History YMMV / TheChroniclesOfNarnia

* HardToAdaptWork: An odd case in that, while several of the individual books have been successfully adapted, and the premise as a whole seems easy enough to adapt on paper, adapting the entire series is actually a lot easier said than done than such a task might look at first glance. For unlike other fantasy works like ''Literature/HarryPotter'' or ''Franchise/TheLordOfTheRings'' that have a clear cut protagonist to follow throughout the entire narrative, the narrative of Narnia follows the point of view of multiple different protagonists across multiple books, with some of them appearing as teens or young children in some installments before appearing as adults (and in one case as an elderly man) in other installments; which naturally means that maintaining a consistent straightforward narrative around any one protagonist is difficult. Further not helping matters is that a lot of the primary narrative focus is generally on the world of Narnia itself as opposed to any specific character, which results in a lot of the POV characters either not having any clear arc to their character or having any arcs they do receive fairly swiftly resolved by the end of one or two books, which led to the people behind the film adaptations of ''Prince Caspian'' and ''Voyage of the Dawn Treader'' forced to try to create brand new arcs for some of the characters in order to prevent them from coming across as {{PinballProtagonist}}s.

* AwesomeMusic: The beautiful theme music, and background animated map of Narnia.

* TearJerker: Creator/TheBBC version attempts to be this with Aslan's death. The build-up is sad, but the death sequence is ruined by The White Witch's acting (and the...shall we say, less than stellar animation).

* FairForItsDay: Lewis has taken a lot of flak in recent years for his ValuesDissonance-laden statement in LWW that "battles are ugly when women fight". But other books do show that Susan and Lucy and Jill Pole are capable fighters and can hold their own in a battle. Consider that the U.S. Military didn't allow women in combat zones until the 1990s, and not in direct combat at all until ''2013''. Lewis's statement, written in 1950, merely refers to situations in which wars are so terrible and invasive upon the civilian population that women, who would ''only'' have been in the civilian (not military) population, are forced to fight for their lives. Replace the word "women" with "civilians" in your mind and it conveys more closely what Lewis actually meant but in a modern context.

* BrokenBase:
** Should the books be read in chronological order or publication order? Creator/CSLewis said in a letter to a fan that although he slightly preferred the chronological order, he pointed out that the series' chronology was not planned. In the end, he concluded by saying that [[MST3KMantra "perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone reads them."]]
** What to do with Susan probably qualifies too.

* BaseBreakingCharacter:
** The Pevensie siblings. Fans of the latter books say that Lewis started writing more interesting protagonists as the series kept going and tend to consider the siblings to be [[FlatCharacter boring, uninteresting characters]] in comparison to the protagonists from the posterior books. On the other hand, they are still very popular characters in the fandom, especially Edmund, who is the most popular character in the series.
*** Susan is particularly divisive thanks to the events of ''The Last Battle''. Many feel like she was being a jerk for making fun of her sibling's stories of Narnia, while others think she was just trying to be mature and is slut-shamed by the narrative for caring too much about "lipstick and nylons and invitations." Many also feel like her being left outside of Aslan's Country was either justified since she denied his existence or way too cruel for leaving her with [[spoiler: all her family dead on Earth]].
** Tirian is either a huge [[TheWoobie Woobie]] who saw everything he loves fall in front of his eyes or an absolute idiot who is guilty of everything that went wrong in the last book for his tendency of attacking without thinking of the immediate repercussions.

* IAmNotShazam: In a location variation, Narnia is the main ''country'' the stories take place in, not the name of the world itself.

* IAmNotShazam: None of the characters are called Narnia. Narnia is the main country the stories take place in.

!!Subjective tropes for the book series as a whole (and many for how Susan is treated in the end):

* BaseBreakingCharacter :

!!Subjective tropes for the book series as a whole:

** A meta-example is that Lewis wrote ''The Magician's Nephew'' in order to do, in fiction, something he was tragically unable to do in real life: save his mother.