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YMMV / The Death Gate Cycle

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  • Base-Breaking Character: There are basically no neutral opinions about Zifnab (much like his counterparts in other W&H works). He's either dreadfully unfunny, constantly breaks suspension of disbelief, and way over-pushed, or he's charmingly daft, desperately needed comic relief in a dark story, and pleasantly nostalgic.
  • Critical Dissonance: While popular with the Weis & Hickman fanbase, certain critics seemed to have it in for the series. Publishers Weekly in particular got increasingly scathing and vitriolic with each entry.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Hugh the Hand.
  • Genius Bonus The discussion in one of the appendices of how magic works (by manipulating the "wave" that governs the probability of events) seems a fairly clear reference to/inspiration from quantum mechanics.
  • Moral Event Horizon: It's impossible to have any sympathy for Sinistrad after learning how he used and abused his teenaged wife Iridal and son Bane though Bane didn't exactly take it lying down...
  • Nightmare Fuel: In rough descending order of freakiness, the Lazar, the serpents, and the tytans.
  • Squick: The Haplo/Alake subplot in Serpent Mage. Not for the squeamish.
  • Tear Jerker:
    • Bane's death, though you feel far more sorry for the mother forced to execute her own son than the psychopath-in-training who really had it coming.
    • The description of Xar's first arrival in the then-empty city of Nexus, the first Patryn ever to escape the Labyrinth and behold a beautiful and peaceful place for Patryns to live. It's stated that it didn't take him long to start looking out over the streets with cold eyes and imagine armies - but that in that first moment, he looked on them and imagined children playing.

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