YMMV / Whip It

• Adaptation Displacement: Few people seem to know that the movie was an adaptation of a novel.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The pool scene. It breaks the flow of the movie, accomplishes little narratively, is very fantastical in a cinematographic sense while the rest of the movie is fairly realistic, and basically exists to fill screen time.
• Broken Base: The Oliver subplot. Some find it completely unnecessary and adding nothing to the overall film (see below). Others like that he deconstructs the Satellite Love Interest trope.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Bloody Holly due to being played by cult favourite Zoë Bell and quite a bit of Fanservice coming from her.
• Heartwarming Moments: At the very end, when Bliss's mom reads her daughter's Bluebonnet Ball speech. It turns out that Bliss names her mom as the person she admires the most.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The amount of Les Yay detailed below, given that Elliot Page would later identify himself as a lesbian, at least prior to his transition.
• Les Yay:
  • Eva Destruction and Rosa Sparks. Ari Graynor said she played her character Eva Destruction as a lesbian seductress.
  • A little between Pash and Bliss, who are bullied by gaybashing schoolmates for their close and exclusive friendship, and are shown to be quite touchy-feely with one another.
  • In general, the film is tailored to the female eye, being a story about a girl finding her place in the world, and mainly aimed for female viewers. The point of the main character's relationship is essentially "boyfriends actually stink so stick with your ladies".
  • If you listen to Eva and Rosa's conversation, they flirt with "there's some stuff I'm pretty sure I could teach you". How does the final encounter between Bliss and Iron Maven go? Maven, who has been relatively antagonistic towards Bliss the whole film, compliments one of Bliss's moves and Bliss responds that she'll teach her sometime. If the subtext of the line is consistent, that would definitely shed an interesting light on many interactions between Bliss and Maven, especially when the food-fight scene ends with the two of them rolling around on the floor and Maven laughing as she's pinning Bliss down. It may be that this film is intended more for the gay audience than most people realize.
• Moment of Awesome: Bliss knocks Corbi off a railing after she and her boyfriend make fun of her and Pash.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Jimmy Fallon as the over the top announcer Johnny 'Hot Tub' Rocket. He only appears in the bout scenes with brief snippets of dialogue, but he's wildly entertaining.
  • Drew Barrymore also has very few lines, but Smashley Simpson is such a fun Boisterous Bruiser that you still remember her.
• Retroactive Recognition: Kristen Wiig was known for Saturday Night Live at the time but it was right before her real breakout role in Bridesmaids.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Bliss's romance with Oliver has very little bearing on the rest of the plot—it gives her a reason to ditch Pash and a reason to reconcile with her mom, and that's about it. Though it does provide a neat deconstruction of the Satellite Love Interest.
• Unintentional Period Piece: For someone who follows Roller Derby, there are numerous things shown in the movie that pin the events of the movie to a period in the mid-2000s; most notably, fighting has gone from largely ignored to explicitly forbidden, and the two-whistle start seen in the movie has disappeared in favor of a single whistle releasing both the pack and the jammers. More generally, the film's fashions and music are loving homages to the mid-2000s indie scene.

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