YMMV / A Tale of...

• Angst? What Angst?: Snow White neither mourns, nor even seems phased by, the death of her step-mother. This is discussed, with Snow saying that to her the evil Queen died years ago alongside her father. Future books explore Snow's mentality and subvert this. Snow is traumatized by the events of her past, but she tries her best to move on and focus on good things.
• Continuity Lockout: The series seems like it would be full of stand-alone books, but in reality it contains an interconnected story with many Call Backs and Continuity Nods. It's a must that you read them in order or else you'll be confused by who all the characters are.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The Happily Ever After ending of The Beast Within becomes this when one wonders what will happen if/when Belle finds out what the Prince did to become the Beast in the first place, while he seems to completely forget all of the wrongdoing he committed, meaning that the chances of him trying to make amends after the curse is broken are slim.
• Fridge Logic:
  • The Prince is shocked to learn that Circe seems to be a pig farmer's daughter... except he met her in Belle's tiny, provincial town, which doesn't seem to have anyone but farmers and merchants living in it! Why, exactly, was he so surprised to find out she wasn't nobility?
  • In the same story, what exactly was the end goal of the witches? They seemed to want the Prince to live the rest of his life cursed and miserable, but then are horrified at the thought of Gaston failing to kill him.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of Mother Gothel's sisters is named Primrose. Primrose was the fanon name of Rapunzel's mother before Tangled: The Series gave her the name Arianna.
  • Gothel was among three of a powerful sorceress's daughters. In Tangled: The Series, instead, she's revealed to have been among three of a powerful warlock's apprentices.
• Les Yay: The Queen and Verona have their fair share. They consider each other sisters and they're just as close as the Queen is with her husband. After the King dies, Verona becomes a Living Emotional Crutch to the Queen. The Queen also becomes quite jealous when Verona finds a husband.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Prince/Beast in Beauty and the Beast is described as merely being "spoiled, selfish, and unkind" as a human, but the Backstory he gets in The Beast Within has him arranging for the death of a painter because he wasn't happy with the portrait he painted of him and fiancée number two. He breaks off his engagement with her — a woman who's become a Love Martyr for him, putting up with his emotional abuse — knowing full well it will be the ruin of her kingdom. And when Belle flees the castle, he initially pursues her with the intent of killing her. Any or all of these events can be seen as crossing the horizon...which is unintentional on the author's part, as the reader is still supposed to root for him and Belle getting together and breaking the curse, and he does nothing more heroic than he does in the movie to compensate for his crimes.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Perspective Flip novels featuring some of the most interesting antagonist figures in the Disney Animated Canon? A great idea, but Fairest of All dilutes the Evil Queen's evil by presenting her as more of a victim of abusive figures than anything else, The Beast Within goes full Ron the Death Eater on the Beast and lets the Odd Sisters become a Spotlight-Stealing Squad, and Poor Unfortunate Soul is more interested in what they, Princess Tulip, and Nanny are doing than in Ursula's story, which is more told than shown. The books come off as the author using Wolverine Publicity to push original characters.
  • In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there was a skeleton locked up in the Queen's dungeon. In Fairest of All, considering Verona has been titled Fairest in the Land, it would've been interesting to see the Queen go as far as locking up her best friend and leaving her to rot, just so she can be the Fairest. Instead, the Queen just bans Verona from the Kingdom. Nothing more.
  • Why would you make a horrible monster out of the Beast when Gaston is RIGHT THERE!?!?
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Circe. She's described as being kind and compassionate, but she only curses the Prince after he jilts her personally (even though one would think she would have picked up on the fact that he's rather selfish and misogynistic in general), she extends the curse to the servants after he taunts her (essentially messing up their lives just so he'll be a little worse off), and then completely ignores him for years, without even thinking to check in on his progress until she hears her sisters are doing so behind her back (because of this, she doesn't learn about the abuse he heaped on Princess Morningstar until it's nearly too late to save her and her family). And on the subject of the last point, despite knowing how her sisters operate on a different moral sense than she and hate the Prince, she does little to enforce her order to leave him alone and is easily manipulated by them into not noticing them attempting to kill Belle and the Beast. The end of the novella also has her showing more sympathy to Belle than the Beast, who besides being the character she actually knew and claimed to care about, is on the ground, dying of a stab wound.

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