YMMV / She

• Badass Decay: In She, Ayesha is an outright tyrannical hypotenuse-murdering villain (though very nice to look at while doing it). Over the course of subsequent books she is softened, excuses are supplied for her excesses, and she turns out to be Leo Vincey's true soulmate.
• First Installment Wins: This book has sold 87 million copies, has been translated into 44 languages, and has never been out of print. The sequels weren't so lucky.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In this tale, which reflects sexual and gendered anxieties of its era and has more than a bit of Values Dissonance, two travelers (at least one of whom appears to be a virgin) are on a trip to revisit their past when they get captured by a mysterious, insular group of degenerate foreigners with ways different from their own. The foreigners take the travelers to their bizarre and vampish leader, an Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette with extensive biological expertise, control over life and death, and uncanny powers of seduction. Despite the indiscriminate use of seduction as a means of control, this leader is in love with one specific man, who was previously a dead puppet but has recently come to life. The leader becomes violently protective of this lover, even going so far as to Murder the Hypotenuse and to force the man into eternal love-servitude. Fortunately, the leader dies during a strange ritual gone awry, and the travelers escape. Oh, and somewhere along the line, an attempt at cannibalism occurs. Nowadays, it's hard to describe that plot without picturing Tim Curry in drag.
  • The notion of a mystical African kingdom, ruled by a tyrannical sorceress whose skin is conspicuously lighter than that of her subjects, calls to mind the Surreal Music Video for "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry. (In that video, many of Katy's subjects actually have bright blue or red skin, though they're clearly black under that body paint, while Katy's naturally pale skin isn't dyed.)
• Older Than They Think: There are a lot of similarities with Hansel and Gretel. Two innocents are sent out into the unknown, where they find a strange and wonderful home where a powerful witch lives. She dotes on one, whom she intends to use, and largely ignores the other. At the climax, she tries to send the one she prefers into a fire, but he protests that he doesn't know how — in order to show him the way, the witch goes into her own flames and dies, and the innocents eventually find their way back home.

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