Alas, Poor Scrappy: Not many people like Terez at all, as she's a rather unlikable, elitist person, but it's not uncommon to be utterly horrified at her revealed as a lesbian forced into an unwanted marriage with Jezal, only to have her lover kidnapped with Terez blackmailed into being party to her own rape with an unwitting Jezal to bear heirs for the Union. Joe Abercrombie himself wasn't entirely happy with the way he handled this subplot.
Bayaz, First of the Magi, at first appears to be a kindly, if grumpy, old wizard-mentor archetype. The truth is far more sinister. Bayaz has been the secret puppet master of The Union for centuries, sending countless men to pointless death against his Rival Turned Evil Khalul. While Khalul is a threat with his incredible magic power and legion of Eaters, those who have gained sinister powers upon eating human flesh, Bayaz manages to be far worse. He sadistically dominates the new king when the young man tries to stand up to him, revealing him as nothing more than an expendable Son of a Whore; starts a peasant uprising which claims many lives; leaves his supposed friend, Yulwei, to die when the latter learns too much; and when Bayaz uses the magical equivalent of a WMD that wipes out a huge faction of his own men and thousands of civilians, Bayaz's only response is a satisfied grin and to say "It works", not caring that another of his brother's disciples was caught in it. Bayaz even sabotages any attempt at peace that would save countless lives by killing the crown prince and framing an innocent Gurkish ambassador for the murder, just so he can keep waging war on Khalul. It is then revealed that Bayaz was the traitor and murdered his own lover, and it's implied that he also killed his master, Juvens, and Khalul fell to darkness to bring Bayaz to justice. It's further implied Bayaz might even be a cannibal himself and has no compunction using the Eaters for his own benefit.
The Heroes: Stranger-Come-Knocking, originally named Pip, is a brutish Northman giant with a fascination for civilization, who proclaims himself chieftain of all that lies east of the Crinna. A savage tactician who lures Governor Meed's army away from his command post so as to ambush and slaughter the dozens of servants, chefs, and other unarmed staff at the outpost, Stranger-Come-Knocking takes Finree dan Brock and Aliz dan Brint as hostages and beats one of his own men into a bloody pulp just for touching Finree. Stranger-Come-Knocking plans to turn Finree and Aliz into breeding slaves to give him "civilized children" as he boasts to have done to entire tribes' worth of women in the past, and he eventually betrays King of the Northmen Black Dow and arranges for Calder to take the throne. Stranger-Come-Knocking is revealed to have been an agent of Bayaz the entire time who deliberately escalated and bloodied the war in the North before turning on Dow for Bayaz's schemes. Stranger-Come-Knocking shows himself to be truly vile even by Northmen standards, a traitor to his own people who will go to any lengths to get what he wants.
Red Country: Grega Cantliss is a bandit who owes money to bandit Papa Ring. Setting on the frontier, Cantliss murders numerous innocents to enslave over twenty children to sell to the Dragon People of Ashranc. Murdering one child who tries to escape, Cantliss believes he is selling the children to be violated or cannibalized, unaware the Dragon People merely seek to adopt them. Frequently abusing his lover Bee, Cantliss also tries to lead Nicomo Cosca and his mercenaries to slaughter the Dragon People for money and burn Ashranc to ashes.
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.
Crosses the Line Twice: For the most part the books avoid this, but Best Served Cold provides one example. Despite the tone of the series, it's sarcasm.
Morveer: "What could possibly be more amusing than orphan children sold into slavery?"
Don't Do This Cool Thing: Openly admitted by the author in the foreword to The Heroes, where he says his intention with the book wasn't so much to show that War Is Hell as to explore the reasons why stories of it still fascinate us.
Draco in Leather Pants: Glokta's wit, Pet the Dog moments and sympathetic backstory tend to obscure the atrocities he commits and enjoys committing.
Funny Moments: Shev from Sharp Ends has tried having sex with men, but...
Shev: Bloody useless. Like trying to have a conversation with someone who doesn't even speak your language, let alone understand the topic.
Javre: Some are certainly more horizontally fluent than others.
Shev: No. Just no. The hairiness, and the lumpiness, and the great big fumbling fingers and... balls. I mean, balls. What's that about? That is one singularly unattractive piece of anathomy. That is just... that is bad design, is what that is.
Harsher in Hindsight: One of the few heartwarming moments in the trilogy is early on, when Logen saves Quai's life by carrying the apprentice to safety, despite A) Being on the verge of starvation himself, and B) Hardly knowing the man he risked his life to save. Later we find out Quai was Killed And Replaced before the first book even ends, making Logen's heroism pointless.
Heartwarming Moments: Glokta berates West for never coming to visit him after he returned from being tortured by the Gurkhish. West responds that he came, but was turned away—twice. Only moments before, Glokta had been thinking about how he did not have, want, or need friends. After this revelation, he suddenly sees his friendship with West as a precious thing.
Inquisitor Glokta. He certainly doesn't do much that merits sympathy, but at the same time it's impossible not to pity his broken body and wish him a miraculous recovery, even if it would only serve to make him do horrible things more efficiently.
Terez, a man-hatingRoyal Brat who ends up having to become a baby farm for the king to prevent her lover from being tortured to death.
Bayaz crosses it in The Last Argument of Kings, when he unleashes the equivalent of a magical WMD against his enemies, which kills a good chunk of his own allies in the initial attack and thousands more through a fantastical version of radiation sickness. Not only does he not care about all the people he's killed, he's actively proud of his achievement and still considers himself a righteous man.
Take your pick when Glokta caused it. A number of fans turned on him when he takes Countess Shalere hostage under threat of death and torture to force her lover, Queen Terez, to be a party to her own rape so she might bear children for King Jezal. But if that wasn't it, he absolutely did when he's revealed as the Weaver behind the Great Change, burning down an entire nation to rule it and being responsible for countless deaths with no care of the atrocities he's committed.
"Wasted" might be too strong a word as Savian is still a major badass but the readers never learn exactly what made them that way. Seems like a waste of a fine backstory, really.
The Shanka are the only sapient non-Human mortal race in the Circle of the World but their civilization is only hinted at and otherwise they act as generic orcs. They're not heard about again after the party leaves Alcus in the original trilogy, and, despite references to them in Red Country and some non-hostile ones being encountered in The Age of Madness, their species still doesn't impact the story, nor do they get more development.
