History YMMV / Dragonlance

* AlasPoorVillain: Ariakan actually dies offscreen as it were but when Steel finds his wound covered body we get a touching scene.

** The races of Kender, Gully Dwarves and Gnomes are often this. All are intended to be ComicRelief races, but many instead find them just annoying for the traits that are supposed to be funny -- Kender are a race of childlike, CuriousAsAMonkey kleptomaniacal {{Fearless Fool}}s, Gully Dwarves are dity, ugly, slovenly, and so stupid that they can't count past two, and Gnomes are {{Motor Mouth}}ed {{Bungling Inventor}}s who fail to grasp concepts such as [[RubeGoldbergDevice simplicity in technology]] and actually prize ''failure'' over ''success''. Kender are particularly hated amongst the tabletop gaming sect because their racial description gives them borderline carte blanche to be played as ChaoticStupid.

* CanonDiscontinuity: A lot of things are brought out in one novel, only to then be officially banned from continuity in another. Two of the most famous examples; the short story implying that Raistlin was courted by, and fathered a daughter upon, a female Irda (a member of the Ogre race before their fall to Takhisis), and Lord Soth being a Darklord in {{Ravenloft}}

* DesignatedHero: The Gods of Good... really aren't that good, in a lot of ways. See JerkassGods on the main page. More than one reader thinks StrawmanHasAPoint when somebody like Tanis proclaims that the gods don't deserve mortal worship and that the gods were the ones who abandoned the people rather than vice versa.

* UnfortunateImplications: A lot of fans feel that Gully Dwarves are a race made to make fun of the mentally retarded.

** Raistlin deserves an entrance here too. Yes, his [[SiblingRivalry brother]] was more popular than [[TheUnfavourite him]]. Yes, he was bullied as a [[LonersAreFreaks kid]] and has [[IntelligenceEqualsIsolation difficulties forming relationships]]. But ''still''...

** Kitiara Uth Matar.

* AdaptationDisplacement - The ''Chronicles'' Trilogy were originally just meant to be [[TieInNovel Tie-In Novels]] to the DungeonsAndDragons gaming modules, but thanks to the ''Chronicles'' Trilogy massive popularity, even more novels were written by both Weis & Hickman and other authors as well. Now it has gotten to the point where there are quite a few Dragonlance fans who have no idea there is even a game tied to the novels.
* AlternateCharacterInterpretation - Happens with the Gods of Evil, and Raistlin.
* BrokenBase - Fandom tends to be divided on either side of the ''Dragons of Summer Flame'' novel. On one hand, you have the old schoolers who generally refuse to accept anything that isn't connected to the original [[TrueCompanions Heroes of the Lance]] and the original ''Chronicles'' and ''Legends'' trilogies. On the other hand, there are those who consider the Fifth Age a bold and innovative step away from the original characters and consider the first group to be hopelessly clinging to the past. For their part, the first group considers the Fifth Agers to have discarded everything that made the series popular in the first place. Both groups, however, almost universally revile [[GodModeSue Mina]] and her [[CosmicRetcon Cosmic Retcon Army]], which over the course of a single trilogy managed to systematically destroy everything even remotely connected to the Fifth Age and return it to the status quo. Old school fans were slightly mollified, though even they were struck by the [[DroppedABridgeOnHim sheer meanness of it]], reading between the lines that the entire War of Souls was an AuthorsSavingThrow writ large.

* CompleteMonster- Maladar the Faceless Emperor in the Taladas Trilogy. His actions include the destruction of an entire city via tidal wave just because it's ruler ticked him off, the slaughtering of thousands of nobles' sons so he could [[BloodBath bathe in their blood]], and a general love of inflicting pain in all its forms- and that's just in the ''backstory''. The author who created him (who had also written books featuring [[EvilSorcerer Fistandantilus]] and [[OurDragonsAreDifferent Malystryx]]) called Maladar the most evil character he had ever written. His [[AndIMustScream final fate]] is well-deserved.
* DracoInLeatherPants
** Raistlin. Dalamar. Lord Soth.

* EnsembleDarkhorse
** Raistlin. Also, to a lesser extent, Dalamar and Kitiara.

* DesignatedHero: The Gods of Good... really aren't that good, in a lot of ways. See JerkassGods below. More than one reader thinks StrawmanHasAPoint when somebody like Tanis proclaims that the gods don't deserve mortal worship and that the gods were the ones who abandoned the people rather than vice versa.
* EpilepticTrees - The theory that Raistlin was really a woman.
* GodModeSue
** If you don't think Mina was following this trope like a checklist, you've been reading the wrong book. A rare example of this trope [[JustifiedTrope justified]], as she had a god on her side, [[spoiler: later revealed to be Takhisis, with no other gods to keep Takhisis' powers in check.]]
** [[spoiler:And then it turned out that Mina herself was a goddess.]]
* GrowingTheBeard - ''Chronicles'' is a solid but unspectacular HighFantasy epic. ''Legends'', the next trilogy, is a character-driven drama about family, the nature of evil, and TimeTravel that cements Raistlin as one of the best [[MagnificentBastard Magnificent Bastards]] in modern fantasy literature. Easy to see why it's considered the high point of the whole saga, and one of the classics of the genre.
* HoYay
** Many possible instances, but blatantly Raistlin and Dalamar - the Master/Apprentice relationship, the fact that they're both scrawny, evil bishounen wizards, the passionate way Dalamar refers to his "''Shalafi''", and who could forget [[spoiler: Raistlin burning his fingerprints into Dalamar's chest to punish his betrayal]]. Whew.

* MagnificentBastard / ManipulativeBastard
** Raistlin Majere.

** Kitiara Uth Matar would also qualify as a ManipulativeBastard.
* OnlyTheAuthorCanSaveThemNow - Against the armies of evil
* TheScrappy
** Tasselhoff has all the hallmarks of one of these, but somehow manages to be genuinely likable despite (or because) of his annoying habits and constant meddling in the story. However, other stories with {{Expy}} Kender characters usually fall head over heels into this trope.

* TheyChangedItNowItSucks - A lot of fans did not like the changes that came with the Fifth Age. Some fans of the Fifth Age books and SAGA RPG did not like the changes made by the War of Souls trilogy.

* ValuesDissonance - Par Salian, head of the order of White Robes, the supposedly do-gooder mages. He curses Raistlin and gives him "Eyes of Decay", for lack of a better title. Not only does he look like a freak due to having hourglass-shaped pupils, but everything he sees is crumbling and decaying as he watches, so he can't see a building, but only an ancient ruin, and living beings are nothing but ambulatory, talking, rotting corpses. This was intended to make him more compassionate- instead, it's implied that this only furthered his disassocation from humanity and pushed him towards his dreams of divine power. It's also implied that it was his decision to add an illusion of Raistlin's brother Caramon being a wizard of even greater power than Raistlin to The Test, which resulted in Raistlin jealously murdering his brother... an act that was witnessed by the real Caramon. Seriously, What is wrong with you? Hell, even his best magely friend called him on it...

* {{Wangst}}
** Plenty of it from almost everyone at some point, but Tanis Half-Elven comes off as the greatest offender, primarily because the thing he whines the most about is his inability to choose between his BettyAndVeronica [[LoveTriangle relationships]] with two stunningly gorgeous women (one a bratty but pure-hearted elven princess and the other a wickedly sensual human warrioress)...while he's leading a party embroiled in an epic struggle for the fate of the world. Priorities, man.

* SeinfeldIsUnfunny: The books are sometimes criticized for being one more cliched sword-and-sorcery series built on the D&D model. This was not the case when the Chronicles first saw print.

** The races of Kender, Gully Dwarves and Gnomes are often this. All are intended to be ComicRelief races, but many instead find them just annoying for the traits that are supposed to be funny -- Kender are a race of childlike, CuriousAsAMonkey kleptomaniacal {{Fearless Fool}}s, Gully Dwarves are dity, ugly, slovenly, and so stupid that they can't count past two, and Gnomes are {{Motor Mouth}}ed {{Bungling Inventor}}s who fail to grasp concepts such as [[RubeGoldburgDevice simplicity in technology]] and actually prize ''failure'' over ''success''. Kender are particularly hated amongst the tabletop gaming sect because their racial description gives them borderline carte blanche to be played as ChaoticStupid.

** Tasselhoff has all the hallmarks of one of these, but somehow manages to be genuinely likable despite (or because) of his annoying habits and constant meddling in the story. However, other stories with {{Expy}} Kender characters fall head over heels into this trope.

* DracoInLeatherPants - Raistlin. Dalamar. Lord Soth.

* EnsembleDarkhorse - Raistlin. Also, to a lesser extent, Dalamar and Kitiara.

* FridgeLogic - The primary landmass of the world is in the southern hemisphere. Considering that north is defined as the celestial "top", this implies that either the first people to develop astronomy lived somewhere in the north that no longer has contact with the south, or when they developed it in the south, they considered themselves the celestial "bottom".
** But just think about ''before'' the First Cataclysm. Istar, anyone? And besides, Solamnia takes up most of the north - which ''was'' the ruling civilization at the time. So technically, for most of Krynn's history, the celestial "top" ''was'' the North, and after the fall of Istar and the Solamnic Knighthood, people were just too lazy to flip the map over.
** There is in fact another continent about the size of Ansalon: Taladas, in the northern hemisphere and just about on the opposite side of the world. There's hardly any contact between the two, and it's hardly been mentioned at all since the ExpansionPackWorld sourcebook that established its existence.
* GodModeSue - If you don't think Mina was following this trope like a checklist, you've been reading the wrong book. A rare example of this trope [[JustifiedTrope justified]], as she had a god on her side, [[spoiler: later revealed to be Takhisis, with no other gods to keep Takhisis' powers in check.]]

* HoYay - Many possible instances, but blatantly Raistlin and Dalamar - the Master/Apprentice relationship, the fact that they're both scrawny, evil bishounen wizards, the passionate way Dalamar refers to his "''Shalafi''", and who could forget [[spoiler: Raistlin burning his fingerprints into Dalamar's chest to punish his betrayal]]. Whew.

* JerkAssGods: They dropped a mountain on Krynn and killed who knows how many innocent people because of what ''one guy'' did. DisproportionateRetribution much? And afterwards, when people prayed to them, they never answered those prayers. Which makes the whole "We didn't abandon you, ''you'' abandoned ''us''" statement pretty nonsensical.
* MagnificentBastard / ManipulativeBastard - Raistlin Majere.

* TheScrappy - Tasselhoff has all the hallmarks of one of these, but somehow manages to be genuinely likable despite (or because) of his annoying habits and constant meddling in the story. However, other stories with {{Expy}} Kender characters fall head over heels into this trope.

* UltimateShowdownOfUltimateDestiny - The final print Dragon magazine had an article about a hypothetical fight between Raistlin Majere and [[ForgottenRealms Elminster]], both perhaps the most powerful Wizards in their respective worlds.

* {{Wangst}} - Plenty of it from almost everyone at some point, but Tanis Half-Elven comes off as the greatest offender, primarily because the thing he whines the most about is his inability to choose between his BettyAndVeronica [[LoveTriangle relationships]] with two stunningly gorgeous women (one a bratty but pure-hearted elven princess and the other a wickedly sensual human warrioress)...while he's leading a party embroiled in an epic struggle for the fate of the world. Priorities, man.

*** Actually, comapred to other dudes, Tanis manages to keep it quiet. He just gets broody. Which is better than Drizzt.
** Raistlin deserves an entrance here too. Yes, his [[SiblingRivalry brother]] was more popular than [[TheUnfavourite him]]. Yes, he was bullied as a [[LonersAreFreaks kid]] and has [[IntelligenceEqualsIsolation difficulties forming relationships]]. But ''still''...
* WoobieDestroyerOfWorlds: Raistlin [[ByronicHero admittedly deserves]] some of the things that happen to him, but at some point, him [[spoiler:becoming a god to spite reality]] becomes understandable.

* BrokenBase - Fandom tends to be divided on either side of the ''Dragons of Summer Flame'' novel. On one hand, you have the old schoolers who generally refuse to accept anything that isn't connected to the original [[{{Nakama}} Heroes of the Lance]] and the original ''Chronicles'' and ''Legends'' trilogies. On the other hand, there are those who consider the Fifth Age a bold and innovative step away from the original characters and consider the first group to be hopelessly clinging to the past. For their part, the first group considers the Fifth Agers to have discarded everything that made the series popular in the first place. Both groups, however, almost universally revile [[GodModeSue Mina]] and her [[CosmicRetcon Cosmic Retcon Army]], which over the course of a single trilogy managed to systematically destroy everything even remotely connected to the Fifth Age and return it to the status quo. Old school fans were slightly mollified, though even they were struck by the [[DroppedABridgeOnHim sheer meanness of it]], reading between the lines that the entire War of Souls was an AuthorsSavingThrow writ large.

* AdaptationDisplacement - The ''Chronicles'' Trilogy were originally just meant to be a [[TieInNovel Tie-In Novels]] to the DungeonsAndDragons gaming modules, but thanks to the ''Chronicles'' Trilogy massive popularity, even more novels were written by both Weis & Hickman and other authors as well. Now it has gotten to the point where there are quite a few Dragonlance fans who have no idea there is even a game tied to the novels.

* CrowningMomentOfHeartwarming - "Look Raist, bunnies!"
** Given Raistlin's general behavior towards Caramon, ''any'' moment where Raistlin is actually nice to him ("nice" being a [[YourMileageMayVary relative]] word) counts. Once you factor out the ones that include Raistlin-treats-Caramon-like-a-faithful-dog and Raistlin-does-something-out-of-self-interest...

* CrowningMomentOfFunny - Multiples ones in the story "Wanna Bet?", from ''The Second Generation''. Krynn's gnomes are usually good for a laugh, and there's a whole shipful of them in this story. The description of the ship alone is a CMOF, actually.

* WallBanger - To some, the color-coding of the wizard robes. Also when Raistlin suddenly carries an IdiotBall when he [[spoiler:is too dumb to realize the time traveling device that Tasslehoff has could mess up his spell on his way to fight the evil Queen]].
** ''Dragons of Summer Flame'': Not until we got to see [[HarryPotter Harry and Co.]] on a three-hundred-page camping trip would we ever read something that focuses on characters we're not familiar with doing things we don't want to see when there's an unexplored world of awesome going on right next door. We see Palin running around as a gofer, Usha being an InnocentFanserviceGirl who is ''swiftly'' [[BreakTheCutie broken]], and Steel half-[[{{Wangst}} wangsting]] and half in prison, while in the meantime, '''Raistlin Freakin' Majere''' is back from the dead and standing in front of the Wizard's Conclave telling them how they're gonna save the world! Later, Palin and Usha get sent to fetch a rock while Dalamar and the World's Most Powerful Sorcerers Wage War at a fiery rift in the middle of the ocean against armies of shadow warriors and demonic fire dragons.
*** Not to mention the perfectly good plot [[TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodPlot that was wasted]] as the [[LawfulEvil Knights of Takhisis]] sweep across Ansalon, conquering half the continent in a matter of weeks. Harsh though it may be, the roiling chaos and disunity of the many nations is quickly stamped out. Even [[RetiredBadass Caramon]] remarks that it may be for the better as the Knights frequent his inn, buy his beer, pay their tabs, and show respect to him and his townspeople. This alone could have made for an outstanding trilogy to see it resolved somehow, but it's quickly swept to the side by Chaos' unleashing and TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt. Now, the book itself was genuinely well written and definitely had its moments, but why introduce all these new characters if you're just going to kill them and their world off all in one book?
** ''Mina'': Let's just get the background out of the way right now. Basically, Mina was an orphan with no memory of her former life who washed ashore on Goldmoon's island sanctuary. Goldmoon raised her as her own daughter until she eventually ran away to "rediscover the gods" whom Goldmoon had taught her so much about. Eventually, she believes she has as she becomes the High Priestess of the One God. At this point, she heals a dying minotaur and takes him on as her lieutenant and herald as she (somehow) takes command of the Knights of [[strike: Takhisis]] Neraka and leads them against a Solamnic garrison. And then, because she's [[GodModeSue just that damn awesome]] she criss-crosses the continent and kills off nearly every Great Dragon there is, each more implausibly than the last. When she returns to Goldmoon's island, she tells her that she's found the god her adopted mother had always told her about, but Goldmoon recognizes the One God as Takhisis and rejects her, dying in the process. And so with nothing more than her Joan of Arc archetype, she has (for better or worse) decimated every last trace of the Fifth Age influence on the setting, killed off no fewer than two Heroes of the Lance, returned the gods and proper magic to their place, and reset everything to the status quo.
*** To make things worse, in the wake of her crusade, she manages to attract the attention of Chemosh, God of Death, who damn near kills Mina's minotaur bodyguard (and only genuinely compelling character in her entourage), inspire an entirely new race of undead, and is eventually revealed to be [[spoiler: not only the priestess of the "One God", but a god on her own right!]] This revelation alone violates everything established about the Dragonlance deity system; namely, seven deities each of Good, Neutral, and Evil, all in balance. It takes a GodModeSue of the highest order to shatter an entire cosmology.
** ''Takhisis' Stealing the World'': As discussed above, after ''Dragons of Summer Flame'', Takhisis somehow managed to steal the entire planet and move it to a different part of the cosmos, where she can reign as the one true deity. Leaving out the question of why she waited 30+ years to move in, to accept this as valid, we also have to accept the following retcons as true:
*** That Raistlin's and [[spoiler: Fizban's]] appearances in the aftermath of the Chaos War were, in fact, impersonations concocted by Takhisis to fool the puny mortals ''(though if she were reigning surpreme, why would she bother?)'', thus ruining one of the truly poignant and touching moments in that book.
*** That [[spoiler: Tasslehoff's]] death and traveling to [[spoiler: Flint's forge]] in the afterlife was a lie ''(ruining yet another TearJerker)'' and that the red star in the sky, meant to convey a watching eye over a world without gods, was just Takhisis jerking her subjects around for the lulz.
*** Takhisis not overtly trying to take over the world for forty (not thirty) years actually ''is'' explained: she didn't have the power. The effort needed to steal Krynn nearly destroyed her and it took decades for her to gather her strength back.
** And how about the gods destroying the '''entire world''' and killing several hundred thousand people (at least) in order to stop '''one man''' who '''worked for them''' who'd gotten a little out of hand in his efforts to purge the world of evil. Oh, and then consistently touting how they hadn't left the people of Krynn, but the other way around, totally ignoring the fact people used to pray to them all the time, they just didn't actually do anything about it. Overall, the gods seem prone to inducing these.
*** It wasn't just one guy---the entire Empire of Istar had become an aggressive nation of insanely zealous KnightTemplars. They had crushed anyone who could have opposed them and were well on their way to erasing all freedom of thought in the world. It was also a lesser of evils. In the story "The Silken Threads," Nuitari, the god of evil magic, told one of his mages that Krynn's destruction had been foreseen because the world was out of balance.
*** Even so, the gods did not just kill the Kingpriest and those KnightTemplars. They also killed countless innocent people. These gods could have used less extreme measures to stop the Kingpriest and his followers; Paladine is shown to be quite willing to interact directly with mortals in the ''Chronicles'' trilogy, so it begs the question of why he didn't appear before the Kingpriest and tell him to his face what an idiot he was being and to stop it. That certainly would have been more effective and gotten the message across more clearly than battering the city with a storm and making trees weep blood and so forth, which the Kingpriest mistakenly believed was ''Takhisis'' and other evil gods trying to stop him. Or, if they were hell-bent on going the "throw a fiery mountain at Krynn" route, they could have teleported those innocent people to safety the same way they did with their "true clerics" before the Cataclysm. Instead they did nothing to safeguard those people's lives. The death toll far exceeded anything the Kingpriest could have possibly brought about.
** Also, when the gods seal off the portal to the Abyss, they make it so that only an evil mage and good cleric working together can open it up. While the cleric must completely trust the mage, there are no restrictions placed on the side of evil. The whole "Legends" storyline could have been averted if the gods had just said that the evil person had to be honest- no JediTruths, no lies or deceptions. As it stands, it looks like either the gods thought that evil would never lie or they actually wanted the portal to be opened.
*** It wasn't the gods who sealed the Portal, though- it was the Wizards' Conclave of the time, who did everything in their power to keep it shut. They just figured that the whole "black-robed wizard of infinite evil + white-robed cleric of infinite good" alliance would never happen.

** Raistlin deserves an entrance here too. Yes, his [[SiblingRivalry brother]] was more popular than [[TheUnfavourite him]]. Yes, he was bullied as a [[LonersAreFreaks kid]] and has [[IntelligenceEqualsIsolation difficulties forming relationships]]. But ''still''...

* CompleteMonster- Maladar the Faceless Emperor in the Taladas Trilogy. His actions include the destruction of an entire city via tidal wave just because it's ruler ticked him off, the slaughtering of thousands of nobles' sons so he could ''bathe in their blood'', and a general love of inflicting pain in all its forms- and that's just in the ''backstory''. The author who created him (who had also written books featuring [[EvilSorcerer Fistandantilus]] and [[OurDragonsAreDifferent Malystryx]]) called Maladar the most evil character he had ever written. His [[AndIMustScream final fate]] is well-deserved.

* AdaptationDecay - Some people consider the movie an example of this.

* TheScrappy - Tasselhoff has all the hallmarks of one of these, but somehow manages to be genuinely likeable despite (or because) of his annoying habits and constant meddling in the story. However, other stories with {{Expy}} Kender characters fall head over heels into this trope.