YMMV / Chronicles of Blood and Stone

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: While it may seem like a case of All Animals Are Dogs, playing fetch with a horse is actually possible in real life.
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • Little things like being raped tend not to trouble Tristan too much. On the other hand, he'll spend paragraphs whining about how he doesn't want to be king and how he can't fall in love with any of the hot women he sleeps with...
  • Shailiha in the sequels is remarkably unaffected by her time as a Brainwashed and Crazy sorceress after being freed from said brainwashing, and rarely seems to remember that her husband was killed in front of her in the first book.
• Bile Fascination: The trilogy as a whole and especially the first book have garnered a reputation for being some of the worst fantasy novels ever written; one of the main reasons a lot of people check out the series is to see if there's any truth to all the crazy rumors they've heard about the books' content.
• Cliché Storm: The first book alone manages to pack in about every High Fantasy cliche there is; pages and pages of exposition, a prologue that begins hundreds of years before the present, the hero is The Chosen One but doesn't know it, Card-Carrying Villains , wise old wizard mentor, etc...
• Crosses the Line Twice: The Minions slaughter a town close to the end of the first book... then use the severed members of the victims to literally paint the walls red.
• Designated Hero:
  • Tristan may have elements of the Knight in Shining Armor, but he's definitely not pure, having a tendency to make selfish, overly aggressive or stupid decisions for no real reason other than that the plot calls for it. In the second and third books, meanwhile, even though Eutracia is falling apart in the aftermath of the Minion invasion and as the crown prince who has the backing of two powerful wizards, he could do something about that... he literally completely ignores the situation for hundreds of pages to do other things. Also, most of his angst starts self-inflicted.
  • Wigg rarely contributes anything constructive to the story; many of the conflicts are directly caused by his actions (starting from when and how he exiled the Coven and snowballing from there), both Faegan and the Ones Who Came Before are shown to greatly exceed his magical power and knowledge and frequently prove him wrong, and even his actual displays of magic are fairly limited and rarely of particular use in resolving the story. He's also kind of a jerk. He also has put children in a spell that will kill them if they use the Vagaries, and, even though there are already other measures against the return of the Sorceresses, he still thinks it's necessary to ban women from practicing magic, yet when the Sorceresses do attack in Tristan's coronation, he had organized it in a way that ensured the attack succeeded. Nonetheless, the narrative consistently treats him as a wise and powerful archmage.
  • Faegan is also seen as a mentor, even wiser and more pragmatic than Wigg, who is supposed to be sympathetic for losing his daughter. In practice, he is seen as an arrogant man who saw his daughter as a tool and was glad she died, because she was forced into evil.
• Designated Villain:
  • In The Fifth Sorceress, Shailiha is treated as fully evil from most of the heroic cast because she has been tortured and brainwashed into being evil. Wigg keeps insisting on putting her down.
  • In The Scrolls of the Ancients, Wulfgar and Serena are literally only evil because they were brainwashed by Krassus to turn them to the Vagaries - as in, their personalities literally and visibly do complete one-eighties the more enchantments he puts on them. The protagonists know full well that Krassus can do this. Nonetheless, Wulfgar and Serena are treated as irredeemable monsters and no effort is ever made to free them from the Vagaries, which is eventually shown to be perfectly doable.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Go on, try reading about the sorceress' minions without picturing them as gibberish-speaking little yellow dudes... especially, since in the sequels, they serve the protagonists instead.
• Narm:
  • Newcomb really wants the reader to know how evil the sorceresses are. They seem to only have two modes of acting: exposition machine or gleeful rapist and Torture Technician. As expected, the descriptions of their various atrocities quickly stop being shocking and dilute to just being either dull or comically overblown. Their top enforcer, Kluge, suffers from the same issue. So does Ragnar in the sequel.
  • Their names make them hard to take seriously as well. Their leader is called Failee, while their second-in-command is called Succiu (which sounds like "suck you" or possibly derived from the Succubus). And the one with the most normal name, Natasha, disguises herself as Lilith, which, considering what Lilith is associated with and how the sorceresses act, is a very poor choice of a false name.
  • On the other hand, Wigg's name resembles a slur regarding blackface. It's not helped by the fact he is very prejudiced against anything that isn't men who use magic.
• Strangled by the Red String: Tristan's "relationship" with Narissa. They only really meet once, Narissa comes across as a Satellite Love Interest and gets killed off not too long after she's introduced so we really know nothing about her personally and why she and Tristan would like each other.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Natasha is a character full of potential. She is the kidnapped daughter of Faegan and has an actual agenda apart from rape, which is getting a promotion in the Coven. The confrontation with her could be very emotional, and she could have a redemption arc. Instead, she becomes a flat rapist that is easily disposed of after trying to force herself on Tristan.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Tristan can be this for some readers, given his tendency to complain a lot and behaving like a Bratty Teenage Son whilst actually being almost 30. His hang-ups about being king earn him few sympathy points, as it tends to come off as him being a selfish, immature jerk who just doesn't want to take any responsibility in his life (which is especially difficult for some readers to swallow given his age). The fact he frequently does rather stupid things but rarely experiences negative consequences for this doesn't help, either. However, he downplays this at some moments, because sometimes his mentors call him out for doing something morally right, and he also gets put through things no one deserves.
• Wangst: Tristan, a 29 year old man, does not want to be king and spends 100+ pages whining about it.

---