YMMV / Gleams of Aeterna

aka: Reflections Of Eterna

• Broken Base: While Richard was not intended to be The Woobie, he kind of came off as this, especially in the first books, which gained him a lot of fans. It's up for debate whether it's a case of Draco in Leather Pants or just people not buying the lack of logic in characterisation... and boy, a heated debate it is!
• The Chris Carter Effect: Many plot knots and riddles of first, second and third books are still unresolved or explained very poorly (such as Suza-Muza's mystery).
• Crazy Is Cool: Alva has, among other things, formed a squadron of kamikaze mountain goats to blow up the gates of an impregnable mountain fortress.
• Creator's Pet: Inverted big time with Richard, who seems to be more of a Creator's Favorite Punching Bag.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Selene Aramona is noted as "weird" by pretty much everyone, with the only dispute being between those who find it adorable and those who think she is insufferably insolent. Her most salient personality traits are a peculiar speech pattern where she feels the need to outline the reasoning behind her every action, no matter how trivial, and her deliberate disregard of social conventions and hierarchical relations of a late Feudal society (or rather, her deliberate regard of them insofar as they help her get through the day without upsetting people she likes); all of which may place her somewhere on the autistic spectrum — not that anyone in the setting actually knows the term. She also seems to be asexual (though not aromantic, for her infatuation with Alva is well-documented), as she tells Mellith in Heralds Pursuit that she has never experienced sexual arousal in anyone's proximity, even Roque's, and treats the loss of her virginity to King Heinrich as just a cumbersome marital obligation.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Towards the end of Sunset, the author really goes out of her way to make us believe she had Alva Killed Off for Real, to the point where characters who know about what happened spend the entirety of Midnight mourning him. Still, given how important Alva still was to the Myth Arc of the series, and that they've Never Found the Body, the suspicion remained until Sunrise, where Alva shows up once again no worse for wear, except for a mild case of amnesia.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Whenever the Revenants appear, especially Scilla and her Hellish Horse.
  • The destruction of Nador. Holy motherbleeping cow. Reading the last part of Poison is like watching the scariest Disaster Movie ever made.
• Sequelitis: Many see the series as suffering from an epic case of this. Usually it's Kamsha's Pandering to the Base (or at least that part of the base that flatters her, see Broken Base) that is seen as the main cause of this.
• Stoic Woobie: Robert Epine endures a nasty Trauma Conga Line throughout the series, from losing everything but his life and title in Oakdell's rebellion, through his Best Friend turning out to be a power-hungry bastard, who raped the woman Robert loved—unrequitedly!—at the time, his sister, Queen Catherine, being murdered on his watch by a youth he mistakenly trusted, to his second love Marianne giving her life to save his without him learning about it for months... the list just goes on and on. But even though Robert finally begins to crack under the pressure in Blue Gaze of Death, becoming plagued with weird mystical visions (he is, after all, the only Elemental Lord in the series whose position and heritage is completely unambiguous), he never stops trying to fulfill his duties when needed. Most characters by that point recognize that, however, and, for once in his life, treat him with care.
• Trilogy Creep: The main problem of the series, which was originally planned as a duology, but expanded into five books of roughly the same length (RoR, FWTW, FoV, WB, HotB) after Kamsha started actually writing them. The first three were published within two years. The next one was split in three volumes, which took just as long. The last book was initially split in four volumes, spread out over five years, then the last volume of that went on a four-year hiatus, reemerging as a five-parter itself — read: the final bit of the final part of Heart of the Beast was on its own about as long as everything that came before Heart. And the series is not done budding, either, with the final volume of Sunrise spun off into its own trilogy in 2021 — it's a fractal series!

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