YMMV / Heralds of Valdemar

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Canonically! Near the end of Brightly Burning, Herald Pol notices that Lan is using his powers more and more destructively, culminating in a Superpower Meltdown that nearly kills everyone in both the allied and enemy armies. We see in Lan's POV sections that using his powers to kill people has been decaying his morality and making him more sadistic beyond Kalira's ability to regulate him - when Kalira is killed, Lan only wants to burn the world. Pol, and Lan's friends, choose to remember the end of Lan's life as more of a Heroic Sacrifice done to save Valdemar, rather like the one Vanyel made before him.
• Angst? What Angst?: A few characters get the "keeping it together during a crisis, collapsing afterward" version.
  • In Arrow's Fall, Talia suffers Cold-Blooded Torture and rape before the Heralds rescue her. When The Power of Love finally kicks in and cements her bond with Herald Dirk, everything seems to be okay... until she reveals that she is having flashbacks to her sexual assault whenever he touches her. It takes some time before she is mentally recovered enough to feel ready for a physical relationship again.
  • In Winds of Fate, Dawnfire's body dies and her mind is stuck in the body of her bondbird. She was supposedly quite close to Darkwind, enough to want to essentially marry him. Darkwind has intense anguish when her body is found but then moves on immediately, thinking about Elspeth as more attractive and interesting than Dawnfire. When he encounters her as a bird he's upset over her situation again, and her Emergency Transformation into an Avatar has him in agony. Then he doesn't think about her at all in Mage Winds or beyond. Dawnfire herself no longer has POV after she's made into an Avatar and has only a few appearances, but she doesn't mention him either. Even in a scene where she manifests to a group that includes him, there's no connection or acknowledgement that they even knew each other.
  • During Winds of Fury, An'desha is too busy trying to reclaim his body from Mornelithe Falconsbane to really dwell on his situation. By Storm Warning, he has regressed into a weepy, timid child in a man's body with cripplingly low self esteem and constant fear that Falconsbane will come back. It takes him most of a book, plus some Epiphany Therapy, to truly get over what he's been through and develop a stable personality.
• Anvilicious: The Last Herald-Mage trilogy had a gay protagonist. Much of his character arc was devoted towards overcoming the homophobia of his abusive family, accepting his sexuality, and realizing that it did not make him 'wrong' or 'bad' in any way, all portrayed at great length. To present-day readers, the trilogy probably seems a little overwrought. But the books were published in 1989, a time when homophobia was much worse than it is now, and openly gay characters in fantasy were rare.
  • In the Mage Winds trilogy, that Nyara doesn't deserve and is not responsible for the abuse her father inflicted on her is briefly raised in the first book, then repeatedly and at more length in the second. In the third it's baldly stated by Stefan's ghost and Nyara considers it carefully and decides he's right. This is not subtle, though applied to survivors in general it's a good message.
• Broken Aesop: In By the Sword, Tarma and Kethry (and Warrl) play Aesop Enforcer to make sure Kerowyn learns that sometimes you have to work with people you don't like. But in Kero's subsequent career as a mercenary, she gets along well with all her cohorts except the one Captain who nearly drives the Skybolts into the ground, meaning she was absolutely right to not want to work with the woman. It could be argued the payoff is that she tried to make it work until Ardana did something that everyone could agree was bad management, but once the Skybolts recover from that setback, Kero ensures that they never work under someone she dislikes, because she won't trust her people to someone she doesn't trust herself.
• Complete Monster:
  • Prince Ancar is the sadistic, spoiled son of King Alessander of Haldorn, who murders his father to take over the throne. After murdering Herald Kris and capturing the Queen's Own Herald Talia, Ancar tortures her more for sport than information, framing them for his father's death as an excuse to start a war with Valdemar. He also consolidates power by having anyone even remotely related to him killed, uses magical Mind Control to turn his male citizens into mindless soldiers, and even drains his own lands of power to increase his own. And if all that weren't enough, he personally uses Blood Magic and enjoys sex with captive young girls... sometimes in combination.
  • The closest thing to a Big Bad in the series is a Sorceror-Adept who starts off going by Ma'ar, the Mage of Black Flames. He's at his most nuanced then, acting in what he thinks are the best interests of his people and inspiring genuine loyalty, but he does also take power by moving against "decadent foreigners" and starting a purge of the Kaled'a'in, then moving against other countries. This sparks the Mage Wars, and his greatest opponent created weapons to use against him which started the Cataclysm that devastated much of the world and had a ripple effect through time itself. Though defeated, Ma'ar didn't actually die, as he had set up a Grand Theft Me system so that he could take over the body of any his descendants once they started showing signs of magical ability. He continues this over two thousand years, "seeding" the world with children so as to never run out of descendants. In the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy he's in his Leareth incarnation and spends decades systematically killing off Herald-Mages, but also playing around with such cruelties as deciding to reenact a myth in which a god was fed on by crows every day and regrew his flesh every night on a minion who had failed him. By Mage Winds, he's Mornelithe Falconsbane and has undergone quite a bit of Villain Decay twisting him into a Stupid Evil creature who sometimes just eats human flesh. He's still quite formidable and monstrous, and retains his old vendetta against the Kaled'a'in and their descendants. To this end, Falconsbane would force Starblade, elder of the k'Shenya, to destroy his people's Heartstone, almost wiping them out and corrupting their valley.
  • The White Gryphon: Hadanelith is a minor villain who possesses the Gifts of Empathy and Mindhealing, but uses them to serve his own sadistic desires rather than to aid people. When first discovered, he is found to have been using his gifts to warp the minds of women until they live only to serve him in slavery, sexually and otherwise. He is exiled from the city of White Gryphon under the relatively loose laws and customs of their society. Rather than die in the wilderness, he makes his way south to the Haighlei kingdoms and is recruited by the Evil Chancellor to assassinate high ranking members of their society in order to frame the delegation from White Gryphon. In doing so, he is permitted to indulge his sadistic fantasies and accordingly tortures his victims before killing them.
  • The Collegium Chronicles: Master Cole Pieters puts children as young as four and five to work in a mine. He forces them to sleep in a basement, feeds them so little that they supplemented their diet by stealing the pig slop whenever they could, and is known to beat the children to a bloody pulp with a mallet in front of the rest of the child workers should he deem it "necessary" for control of them.
  • Closer to Home: Brand is the charming, psychopathic heir of House Raeylen. He begins by seducing young Violetta of House Chendlar with false promises of love, but when the King arranges for him to marry Violetta's older sister and promises them an estate, he comes up with a new plot: His men try to kill every member of both Houses Chendlar and Raeylen at his wedding feast except for himself and Violetta, so that when he marries her, he'll hold three estates instead of one. Brand succeeds in killing his father, and when apprehended, he calls Violetta "a pair of legs and an empty head", and admits that he planned to manipulate Violetta during their marriage so that he could use his new wealth to purchase the services of a High-Class Call Girl.
• Designated Hero: Increasingly common in the later series, but there are suggestions early on, too. Tarma resents her partner Kethry being compelled to help women in danger because it's inconvenient and many women don't 'deserve' help, an attitude passed on to Kerowyn. In one story, after a city girl is raped and cast out Tarma and Kethry take her with them and are hugely condescending to her, passing her off to a farmer with Stay in the Kitchen views while literally calling her a "pet" for him to take in. Not only that, but her rapist has an arranged marriage with a wealthy girl who looked vain and stuck-up when the pair saw her in passing. Tarma and Kethry blithely say that these two deserve each other.
  • In Intrigues, Bear (an aspiring Healer who is supposedly the protagonist's best friend) baselessly accuses Mags of murder and threatens to beat him to death. Mags is a 14-year-old child. And despite the fact that Bear's abuse almost drove him to suicide, they're buddies again in the end of the book, with no apology or effort on Bear's part.
  • In Storm Breaking, Elspeth takes sadistic joy in the suffering Tremane inflicts on himself so he can protect his countrymen. Mind that Elspeth is literally marked out by the powers that be as a Good Person. There's also the fact that Elspeth, Solaris and Darkwind take an entire book to forgive him for his assassination of Ulrich. (In the meantime, they take passive aggressive potshots, withhold information out of spite and Solaris already punished him by cursing him.) They've assassinated people before, and Tremane thought he had a good reason, utterly regretted the act and made clear he wouldn't do something similar again. It's also bizarre how Tremane hasn't kicked them out for being horrible ambassadors and advisors (regardless of how they personally feel about Tremane, they should have put aside those feelings or Selenay should have sent someone with less personal stakes). The entire thing smacks of Moral Myopia.
  • The short story Trust Your Instincts in the anthology novel Pathways makes the king-choosing Sword That Sings into at best a really callous Creepy Good entity. Predicting that a tyrant would destroy it, it plants a strong compulsion in a minor noble, making him utterly obsessed with it first using soothing and pleasant emotions, then when Fayne finally touches it switching to torturous visions until he realizes it wants him to take it to safety. He steals it and travels with a friend who eventually has enough of Fayne deferring to the sword and leaves, climbing a mountain pass and then realizing his friend was right, the Sword That Sings wants him to die here. Suffused with the sword's pleasant emotions again, Fayne sees this as a Heroic Sacrifice and is happy.
  "I'm sick of listening to your damned sword! It doesn't talk, but still you know what it's saying and that it wants us to kill ourselves in these hills. There's not enough food for the horse. We're here just before winter without food. If that sword's even saying anything, it's been giving you the worst advice it possibly could!"
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Mercedes Lackey's Kickstarter produced merchandise of characters and groups especially beloved by a polled group of fans. Some of this merchandise is of Natoli and the other Artificers, who are only prominent in two books, Storm Warning and Storm Rising.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The broad strokes of how The Oathbreakers (1989) and the Golden Age arc of Berserk (1996) end have enough similarities to take note of. A Universally Beloved Leader (Idra, Griffith) who has particular ideas about ruling and captains a wildly successful mercenary company (the Sunhawks, the Band of the Hawk) made a poor choice that was met with Disproportionate Retribution. Evil kings imprisoned them in their dungeons and terribly abused them, completely incapacitating them (Driven to Suicide, tongueless and maimed). Their second in command leads the remainder of the mercenaries while the most extraordinary of the company (Tarma and Kethry, Guts) are off on their own. On discovering what's happened and reuniting with the wanderers the mercenaries rally and perform a daring maneuver in their captain's name (attacking the king, rescuing Griffith from the dungeon) supported by common people. In the process the barriers between worlds are torn asunder in a dramatic ritual moment and the captain returns to better-than-human health and vitality and turns someone (the king, almost the entire Band of the Hawk) into unrecognizable bloody pulp. Of course, if you know what happens in both, you understand that how the Golden Age ends is much, much, much Darker and Edgier. When the captain of the Sunhawks rode out from the kingdom of Death her mercenaries were briefly afraid but understood that their beloved Captain Idra meant them well, and she returned to the afterlife peacefully after mulching her brother.
• Ho Yay: Both in-universe and among fans, naturally. In universe, certain areas are quite prejudiced against homosexuality and the suggestion of it must be avoided by those wishing to remain un-lynched. The first book has a bit of Early-Installment Weirdness in that even many of the Heralds are somewhat homophobic and don't associate closely with known gay Heralds, which is at odds with later depictions of them - then again, that book was published in 1987.
• Nightmare Fuel
  • Not that it gets brought up again, but there's something so grim about Heraldic arrow-code including a standard signal for "complete disaster, situation hopeless, do not attempt rescue." Just the thought of a Herald having enough time before death to mark and break an arrow and send it with their Companion or some other ally, knowing they can't be saved and hoping only to warn others...
• Squick: Young Talia being forced to experience Companion Rolan's sexual encounters through their empathic bond. She is noted repeatedly to be unable to block him out, implying that she really doesn't want to be party to his fun, knows what's happening in enough detail to be able to identify the other Companions and their general attitudes, and ends up resignedly considering this "an education". Rolan knows his teenaged Chosen is sharing his sex life and makes no attempt to draw a veil over it, or even to refrain on nights when she really needs to get some sleep. Talia's also forced to experience her next-door neighbor's trysts with virtually every male Herald or Herald-Trainee - even though she eventually learns to block out her Empathic awareness, her neighbor is loud.
  • Beyond opens with several fart jokes and an exhaustive description of a foal's breech birth, complete with the detail, "her vaginal muscles clamped down on his arm". While personally attending to a difficult foaling is indicative of Duke Kordas Valdemar's lack of pretention and hands-on attitude toward his duties the description is, again, detailed.
• Informed Wrongness: In Brightly Burning, a bully is burned to death after targeting the wrong kid. This is hushed up when the kid in question is Chosen and whisked off to the Collegium. The bully's mother, Jisette Jelnack, mourns her child and questions the circumstances of his death. While she does go too far in questioning the Companions' Omniscient Morality License and trying to kill a Herald Trainee, even before then she gets No Sympathy for her grief - Herald Pol thinks it's in bad taste for her to mourn her son or want answers, because he was a bully. This may be in line with how across much of Mercedes Lackey's work there is a general rejection of Even Evil Has Loved Ones - if evil people can't love, then no one should love them, either.
• Love to Hate: In The Valdemar Companion Mercedes Lackey waxes lyrical about how much she enjoys writing from the POV of vile characters like Falconsbane and Ancar, which can come through and make them fun to read as well. Her villains can be so over the top.
• Ron the Death Eater: Choices, one of the anthologies, features Weight of a Hundred Eyes, a short story by Dylan Birtolo about a girl coming into her Gift and using it to help in emergencies, and then has a life-changing encounter with a Companion. Unfortunately for Paxia, she has the Mage-Gift and was born after Vanyel worked spells that made vrondi watch all mages and kept Valdemarans from being able to think about magic - so she's increasingly deranged by the painful sensation of constantly being stared at. It gets worse around Companions, who pause to stare at her. One finally has a Herald escort her out of the country. Free of those two spells, Paxia feels she has been tortured for years and is now exiled from her home and immediately attacks him. Herald and Companion retreat and Paxia swears revenge on Valdemar, furious at the thought that the Heralds have allowed people like her to suffer from "the eyes". She wouldn't know, but the Heralds themselves, and Valdemar in general, are completely innocent, subject to the same inability to think about magic. If they weren't they would likely be prompt in helping young mages leave Valdemar. The Companions know and took their time in helping her. The real architect of Paxia's misery is Vanyel, though.
• Tear Jerker: In Arrow's Fall, Rolan arrives with the broken arrow — "all hope lost, do not attempt rescue" — a signal one hopes to never see. When Elspeth sees for the first time what has happened to Talia, she gets nauseated and horrified. The second time she sees: "I think she's dying!" She also feels guilty over her major dispute with Talia, just before Talia departed.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Mercedes Lackey likes to populate her books with large numbers of named characters given a few interesting traits but who are generally quite Out of Focus and don't end up participating much in the main plot. This certainly fleshes the setting out and makes it more populated, but it can lead to some frustration too as sometimes they come associated with distinct plot hooks.
  • In Winds of Fate, Darkwind muses on and interacts with quite a few other Tayledras in his clan who all seem distinct and interesting but ultimately are background characters. He mentions two mages who like him were shaken by the Heartstone disaster enough to change their names - Moonwing, who became Silence and retreated into a solitary existence, and Starfire who became Nightfire and dedicated every waking moment to studying the Heartstone and trying to discover what went wrong. The Heartstone had been sabotaged, but Nightfire doesn't get to find that out or react to the news. Among the scouts, Darkwind's best and oldest friend is Stormcloud, who had some Mage-Gift but little enough that Starblade had refused to train him, and whose bondbird is a playful crow. He has no dialogue after the scene where he's introduced and Darkwind never considers going to him for help or support.
  • Need is a prominent character in the Mage Winds books and comes Back for the Finale of Storm Breaking, but for an ancient spirit that seems to be equivalent to a Companion, a whole lot is left on the table. See below.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Two of the characters in the Mage Winds trilogy are Need; an ancient mage spirit possessing a sword and advising and acting through people she chooses, choosing new ones as they age out or die; and Falconsbane, an ancient mage spirit possessing men of his bloodline and Body Surfing on at their deaths. One is irritable and arrogant but genuinely cares and wants her bearers to get stronger and find happiness, the other is the Big Bad who destroys the souls of his hosts on entry. They never speak to each other, there's no sense of whether they've met before in the past two thousand years, and no one ever even compares and contrasts them.
  • Additionally, in Storm Rising Firesong gets really interested in immortality and specifically Falconsbane's method, though he understands that it's unethical and ponders ways that it could be more acceptable. He doesn't once think of Need, even though they worked together so well in the last trilogy, or contemplate her method even in passing.
  • Just in general, Need is out of the picture for the whole Storms trilogy until she comes Back for the Finale, even though she's somewhere, out of focus, in the same set of buildings as the rest of the cast in Storm Warning. She's older than the Mage Wars and in Storm Breaking is able to reveal how she survived the first Cataclysm - she should have been involved in discovering what the Storms were.
  • During Storm Breaking Need, the Avatars Dawnfire and Tre'valen, and Vanyel and Tylendel and Yfandes all end up crowding into Urtho's Tower to try to avert the Cataclysm. All of these characters were humans once and now something different, and Need is friends with the Avatars, who've only been spirit beings for a few years at most. But they don't talk to each other on page at all, and they barely talk to the living characters. They get introductions and then it's time for the Final Storm, and none of them say anything at the climax. Vanyel, possibly the most iconic character in the setting, doesn't even get the sendoff in the afterlife that Need and the Avatars do.
    • The ghost of Vanyel even offers to tell Karal a story about a Karsite Sun-priest he once met who wasn't a despicable bastard, but Karal is far too intimidated (I mean, this is Vanyel Demonrider) to take him up on it, the matter is dropped, and the story goes untold.
  • Still on that streak, Lackey returned to Need more than two decades later with the short story Women's Need Calls Me, where she's been partnered with an aging mage in Urtho's army, chooses a transgender woman as her new bearer, and helps her to physically transition. That's great, but in that time Lackey has forgotten Need's wide-ranging powerset and that she can shield a large number of people from even very powerful magical attack, which would have been invaluable in the Mage Wars - instead, Mel is essentially a foot soldier and all Need is able to do for her is have her fight like a warrior.
  • The canonicity of many of the short stories in the anthology novels, written mainly by non-Lackey authors, is unknown. Sword of Ice has the story In The Forest Of Sorrows, where a Vanyel who's been dead and haunting the titular forest for thirty years helps a twelve-year old boy, Treyon, with strong Gifts, who he believes will be Chosen and promises to stay in contact with. The first book of the Collegium Chronicles, Foundation, takes place only fifty years after Vanyel's sacrifice, but Treyon never appears.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The series' habit of giving its protagonists Dark and Troubled Pasts can get quite wearying at times. The early books especially really enjoyed using Rape as Backstory to the point where it's a dominant force in most of the Tarma and Kethry stories.
• Too Cool to Live: A few characters seem destined to burn very brightly and very briefly.
  • When Tarma and Kethry join the Sunhawks in Oathbreakers, they join under Captain Idra, a princess of Rethwellan who abdicated her hope of succession preferring the freedom of being a mercenary, and who rose to become the Sunhawks' Universally Beloved Leader. She's barely in the book before she returns to the capital of Rethwellan to help decide which of her brothers will be King, only to stop answering letters and vanish, kicking off the plot of the book as Tarma and Kethry go to discover her fate.
  • Kerowyn's first Captain in the Skybolts, Lerryn Twoblades, is The Ace in multiple skillsets, has the fanatical devotion of the entire Company, and on top of that he's the son of a character from Tarma and Kethry's day. He dies 'off-screen,' opening the path for Kero to eventually take command herself.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Elspeth is short-tempered, self-absorbed, and has a disturbing Lack of Empathy for a Herald. She scuttles the plan to bring new mages to Valdemar in Winds of Fate just to regain a sense of control (never mind that she liked the idea when she thought she was in control), about which the narrative tells us that she was right and the others were wrong.
  • Rolan, Talia's Companion, is said to have a very close bond with her, but he just isn't as supportive of poor Talia during her many difficulties as many other Companions are to their Chosen. Companions are reluctant to put their hooves in and solve the problems of humans for them, but they're usually willing to be a comfort and support in a difficult time. Rolan can't or doesn't usually speak in words to her, but he has other ways to communicate - he will come to Talia's rescue when she's physically at risk but he doesn't so much as nuzzle her when she panics at the entrance to the Collegium in Arrows of the Queen, and he seems to have a Tough Love approach in Arrow's Flight. As Talia's control of her powers, and her self-esteem with them, slip he gives her no reassurance; while addressing a plague he helps her keep control in a way that she interprets as impatient with her failings, and he remains very remote while Kris slowly and painfully teaches her. Combined with forcing Talia to be privy to so much Sex by Proxy - which she discusses within his hearing as something that she doesn't like - he doesn't seem to care all that much about her emotional well-being. As a Monarch's Own Companion he has had other Heralds and appears in numerous books set before Arrows, and he usually appears to be warmer and more kind in them, even to people he hasn't Chosen! It's likely Early-Installment Weirdness.
• Villain Decay: Mercedes Lackey's villains tend towards Orcus on His Throne and are often somewhat removed until the Cosmic Deadline looms, but Mornelithe Falconsbane is quite active in Winds of Fate. He's engineered the situation with k'Treva that has split an entire Tayledras clan and brought it to the brink of dissolution, he allows Nyara to escape so that he can use her to acquire information, he opportunistically pursues Elspeth's party and the gryphons, he captures Dawnfire and feeds her misinformation before allowing her to escape, he's even roaming around the gryphons' territory and comes across the group before they're ready for him.
  • Then in Winds of Change he's almost entirely passive, sending a magical attack that kills Tre'valen but otherwise staying in his fortress doing not much. The heroes refer to him as being stupid and predictable and when they go after him, it's not that their plan goes off without a hitch, but that the effort is easier than they expected. It's even more exaggerated in Winds of Fury, though somewhat explained by the events of the second book diminishing his mental capacities. The heroes defeat him easily and then stand around marveling that he'd been so stupid.
• Wangst: Talia, partially due to her upbringing is constantly bottling up inner turmoil, only to break down completely at regular intervals; usually over things that could have been solved if she'd simply talked to someone. Her Love Interest Dirk even moreso. Most of his POV sections are of him wallowing in self pity because he thinks his best friend and the girl he loves are together. Dirk would rather get blackout drunk every night or give himself pneumonia than talk to either of them, and in fact avoids them when they try to track him down and set the record straight.
  • Talia calls Dirk's admittedly terrible breakup with a woman who just wanted to hurt him "rape of the soul" and worse than what she just went through at Ancar's hands. He does not contradict her.
• What Could Have Been: According to the Ask Misty section on her official website, in 2005 Lackey intended the Collegium Chronicles to be set after the existing books, including saying readers would "get to see [Talia] as an exasperated mother".
• Wish-Fulfillment: Being Chosen and taken to Haven is a fantasy both in- and out of universe. Bardic Gifts, Mage Gifts, Healing Gifts, or just a bond creature would be nice too. Talia is one twice over, first as a teenage girl getting to be one of the heroes she read about and as an abuse victim getting to escape her situation and find a healthy and loving environment. Many books in the series feature misunderstood and unhappy kids finding themselves in new and more supportive environments where they're treasured, but it's most explicit with Talia.
• The Woobie: A lot of the major characters start out this way, Vanyel and Talia being the most Anvilicious of the lot. (Vanyel never stops being one.)

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