YMMV / The Age of Madness

• Badass Decay: Stour Nightfall goes from being the primary villain of the North's story arc in A Little Hatred to little more than bait in The Wisdom of Crowds.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • The battle atop the Tower of Chains is one as it marks the downfall of Judge's. First her lover, Broad, whom she believes is her willing attack dog, betrays her, then frees Orso so the two of them can kill her men, and ends with Judge being thrown from the tower herself by Savine in an attempted mutual kill. The difference is Savine has people who care about her there to catch her, while Judge is left snarling and flailing as she takes the drop alone.
  • After spending nine books as a smug, insufferable, seemingly invincible villain, there's something deeply cathartic in seeing Yoru Sulfur being bodily thrown out of a party while being able to do nothing but hurl insults at someone no longer afraid of him. It's even more cathartic when he comes back for revenge on Savine and her father only to have blindly stepped into a trap where he's gruesomely eaten alive by three enemy Eaters.
  • His master Bayaz, likewise, finally turns out to not always be a step ahead of everyone else, and gets stripped of all his influence both in the Union and the North. While he's clearly not done for just yet, it's at least been shown that he's not all-powerful. Of special note is Rikke staring him down despite his threats to kill her on the spot, revealing them for empty bluster.
• Complete Monster:
  • Judge, one of the leaders of the Great Change and mistress of the ferocious Burners, is a wild and sadistic adjudicator whose verdict is always guilty. Having numerous prisoners hanged in Valbeck with areas under her control devolving into savagery and lawlessness, Judge attempts to burn the city down upon fleeing and later helps to capture Adua. Industrializing mass murder in her show trials, countless innocents and even her own allies are tried for fictitious crimes. Judge plans to implement such trials all over the Union and has dozens to hundreds condemned a day, with each tossed from the Tower of Chains to dash upon the stones below.
  • Lord Fedor dan Isher is a corrupt, self-serving member of the Open Council, who schemes outright treachery against the kingdom. A brutal land baron who forces many families into the streets under threat of death down to the children, Isher grows annoyed at his own funds being depleted for the sake of the kingdom, so he decides to stage a civil war to secure himself power. Isher tricks his own ally Wetterlant into getting himself hanged so that Isher can frame it as an "injustice" committed by the crown, manipulating the idiotically ambitious Leo dan Brock into treachery. After organizing a massive army that Leo leads into bloody war at Stoffenbeck, Isher quickly abandons thousands of his allies to die to save his own skin, then weasels his way back into an alliance with King Orso to fight the Burners. Once their mutual foe is defeated, however, Isher immediately works with Leo to turn on Orso, kill him and many of his loyalists, and take over the Union for themselves. Isher then promptly betrays Leo to throw in with Savine instead, always valuing what serves himself best above all else.
• Iron Woobie: Prince Orso dan Luthar. When he's first introduced he seems merely lazy and indolent but after gaining a purpose in life he decides to start working to do some good for the Union. Unfortunately by the time he makes this decision, the world goes to hell and every time it looks like he's finally accomplished something, it's only for something worse to blindside him and leave him worse off than when he started. He manages to peacefully resolve the uprising at Valbeck only for the Inquisition to go behind his back to execute two hundred rebels he promised clemency, both horrifying Orso and saddling him with the blame for the incident. His father dies and his efforts to be a fair ruler are compromised by the obstructionist Closed Council and the scheming of the aristocracy. The woman he's in love with ends up rejecting his marriage proposal, marries his rival instead, and then launches a coup against him, and he eventually finds out she rejected him because she learned they're siblings. Even after defeating the rebellion and showing mercy to Savine and Leo, his victory is meaningless as the Breakers and Burners seize the opportunity to rise up and imprison him. He then spends months watching innocent people be tried and murdered by Judge. When it finally seems like Orso will win after his and Leo's armies team up to retake Adua, Leo betrays him against Savine's wishes, seizes the throne for himself, and has Orso executed. Yet throughout the trauma and betrayals and brushes with death, Orso remains dignified, friendly and self-deprecating while refusing to ever result to morally dubious actions to secure victory.
• Magnificent Bastard: Rikke, daughter of the Dogman, begins the trilogy as an idealistic Northwoman gifted or cursed with the Long-Eyem the power of prophecy. When she assists her old friend Leonault "Leo" dan Brock in defeating warmongering prince Stour Nightfall, Rikke is soon abandoned by the egotistical Leo and works at uniting the North against the ruthless Stour. After betraying Leo in his rebellion to secure the victory of King Orso and enhancing her own position, Rikke has Stour overthrown in a trap to take control of the North and proceeds to prepare for war against Stour's clever father, Black Calder. Using a Fake Defector as a double agent, Rikke executes Stour in Calder's view to lure him into a fatal trap to win her civil war before ending up betraying even Orso himself to broker peace with a vengeful Leo and secure her position as undisputed ruler of the North.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • In The Wisdom of Crowds Leo dan Brock crosses it when he betrays his alliance with Orso after defeating the Burners. Rather than take Orso's offer of redemption to make the Union better, Leo murders Lord Marshall Forest in a sneak attack and seizes power for himself by placing his son on the throne and ruling the Union as regent. Leo then executes anyone who's loyal to Orso and even intended to do the same to Orso's thirteen-year-old valet, and makes plans to launch senseless wars against anyone he feels has slighted the Union. After Savine frees Orso from prison and Leo recaptures him, he keeps the arrest a secret so he can "surprise her" during Orso's execution, relishing the look on her face. He then has Orso hanged without a hint of remorse despite him only being alive because Orso showed him mercy. Appropriately his final POV chapter is called "Villain".
  • During the Great Change Spillion Sworbreck goes from being a hack writer to a willing Quisling for the Burners, even coming up with the idea to execute their enemies by throwing people off of the Tower of Chains. As Chief Prosecutor for the Great Change, he becomes drunk with power and charges innocent people with made up conspiracies in show trials just so Judge can kill them, resulting in the deaths of thousands.
• Narm: Yoru Sulfur asking for the King's permission to authorize a loan while human blood is still dripping from his mouth is perhaps a bit on the nose.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: While admittedly much of the point of Orso's character arc is the tragic downfall of a decent man who doesn't have much power despite being a king (much like Jezal before him), it's disappointing that his only real use in Wisdom of Crowds is a literal POV character to show the reader the horror of Judge's trials and otherwise just be imprisoned for most of the book, when just previously in The Trouble With Peace he's shown to rise well against the crisis he faces as a ruler.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Aside from him just deciding that the general chaos engulfing the Union can't be fixed through any direct means, it's not clear why Bayaz isn't doing more to intercede with The Great Change in Wisdom of Crowds, when he is shown giving Calder a great deal of aid in taking back the North from Rikke.
  • After the impressive reveal in The Trouble with Peace, the Weaver turning out to be Sand dan Glokta instead of Superior Pike can be seen as disappointing. While Glokta has the intelligence, resources and motives to pull off the plan, the tradeoff is that the leader of the Great Change doesn't believe in their stated ideology. It also robs Superior Pike of any agency in the story, turning him from an underdog who managed to mastermind a revolution under the noses of Bayaz and Glokta into the latter's willing puppet. It doesn't help that the arc of Pike transforming from Salem Rews, a corrupt mercer of the Union, to the head of a group that wants to destroy the corrupt financial institutions destroying the Union, comes across as more interesting than Glokta just taking over the Union from Bayaz so he can become Bayaz.

---