YMMV / Last Herald-Mage Trilogy

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Lady Treesa Ashkevron is generally held in contempt by the other characters, as a "weak-willed" Hysterical Woman who's usually lumped in with her husband to refer to both as Vanyel's Abusive Parents. She's a feminine woman with no Action Girl tendencies and Mercedes Lackey can sometimes get into Real Women Don't Wear Dresses territory with that sort of character, but she really seems like she's done her best in a bad situation. Treesa "spoiled" Vanyel, making him the "pet" of the bower and sharing her enjoyment of Courtly Love, poetry, and music. These are all things Withen has negative interest in and Vanyel enjoys - he knows full well that for Treesa flirtation is just a game and a reason to exchange compliments. She couldn't protect Van from Withen and she didn't really understand him herself but she really seems to not have the power to change things. Also, she tends to take actual dangerous events, if not in stride, rather more calmly than the usual talk of her being hysterical and useless would imply. Once the danger is past she always pulls herself together.
  • In-universe, hearing about the abuse Tashir suffered from his mother Ylsa, Vanyel is inclined to think of her as a monster. The lady's maid telling him about it, who knew her, sees her as a Troubled Abuser despised by her family for being a Muggle Born of Mages and by her husband and his family for suspicion of Brother–Sister Incest when she was fourteen, kept in a "childlike" state of mind and believing the only thing she was good at was sex.
  • Also in-universe, Tylendel! After he's repudiated by Gala and subsequently kills himself, enough Companions think of him as still a Herald that they ring the Death Bell for him and he's buried in Whites. Vanyel and Savil's views of him are very sympathetic. Other Heralds find him too painful a subject to bring up. A Companion in the Collegium books who is the Reincarnation of a Herald who knew Tylendel well enough to refer to him by nickname thinks of him with considerable vitriol as a feckless Manchild, something Stefan would probably protest.
• Anvilicious: While few decent people would disagree with the story's Gay Aesop that homosexuals aren't all lecherous pedophiles, does it really need to pound the point in quite so hard in Magic's Promise?
  • Given the general attitudes towards gay people IRL at the time of publication (especially in the media), and towards gay people as portrayed in Valdemar and their neighbours at the time ^note it's heavily implied during the Collegium series, set several decades after LHM that Vanyel's open sexuality and outrageous heroics was responsible for a huge change in attitudes towards homosexuality, the Aesop being so blatant was probably necessary.
• Escapist Character: Vanyel struggles a lot in his life and is often lonely and unhappy, but over the course of the trilogy he becomes incredibly valuable to everyone he cares about, important and powerful and able to affect change like no one else. Everyone who dislikes him either comes around to loving him, comes to see him as a paragon they respect highly, or just dies. His Gayngst can be pretty relatable, particularly to queer readers, and resolves with his father mending his ways and a positive spin on Together in Death with Stefan. Centuries after he's died Vanyel is still adored and respected. Also, he's got a beautiful face, lean build, blue-black hair, and silver eyes — even after his hair goes prematurely grey, he remains the most striking Herald in Whites until the day he dies.
• Fair for Its Day: The trilogy is turning into this in terms of its portrayal of homosexuals, notably for the fact that almost all of them are Camp Gay to a degree and one of the "early signs" being a tendency to be more effeminate than straight male characters. Despite this coming off as stereotypical nowadays, at the time of the books' publication (1989 - 1990) it was rare to see positive portrayals of gay people at all. In fact, Vanyel was arguably the very first openly gay hero of a mainstream fantasy novel.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: At one point in Magic's Price, Yfandes teases Vanyel mercilessly when he has to do a major spellcasting with a hangover. He vows that one day he'll get a Companion drunk, just to turn the tables. In later books, it's explicitly revealed that Yfandes, like most Companions, is the reincarnation of a human, so she probably knows exactly how it feels (and just to make his revenge complete, Grove-born Companion Gwena — who is no one's reincarnation — wakes up woozy after being clipped with a magic-bolt and promises she'll never again mock Elspeth when she is "wine-sick".)
• Nightmare Fuel: These books get dark at times
  • In Magic's Pawn, a maddened Tylendel calls up wyrsa, creatures that look half-greyhound and half-snake, and sets them on his enemies. His Companion disowns him — the one and only time in this series this has happened — and tries to stand against them, but she is pulled down and destroyed in minutes... as she must have known would happen.
  • In the same book, Vanyel sees an ice-drake queen psychically dragging a woman within reach. The woman is fully aware of what is happening but can't do anything to stop it, and Van is paralyzed with fear himself.
  • In Magic's Promise, Van intercepts Herald Lores savagely whipping a Companion, to the point of shearing off strips of flesh. His own Companion is in a Heroic BSoD of anguish — which is good for Lores, because she would have had every reason to repudiate him too, if she'd had enough mind to do so at the moment.
  • In Magic's Price, it's mentioned offhand that "Lord Dark" took an underling who displeased him and chained him out in the woods so the carrion birds could eat his flesh — bad enough, but he also added a Healing spell so the flesh would keep growing back... now the crows are always fat and glossy, and none of the other underlings will eat them.
    Sometimes you could hear him screaming when the wind was right.
  • In the same book, King's Own Herald/Healer Shavri deliberately opens an unblocked link to her dying Lifebonded, meaning her life will go when his does. Her own death, while not shown 'on-screen' or described in detail, is implied to be horrible.
  • Vanyel and Yfandes meet their end by releasing all their mage energy at once — a technique called the Final Strike — to destroy Leareth and his army. While it's over quickly, Stef shares their incredible pain as they effectively explode.
• Paranoia Fuel: Leareth's modus operandi is to slowly corrupt or kill every mage in Valdemar, especially the Herald-Mages. Since he is the latest incarnation of the immortal sorcerer Ma'ar, he plays an extremely long game, whittling down the mage ranks for decades until he can march on Valdemar practically unopposed. And while the corruptions and slayings are subtle at first, they get more and more blatant as he cleans up his list, ending with an assassination that practically has his name on it. This, unsurprisingly, leaves Van blind with anger, and he comes within a hair of winding up in Leareth's possession too. As it is, he wins only at the cost of his own life.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The villain of each book is doing things behind the scenes through the whole book but only actually appears in person at the very end, in the same scene where Vanyel confronts and defeats them. He exchanges literally a sentence back and forth with Vedric in the second book, although Vedric is more present in the narrative than Leareth and Krebain and off-screen is pretending to be good and reasonable to fool the people of Highjorune. Van makes a total of three trips to that city and doesn't encounter him at all the first two times. Additionally, Vedric and his nephew Tashir are both noted to bear a strong resemblance to Tylendel. Something could have been made of this, like the Frelynnes and the Mavelans being related, but it's regarded as a coincidence which gives Van a passing stab of angst.
  • Vanyel's second trip to Highjorune has him in disguise as a down on his luck minstrel, who's taken under the wing of a slightly more prosperous local minstrel. When he has to leave the city in a hurry the older musician immediately and selflessly helps him. Van enters the city for his third time in the guise of a Bard, a more prosperous and prestigious musician, but he never sees the local minstrel again.
• Wangst: Of course, it's meant to be annoying to the other characters, but every once in a while Vanyel's self-pity risks stretching the reader's patience as well. This was lampshaded by the author - in a short story where she's confronted by her characters for tormenting them, he complains about her making him do this, and another character takes a moment to sing "My name's Vanyel and I whine, and I whine, and I whine" to the tune of London Bridges Falling Down.