YMMV / Ranger's Apprentice

• Alternative Character Interpretation: In Book 10, is Alyss being an unreasonable Jerkass and Territorial Smurfette towards Evanlyn, or is she just being protective of her boyfriend and putting her through a Secret Test of Character?
  • For that matter: Was Cassandra ever genuinely in love with Will, or even infatuated with him, with it falling away afterwards since they don't spend much time together? Or was it simply a closeness due to their shared experiences which never would have lasted no matter what?
  • In the first book, how much of Halt's grimness is due to his having not yet Taken a Level in Kindness, and how much is Will seeing him in a negative light, due to his reputation as The Dreaded?
  • Is Keren actually a good leader to his men? Or did he hypnotize them into obedience? Either would be in character for him.
  • Halt telling Horace that he's ruining good coffee by taking it with honey. A continuity snarl? Or just Halt pulling Horace's leg?
• Broken Base: Of a sort. Book 12 got a mixed reception, to say the least. Some shrug it off and say it's not so bad, others are very displeased. Alyss' death, for example, is this given that the character in question is beloved by some and not very well liked by others. There is the rather poor handling of mental health issues, which is actually justified for the time period, but seems strange and unlikable to some modern readers. Other complaints include the abrupt unlikability of most of the main cast and the Darker and Edgier tone of the book as a whole. Also, strangely enough, Will's beard, which got a lot of flak.
• Catharsis Factor: Horace beating up his bullies in Book 1 is incredibly cathartic to anyone who's ever been bullied themselves.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Guess who the villain of The Red Fox Clan might be. Maybe the only major new character, and the guy stated to be a distant relative to the royal family?
• Complete Monster:
  • The Icebound Land: Lord Deparnieux, one of many warlords ruling over pockets of territory in the lawless country of Gallica, is a petty thug who doesn't pretend his reign is anything but one of terror. Deparnieux searches for any excuse possible to terrorize innocents, forcing a servant to pick a punishment for a cook who served cold vegetables; when given the option of flogging, Deparnieux opts to flog the servant and have the cook left to die in a cage. Deparnieux adores the cages, having dozens of subjects caged up and left outside to be pecked to death by birds for any reason he can think of, most of which he cheerfully admits can be boiled down to "displeasing him". Deparnieux toys with and murders a young man whose elderly parents Deparnieux randomly murdered, and tries to goad the noble Ranger Halt into a similar duel solely so Deparnieux has an excuse to kill him.
  • The Kings of Clonmel & Halt's Peril: Tennyson is the leader of the Outsiders, a Scam Religion that extorts riches out of innocent people by pretending their god protects them from raiders that are secretly under the Outsiders' control. Tennyson regularly has villages annihilated, leaving at most a few survivors to spread the word and sometimes none whatsoever to illustrate what would happen if he isn't able to "intervene" in an attack. Tennyson assassinates King Ferris after Horace makes a fool out of him; tries everything to dispose of Horace from drugs to rigged duels; murders an innocent family of farmers; and finally abandons his own men to die in his pathetic attempt to escape and abscond with his ill-gotten riches. Despite his appearance as a holy man, Tennyson was nothing more than a greedy crook who thought he deserved everything the world had to offer.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Skandians. For a people that started off as just an Always Chaotic Evil Viking Expy, they end up getting a ton of focus. And the sequel series actually involves them more than the Araulens. They even got their own series, The Brotherband Chronicles.
  • Gilan, as Flanagan himself points out, is quite popular - especially with young ladies.
  • Crowley (even before the prequel books, in which he is a main character) is one of the more popular characters in the fandom.
  • One who never even appeared on the page is Halt and Ferris' younger sister Caitlin, who was able to see what was going on with Ferris' assassination attempts, is the mother of Sean, died "a while back" and...that's all we know. Still doesn't stop lots of fans from wondering about her.
• Growing the Beard: The series becomes increasingly well-written, original, and funny, with a major leap in stylistic quality, between books six and seven.
• Narm: The Kalkara. They're actually described in-universe as bear assassins.
• Narm Charm: While the Kalkara may seem weird, there are some who find them extraordinarily creepy due to their bone-chilling hunting cries, the legends of their invincibility (which prove well-founded), and the terror with which Will, the viewpoint character, sees them.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Warmweed. This is a plant that essentially mindwipes you after a few doses, is apparently quite common and easy to get, and was distributed to most of the Skandian yard slaves for a very long time.
  • The numerous Family-Unfriendly Deaths in the series, for some people, leading into What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?. For example, the Kalkara in the first book are so dangerous because massive layers of hardened oil make them virtually invulnerable. When the characters get access to fire arrows, they ignite in blinding pillars of flame, ''and are completely disintegrated.
  • The barrow wight in Book 9 also counts.
• The Scrappy: Dear God, Madelyn. Doesn't help that she's something of a Creator's Pet, and that many feel the writing of the series in general went downhill around when she was introduced.
• Seasonal Rot: "The Royal Ranger" miniseries, both because of The Scrappy and because some feel that the writing style itself has become less nuanced and mature.
• Sequelitis: Many feel that Book 12 was by far the weakest, due to unpopular Character Development and Maddie's nature as The Scrappy.
  • The Red Fox Clan also comes in for this, given that it features The Scrappy as a main character and is set to start a new series, despite the fact that The Royal Ranger was about the fifth time that it looked like Flanagan would stop for good. It certainly doesn't help that most of the book consists of either Filler or very slowly loading a very obvious Chekhov's Gun, building up to a Captain Obvious Reveal.
  • From around Book 12 onwards, there are many more moments of "as a matter of fact" and "in truth" in the narration, which can come across as weak Informed Attributes or just As You Know.
• Squick: In The Kings of Clonmel, Horace observes a market scene in which carts of manure and sides of meat pass close enough to each other to touch. Horace immediately decides he's having fish for dinner that night.
• Values Dissonance: The treatment of warmweed, which is all but stated to be the Rangerverse equivalent of marijuana. It’s an extremely dangerous and addictive substance that weakens your mind and body, turning Will into an Empty Shell that barely even speaks. In the United States, this treatment of marijuana as a dangerous hard drug brings to mind the mocked-in-retrospect “Reefer Madness” panic of the mid-to-late 1900s.