YMMV / The Lightbringer Series

• Angst? What Angst?: Considering how much she angsted over having giving Zymun up for adoption, Karris seems oddly unaffected by his eventual death. While she knew at that point that he was a complete bastard that she couldn't bring herself to love, you'd think it would at least be worth a tear or two for what might have been.
• Ass Pull:
  • Grinwoody and Ironfist have been super high-ranking moles for the Order of the Broken Eye this whole time?!
  • The Blinding White: Orohlam is real, and also here to help. The prior confirmation of other immortal beings existing means that him showing up isn't totally out of nowhere, but considering all the theological back and forth in the series it still pretty shocking to have the question of the existence of God answered with such a direct "Yeah he's real, and here he is!".
• Ending Fatigue: The final battle of the Chromeria takes up something like half of the last book. After a while, it gets a little hard to get excited about yet another terrible setback getting reversed by yet another heroic feat and/or astonishing miracle.
• Fridge Logic: How was Gavin planning to dye bread infrared or ultraviolet if his prisoner had made it that far?
  • Except his brother himself figured out the prison most likely only went to yellow, since making a cell out of oiley orange or sludge-like red would be impossible, let alone superviolet or sub-red. So there'd be no need for the "invisible" colored bread. We learn in the fourth book that Gavin/Dazen did in fact make prisons for sub-red and super-violet, but unlike the other cells they are meant to be death traps for the prisoner. Thus no need for bread.
  • Speaking of bread we learn in the fourth book that the real Gavin has been dead since the False Prism's War and his imprisonment chapters were a delusional fantasy brought on by the real Dazen's insanity. If that's the case, then where the hell did sixteen years' worth of bread go?
    • Both Gavins mention how difficult it is to board the bread, since the weekly bath washes everything away. So it wasn't 16 years' worth of bread, it was a week's worth, every week, for 16 years.
    • This is assuming that the real Gavin is still only in his head, since his room slave did eventually catch on one of the alarms didn't work and she was sending the wrong bread down. We can assume that Dazen is just lost in his own insanity of his fever while Andross took advantage and never telling him he found Gavin's body.
• Jerkass Woobie: Fake Gavin, heavy on the woobie, light on the jerkass. Fake Dazen, EXTREMELY HEAVY on the jerkass but a woobie because it's implied to be a result of his father's influence and years of captivity. Which is not to mention being compelled to murder his 8-year-old brother Sevastian, and then finding out he'd done so for no reason.
• Nightmare Fuel: The experience of the Nine Kings card for Black Luxin begins with a young child's happy recollection of a fun morning at the family home. It ends with Dazen being told he is a mono-chromatic drafter of black luxin. Cue breakdown as he realizes he really was on the wrong side of the False Prism's War.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Gavin forces himself to not do this when he is being publicly tortured in Rath.
• Shared Universe: Never explicitly confirmed, but Orholam claims to be the God of a thousand worlds. He also bears a strong resemblance to the One God of Weeks' other epic fantasy series, The Night Angel Trilogy. That series Big Bad, Khali, would fit right in with the Djinn except for The Reveal that she's a mortal magic user from 700 years ago at the end of the series.
• The Woobie:
  • Kip is the prime example of this. Lived in a backwater shithole in the worst-off Satrapy, where he suffered All of the Other Reindeer from his fellow villagers and horrific abuse at the hands of his drug-addicted mother, until all of them were slaughtered when he was fifteen. It gets better for him in some ways, in others it only gets worse as the books go on. By the end of the first book, he's afflicted with what may be PTSD from participation in the Battle of Garriston. Regardless of what it is, he's shown to be badly traumatised by it. It's shown that he often has nightmares about the bloodbath he single-handedly inflicted, and it's implied he doesn't get much sleep.
  • Fake Gavin. Karris' backstory is a big Tear Jerker, too. Fake Dazen in the second installment might qualify, as well. As we learn more about Ironfist, he manages to fall under this banner as well.

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