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- Awesome Music: The accompanying background music for the online game "Kirsten's Winter Stars" is absolutely gorgeous. See for yourself:[1]
- Base Breaker:
- Depending on who you ask, Samantha is either a beloved favorite or a spoiled rich princess who gets too much attention from the company.
- Molly gets a lot of hate from adult fans who find her a whiny brat and her books inaccurate to what life was really like in World War II, some even unfavorably comparing her to Nanea, the other WWII era doll. But just as many fans adore her and find her behavior understandable given her age and what she's dealing with. Some fans meet in the middle, finding her more likeable in the movie than in the books due to the former's story structure and Maya Ritter's acting.
- Addy, to a lesser extent. She's celebrated for being the company's first African-American doll, but while some people find it problematic that the first doll of color has slavery in her backstory (insinuating that African-American people are only known for being slaves in the past), others point out that her stories start with her escape from slavery and focus on her new life in the free city of Philadelphia.
- Felicity is starting to get this due to her family having owned slaves, as was typical of the 1700s. Many fans say they still love her, but feel the books were wrong not to address the slavery issue, while others point out that it wouldn't work due to, again, that basically being the normal attitude of the time period.
- Broken Base: Pleasant Company versus Mattel. Old-school fans refuse to believe a toy megacorp could capture the magic of the beloved dolls, while Mattel fans find Pleasant Company's products lower in quality and think Pleasant Rowland herself is over-valued and a bad person for some things she said in the past.
- Fan Dumb: Hoo boy.
- Girls Need Role Models: The books inspired a generation of female history nerds.
- Memetic Mutation:
- Misaimed Fandom: American Girls Premiere, a computer game released in the late '90s that gave players the ability to write and perform plays about the various historical protagonists and their families and friends. It was supposed to be educational, but it was hard to take the game seriously between the creepy robot voices and the strange movements (characters could even float or walk through walls, and even normal gestures were always exaggerated). As a result, way more people used the game for parodies, Downfall spoofs and poop jokes than for its intended purpose, helped along by the game's almost total lack of a word blacklist.
- Narm: Jiggy Nye beating Penny in the Felicity movie.
- Nightmare Fuel:
- In the first Addy book, the slave driver makes her eat slugs off the tobacco plants.
- In Samantha's movie, a boy working in a factory gets his finger caught in a machine.
- Periphery Demographic: American Girl actually has a lot of fans who are adult women, often doll collectors. They can often be the strictest fans, especially those young women who got into the dolls as kids and apply the Nostalgia Filter.
- Replacement Scrappy: Inverted with Nanea (introduced in 2017) who many fans see as being the superior World War II era doll to Molly (one of the original three), whom many adult collectors find annoying.
- The Problem with Licensed Games: Both the Julie and Kit games for the Nintendo DS were given scathing reviews. The American Girls Premiere PC game was a different story, though, despite being that it was unintentionally hilarious.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks:
- Whoo boy. Mattel took over from Pleasant Company in 1998, and remodeled the dolls and outfits as well as retiring a lot of items. In some corners of fandom, anything made after 1998 is utter crap. This has led to pushback from Mattel fans against Pleasant Company; not only do they claim the items by PC are not as well-made, but they've made some disparaging remarks about Pleasant T. Rowland herself (mainly calling out her fictionalized account of the doll on the back cover of her first catalog).
- Fans of the Felicity books hated the change of Elizabeth from a brunette to a blonde to match the movie's depiction.
- Unfortunate Implications:
- It's happened a few times, such as the famous incident where Marisol was criticized for moving out of the inner city because it was unsafe and therefore making her old neighborhood (a real place) look bad.
- News magazines in 2009 tried to play this up and create a controversy out of minor character Gwen, labelling her "the homeless doll", even though she gets a place to move into partway through the first book she's in, we don't even know she was homeless until The Reveal near the end of said book, and she's not even the main character (that'd be Chrissa).
- Values Dissonance: Several examples given the historical periods and the time some of the books were written:
- Felicity's family had slaves, and her grandfather owned a plantation. This has not been overlooked by modern fans, who wish the books had "done better" and imply reprints of the books should remove any references to Rose or Marcus.
- Molly and her friends dressing as Hula dancers for Halloween. Many modern Hawaiians have written articles decrying Hula costumes as cultural appropriation, and some readers even think it was wrong of the book's author to include it. This may be even more awkward due to the release of the Hawaiian doll Nanea Mitchell, who shares a time period with Molly.
- Downplayed by Kirsten's books with Singing Bird. The Native Americans are in the process of being driven out of their lands by white settlers, and Kirsten realizes the sad reality of this when Singing Bird tells her she has to leave because her family can't find food.
- While Jessie, a black seamstress, is treated with reverence and respect by Samantha, she works for a rich white woman who embodies the racist attitudes of the time period.