YMMV / Elemental Masters

• Ambiguously Gay: are Nan and Sarah a couple, or Platonic Life-Partners? Nothing explicitly romantic happens between them, but neither ever has a romance with a man, either- and Nan becomes jealous of Sarah's close relationship with another woman in A Study In Sable.
• Complete Monster:
  • The Fire Rose: Paul du Mond is the seemingly loyal servant of Jason Cameron, but hides a truly despicable personality behind his smug appearance. A power hungry sadist with a love for hurting others, Paul schemes to betray Jason to a horrible death at the hands of his rival Simon Beltaire, and spends his free time torturing and raping young, trafficked girls to "break" them into their new lives as prostitutes. Desiring a Sex Slave of his own, Paul begins buying trafficked women to torture as he pleases, only to kill them within days' time and buy a new slave to replace them, leading to a bevy of mutilated corpses piling up that Paul regularly disposes of. When his plan to sacrifice a child goes awry, Paul aims to kidnap Jason's true love, Rose, and use her as a sacrifice just to torture his former master.
  • The Gates of Sleep: Madame Arachne Chamberten is a vain Satanist who throws countless innocent lives away in pursuit of ultimate power simply to make up for the fact that she was born without the talent of magic. A murderess who killed her own parents, husband, and even brother and the man's wife, Arachne curses her niece, Marina, as an infant to die out of spite for her family, and schemes to turn her own son into a mindless puppet, or even kill him if need be. Arachne uses a pottery business as a guise to the fact that she poisons her workers—all orphaned young girls—with lead, then forces them to prostitute themselves out when the sickness hinders their work, until they either die from the poisoning, or Arachne uses them as a sacrifice for her black magic. When Marina's curse threatens to backfire on Arachne, Arachne attempts to reverse it and plunge Marina into a coma and leave her to rot and die a horrible death, hoping to move on after and continue to expand her pottery business and ruin evermore lives for her own selfish desires.
  • Phoenix and Ashes: Alison Robinson is the stepmother of the novel's protagonist Eleanor and the murderer of her father, one of many victims Alison has left behind her in her history of marrying and murdering for wealth. An evil Earth Master with a capacity for capricious violence behind her dignified façade, Robinson has Eleanor enslaved to a geas that involved hacking Eleanor's finger off, and Alison gleefully tries to have Eleanor driven to insanity within the depths of an Elemental-infested mine later. Alison once bargains with a disease Elemental she unleashes to prolong World War I, kickstarting The Spanish Flu in the process so she can reap power from the death of millions. Not even her own flesh and blood is safe from her curse, as she drains the life from her own two daughters, as well as one of her associates, leaving her daughters as withered, catatonic vegetables. Prim, proper, and viciously sadistic, Alison Robinson is a Wicked Stepmother to put the worst of them to shame.
  • The Wizards of London: The seemingly respectable Lady Cordelia Bryce-Coll is nothing more than a wicked sorceress who pledged loyalty to a sealed Elemental called the Ice Lord in exchange for power. Cordelia moves herself up in society in an especially wicked process; murdering children to bind their souls to a dream world, and using their spirits to subliminally whisper suggestions in the minds of nobility to move Cordelia up in life. Cordelia has killed dozens of children with the attitude of throwing away unwanted puppies, and even experiments on two of them to swap her body to escape the limitations of a female body in Victorian society, intending on repeating this body-surfing process to attain immortality. When the Ice Lord reveals it intends to freeze over all of Great Britain in eternal winter, Cordelia is only too happy to hand it over the key to its seal so long as she reigns supreme.
• Fridge Brilliance: Magic in The Fire Rose has inconsistencies with the rest of series due to being a prototype. However, it is established several times that magic is shaped by culture, and the book is set in America. It's wholly possible that the inconsistencies (spirit elementals, sylphs being cruel, only four types of elementals apiece) are simply the way things work there.
• Ho Yay:
  • Amelia blithely asks Maya if all Indians are as "handsome" as she is. Maya is quite flustered by the question.
  • Between Nan and Sarah as of Home From The Sea. By A Study In Sable they are even raising a child together, and the main conflict of that one is of the Evil Diva breaking them up. Nan's jealousy and anger towards said Evil Diva certainly is eyebrow raising for a mere "friend" to have.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • In A Scandal In Battersea, when they're in the alternate universe ruled by the Eldritch Abomination Mary Watson manages to find and call a friendly air elemental to help them. The awesome goes not just to her for actually turning up something benign in such a Crapsack World, but to the elemental for surviving when even the microbes in the dirt were all wiped out.
  • Most of what Rosamund does could qualify, as she's an Action Girl and monster slayer in a world that doesn't allow women to be either. Her crowning achievement, however, is at the climax of Blood Red: when faced with a clan of forty-three werewolves, she successfully takes out all of them through strategy and clever use of the local Elementals.
  • Leading Fox taking out the witch. Giselle notes that the witch, with all her stolen magic could easily overwhelm a lone Master, and he pulls it off with the aid of Hu-huk and Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Eleanor's stepmother may have crossed it at the beginning of Phoenix and Ashes, but she is definitely over the line when you realize she would be happy to subject her stepdaughter to magical and psychological torture for days in order to drive her insane and retain control of the estate.
    • If torturing her stepdaughter into madness isn't enough of a swan-dive over the event horizon, Eleanor's stepmother unleashes a plague—implied to be the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic—just to prolong World War One so she can reap more corrupted power from all of the death and conflict. She also drains the life almost entirely out of her own two daughters during the final confrontation. It becomes difficult to think of anything this woman does that isn't an affront to human decency.
  • Aunt Arachne in Gates of Sleep marries an industrialist, gets pregnant by him, and kills him to inherit his wealth. If she hadn't crossed it when she uses Dark Magic to curse the infant Marina in front of her parents, using magic that could have killed the child right on the spot if it weren't for a magical christening gift Marina had received just moments before, she does when her exploits after she turns herself to industrial baroness are brought to light. She sets up pottery factories with pretty lower class girls to paint ceramics, ensures they get pretty clothing and nice surroundings, and prostitutes them out to moneyed patrons, which corrupts the girls' souls and morality. All the while, the glazes and paints slowly poison the girls with lead. She then harvests dark magic from the girls' physical, emotional, and spiritual poisoning and pain. The clincher is when she uses Marina's own cradle to reawaken the curse which puts Marina into a coma. This being Edwardian England, this would consign Marina to a slow death by starvation/dehydration. Her satisfaction at this fate is utterly disturbing.
  • Richard Whitestone, in Unnatural Issue, turns to necromancy to get his dead wife back, and is willing to destroy his daughter's soul in order to put Rebecca's soul into her body. That's sick and twisted to begin with. Then he uses an army of zombies to savagely attack the household that shelters Susanne when she runs away, and follows it up by poisoning his faithful old house servants—the people who raised his daughter, as well as stood by him for twenty years while he turned into a complete shut-in—and turning them into zombie slaves. It's hard not to start cheering when he finally gets what's coming to him.
  • Lady Cordelia in The Wizard of London gains power, influence, and wealth... by murdering small children, binding their souls to a dream world, and sending the ghosts to whisper suggestions into people's dreams. Then she starts experimenting on them to transfer her soul to another body.
• Recycled Script: Both Steadfast and Reserved For The Cat focus on turn of the century show business (specifically mid-level music hall), feature Elemental Mages who work as stage magicians, and include subplots where the heroines, who are professional dancers, pretend to be Russian prima ballerinas. Despite that, the stories ultimately diverge, keeping the story from getting too stale.
• Rooting for the Empire: Shivani's crusade against Maya for simply having a white father? Irredeemably awful. Shivani's crusade against former agents of the oft-brutal British Raj, on the other hand? Pretty understandable Anti-Hero territory. Shivani gruesomely sacrificing Simon Parkening for daring to lay hands on her niece? The readers are cheering as he gets what he has coming to him.
• Voodoo Shark:
  • Katie can't use her Elementals to kill, because it might corrupt their innocence. Fair enough, though this is a unique restriction. But it's established that an Elemental Mage can use her Element without an Elemental, and Katie should be strong enough to intentionally ash her husband instead of waiting for the plot to do it. Given the accident that ends up killing him is a result of a totally ordinary household object, she could well have made it happen herself.
  • Jack and Lionel do discuss either poisoning him through his gin or rigging a match against him, but both back down at the idea of murder. Presumably, Katie also wanted to find a way to get rid of him without killing him.
  • Considering the legal scrutiny and trial Katie has to deal with in regards to Dick's accidental death it's probably for the best she has absolutely no guilt or tie to it.
  • Leaving the question of whether she should or should not kill Dick aside—it's understandable she might not want to murder someone, no matter how shitty the someone is, for the reasons already explained—the book acts as if there are no magical options besides turning Dick into a crispy critter, even though fire magic is more versatile than that.