History Literature / Xanth

** Grey Murphy in ''Man From Mundania'' is a FlatEarthAtheist that refuses to believe in magic even after arriving in Xanth. It's not helped by the fact that magic stops working around him. Truthfully, Grey has a Talent -- he projects an AntiMagic field around him. [[spoiler:This is because he's the son of the Magician Murphy, who fled to Mundania after his defeat.]]

** Harpies are a partial aversion, and also take pride in their ugliness and go out of their way to make themselves disgusting; young harpies, however, are capable of being beautiful and seductive (especially if they're trying to get a human man to mate with them. The only male harpies we see are handsome.

* TriangRelations: In ''Heaven Cent'', Dolph becomes engaged to two girls: Nada, who he loves, and Electra, who loves him. Both girls have external reasons why they need to marry him, and Dolph decides to maintain both betrothals until they can come up with a solution; the tangle is resolved two books later in ''Isle of View''.

* TheMindIsAPlaythingOfTheBody: Particularly in evidence with Trent's transformational magic, which causes anyone hit with it to obtain the nature and instincts of the new form along with the physical attributes.

%% * GettingCrapPastThe Radar: Due to overwhelming and persistent misuse, GCPTR is on-page examples only until 01 June 2021. If you are reading this in the future, please check the trope page to make sure your example fits the current definition.

* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: In ''Castle Roogna'', a ring claims to be magical, a wishing ring. When Dor makes a wish on it, it answers, "I'm working on it." Every wish made on it comes true through outside factors — except that every wish made on it does come true, and it never claimed that it could pull off instantaneous wish granting. [[note]] This is consistent with the operation of the talents of both [[spoiler:Bink - self protection through making things go right. Only later in the series does he gain a level of control over this talent to allow it to work on a chosen target]], and [[spoiler:Murphy - making things go wrong, with self protection as a side effect. Unlike Bink, Murphy learned early in how to direct his talent's target]], which work through coincidences.[[/note]]

* ShesGotLegs: Irene is repeatedly stated to have some of the most beautiful legs in the land (even without magical enhancement).

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/xanth_quintology.png]]
[[caption-width-right:350:The novels that started it all.]]

* BalefulPolymorph: Trent's talent is to transform any living creature in line of sight into any other creature. This includes turning soldiers sent to attack his army into fish and leaving them there to die [[spoiler:[[WrittenByTheWinners according to the history books, anyway]]]]. Eventually he figures out "creature" doesn't have to mean "animal" and starts [[{{Transflormation}} turning all his enemies into trees]].

** Take Dor, for example. His talent is making inanimate objects talk, and he doesn't consider it very powerful compared to, say, Trent, who can [[BalefulPolymorph transform any living creature into any other]]. However, it's considered a Magician-level talent.[[note]]A person with a sufficiently powerful talent is called a Magician, and there are only a few in every generation.[[/note]] Why? Well, inanimate objects remember everything, which means that, if he so chooses, Dor can know anything about anybody by questioning their possessions. Similarly, his granddaughter Eve can tell anything about any inanimate object, including living beings that it's encountered.

* {{Transflormation}}: Eventually becomes Trent's go-to BalefulPolymorph. One of the major examples is Justin Tree, who becomes a fixture of the North Village for seventy-six years (Trent finally turns him back at his request, after his adventure with Breanna in ''Zombie Lover'').

** ''Night Mare'' features a whole chain of Kings who are explicitly king ''pro tempore'' (because of an evil sorcerer who was somehow able to target and take out whoever was king at the time).

** In ''Ogre, Ogre'', Blyght Brassie introduces herself, but almost immediately, the Siren accidentally calls her "Blythe" instead. Blyght decides she likes the new name better and goes by it from then on.

* AintNoRule: Xanth's laws appeared to deny the throne to women because the ruler must be a King, not a Queen, and a King must be a Magician. Eventually someone realized that a Sorceress is just a female Magician, and nothing else in the law said that a King had to be a man, so the rules of succession were changed to allow women (and non-humans) to [[SheIsTheKing hold the title of King]].

* CureYourGays: With a pun-made-literal ''[[UnfortunateImplications straightjacket]]''.

* LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters: Mostly a result of the series simply being so long and spanning multiple generations of the same royal family. He also (usually) comes up with ways to keep the older characters from dying of old age.

* MoralDissonance: Chameleon's attempt to prosecute the man who essentially raped her (he should have known that Wynne was not able to give informed consent) in the first book. Bink's response, hearing the story presented at the trial by the judge (not her), which wasn't what was going on at all and was incredibly biased against her, is that it's understandable: what was a man going to do with a beautiful woman asking him to sleep with her? Since, at the time, he didn't know about the consent issue and thought that since she'd said yes at the time and 'changed her mind later' it was unfair to accuse the man of rape. The first time Bink encounters Chameleon in Wynne-phase knowing what's going on, however her attempts to seduce him occasionally edge into molestation, and to a modern reader it's a pretty clear analogue for someone given a date rape drug. Keep in mind that Wynne-mode Chameleon is essentially a nymph, and it's made clear in the first book that young men are encouraged by older men to use nymphs for guilt-free sex, as opposed to real women. Since nymphs, like Chameleon herself, are magically mutated humans... And then, just to bring things full circle, Bink has sex with Wynne-mode Chameleon, despite her having the intelligence of a child. He briefly feels bad about this, the key word being "briefly".

* MurphysLaw: Magician Murphy, introduced in book 3, has this as his talent. Anything he wants to go wrong will, and while he initially tried to use it to become King of Xanth, he later used it to benefit the sitting King (Dor) as a condition of his return from exile.

* CrouchingMoronHiddenBadAss: Grundy the Golem is easy to dismiss, being a six-inch high smart-ass with a tendency to insult everyone around him. However, he's also highly intelligent, very good at thinking on his feet, and his ability to talk to any living creature means he can gather information very quickly. He's demonstrated several times that while insects, birds, and small animals are pretty insignificant when taken alone, get a few million of them together and motivated and they become a force to be reckoned with.

* ContemptibleCover:
** One book has the awkward title ''The Color of Her Panties''. (This one was Lampshaded before the book even appeared in print, which is a pretty good trick to pull off.)
** A number of the early books sported half to fully naked women (plus, a couple of male examples with both ''Golem in The Gears'' and ''Heaven Cent'') on the cover, so the actual artwork had its own issues.

* HumanMomNonhumanDad: Crossbreeds with this combination generally result in a were-beast, such as [[spoiler:the Horseman, the werehorse lead villain of ''Night Mare'']], or Becka Weredragon. The other way around results in a creature with a human front and animal back or lower half, such as centaurs and mermaids.

** It started out with a LawfulGood borderline PhysicalGod in a DeathWorld[=/=]CrapsackWorld, averaging out somewhere in the middle, and moved towards MarySue types in a world where happy endings were a law of nature.

** Good Magician Humfrey is aware of other worlds, as demonstrated in ''Question Quest'', when he references characters from Piers Anthony's ''Incarnations of Immortality'' and ''Apprentice Adept'' series.

* LethalHarmlessPowers: In ''Night Mare'', The Horseman has the relatively useless talent of connecting someone's line of sight to a different location. Unfortunately, Mare Imbri teaches him about the gourds, and The Horseman starts using his talent to connect peoples' line of sight to a gourd peephole, trapping their consciousness in the gourd.

* DisneyVillainDeath: It happens off-screen in ''Night Mare'', but Mare Imbri follows the trail of then-King Bink and Hasbinbad, leader of the Punic Nextwavers and TheDragon to the Horseman, and discovers that their sword fight ended when Hasbinbad fell to his death in the Gap Chasm.

* AndIMustScream: Anyone who got turned into a tree or plant by Trent. Although subverted with Justin Tree, who'd been turned to a tree when Trent tried to seize the throne by force. By the time Trent came back to Xanth, Justin had grown to enjoy being a tree and didn't want to change back.