YMMV / Hope for the Heartless

• Awesome Music:
  • The theme of Faerydae's video "Horned King X Avalina Save Me". "Save Me" by My Darkest Days fits excellently the Horned King's dilemma and Avalina's role in it.
  • In another fanvideo made by Akemi Rain, the song "Where butterflies never die" by Broken Iris is used to skillfully capture the theme of humanizing the Horned King.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: The Horned King became an undead, disfigured demon-thing… because he murdered a lot of people. That's it. No Dark Magic involved, no conscious attempt to turn himself immortal. Despite the fic's great reception, this is definitely one of its shakier bits of Worldbuilding, especially since it arguably delivers an Accidental Aesop — "slaughtering people unfeelingly will give you great power and make you immortal". ^note  Granted, at the time of this writing, the whole backstory isn't told yet.
• Fridge Brilliance: The Invisibles are instructed by the Fates not to speak to anyone else but the Horned King and Creeper. They are punished when they disobey this order, but eventually the Fates give up trying to enforce it when they consider it pointless to keep up. At said point, the bond between Avalina and the Horned King is well-established. If Avalina would have had from the beginning the Invisibles to converse with instead of just Creeper and the Horned King, she wouldn't have spent enough time with the lich and get over her fear of him.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Creeper. He's an unfriendly and cowardly bully, but mostly because he has been abused by the Horned King and bullied on by the lich's men for his entire life.
  • The Horned King himself. For all the cruelty he shows towards Avalina, Creeper and others, he's all too aware of himself being a monster and doesn't believe that he can be redeemed.
• The Woobie:
  • Avalina who is imprisoned in the Horned King's castle with only Mitternacht to accompany her. Any time she cries over the crap she goes through because of the lich, Arawn and others makes you tempted to hug her.
  • Avalina's mother and brother Arran have to live with the knowledge that she's imprisoned in the Horned King's castle and may never return. They cannot do anything or tell anyone else because her life might then be endangered.
  • Taran has had to relive in his dreams the Horned King's death for months after it happened, leading him to privately doubt his decisions and actions back then. He then unexpectedly finds himself face-to-face with the subject of his nightmares who's not only alive, but also nearly kills him. This gives a lot more weight to the comment Dallben makes in the movie's beginning about young Taran getting too much responsibility on his shoulders.