether of not Daphne Rubin-Vega or Rosario Dawson was a better Mimi. Some find Rosario Dawson to have a better voice than Daphne Rubin-Vega while others find that Daphne Rubin-Vega's voice fit the personality more.
• Can't Un-Hear It: For many fans the original cast is how they see the characters, no doubt helped by just how many times they've reunited: the 2005 film, the 10th Anniversary concert, and performances for the 2008 Tony Awards, the final Broadway performance, and the 2019 Fox TV production.
• Common Knowledge:
  • It's often assumed that the entire cast are unemployed hipsters who want to live self indulgently for their art. Actually it's only Mark who is (and Maureen if you go by the book). Collins, Joanne and Mimi are all conventionally employed, Angel has a side hustle and Roger is just recovering from a heroin addiction.
  • It's often argued that Benny isn't actually a villain because all he's doing is asking his tenants to pay their rent. Put simply, this is not the main point of the protagonists' conflict with him, it's actually two-fold: first, he's going back on their deal to blackmail them with an eviction he knows they couldn't fight in order to get favors out of them, and his main goal is to kick a small tent city's worth of homeless people out of their place to build his studio. The actual rent he's threatening them to pay barely even comes up - the group rejects the deal immediately and never bring it up again.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The reason a lot of viewers are able to let the whole "killed a dog" thing go and still like Angel? Because the whole thing is just so ridiculous, considering that Angel essentially Disney Villain Death'd Evita the Akita with their incessant percussion performance and she tells the story in such an over-the-top happy manner. Crosses into Refuge in Audacity, especially when it's revealed that not only was it Benny's dog, but he hated it too, and seems to have already known that Angel killed it before Collins told him.
• Draco in Leather Pants: There are some, especially among the show's hatedom, who insist Benny did nothing wrong. While whether or not it was understandable for him to change his mind about not charging his friends rent is up for a debate, he did promise they could stay there for free, so it's understandable why his friends would be pissed at him for suddenly dropping that bombshell on them. Even if you agree with his decision to charge rent for future leases, demanding to be paid back for the year's worth of rent he previously said they didn't have to pay is a massive dick move. While Benny is a decent man at heart and he does redeem himself in the second act, he's far from blameless.
• Ending Fatigue: After the non-stop action of the first act, the second act seems a bit disjointed by comparison, allegedly due to the author never completing his revisions to the script. The first act has no scene breaks and (on stage at least) depicts almost in Real Time the course of one Christmas Eve. Then the second act brings in lot of Time Skips because it gives an overview of the year that follows.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Mimi recovers from her illness, the bonds of friendship between the main cast are renewed, and the musical ends on a high note, but it doesn't change the fact that half the main cast are HIV-positive (and it's very possible Benny and his wife got infected thanks to Benny's affair with Mimi), and this being the nineties, they're running on borrowed time. (In fact, it had already run out for Angel and Word of God says Mimi will die soon after.) Notably, one Dutch production flat out rejected this ending on these grounds and had Mimi die at the end.
• Ethnic Scrappy: Maureen is a rather divisive character, and part of that comes from her perpetuating the stereotype that bisexuals are sluts. Not helping matters is how she's fully aware of her promiscuity and is prideful of it.
• Fair for Its Day: The show was and still is highly regarded for its normalized portrayal of queer sexuality and the frankness in its discussion of AIDS, two things that the wealthy, theater-going crowds of the mid-90s weren't used to seeing. Nowadays, it's often accused of trivializing the AIDS crisis from an extremely brutal and blatantly homophobic battle for human rights, as well as homelessness itself, to somewhat-minor difficulties (squatters would not be able to afford AZT, even if it were sold secondhand like in the play). The fact that it kills off the gay drag queen/gender-fluid Angel, while sparing the cishetero Mimi, whose La Bohème equivalent dies, has also been called into question. It also remains one of the few mainstream shows to feature an openly bisexual character... who perpetuates their most hated stereotype. And due to author Jonathan Larson's death before the show opened, there's no way of knowing if or how his views might have changed with the times, despite Larson himself being both heavily associated with friends and acquaintances who were LGBT, and having multiple friends who ultimately succumbed to AIDS' grasp.
• Fanon: It's never revealed how the four HIV-positive characters seroconverted, but it's generally accepted among fans that Roger and Mimi got HIV from intravenous drug use, while Collins and Angel got it from unprotected sex.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: A full version of "Goodbye Love" was filmed for the movie, but all of it except for the initial argument was scrapped in post because director Chris Columbus thought it would be too much sadness all at once. It's universally agreed that cutting this was a bad decision, as it removes Benny's redemption when he pays for Angel's funeral, invites his friends out to drink, and pays for Mimi's rehab, the climactic Mark/Roger argument (meaning there's no revealing Mark's Survivor's Guilt nor Roger calling Mark out for hiding behind his camera, meaning there's also no callout of the audience by proxy), and Roger abandoning Mimi to die, giving his words in "What You Own" very little weight. Reception to the scene itself has been nothing but positive, leaving most fans wishing it had just been kept in.
• Ham and Cheese: Vanessa Hudgens added a lot of energy to Fox's production with her performance of drama queen Maureen.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Maureen and Benny's animosity is harder to watch, thanks to Taye Diggs and Idina Menzel's divorce.
  • Invoked by Anthony Rapp in his memoirs Without You about Larson dying post-production. He says that the musical was about doing what you could on borrowed time and if you can create art out of people's pain, it was a cruel irony that Larson had a rare condition — aortic rupture— that killed him before he could see the success of his show. Rapp himself mentioned that the song "Will I?" helped his mother come to terms with a terminal cancer diagnosis, and helped with his subsequent grief over her death as well as the decision to get help when he lashed out as an abusive boyfriend, the way Roger attends the Life Support meetings after lashing out at Mimi. Not helping was that when the cast agreed to do a workshop performance in honor of Larson, most of them couldn't stop crying.
  • Rosario Dawson starring in one of the most LGBT-positive musicals of all time becomes harder to watch after she was accused of harassment and assault against a transgender man in 2019, though the charges were later dropped.
  • Both in and out-of-universe, Mark receives criticism for how he's a pretentious filmmaker that thinks filming his friends and random homeless people on the street equates to "good art". Roger has a Gut Punch of a song where he accuses Mark of hiding behind his camera so as to not confront that he is helpless to save his friends from the inevitable, and Mark blurts out that he has Survivor's Guilt and has been questioning why he has to watch and serve as their witness. Then when you see tick, tick... BOOM!, which Jonathan Larson wrote as a roman-a-clef about his life before he made Rent, and you realize Jon was being self-deprecating about himself through Mark. Indeed, Jon has a lot of Survivor's Guilt in the film as some of his friends measure their T-cell counts and go to support groups, not knowing that his heart will give out in a few years' time.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In one scene from the film, Maureen (played by Idina Menzel) sings with an ice sculpture wearing a purple cloak. Sounds familiar...
  • "Over the Moon" has a line about being pushed off a cliff by a suicidal Mickey Mouse. Naturally, it has become this trope thanks to Maureen's (who sang the song in the show) original actress having worked several times (first with the Hercules: The Animated Series, later in Enchanted and the many Frozen works) with the Mouse House. Additionally, the two "live" recordings of RENT feature Maureens who either later or previously worked on Disney Channel.^note Tangled: The Series' Eden Espinosa in RENT: Filmed Live on Broadway and High School Musical's Vanessa Hudgens in Fox's RENT.
  • Roger is a wannabe rock star who refuses to "sell out" by getting a day job while pursuing his craft. Seven years after the show's debut, Adam Pascal (the original Roger) would star in School of Rock as the more career-driven bandmate of a wannabe rockstar who refuses to "sell out" by getting a day job while pursuing his craft. Even funnier, both end with Pascal's character writing a cheesy rock ballad as their magnum opus.
  • The film version has Tracie Thoms playing Joanne and Rosario Dawson as Mimi. Seeing the former as the more responsible one in comparison to the latter is very amusing when the two starred in Death Proof a couple of years later. There it's Rosario Dawson sick of being considered the responsible one, begging to be included in Tracie Thoms's reckless scheme.
• Jerkass Woobie: Roger is not wrong that Mark hides in his work largely as a way to not have to deal with his responsibilities and has no right to act as put-upon. Mark is also hiding behind his camera to avoid facing the inevitable fact that his friends are dying before his eyes, and he basically forces himself into the role of The Heart out of terror for the day he'll eventually be alone.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: While Benny is not necessarily a villain, he's still the show's main antagonist and is guilty of things like blackmailing his former friends over rent he knows they can't pay, helping to gentrify the neighborhood, and calling the cops on a tent city, which eventually escalates to a full-fledged riot. He's still far more sympathetic and likable than the pastor at Angel's funeral who, though he's onstage for about fifteen seconds and his worst crime is calling Collins a "queer", is universally despised by the entire fanbase for insulting a grieving lover like that just because he can't pay the undertaker.
• Just Here for Godzilla: There are people who only like this show for its music. To say nothing of the polarizing story and characters, the songs themselves are extremely emotionally powerful.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Your Eyes," despite being the song Roger is obsessed with finishing before he dies, is by far the least popular song among the fanbase. This has not escaped anyone's notice, so there are jokes abound. It doesn't help that the song Roger sings about wanting to write a great song, "One Song Glory," is considered to be one of the best in the whole show.
• Moe: Angel is...well, an angel, and no matter who plays them, they're pretty much always guaranteed to be adorable.
• Narm:
  • Some of the lyrics are a bit too heart-on-sleeve. Roger's "Who do you think you are/Barging in on me and my guitar" may be the corniest line in the whole show.
  • The fact that Mimi GETS CURED OF AIDS THROUGH SONG!
  • In the film version, when Roger moves to Santa Fe, there's a scene with him singing on top of a hill overlooking a desert. While it's probably meant to look dramatic, it comes across as incredibly cheesy, as if director Chris Columbus wanted to make absolutely sure that everyone gets Roger is in New Mexico now.
• Narm Charm: Ben Brantley of the New York Times said "One forgives the show's intermittent lapses into awkwardness or cliche because of its overwhelming emotional sincerity."
  • Maureen's performance-art piece, "Over the Moon," is usually played as in-universe Narm: an ostensibly serious protest piece about gentrification that she turns into an indulgent, haphazardly staged drama about talking cows and a suicidal Mickey Mouse and begging the perplexed audience to "MOO WITH ME!" This is also the reason why it's so memorable and usually draws Audience Participation.
  • Mimi's Disney Death. Yes, it's not even close to realistic. However, it's still a very touching moment for many, and given the time period when it came out, the defying of a disease that had countless people terrified can be considered quite powerful. And to be fair, nothing explicitly says she's cured of AIDS and won't have any health issues in the future with the only real certain being that she has at least a little more time with Roger and the others.
• Never Live It Down: Angel killing the dog, the only immoral act she commits in the show (which was more of a hitjob because she was desperate for money), sullies her entire character for many fans. Year in, year out, the argument never changes...
• Once Original, Now Common: A lot of modern audiences, no longer familiar with the specter of AIDS as a death sentence due to advances in medicine and AIDS research, don't really appreciate the gravity of what the characters are going through. In the film, a lingering death from AIDS complications is graphically depicted to make sure the point comes across. The Fox production RENT Live also takes care to emphasize how bad it was. There's slides detailing the severity of the condition and a voiceover (from Anthony Rapp) during the transition to "Life Support" that explains it for anyone who doesn't know. It also takes a cue from the film and makes sure to highlight Angel's deteriorating condition during "Without You" and Collins' attempts to care for them still.
• One-Scene Wonder: The "Blanket Person", a homeless woman who tears into Mark after he films her being oppressed by a cop. She only has a few lines, but her rant causes Mark to change how he goes about making his film.
• Pop Culture Holiday: The second the clock hits 9 PM EST on December 24th, fans are bound to post a reference to the musical on social media, followed by a second wave an hour later.
• Questionable Casting:
  • Sarah Silverman as Alexi Darling. Hell, her character was used so little in the film, it almost feels like a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.
  • The movie featured most of the original Broadway cast reprising their roles around a decade after the show debuted, the sole exceptions being Daphne Rubin-Vega and Fredi Walker.^note  The former because she was pregnant, the latter because she thought she had aged out of her role. It's a little hard to take the characters seriously as rebellious and idealistic young bohemians when most of their actors are clearly in their mid-30s.
• Refrain from Assuming: "Seasons of Love" is not called "525,600 Minutes".
• Retroactive Recognition: The stunt team for the movie included Diana Lee Inosanto, who later dueled Rosario Dawson on The Mandalorian and Ahsoka (in which Dawson portrays Ahsoka Tano, and Inosanto portrays Magistrate Morgan Elsbeth).
• Signature Song: "Seasons of Love" is not only the most well-known number of the show, it's one of the most iconic musical theatre songs ever. It helps that it's a popular choice for choirs and theater groups to do at graduation.
• Strawman Has a Point: Benny has a number of points. While he's a jerk and uses immoral means, he is trying to improve the neighborhood. And while his abrupt attempt to get Mark and Roger to pay a whole year's worth is a massive dick move, the idea that he somehow owes his friends eternal free rent doesn't hold water, especially since it’s unfair to everyone else who has to pay.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • In the movie version, while he, Roger, Mark, and Angel are on the subway train singing "Santa Fe", Collins gets up on the handles and flips over it; when he "flips" back, it's just the same shot in reverse.
  • The movie was filmed in summer, with everyone's visible winter breath added digitally. It's... very noticeable.
  • In-Universe, some performances (such as the 2019 Fox production) will play this up to different degrees in "Over the Moon," depending on how much Stylistic Suck they are going for.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The last line of "Santa Fe" takes a Title Drop from "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?", and replaces the city's name.
  • "La Vie Boheme" was admitted to be inspired by "Linus & Lucy".
• Unintentional Period Piece: The movie starts on Christmas Eve 1989, but the show has always been synonymous with The '90s. The internet and Virtual Reality as an evil takeover plot, AIDS spreading like wildfire, etc. However, the movie also created a serious anachronism: The Thelma & Louise joke in "Today 4 U".
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: A common complaint among non-fans.
  • One of the biggest criticisms of the show is that Mark and Roger's struggles are hard to take seriously, due to the fact they're squatters by choice and refuse to pay their rent because they aren't willing to "sell out" (read: get a job). Roger has an excuse of being a shut-in due to recovering from his addiction and dealing with his AIDS diagnosis, but Mark is one of the few characters who doesn't have AIDS and who isn't part of the LGBT community, meaning he doesn't face the same discrimination and health problems that keep his friends from advancing (especially since most productions cast him as white). He even gets a well-paying job with Buzzline, but turns it down because he doesn't find it respectable and wants to finish his own film. The narrative depicts this as a noble pursuit of his vision, but it looks incredibly selfish compared to his friends who are dying and can't afford rehab for their troubles, as well as the other homeless characters who do not appear to be homeless by choice (one of them even calling Mark out early in the show).
  • Angel, despite being arguably the single purest character in the whole show who does honest work as a street entertainer, happily accepts payment to take out a hit on what turns out to be Benny's dog.
  • Mimi's behavior in "Another Day" is meant to inspire Roger to live his life again, and the repetition of the "No day but today" Arc Words and the fact she ultimately gets him out of the apartment suggests we're supposed to agree with her Anti-Nihilist mindset. However, her relentless attempts to get Roger to party and take drugs with her despite him only recently recovering from his addiction makes her look selfish. Since neither of them know the other has AIDS at this point, she doesn't even have the excuse that he's going to die anyway - she just wants to have fun with him for her own amusement.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The show equates being openly gay and living with AIDS as a form of rebellion from the establishment. 20+ years later, it can come off as either no big deal or more than a little insulting. Downplayed somewhat, as openly gay people are still very mistreated in many parts of America.
  • Most millennials would kill to be in Mark's position of getting a high-paying startup job in his career of choice, and those who have one tend to swallow their pride regarding any resentments about the job in question not meeting their personal standards (example: a film school student working on a reality show as their first professional gig will still be grateful to have a job in their field of expertise). For those too young to remember the more forgiving job market of the 1990s, Mark quitting his job for a gossip news channel because he finds it beneath him is infuriatingly petty.
  • At the time the show was written, a Soul-Crushing Desk Job was seen as not just easy to get for middle-class white men like Mark and Roger, but as all but inescapable. Maureen would have had a choice between that and being a suburban Housewife. Living in poverty in order to focus on one's art when one would otherwise have a comfortable middle-class life was widely seen as a brave and noble thing (though the people who didn't have any choice about whether or not they lived in poverty were never very impressed, which the show does portray). "Selling out" to take a corporate job, even one that used your artistic talents, was a failure that meant you had abandoned your own art. Fast forward to past the 2008 Financial Crisis, when Soul Crushing Desk Jobs are very difficult to get even for college-educated middle class white men; living by one's art, even in poverty, has become all but impossible; and the job market has become a desperate struggle for survival, and these values have become all but incomprehensible.
    • Note that these values apply mostly to the white characters. While Joanne is seen as somewhat stuffy, her profession as a lawyer is not portrayed as a failure, because it was difficult for her to achieve as an LGBTQ woman of color in the late 80s and early 90s. Benny is held in some contempt for "selling out", but it's clear that the rest of the cast's real resentment is for the personal betrayal involved in telling them that they were "golden", then demanding all the back rent at once as a form of extortion to get them to help in evicting the homeless encampment.
• Values Resonance:
  • In spades. While much of the show is pretty dated – AIDS is no longer a death sentence, very few people in their 20s are suspicious of the internet – it remains popular, in part for its anti-establishment themes and because half the cast is queer.
  • There's also a serious look at adultery and how even a Sympathetic Adulterer can cause chaos if they don't think about the consequences of their actions. The musical implies that Joanne helped Maureen cheat on Mark, a (relatively) Nice Guy who has no grudge against either of them. This makes Joanne feel "fucking weird" when Mark helps her set up equipment for Maureen's concert, despite him saying that it's okay to have conflicting emotions about the woman they loved. Joanne and Maureen's subsequent fights cause chaos among their friend group, with Maureen making Joanne serve as her unpaid AV stage manager, and Mark visibly looks uncomfortable in the film when they start to break up. Meanwhile, it's implied that Benny had an affair with Mimi and cheated on his wife Allison, whose worst flaw is that she's a "yuppy". As a result, there's a high chance that Benny and Allison contracted AIDS from Mimi and will die in turn. As Roger starts to push Mimi away when Angel dies, one of his contentions is that Mimi had an affair with "yuppy scum" and the fight causes everyone except Collins, Benny, and Mark to argue at Angel's funeral. It takes Roger undergoing Character Development to tell a dying Mimi that her love life doesn't matter to him, she just needs to hold on until the ambulance comes. Overall, it shows that adultery may not be morally wrong but it can be super awkward for those caught in the middle.
  • A generation born after the height of the AIDS epidemic can still understand what it's like to live in a world with a rapidly spreading, deadly disease that leads to alienation and paranoia.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Is Angel a trans woman, a cis male drag queen, non-binary, genderfluid, or something else entirely? They're referred to as female by some characters and male by others, or both at different times depending on context. The movie muddies it more by adding scenes of them removing their wig during the life support meeting and, as they are dying, wearing masculine clothes, all without explicitly stating their gender identity. It's uncertain if either Jonathan Larson or Chris Columbus had a specific flavor of gender identity in mind. Some adaptations like Rent LIVE have attempted to clarify this by portraying Angel as transfeminine, keeping her pronouns consistent barring Mark's slip-up.
• Why Would Anyone Take Him Back?: It's a rare justified case where the romance is established as mutually unhealthy. Joanne loves Maureen and wants to be with her, but is threatened by how Maureen Really Gets Around even when they're in a committed relationship. It's also implied that she helped Maureen cheat on Mark, which makes the "Tango Maureen" hilariously awkward. Mark and she agree that Maureen is a whirlwind and yet you are drawn to her knowing exactly what she is. Joanne and Maureen do break up when Joanne tells off Maureen for her philandering and Maureen calls Joanne a Control Freak, but they are witnessing their friends succumbing to a fatal disease and attend Angel's funeral, with Joanne expressly saying she wished that Maureen loved her the way Angel loved Collins. They get back together because Joanne knows she can't get rid of Maureen, and they want to be there for Mimi and Collins.
• The Woobie:
  • Collins, one of the more gentle characters in the musical in the healthiest relationship, loses the love of his live to AIDS. His Dark Reprise of "I'll Cover You" is utterly heartbreaking.
  • Roger. A sensitive, emotional rock star with not one but two tragic love stories, and slowly dying from AIDS.
  • Mimi is so hopelessly in love with Roger and so self-destructively vulnerable that you may hate Roger for throwing her out. And then she has a near-death experience from AIDS.
  • Angel, the single most positive and kind character in the show who spends most of the musical helping her friends out, and the only one who actually does die from AIDS.
  • Joanne, desperately trying to single-handedly sustain her girlfriend's career and their rocky relationship. Moreso in the movie, thanks to Tracie Thoms's performance and Maureen being depicted as even meaner than she is in the show.

---