YMMV / The Great God's War

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Bifalt is presented as a person of boundless integrity who is traumatised for life by Marrow taking away his agency and therefore by extension his honour. However, it's a little too easy to see him as a Royal Brat who is very comfortable ordering other people around, but who was absolutely horrified to learn that he might sometimes have to do things he didn't want to.
• Funny Moments: One scene in The War Within has a bar brawl about to break out between a group of Amikans and a group of Bellegerins. A devotee of the Flesh steps in and stops it. How? By giving the ringleader of each group a Big Damn Kiss in turn and then dragging them both away for a threesome. That not only leaves both groups leaderless, but now the men on both sides are too busy imagining it to be interested in fighting.
• Narm:
  • Bifalt hearing a disembodied voice asking him "are you ready?" whenever he's close to death would be a lot more ominous if it didn't immediately make you start hearing this in your head. The fact that the voice seems to get increasingly irritable and petulant over time ("Now are you ready?") doesn't help.
  • Belleger's sigil is apparently called "the beleaguered eagle." Even aside from how ridiculously heavy-handed the symbolism is (the Bellegerins are such Iron Woobies that their sigil is a literal Broken Bird!), the weirdly pretentious, semi-rhyming phrase just sounds inherently goofy.
• Obvious Judas: The Last Repository crowd are apparently really bad at rooting out traitors. With four possible candidates for who has been attacking them from within, it takes Estie to suggest that maybe, just maybe, it was the guy who first arrived just when Rile's invasion was gearing up to start, who got himself a position right next to Marrow, and who is notably insolent and respectless. And then when she goes to interrogate him, he starts spouting Rile's exact "knowledge is the root of all evil" rhetoric at barely any provocation.
• So Okay, It's Average: A common reaction to the first book. It's well-written, but neither the themes, the characters or the setting is particularly memorable, especially not coming from the same writer who produced the genre-defining The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.
• The Un-Twist:
  • Yes, of course sorcery has stopped working in Amika too. The sheer number of times we're reminded that the protagonists don't actually know that the Amikans still have sorcery, they just assume they do, is a pretty heavy hint.
  • It is completely obvious at the moment that Magister Marrow promises to make Bifalt's mortal combat as unfair as possible that he plans to name Elgart as the Repository's champion to face him.
• Wangst: A large part of Bifalt's and Estie's character arcs in the second book concerns the fact that he refuses to sleep with her even though they both want to and even though it's making both of them miserable, for reasons that seem to amount to, "the mean sorcerers forced me to do stuff I didn't want to do, and if I enjoy my life the slightest bit it means they win!" Even more sympathetic reviewers have noted that after 600 pages, Bifalt's determination to bite off his nose to spite his face gets a bit old.