YMMV / Buru Quartet

• Badass Decay: A lot of characters from the first book get hit with this as the series progressed, especially by the time Child of All Nations rolls around.
  • Annelies, who gets introduced as a remarkably talented, intelligent teenage businesswoman yet gradually dwindles down to a childish Damsel in Distress the further the plot progresses and breaks her down. Even worse, she gets a sudden Bus Crash, like, 10 minutes into the second book and the characters cope with it later by trying to not mention her in conversations. Not that the degradation of her mental and physical state isn't entirely unjustifiable, given the tone of the series' plot.
  • Juffrouw Magda Peters, Minke's eccentric, but exceptionally inspirational teacher, gets Demoted to Extra following her deportation to the Netherlands and pretty much quickly disappears following a brief cameo in the second book.
  • Miriam Delacroix later Frischboten has lost all of her biting wit and capability as an observant intellectual critic by the time she reappears in Footsteps, in which her character is unfairly reduced to that of a baby-obsessed harpy and is only central to the book's whole Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe soap-opera subplot.
  • Prinses van Kasiruta, Minke's fearsome, gun-toting last wife, who, like Magda Peters, virtually disappears from Footsteps following her attempted murder of Suurhof's Indo-European anti-indigenous hate-group and only reappears in House of Glass to have Pangemanann hand her persistent ass a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. She promptly got dragged stage left, destination Bacan, after the beating and is never seen again.
• Broken Base: While Bunga Penutup Abad is naturally not without its own flaws, a huge majority of Pramoedya's fans adored it; the 2019 movie adaptation, however, pretty much awakened the relatively-dormant fandom to a chaotic Flame War between people who think the film has done a great service to the novel's profound complexity and those who think it's a dumbed down theme-park version of an epic literary masterpiece, its inappropriate emphasis on the romance between Minke and Annelies as well as Hollywood History reinterpretation (despite the source material's otherwise being very intricately researched) often cited as but a few of its biggest letdowns.
• Breakout Character: The first book's principal protagonists—Minke, Annelies, the Nyai, Jean, and the two Roberts, to a lesser degree.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Concerns regarding the state of literacy in Indonesia are apparently not entirely unfounded.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Minke's constant pining for Annelies in This Earth of Mankind is often criticized to be one of the book's most negatively distracting points; Annelies' generally rather unremarkable characterization as well as her most defining role certainly don't help at all, especially when compared to her mother.
• Spotlight Stealing Character: Annelies is Minke's most famous Love Interest at the expense of his other arguably more solidly-written wives.
• Tough Act to Follow: A lot of fans who have watched Bunga Penutup Abad think the 2019 movie is this compared to it, which they regard as a superior adaptation that managed to capture the postcolonial spirit of the quartet more successfully even with a far more limited budget and cast.