YMMV / Iron Gold

• Base-Breaking Character: Lysander au Lune. Some view him as a Well-Intentioned Extremist who genuinely wants to stop the chaos in the solar system that resulted from Darrow's rebellion in the original trilogy, while to others he's a Spoiled Brat who feels entitled to leadership and power simply because his grandmother was Sovereign. One camp believes that he still has the potential to be redeemed, while another sees him as a monster who has already gone too far, and a third sees him as a genuine hero (see Misaimed Fandom).
• Misaimed Fandom: A sizeable portion of readers believe that not only is Lysander a case of The Extremist Was Right and that everything he does to restore the Solar system to the pre-Red Rising status quo is completely justified, but that he's ultimately The Hero of the sequel series whose quest to destroy The Republic and restore The Society to its former glory is the right thing to do.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • To some, Lysander crossed this when he murdered his cousin and deliberately sabotaged the Free Legions' plan to escape Heliopolis in order to personally reconquer Mercury for the Society.
    • For many that didn't think he was too far gone after that, his decision at the end Light Bringer to keep Atlas' Synthetic Plague for himself instead of destroying it, followed by his subsequent murder of Cassius and deliberate destruction of the Rim's food production facilities rather than accept Darrow and Diomedes' offer of an alliance against Atalantia in exchange for peace between all three factions, was the final nail in the coffin.
• Ron the Death Eater: Darrow is subjected to this by some fans of Cassius and Lysander.
  • While Darrow has missed out on much of Pax's childhood because of the war, he openly expresses how much he hates missing so much of his son's life, and his plan for a covert assassination attempt against the Ash Lord is specifically undertaken to hasten the end of the war so that he can finally retire from fighting. But as far as some readers are concerned, he's a deliberately neglectful husband and father who thinks he's untouchable because of his fame and is too focused on fighting to care about making time for his wife and child, who should be killed off so that Cassius can step in to serve as the attentive husband and father, respectively, that Virginia and Pax need. The calls for Cassius to replace Darrow as Pax's father figure and Virginia's husband died down after Cassius was killed in Light Bringer.
  • Many fans who believe that Lysander is a case of The Extremist Was Right blame Darrow for the massive civilian casualties and environmental devastation on Mercury in Dark Age that occurred because of the Storm Gods, claiming that Darrow has become a war-hungry tyrant willing to commit any atrocity in order to win, despite Orion being the one who caused the devastation and casualties by deliberately going against Darrow's orders and the book repeatedly showing Darrow going out of his way to minimize the risk of harm to civilians at the expense of his own troops.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Tongueless, the mysterious Obsidian without a tongue that Darrow and Sevro find in Apollonius's cell in Deepgrave is set up to potentially being more than some prison guard that got put into his cell, with who he actually is being a mystery. He's unceremoniously hacked to pieces in the prologue of Dark Age and never mentioned again.

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