YMMV / The Arts of Dark and Light

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • How heroic is the conservative Amorran opposition to Patronus? They oppose the expansion and annexation of the allied states that his progressive faction pushes—but there are hints that at least some of them do this mainly to protect their own power bases from rivals, and others to protect Amorr's ethnic purity, rather than out of concern for people being oppressed.
  • The Witchkings. They are the great historical antagonist faction in the setting, and pretty much everything about them is Obviously Evil. Yet at the same time, when Ar Mauragh features as a POV character, he not only does nothing evil onscreen, but comes across as pretty much of a Noble Demon, and his human servants are expressly willing to die out of loyalty to him—even long after he is dead, the Witchking state destroyed and no means of threatening or forcing them to do so exists. So it seems things weren't quite completely black and white. Adding to this is the portrayal of the Witchkings as atheists, transhumanists and promoters of science and materialism, with For Science! as the core of their philosophy. In-Universe, all of this makes them even more Obviously Evil to most people, but it can also make them seem more sympathetic to readers who support some or all of those things in real life.
• Cry for the Devil: The fate of the last Witchkings is genuinely sad, with a tearful farewell and Ar Mauragh applying a Mercy Kill to save his companion from torture after death by elven necromancers as the allied armies storm their castle. It helps that none of their villainy is really seen up close, such as is presented taking place off stage.
• Designated Hero: Theuderic. He is intended as an Anti-Hero, to be sure—but he does sufficiently little that is heroic, and sufficiently much that is questionable to genuinely horrible, that he comes across more as a straight Villain Protagonist much of the time.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Perhaps unexpectedly, given Vox Day's strongly anti-feminist political positions in real life, he is rather good at writing strong female characters, several of whom have become fan favorites despite being mostly secondary to the main plotline in Amorr.
  • Caitlys is kept offscreen throughout most of the story so far, but outshines the protagonist Marcus in just about every scene where they appear together. A level-headed elf sorceress with kickass magic is just that much cooler than a rather mundane theology student/staff officer, almost no matter what he does.
  • While Fjotra is not an Action Girl, she impresses many readers through her determination and willingness to make whatever personal sacrifices she has to in order to save her people. She comes across as perhaps the most sincerely selfless character in the story, and certainly among the POV characters.
  • In A Sea of Skulls, Bereth is introduced as a career military badass whose stories are interesting both because she gets to use the elves' cool magical gadgets and because of her own personality. Notably, her Career Versus Man problems are sympathetically portrayed, with Bereth a reasonable "feminist" character who just wants to have her own life, without being a man-hater or strawman.
• Evil Is Cool: "The Last Witchking" both invokes and subverts this, showing the apparent awesomeness of being an Evil Overlord before deconstructing the same. Dauragh starts out as an aspiring Darth Vader (without crippling injuries), then gradually declines as he sinks deeper into villainy and corruption.
• Fandom Rivalry: With A Song of Ice and Fire, to which The Arts of Dark and Light is more or less the Spiritual Antithesis. Though it's a largely one-sided one, as Arts has nothing remotely close to the mainstream notability of Song, and most of the fans of the latter are unlikely to have heard of it.
• Friendly Fandoms: With the fans of Victoria, a neo-reactionary thriller from the same publisher, Castalia House.
• Informed Wrongness: The notion that magic is intrinsically evil, as the Church teaches, can appear this way. It would seem that this is supposed to be objectively true, but the story (at least as of the second book) never really gives any clear reason why this should be so. Some subdisciplines of it are certainly Obviously Evil enough (with Blood Magic often mentioned in this context, for example), but the objective metaphysics of Selenoth don't appear to treat magic in general as demonic or inherently corrupting, but rather simply as a tool or technique that seems morally neutral in and of itself from a secular point of view. This is even brought up in-story, with the elves (Selenoth's main users of Utility Magic) meeting what they consider mere human superstitions with either perplexion or scorn: to them, the Amorrans make about as much sense as medieval people warning 21st-century Americans that the use of electricity is of the Devil. Few, even of the ones who are otherwise sympathetic to the humans, are persuaded by the sole argument that this is what the Holy Scriptures say.
• Jerkass Woobie: As she appears in the main story, Lithriel is not very nice... but her extremely Dark and Troubled Past, as well as the scattered hints that she used to be nicer, and is still really rather less jaded than she seems, makes many readers feel sorry for her.
• Les Yay:
  • Roheis gives Fjotra a lot of little smiles, winks and ambiguous compliments as she teaches her court manners in Savondir, with Fjotra blushing at the same. It's probably more about establishing dominance (as in, I know How Things Are Done, and you don't, poor little thing), but it's also fairly easy to read at least some of their interactions as flirtatious. It helps that Roheis also does a very similar thing with her (Fjotra's) brother, where the sexual tension is obviously deliberate.
  • Everyone, whether man or woman, thinks Lithriel is breathtakingly beautiful, and will say so, or at least dwell on it in the third-person-limited narration. Sometimes, it can come across as Even the Girls Want Her. Lithriel herself seems more amused than anything with the attention.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • All daorrs lead to Amorr.^Explanation From an In-Universe statement of Amorr's centrality, recast as a pun on how the name Amorr resembles Roma ("Rome" in Latin).
  • WEREWOLF PISS MAGIC!^Explanation Deriving from Fjotra's surprise and dismay at seeing the werewolves drawing up occult diagrams with their own urine in order to cast a spell. In the fandom, the concept is often snarked at instead.
• Misaimed Fandom: At least some readers, especially liberals who disagree with the author's conservative politics in real life, think the radical Severans are actually more sympathetic than the conservative Valerians in their power struggle in Amorr—despite them being written as (at best) a Well-Intentioned Extremist faction, as well as clear villains who will murder innocent people or even commit treason to have their way.
• Moral Event Horizon: For Patronus, selling Verapora into slavery. Specifically, to a brothel. And donating the proceeds to charity.
• One-Scene Wonder: Magister Amitlya, who is really only a minor character but still comes across as an interesting Lady of Black Magic and potential foil to Bessarias. Certain passages in A Throne of Bones seem to foreshadow additional appearances by her, possibly making her a more important figure in the plot.
• Only the Author Can Save Them Now: The ending to Marcus' plotline in the first book can be polarizing. Depending on whom you ask, his besieged lost legion escaping encirclement by means of a hidden dwarven tunnel which Lodi shows them is either a subtly foreshadowed clever twist and deserved karmic reward to Marcus for his demonstrated decency toward this same character earlier, or a complete cop-out by an author who had written himself into a corner.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The series is less well known for its own literary merits than due to the creator's enthusiastic participation in various scifi-political controversies, perhaps foremostly the battles over the Hugo Awards in the mid-2010s and running feuds with liberal writers N. K. Jemisin and John Scalzi.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Savondir's wizards. Though not infallible, they see a lot with their magical espionage, whether by scrying, mind reading, disguises or what have you. If you're against the regime, they may come knocking on your door in the dark of the night... even if you live in another country.
  • On a somewhat more benevolent note, the elven spy network. Since King Mael is a Friend to All Living Things, the birds and beasts of the fields report everything they see and hear to him. So any sparrow, squirrel or possibly even spider might be spying on you....
  • The Watchers. With shapeshifting, Mind Rape and more, they have all the creepiness of Savondir and then some, but the difference is that since they are impossibly ancient immortal beings, they are playing the long game. Your own grandmother might be a sleeper agent suddenly activated by a trigger word she was taught as a child—if she isn't a star-spawned monster herself.
• Rooting for the Empire: While most antagonists are too repulsively evil to invite this, the Severans in the brewing Amorran civil war evoke some of these sentiments, due to getting a fair bit of Sympathetic P.O.V. and their leader being a completely ruthless, but in at least some respects fairly noble Anti-Villain who really does want the best for the country (as he sees it) and is honestly misguided rather than malicious.
• Sophomore Slump: General opinion is that the second volume in the main series is significantly worse than the first. Specific criticisms often include a comparative lack of thematic unity, weaker pacing and the absence of beloved characters from the first (whether due to them having perished or not being included for other reasons).
• Squick: Scaum-Durna, the gender-bending demon who poses as an attractive woman. If that isn't creepy enough in itself, his penchant for gory murder surely is.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Cardinal Valens is a POV character, but really only in vignettes. Many fans feel that more of his story could have been interesting, with the elections and his quest from the late Pope to investigate the mysterious Laris Sebastius. Especially since he is not only elected Pope himself, but eventually figures out in the most horrifying way who (and what) Sebastius really is.
  • Caitlys, Marcus' elvish love interest, could be used as a POV among her people, as well as provide more of a view of what Amorr looks like to an outsider. But she is also an intriguing character in her own light. Why would a woman from an effectively "modern" and gender-egalitarian society fall in love with a "medieval" man? What does she expect of Marcus, and he of her, as their relationship becomes more serious? How does she, from a country of secularists, feel about his religion (which he takes very seriously)? This could be explored much more than it is: Caitlys plays only a relatively minor role in A Throne of Bones, and in A Sea of Skulls the elvish POV is given to the new character Bereth instead.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Papal election plot looms large in the beginning and ending, but most of the related intrigues in the middle are fairly lightly touched on in favor of the Senate politics Corvus takes part in. At least some readers think more could have been made of the former—for example, if Marcus had stayed on as a clergyman, he could have been part of some cardinal's staff and provided an ongoing insider's take on it.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Amorr is fairly close to the real-life late Roman Republic, and/or medieval Roman Catholic Church in terms of its political system and values, and due to Deliberate Values Dissonance, this will not always look very heroic to many modern audiences (who may think, for example, that they are racist, sexist, or homophobic). Still, they are probably the closest thing the series has to a "good guy" faction, leading to this reaction from some readers. It doesn't help that the more sympathetic characters seem to show a greater tendency to come to a bad end. Then again, the theme of the saga is to fight the good fight even when it seems hopeless.
• Values Dissonance: Other than Deliberate Values Dissonance concerning period-appropriate values for medieval societies, various reviewers have noted (and sometimes objected to) the fact that the series includes few or no heroic homosexual or transgender characters or persons of color, despite being written in the 2010s. Its defenders argue that this is understandable, since the world of Selenoth (at least as revealed thus far) seeks to capture the flavor of classic high fantasy, and so takes place in a European-derived traditional fantasy setting.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: The Arts of Dark and Light is set in an original fantasy world, and per Word of God not overtly intended as direct real-world political commentary (though it includes various political and philosophical discussions In-Universe, which may have some applicability on real issues). However, the outspokenness and very conservative opinions of the author in real life have led many readers to read such politics into the books anyway. For example, the fact that orcs in Selenoth use piercings, tattoos and garish hair dyes has been interpreted as a Take That! to stereotypical "SJWs" and feminist fashion—though it may also simply draw on historical examples of stereotypical barbarians and savages doing this.
• The Woobie: Isabel. As a young Savondir noblewoman, she is part of the Empire's privileged class... until she is identified as a potential magic-user, to be enslaved by the state. And it only gets much, much worse from there on...

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