YMMV / Maladie and Other Stories

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Are the witches from The Mischief Creek Happening the Anti-Heroes of the story? Or are they simply evil? Or just opportunistic? The way they handle the whole situation allows to interpret them in any of those ways, but one thing is for sure - they are not the blameless victims they try to play early on.
• It Was His Sled: When Battle Dust was published for the first time, people were genuinely excited about the announcement of the incoming Space Opera novel. Now, the most known thing about the story is that it was all a joke.
• Memetic Mutation: "Something ends, something begins" became a catch-phrase for the Witcher fandom.
• Misaimed Fandom: Both Tandaradei! and The Mischief Creek Happening have a fair share of people applying a feminist bent to them and how "strong, independent women stick it up to the men". Except like so many other works with witches unleashing their bloody revenge, the stories are about Woman Scorned who still sell themselves to an outside power (which in the case of Tandaradei! is an explicitly evil, corrupting force) and remain dependent on said power, effectively switching their masters for temporal personal gain, rather than achieving any kind of "liberation" or being in any way independent. It also begs to reason that a pair of horror stories that end with Downer Ending are hardly uplifting in any way.
• Once Original, Now Common: When it came out for the first time in 1992, Something Ends, Something Begins was essentially a sneak-peek to the end of the Witcher saga, which by that point wasn't even written yet (Blood of Elves didn't come out until two years later). When read without that context, the sheer amount of stuff pre-planned already might be completely lost, as many elements mentioned in the story are "obvious" for anyone who read the story after the saga concluded with Lady of the Lake in 1999.

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