YMMV / The Call of the Wild

Heartwarming Moments:

John Thornton: As you love me, Buck, as you love me.

• Moment of Awesome: Buck winning the bet for John Thornton by pulling a sled with a thousand-pound cargo, which also leads to a Heartwarming Moment.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The idea of getting overwhelmed by forty dogs and torn to pieces a la Curly if you so much as fall down.
  • The starving dogs. A group of dozens of dogs, some of whom were probably loyal sled dogs left or lost to the wild, come crawling silently into the camp as skeletal animals completely insane and hell-bent on eating everything. On top of that, they basically win despite many of them being killed because the team just couldn't stop them. Not long after this, the quiet and gentle Dolly snaps with a blood-curdling howl and runs mad, chasing and terrifying everyone in camp until she is finally killed with an axe.
  • The trip with Hal, Charles, and Mercedes is this for the dogs considering it's basically a death march for them. After already being worked to the bone in grueling conditions, they're forced to immediately do it again, and in even worse ones on a journey that is doomed from the very start. By the end of it, more than half the team is dead via a combination of exhaustion, starvation, beatings, and untreated injuries, and all of them except Buck then all die along with their new owners after the incredibly overloaded sled they'd been pulling breaks through the ice, and drags them all down with it. What's worse is that even if they somehow had all made it safely across, they most likely would've all still died, or have at least become stranded considering the distance they had left to go, and at the rate at the dogs were dying, and how many of them were actually left.
• The Scrappy: Hal, Charles, and Mercedes. They're so inept and unlikable that London seems to have written them as a Hate Sink.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Curly's death. The big, sweet, friendly Newfoundland is savagely ripped apart for the mistake of trying to befriend a strange pack.
  • Despite pushing his way back into his position on the sled after collapsing, Dave eventually succumbs to exhaustion and has to be given a Mercy Kill.
  • Hal, Charles and Mercedes are more stupid than malicious, so it still manages to be a little sad that they fall victim to their own inexperience. But the reader is more likely to feel sorry for the rest of the sled dogs we've come to know, who fall through the ice and die with them.
  • Everything leading up to Buck leaving John, and then Buck coming back to find John's dead body.
• Values Dissonance: The depiction of the natives as bloodthirsty, unreasoning savages. Also, naming a black dog Nig.

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