Hadronic vacuum polarization currently yields the dominant uncertainty in the Standard-Model prediction for the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. While the phenomenological approach is only as accurate as the hadronic cross sections used as input, there are several aspects related to chiral dynamics that can be used as cross checks, including $\pi \pi$ dynamics and the chiral anomaly. In the talk I gave an overview over such aspects, including recent work to extrapolate the isovector HVP contribution to unphysical quark masses.