YMMV / Rot & Ruin

• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Nix. Some like her for her toughness, badass growth, and brains. Others find her constant angsting annoying, as well as her anger issues and tendency to be a Clingy Jealous Girl where Benny is concerned.
  • Benny is usually seen as annoying in the first half of the first book for his constant complaining, naive view of the world, and irrational resentment towards Tom, before he undergoes his Character Development. Though some might see him as a realistic depiction of a teenage boy growing up in a strange and difficult world.
• Complete Monster: Charlie Pinkeye in the first book. He gets his kicks from torturing and killing zoms, which includes tying them up in the forest so he can pick them off one by one and collect the bounty. He sets up a nightmarish amusement park called 'Gameland', where people, mostly kids, are forced to fight zoms for entertainment and money. He coerces Jessie, a young mother desperate to feed her baby daughter, into fighting in one of these pits, and it's implied he has a thing for her and resents the fact that she turned down his advances. He later beats her to death in front of her daughter, and then kidnaps Nix to take to Gameland.
  • Preacher Jack in the second book almost gives Charlie a run for his money, rebuilding Gameland in what was supposed to have been a sanctuary, putting a bounty out against Tom and the teenagers under his care as revenge for Charlie's death, and feeds a man alive to zoms as punishment. Small wonder he's revealed to be Charlie's father.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Lilah and Benny, for some who might see Benny and Nix as Strangled by the Red String.
• The Woobie: Pretty much all the characters, given that the story is set in the aftermath of a Zombie Apocalypse and everybody has a tragic past. But special mention goes to...
  • Lilah - watches her mother die, resurrect as a zom, and then be put down. Loses her adopted father when she's kidnapped by bounty hunters, is forced to fight in the pits at Gameland, and then loses her little sister Annie - whom she then has to kill again after Annie comes back as a zom.
  • Jessie Riley - loses her husband and two sons when they turn into zoms on First Night, spends the next several years struggling to keep her daughter fed, finally being coerced to compete at Gameland to earn some extra money, which leaves her utterly traumatised. And then she's beaten to death by the man who put her in that position, dying with the knowledge that her daughter has been taken to the place that haunts her nightmares.
  • Tom - loses his birth mother at a young age, watches his father turn into a zom and murder his beloved adopted mother, while all he can do is run to try and save his baby brother Benny. Raises Benny for the next fourteen years, knowing that his brother hates and resents him, and builds a career as a 'closure specialist' - which involves putting down the zombified loved ones of his clients, after reading them a goodbye letter, which leaves him traumatised and full of self-loathing. And then, he watches the woman he loves die in his arms, killed by the man whose life his spared in an act of mercy.