YMMV / The True History of the Conquest of Mexico

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • As it always happens with those chronicles, it's up to debate how much of a reliable narrator Díaz is. The most controversial points are things that are unconfirmable by definition, such as the intentions or thoughts of characters, especially of those whom Díaz didn't have a lot of chance to know.
  • How sincerely loyal are exactly the Tlaxcaltecs? Are they honest when they claim they are scared to fight Narváez, or are just waiting to see who wins and getting ready to court Narváez in the case he defeats Cortés?
  • Cortés' actions during the Olid affair strongly imply he has PTSD from all the conquest. His insistence to go with an overkilling land army when he could have issued a sea fleet, his dramatic reaction to the bad news back home, his execution of Cuauhtemoc (which even his own lieutenants consider absurd) and his long depression afterwards all just point to it, especially compared to how lucid and rational he was previously shown to be.
• Signature Scene: The often quoted, and even more often misquoted, line of Díaz and his peope arriving to the New World to bring light and become rich.
• Values Dissonance: A modern viewer might be much less enthusiastic than Díaz is about the whole topic of erasing paganism and implanting Christianity by all means necessary, not to talk about the need to banish natives' sodomy.
• Vindicated by History: It's likely Díaz didn't expect his work to become so relevant for Mesoamerican studies among all the other works of his time. While it's still far from being our only chronicle of the facts, Díaz's level of detail and first-hand experience of the facts mean that, as Paul Cartledge said about Herodotus and the Greco-Persian Wars, we either write a history of the conquest of Mexico with Díaz, or not at all.