YMMV / The Heart Trilogy

• Alternate Character Interpretation: When Thorin pulls his I Have Your Wife gambit on Smaug in Heart of Fire, is his honorable side pushing through his Sanity Slippage to give a chance to Kathryn's wish to neutralize Smaug without killing him? Or is he just trying to lure Smaug into a deadly trap whatever the dragon would comply for Kathryn's sake or not?
• Awesome Music:
  • "Memories" by Within Temptation for Heart of Fire. It encapsulates the tragic story of Smaug and Kathryn's meeting and eventual separation which Kathryn relays to Gandalf decades later before the Quest for Erebor.
  • "World on Fire" by Les Friction for Heart of Ashes. It reflects the broken and fallen state Smaug and Kathryn are left in after the first story's ending, as well as Smaug's desires to reclaim and protect Kathryn and to claim revenge on the thousands he blames to have taken everything else from him.
  • "Everybody Wants To Rule the World" by Lorde for Heart of the Inferno. It emphasizes Smaug's likely desire to attempt to bring about a new Age of Dragons as described in the official plot summary, as well as Middle-Earth being on the verge of changing forever with the War of the Ring having come.
• Catharsis Factor: After everything Andraya has done in Heart of Ashes — from her vile misandristic treatment of her daughter, to lying to and deceiving others — it is satisfyingly cathartic to watch Smaug grant her such a gruesome and vicious death.
• Evil Is Cool: Fankil is also very sinister, intelligent and confident.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Somewhat. Heart of Fire reveals through the tale of how Kathryn and Smaug met and then separated sixty years before The Hobbit. It offers explanation to just what the source of Smaug's seemingly unexplained personal grudge with Thorin was in the movie, and a lot of Smaug's behavior and dialogue from the movie that still occurs in Heart of Fire becomes more tragic in light of this tale.
  • In Heart of Ashes, Andraya expects Freyja to bear Smaug's offspring, but by the time of Heart of the Inferno, Kathryn and Smaug have had three miscarriages, and the birth of Kolstros and Vervenia succeeds just barely, and Kathryn has to be resurrected by Gandalf. Even if Smaug had impregnated Freyja, she too would have likely miscarried, or died in the very unlikely scenario she had gotten to labour, given that she's just a teenager.
• Jerkass Woobie: By the end of Heart of Fire, Smaug becomes this for the next two stories. He genuinely loves and displays humane caring towards Kathryn and later their twins, but he remains cruel, selfish and unaverse to slaughtering people in droves if he feels they've crossed him. In terms of karma, he does suffer a lot alongside her in the long-term; from losing the Lonely Mountain to the dwarves he despises, to the pain and trauma of watching Kathryn die and thinking more than once he's lost or is about to lose her, to his wishes to reclaim Erebor dramatically clashing with his eventual promise to Kathryn to not do so, to having to live for sixty years restraining his more violent impulses lest a dark affliction he gains reduce him to Sauron's puppet.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Karst and his mercenaries cross it when they attempt to rape Kathryn in Heart of Fire.
  • Thorin Oakenshield, a case of Good Is Not Nice and an Anti-Hero in canon, debatably crosses it in Heart of Fire; if not when he imprisons Kathryn with the threat of putting her on trial for treason against the dwarves, then when he attempts to pull an I Have Your Wife gambit against Smaug. It's not hard to feel when it's revealed in Heart of Ashes that he and his nephews died in the Battle of the Five Armies that Thorin earned it.
  • Andraya crosses hers in Heart of Ashes when she lures Kathryn into Fankil's clutches just to gain Revenge by Proxy against Smaug for killing her daughter (which happened partly because of her own actions) and get from the demon spells for resurrecting Freyja. When she's caught, she boasts that she's aware of what Fankil needs Kathryn for^note releasing Morgoth from the void, but she cares only about getting her revenge.
• Shocking Moments:
  • Kathryn transforming into a dragon for the first time in Heart of Fire.
  • The reveal that Fankil is Morgoth's son in Heart of Ashes.
• Squick:
  • The extreme pain Kathryn has to live with due to her visions is rather unpleasant for anyone who relates to the feeling of having a migraine.
  • Smaug's hybridized form in Heart of Ashes when he partially transforms is rather horrific.
  • There are also a few gruesome deaths which the narrative doesn't gloss over, such as Freyja's mutilated remains in Heart of Ashes.
• The Woobie:
  • Kathryn. Her gift of clairvoyance drove her parents to abuse her out of a misguided sense of protection, so she run away from home to find her place in the harsh world. Her effort to settle in the isolation of Dale's ruined city led her to being caught by Smaug who was smitten with her singing voice, and by the time the evil dragon released her, she had fallen in love with him. She tries to prevent Thorin Oakenshield's company from trying to reclaim Erebor to prevent Smaug from dying and/or causing destruction in response. She ends up killing herself in her (apparently) futile effort to save Smaug from death, and when she's resurrected, she's trapped in a state of madness before her link to Raw Magic is fixed. She then has to endure living as an unwilling guest of Vathvael's mostly unsympathetic royal court for a while and face heartache from Smaug's cruelty and selfishness. On top of that, an ancient demon chases her because he wants to use her visions to find the Door of Night and release from the void Morgoth himself.
  • The timid teen Freyja has an equally abusive and loving mother who has through her misandristic teachings made the girl wary of men. Andraya plans to have Freyja sleep with Smaug for a powerful offspring, much to the girl's fear. She accompanies Faervel to rescue their common friend Kathryn from Smaug, fearing both the dragon and her mother's anger. When she finds Kathryn, she cannot convince the Seer to leave Smaug and is told to leave for her own safety. She's immediately afterwards unceremoniously killed by Smaug when her only crime was to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
• Woobie Species: The dragons can be seen as this. All of them are born with a link to Morgoth that they have no control over and renders them Always Chaotic Evil due to Morgoth's meddling with their ancestors' genes. If Smaug's attitude is anything to go by, the dragons aren't ashamed of this link per se, but they're definitely not proud of it either. They're on the verge of extinction, with only a handful of Great Fire-Drakes, including Smaug, left in the world, and no-one else in Middle-Earth except Gandalf (and to a lesser extent Kathryn) feels inclined to help them; the Free Peoples would be nothing but celebratory if the dragons died out due to their post-Morgoth history of destruction, and Sauron and his dark forces only care insofar as they can use the dragons to serve their goals. Furthermore, the remaining dragons are forced to live in the icy wastes of the Grey Mountains and the overpopulated Withered Heath.