Anvilicious: Terry Goodkind does not believe in ambiguity. While it's not so noticeable in early books, as the series goes on the author's philosophical/political views become far more prominent, with the themes promoting Objectivism and criticising other systems (especially communism and socialism) increasingly permeating or outright overtaking the plot. This includes a particularly infamous moment where the story grinds to a halt so Richard can deliver a speech extolling the virtues of Objectivism and condemning those who oppose it, which goes on for several pages. Richard and the other heroes embody Objectivist values and are consistently presented as good and right (at least according to the narrative) while those who oppose them are either misguided fools who eventually come round to the heroes' way of thinking, or they're completely evil. Even some readers who do see value in libertarianism and Objectivism find Sword of Truth's approach to be excessively heavy-handed.
Badass Decay: Jennsen becomes much less formidable after joining up with Richard, almost to the point of being The Load.
Cliché Storm: Everything from a common man of mysterious lineage, to a wise old wizard with robes and white hair, to a character that was turned into a small, fanatical creature when deprived of the artifact that was precious to him.
Complete Monster: Darken Rahl has made a bargain for power with the demonic being The Keeper of the Underworld. Darken keeps the people enslaved, banning fire and launching brutal extermination campaigns on those who have resisted him. Rahl also continues the order of Mord-Sith: girls raised to be vicious torturers who have their mothers murdered in front of them and are forced to torture their fathers to death. He also sexually abuses the Mord-Sith and especially enjoys tormenting a lesbian couple among them. A Serial Rapist as well, Rahl forces himself upon many women, and if ones with him consensually are repulsed at the scars under his clothing, he tortures them to death. Viewing children without the gift of magic as worthless, he has any of his ungifted offspring disposed of, while also sacrificing other children to the Keeper for power. Rahl's ultimate goal is to plunge the world into the Keeper's domain, where all that lives will suffer eternally.
Crazy Is Cool: Nathan Rahl. Because he is a thousand-year-old wizard who had been imprisoned for most of his life in the Palace of the Prophets, he comes across as a wise and knowledgeable Badass Bookworm crossed with a reckless hormone-crazed teenager, colored with just the tiniest hint of insanity for flavor. Whenever he is on scene, something incredibly awesome and/or entertaining is about to happen.
Richard can certainly come across this way by the later books, given his increasing eagerness to slaughter all those who "choose death" rather than "life". The only thing keeping him from being an Unscrupulous Hero or even an outright Sociopathic Hero is the narrative and the other characters referring to him as incorruptibly pure and The Hero to them.
Kahlan is, if anything, even more bloodthirsty and willing to Shoot the Dog than Richard, and that's saying something, but she's also treated as pure and heroic. By extension, many readers find the idea that something like the Confessors could be in any way heroic, ever, difficult to accept, given their powers involve completely removing someone's free will and leaving them enslaved to the Confessor's will. If the Mind Control wasn't permanent it would be one thing, but it's clearly established that anyone they Confess loses their individuality for life, and they're willing to do this to anyone they deem necessary to achieve their goals. It's hard to blame people for fearing Confessors.
Zedd drifts in this direction in the later books by a mixture of lectures and an extremely high kill count. That said, Zedd's backstory involves being personally responsible for a genocide (when creating the barriers prior to the first book), so he's never had clean hands. His shift is more one of attitude and how it's approached. In early books he's... not precisely The Atoner, but it's heavily implied that his relatively minor role in things is a conscious choice, because he doesn't like what he becomes when in power. In the later books... well, he is in power, and becomes that person again, but it's treated as morally justified, and even laudable.
Gratch is awesome, which is sad because he's absent from the later books. Or maybe fortunate that he doesn't get caught up in the Author Tract.
Even people who don't like the books tend to have a soft spot for Nathan. See Crazy Is Cool, above, for why. It also helps that he's one of the few characters who gets to disagree with Richard without being portrayed as a bad guy for it.
Everyone Is Satan in Hell: The Imperial Order claims this about wizards and sorceresses in particular, but also in general about anyone who is better than anyone else at anything. They are not nice people. It also doesn't stop them from employing these wizards and sorceresses, either. A mob tries this on Zedd. He stokes their fears of him until they all run away screaming. How? By asking them to explain why they're afraid of him.
With A Song of Ice and Fire, partly because it can be seen as the Spiritual Antithesis of just about every element of Sword of Truth. The ASOIAF fandom has made it an almost-game to take the piss out of Goodkind and his works.
There's a huge rivalry with The Wheel of Time fandom as well. Many WOT fans will outright accuse Goodkind of plagiarism, which Goodkind once casually deflected by suggesting that if you notice any similarities between the two, you probably aren't old enough to read his books.
First Installment Wins: Wizard's First Rule remains one of the most famous and well-regarded entries; it's seen as a fairly straight-forward fantasy story with some interesting worldbuilding and a creative ending. It also lacks (or at least tones down) many of the problems present in the later books, such as excessive preaching about Objectivism, the heroes becoming increasingly unsympathetic, the occurences of narm, filler content etc. Even people who dislike the series overall tend to agree that the first book isn't half bad, if not exactly groundbreaking. Some readers even opine that Wizard's First Rule can be enjoyed as a decent standalone story and don't bother with the rest.
Moral Event Horizon: Sebastian arranging the death of Jennsen's mother, along with four of his own soldiers, in order to ingratiate himself to Jennsen and fool her into trusting him.
Richard comparing a Mord-Sith's lesbianism to steamed peas: "I might not like what you like, but that doesn't mean I don't like you anymore for liking it."
The Sword of Truth is literally a sword with 'truth' written on it.
The infamous chicken of doom. The chicken is actually a powerful demonic being in disguise, but it's difficult for most readers to find it as terrifying as the characters do in this form, because chickens simply aren't that intimidating. Kahlan's reaction doesn't help either; she starts cowering before the chicken while it's doing fairly typical chicken-things and tells it to "Shoo", while repeatedly informing the reader it's a chicken that is not a chicken. Lots of readers find the entire scene hilarious rather than suspenseful.
The bird let out a slow chicken cackle. It sounded like a chicken, but in her heart she knew it wasn’t. In that instant, she completely understood the concept of a chicken that was not a chicken. This looked like a chicken, like most of the Mud People’s chickens. But this was no chicken. This was evil manifest.
In a case where Goodkind really should have done the research first, anyone who's at all familiar with anime or manga will not be able to stop laughing at every mention of an evil, sinister villain (a female villain no less) called "Shota".
Samuel, full stop. Goodkind literally took Gollum, changed his name, changed the object of his desire from the One Ring to the Sword of Truth, and dropped him into his own story otherwise unchanged (aside from being a former hero).
Richard taking a full novel to realize Kahlan is still in love with him and was just trying to protect him, despite it being plainly obvious, even if readers weren't privy to her thoughts. (The author tried to justify Richard's inability to see this as being caused by the lingering effects of having been tortured.)
The chicken thing is pretty much all people remember about the Chimes of Death. A lot of people overlook them killing women and children via drowning, burning, and falling off cliffs.
Michael's usually remembered for his speech against fire — even though Kahlan accuses him of advocating banning fire, what he actually says amounts to "A lot of people are killed in fires, we should do something about it." He ultimately does turn out to be a traitor working with Rahl, and that speech was in fact meant to foreshadow this, but if Goodkind actually wanted us to believe Michael was ready to ban fire, he didn't sell this well outside of Kahlan's declaration that "your brother seems close to banning fire."
Listening to some critics you'd get the impression that killing peace protesters is all Richard does in the later books.
The Chimes, demonic entities that exist to choke the world of magic, eventually almost causing the end of the world, are first introduced to the main characters... in the form of a chicken.
When Naked Empire's Big Bad is introduced, all attempts by Goodkind to make him seem terrifying are undermined by his name: Nicholas the Slide. Just try not to imagine him as a brightly-coloured, anthropomorphic piece of playground equipment.
Only the Author Can Save Them Now: Jagang, Darken Rahl and Nicholas the Slide would have had no problems achieving their goals if it wasn't for Deus ex Machina. This is most blatant in the case of Nicholas and the vial of antidote.
Quality by Popular Vote: In any online discussion of these books, its supporters will cling to this trope like it's the last lifeline on the Titanic. It's true that the books sell well, and thus, in the eyes of its most die-hard fans, that alone means that critics of its flaws are automatically wrong, failed to understand it, or are just jealous.
Replacement Scrappy: Jennsen and the other major characters of The Pillars of Creation got a rather poor reception from many fans due to effectively reducing Richard and Kahlan to a cameo appearance in their own series.
Seasonal Rot: The books see a general decrease in quality as the series goes on, although there remain a few good books later in the series. While it's a matter of debate on when precisely the rot begins, most readers agree it was definitely noticeable by the sixth book, Faith of the Fallen. The most commonly-cited writing issues that contribute to this are the repetitiveness of the plots, the heroes becoming so ruthless and self-righteous they're insufferable, and the author constantly inserting his political and philosophical opinions with no subtlety or nuance.
Chandalen thinks Richard is dangerous because ever since he came along his people's village has been attacked repeatedly. Which it has. And yes, it's due to Richard's presence. When dragged along on a quest to save the world from the Keeper of the Underworld, Chandalen is frustrated by Kahlan's insistence on helping out a group of young soldiers against an invading army, reminding her constantly that their main quest is to save the freaking world. However, Chandalen is always presented as being wrong, despite the number of times he's proven right. However, after Kahlen's retrieval from Prindin, she acknowledges that she really got immersed in the war and forgot about her mission to find Zedd.
Warren's death in Faith of the Fallen-seriously sucky timing there.
Also Cara's wedding. The juxtaposition of what they used to be, to what they have now is incredibly moving.
And then in The Third Kingdom, her husband, Ben, is killed covering her and Richard's escape. Seeing her so broken afterward is heart-wrenching.
And this exchange in Stone of Tears:
Verna: What about my wrinkles?
Warren: Someday, when you get wrinkles, I'll love them, too.
They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Many people who have read both Sword of Truth and The Wheel of Time have noted that the former bears a lot of similarities to the latter (The Wheel of Time began publication in 1990, Sword of Truth in 1994) to the point they find it stretches credibility of being coincidental. It's particularly one of the reasons Wheel of Time fans don't tend to have the highest opinion of Sword of Truth, dismissing Truth as just being a rip-off with more sexual content and Objectivism. It doesn't help that Terry Goodkind responded to people pointing out the similarties by making comments about Wheel of Time and its author Robert Jordan that many found insulting, such as insinuating that Wheel of Time fans are too immature to understand his books. When Jordan was questioned about the matter, his response was simply "I am aware of Mr Goodkind."
Zedd, the strange old man Richard is friends with, is indeed the great wizard Kahlan was sent looking for at the beginning of the first book.
Richard's realization near the end of The Stone of Tears that Kahlan still loves him and only sent him away with Sister Verna to protect him comes across to the reader as a colossal "duh!" moment. Especially since the scene where Kahlan made him go with Verna was told from her perspective, the readers knew immediately her reasons for doing so, and the surprise revelation of such to Richard only came after many chapters following. It could be justified that Richard has only spent a handful of days free of a Mord-Sith where he was forced to wear a collar while being tortured and therefore has a neurosis about having to put another one on and could feel betrayed at Kahlan taking advantage of his love for her to make him do something that terrifies him; but that doesn't come across on paper, where Richard seems to take Kahlan telling him that she hates him for not wanting to wear the collar at face value.
The Woobie: Lunetta, Lord General Tobias Brogan's sister and personal mage-slave. She is mostly cowed and broken by a lifetime of abuse and indoctration that mages are damned, and sometimes comes across as almost feeble-minded as a result... but on a few occasions, she livens up a little and shows traces of the great person she probably could have been if she hadn't been born among the fanatics of the Blood of the Fold.
