YMMV / Brian's Saga

• First Installment Wins: How many of you even knew that there was more than one book before visiting this page?
• Funny Moments: In Hatchet, while in danger of being attacked by a tornado, Brian just hopes that it hits a moose that he saw earlier.
• Nightmare Fuel: The scene in Hatchet where Brian swims into the sunken plane to retrieve its cache of emergency gear and sees the plane's dead pilot... after months of rotting in the water with fish tearing at him. He then vomits into the water all around himself. This is another of the novel's Surprisingly Realistic Outcome moments - usually such an event is Black Comedy slapstick, but here it results in one of his closer brushes with death, as he's at least a dozen feet underwater at the time and inside the plane. He nearly drowns before he can struggle out and float to the surface.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: We don't get to see Brian use anything in the survival kit, because some random plane happened to pick up on his radio signal and rescue him before he could barely touch it. The epilogue also mentions that Brian was saved just in the nick of time, because it was nearing fall and the colder weather would have made it much harder to survive, which of course made people want to know how Brian would have dealt with winter. The author received so many letters from dissatisfied readers about these issues that they were the inspiration behind Brian's Winter.
• Values Dissonance: A tiny one; Brian spends two months in the wilderness and gets rescued in book one. While he obviously gets a medical checkup, there's no mention of therapy for his trauma. It gets even more prominent in the Alternate Continuity, where he attacks a bully for threatening him and decides the best solution is returning to the wilderness.

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