YMMV / Belisarius Series

• Complete Monster: Venandakatra the Vile is the first cousin of the Emperor of the Malwa and a depraved hedonistic sadist, hated even among the other Malwa. Venandakatra's tactics involve throwing his soldiers at the enemy until the enemy runs out of defenses before he runs out of men, and when he takes a city he subjects it to horrific massacres, with women taken as spoils and civilians massacred in huge numbers, often by his favorite execution method, impalement on short stakes. When he and Belisarius conquer one city, Venandakatra has a rebel leader with his family brought to Belisarius for rape and torture; Belisarius has them killed swiftly to spare them the fate. Venandakatra is also a pedophile who brutalizes little girls he inducts into his harem, requiring frequent replacements when he kills them, disgusting even the Malwa spymaster Nanda Lal. When he is placed in charge of a section of the empire, Venandakatra's excesses eventually drive it into open revolt. When his chief holding is under siege, Venandakatra has a commander who contradicts him blasted out of a cannon and forces his slaves to carry him to his palace, threatening to impale him should even one of them stumble. When they delay in getting him to safety, he orders them impaled on the spot, only to find out his troops have deserted him, leaving him to the mercies of his greatest enemy.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Given that it's an Eric Flint series, the protagonists are often upstaged by more minor characters.
  • Ousanas, for his subversion of pretty much every trope associated with Darkest Africa, his status as a premier badass, and his hilarious comments on just about everything.
  • Narses, for lying to the Link and orchestrating the fall of the Malwa Empire.
  • Valentinian and Anastasius, for their nuanced view on the world and their Heterosexual Life-Partners antics.
  • Lady Damodara, for her pragmatism and keen intellect.
  • Rana Sanga, for being the single biggest badass in the setting and for his complete devotion to his family.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Justinian. While not necessarily villanous, he's characterized as intensely paranoid, suspicious, and generally unpleasant, to the point where he can't even comprehend Belisarius's loyalty to him. That being said, the nature of the series means that his paranoia is understandable and often correct. It's hard not to sympathize with him when he's tortured and blinded during a revolt, then forced off the throne solely because of said blindness. And he does genuinely love Theodora, which becomes a Tear Jerker when he learns that she's going to die of cancer in just a few decades and there's nothing he can do to prevent it.
  • Theodora, too. Like her husband, she's suspicious, revenge-minded, and often cruel, even though she's never an outright villain. However, a lot of her worst behavior is understandable given the circumstances she came from—she was sexually abused as a child before being forced into prostitution, and her reputation as a "whore" follows her well into her reign as empress. It's implied that her obsession with her status and its associated regalia stems from a need to prove that she's too powerful to be victimized again, making her seem less like an arrogant Jerkass and more like a very, very badly Broken Bird.
• Love to Hate: Venandakatra the Vile. His evil is so hammy that it is fun just to hate him.
• Narm:
  • Flint's obsession with inserting mentions of sex and analogies everywhere he can. For example; Belisarius is talking to a young man he's leaving in charge of a certain location, probably to die. Calopodius says that if he survives, his aunt might stop calling him worthless. Maurice - for no explained or implied reason - jokes that said aunt might start pestering Calopodius instead of the stableboys. Calopodius winces, then retorts that he can probably fend off the "incestuous seductress". But he does seem to be seriously worried about the possibility as Belisarius and Maurice ride off. It completely undercuts the drama of the scene. The aunt, and Cal's issues with his worth in his family's eyes, are never mentioned again, even in narration.
  • Related to the above, the sheer frequency with which the main characters violently brutalize pimps and sex slavers. It's a Running Gag, and it's the same exchange every time—they encounter a pimp, they declare their "fear" of such abusers loudly and sarcastically, then they kill said pimp in an extremely over-the-top way. After a few of these scenes, they stop coming across as badass moments and start seeming quite Narm-y instead.
  • Both the narration and the characters tend to be extra verbose and use obscure terms needlessly which also undercuts the comedy. It's hard to appreciate a 'histrionic' gesture if you don't know the word means 'dramatic' or 'theatrical'.
• Never Live It Down: Played with. Antonina is never allowed to forget her old occupation. However being a friend of Theodora and a wife of Belisarius not to mention being a war hero who can hack men apart with a cleaver kind of makes up for that.
• Nightmare Fuel: What the Malwa do to their enemy is not a pretty sight.
  • Special mention goes to the fate of Ranapur. It has 200,000 residents until the Malwa break into the city. Five days later, there are fifty survivors, and all of those are in the harems of Malwa officers.
    • Later, what the Malwa do in Charax; the Persians are noted as being especially fanatical in murdering every Malwa they see when they hear of the sheer scale of the atrocities committed there, and the Romans and Kushans mercilessly torture and kill literally every single member of the Malwa garrison in retaliation when they retake the city.
  • 99% of everything that Venandakatra does in his free time.
  • The fates of the girls raised to be Link's sheaths.
• Squick: Venandakatra has some... odd tastes.
• Stoic Woobie: Subverted. That is how Belisarius is remembered in legend in the Real Life timeline and what he would be in the "Link wins" timeline. The timeline where the plot takes place has a happier ending.
• The Woobie: Calopodius to an extent, due largely to his blindness. However, he has a lot of people who care for him, which softens the blow of his injuries.

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