YMMV / What Happens Next

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Gage, his actions and his motivations have been the subject of constant debate by the fandom, especially his smile at the end of No Matter What.
  • Claire and her motivations have also been the subject of a lot of debate. After Victim Impact Statement revealed that she's spearheading a movement to have a law passed in response to Haylie's murder, fans were quick to ponder Claire's exact reasoning and how she really feels. It can be summed up as 'How much of Claire's activism and desire to get Haylie's Law passed stems from genuinely wanting to make things better after her sister's murder, and how much of it stems from unresolved trauma, survivor's guilt and her hating herself for not having a good relationship with Haylie when she was alive?'
  • Milo's feelings about Griffin and how they impacted on what happened after the murder are also under debate, given that Milo was upset that Griffin never told him that he had a boyfriend, and admitted that Griffin made him feel special.
  • When Audrey brought up Claire, Mark responded 'Right. Your girlfriend. Okay.' Is he homophobic, or does he not like Claire and think she's not good for Audrey?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Much to a lot of fans' surprise and horror/disgust, the victim impact statement shown in the comic is based on real life victim impact statement forms for children.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Audrey became popular with fans shortly upon her introduction thanks to her attractive character design and being the first major Black character in an otherwise fairly racially homogeneous cast. Her being a Nice Girl helps, too.
• Fridge Brilliance: Why is Milo such a manchild? In addition to the trauma he experienced, he spent the second half of his teenage years institutionalised, which isn't exactly the best environment to mature and become a responsible adult in. And since he got out, he's spent most of his time hiding away from the world and camping out on tumblr.
  • On a similar note, moving in with Gage is an obviously terrible idea (and, given that he's done a whole bunch of things that likely broke his parole terms, probably going to get him sent back to the mental hospital), but it's not like Milo would be able to come up with another solution: he's spent years wallowing in self-pity and his feelings of helplessness and persecution, his only family is kicking him out, he has no friends who can help and no money, and the idea of going to a homeless shelter or asking his parole officer for help would never have occurred to him. In all likelihood, it was probably the only option he thought he had.
• I Knew It!: At one point in No Matter What, Milo looks at a page on a website about the murder of Savannah Plunkett that details what happened, and cuts off in the middle of a sentence that says that Griffin attempted to do something. Multiple readers correctly guessed that the rest of the sentence would contain a variant of the words 'sexually assault'.
• Jerkass Woobie: Milo. Yes, he did something horrible, but he doesn't deserve to be treated the way he has been - though his response to it doesn't help.
  • Claire is deeply traumatised from her sister's murder and everything that stemmed from it, clearly never got the help she needed, and is still suffering in the present day. But, she's also constantly lashing out at people, is very transphobic, toxic and self-centred, and isn't making any effort to actually help herself or learn from her mistakes.
• Memetic Mutation: Joe Biden. ^note Fans jokingly decided that the old white politician who talks to Claire at one of her campaigns is Joe Biden, with someone even suggesting adding Biden to the comic's TV Tropes character sheet.
  • Vikki's hat, and whether it was a good choice or not.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Claire's memory of her discovering Haylie's body has her walking into the laundry room and finding Milo having sawn off one of Haylie's arms. Milo then proceeds to remark, eerily calm, that Claire's home, and then tells her that Griffin's in the basement but will come back, that Claire can't help Haylie, and that she needs to run.
  • Milo's nightmare about the murder. The whole sequence is set out in an eerie, off-colour style, bringing home the nightmare ambience even before anything shocking happens. Then Milo goes to his room, only to find a trapdoor leading down to Haylie's mutilated body.
• Tear Jerker: The ending of Dog Names: Milo watching himself and Haylie doing a duet of the camp song "Linger" and flashing back to their years of friendship before the murder.
  • After Milo moves in with Gage in No Matter What, he gets a call from his father that freaks him out so much that he has a panic attack, hits his head on the toilet and passes out.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: One of the biggest criticisms of the comic is that everyone is a horrible person, and none of them seem to want to change that, making it hard to care about anything that happens to them. Milo is a self-absorbed manchild who treats his suffering as an excuse to avoid acknowledging his responsibility for anything he did or work on improving himself, Gage is the boyfriend of a serial killer who fetishizes the crimes that boyfriend commits without any sort of care about the victims of those crimes, and Claire is a transphobe who takes out her pain on everyone around her and is more interested in ensuring that Milo and Griffin suffer like she is than actually improving anything about her life. Even Vikki, who is comparatively normal and well-adjusted, is exploiting Savannah and Haylie's murders for internet clout.
• The Woobie: Haylie. Everything we've seen of her shows that she was just a nice girl who was horribly murdered by someone she trusted.
  • Poor, poor Savannah Plunkett.
  • Claire. She overheard her sister's murder, found the body and saw what had been done to it, and had to tell her parents what had happened.