YMMV / Thursday Next

• Awesome Moments: Thursday's first venue for her trial in the realm of fiction is in... Franz Kafka's The Trial. Thursday turns the book on its head and manages to get the trial delayed by getting the prosecutor arrested. She out-Kafkaed Kafka.
• Foe Yay Shipping: The closest thing Acheron Hades has to a friend is one of his cohorts, who he likes so much that he took off his face when the original died and goes around grafting it to people. The relevant portion to this trope is that he mentions he wanted to put the face on Thursday next. No pun intended.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Be honest: until The Well of Lost Plots, did you catch the fact that the largely Epigraph-exclusive character Milon de Floss was a reference to George Elliot's The Mill on the Floss? Probably not.
  • Trying to Google "Aornis Hades" will lead to several scratched heads, as Aornis is not a river in the traditional Greek Underworld, unlike the Acheron or the Styx. It is, however, the Greek name for Lake Avernus, a volcanic lake whose fumes killed all birds that flew overhead, leading to the belief that it was an entrance into the Underworld.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The idea of the Crimean War becoming a 130-year-long conflict was absurd when Fforde wrote The Eyre Affair; in the 2010s, the Crimean peninsula became a flashpoint when Russia forcibly annexed it, and it's now become a battleground in the Russo-Ukranian war in the 2020s.
  • In One Of Our Thursdays is Missing, a recurring joke is that the residents of the Conspiracy Theory genre of the continent of Fiction believe they should be in on the Non-Fiction Continent; baseless conspiracy theories being accepted as fact played a major role in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, as well as the rhetoric of the administration that followed.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • There's a brief mention in an early chapter of The Well of Lost Plots of Lennie enjoying time off around rabbits in Sword of the Zenobians, an unpublished novel that has become a sort of sanctuary to fictional animals throughout BookWorld. For those who thought the ending of Steinbeck's novel was too bleak, it can be comforting to see that Fforde gave him a happy ending, of sorts.
  • In The Well of Lost Plots, after Thursday gives Enid Blyton's Shadow the Sheepdog a happy ending, the version of Shadow she removed from the text is afraid he'll be reduced to text. Thursday decides to re-home him in Sword of the Zenobians instead, where he'll be free to chase rabbits to his heart's content.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In The Woman Who Died a Lot, it's revealed that God has revealed himself to the world, and in fact goes around smiting the unrighteous, like in the old days. Everybody in the world now knows for a fact that God exists (it's even mentioned that Richard Dawkins went mad from the revelation and committed suicide). And yet, other than a plot point about building an "anti-smite shield" to protect Swindon from God's wrath, which isn't even the main plot of the book, surprisingly little is made of this. How much more interesting—not to mention funnier and more exciting—would it have been to actually see the revelation firsthand, and how Thursday's world reacted to it?
• Values Resonance: For a series that started its life before 9/11, a lot of the themes in Thursday Next are still relevant to the modern day.
  • Amazon was still just a bookstore when The Eyre Affair was first written, but now, it could easily be a real-life stand-in for the Goliath Corporation, being a retailer that sells literally everything and has unprecedented control over the world of literature, seeing as it holds a near-monopoly over audiobook adaptations and several authors self-publish through them because there aren't many other alternatives.
  • To an American reader, the concept of something as absurd as the Toast Lobby (not bread, specifically toast) holding major sway over what people can say on television becomes far less absurd when corporate interests hold massive sway over the U.S. Government; remember the "got milk?" ad campaign? The Dairy Lobby paid for those.
  • The idea of de-extinction via cloning, while still fringe, is gaining popularity as a possible solution to climate change, with mammoths having the potential to help preserve permafrost in the Russian Tundra.
  • The concept of a Bowdlerizer was startlingly prescient for modern-day movements who aim to censor any media that contains references to LGBTQIA+ topics.
  • The plot point at the crux of The Well of Lost Plots is, essentially, a Digital Rights Management scaffold for books, preventing more than three people from reading any given copy of any given book, while also lowering the quality of the writing. While at the time it was a commentary on what would happen if anti-piracy measures applied to music migrated to other media, DRM has become a massive headache for anyone attempting to purchase digital items legitimately, with services requiring constant internet connection to access the product at a bare minimum; in the most extreme cases, even legitimate owners will prefer to play pirated versions of video games, because DRM has such a negative impact on performance. Moreover, language in certain End User License Agreements means that, broadly speaking, nobody really owns most of the digital media they access, which includes stuff like eBooks.
  • While Literature doesn't have the level of Serious Business in real life as it does in the novel, other forms of media arguably have gained this, unfortunately; just look at the KyoAni fire, set by a crazed fan who thought the company was plagiarizing his ideas, or the fact that Jake Lloyd, who played Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace was regularly sent death threats because he allegedly ruined the character for people, despite being literally six years old.
  • A Running Gag in the books involves normal people styling and even renaming themselves after famous authors, to the point where the British Government forces them to append their names with a number to distinguish them (for instance, Lord Byron-3). Internet culture, particularly Tumblr, has given rise to the phenomenon of 'Kinning', where people relate so heavily to a fictional character that they start to identify as that character.

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