YMMV / The Black Company

• Aluminium Christmas Trees: "Tonk" is a very real card game, a Deep South variant of five-card rummy with a somewhat different scoring system, that still maintains some popularity in black communities there.
• Complete Monster:
  • The Dominator is the true Big Bad of The Books of the North. Once a powerful sorcerer, the Dominator began to crave the power to bring destruction to all he saw fit, and kicked off his tyrannical rule by slaughtering his own hometown. Upon establishing the Domination by forcing ten evil wizards into his servitude as his "Taken," the Dominator turned the lands into a horrific era where entire kingdoms were raped, pillaged and burned at the Dominator's whim. Though locked away in the Barrowlands for his crimes, and later left to rot in them when his wife, the Lady, and Taken escape, the Dominator reaches out and begins corrupting the rebel forces against the Lady's growing empire, and kickstarts a bloody slaughter of a war that ends with a quarter of a million people dead. After failing to use the life-devouring Black Castle to aid his escape, the Dominator attempts to spread dozens of the stones that build the Castle throughout the world to kill countless people and enable his freedom. When finally blasting his way out of confinement, the Dominator butchers all in his path on his way to the Lady, planning to murder her for leaving him in the Barrowlands before restarting his horrific Domination and plunging the world into a hellish nightmare of agony and death for all.
  • The Taken known as the Limper is a vicious Evil Sorcerer and the evilest of the Taken, with malice and sadism matching even the Dominator himself. Ruling his domain in the Lady's empire via brutality, cruelty and regularly allowing massacres or rapes with his forces, the Limper secretly betrays the Lady to work with the rebels and, when convenient for him, massacres the rebels, only to attempt to betray the Lady again to allow the Dominator to free himself and make the world into a twisted hellhole. Returning in the fifth novel, The Silver Spike, the Limper leads a hellish army on a march throughout the country, razing whole cities to the ground and annihilating their populaces save the few he enslaves, with no sign of stopping until he has crushed the world under his heel. One of the single most monstrous foes the Black Company has ever encountered, the Limper also remains perhaps their most personal and sadistic enemy.
  • Longshadow is the leader of the Shadowmasters, leading his forces across the Glittering Plane to conquer the world of Hsien, whereupon he enacted a horrific dystopia that saw Hsien ruined and countless innocents over the world dead or tortured. Enslaving the demons known as Shadows before arriving on Homeworld, Longshadow conquers the south where countless others are killed and enslaved in a nightmarish rule. Intending on betraying his own forces, Longshadow plans to release the Shadows to consume his enemies, even his own forces, to ravage the world until he is left to reign over the ashes, with all knowledge belonging to him and him alone.
  • Kina the Destroyer is an ancient goddess hellbent on bringing about the "Year of the Skulls", an apocalyptic event where she hopes to reign death and destruction onto all of the 16 worlds. Orchestrating her various Deceiver cults in a wide array of atrocities, from cannibalism to mass murder on the daily, Kina's cults have killed thousands over the years, with Kina herself even approving of and endorsing the betrayal and murders of her own cult members. Regularly employing Mind Rape to turn people to her cause, Kina possesses the body of Lady's infant daughter Booboo and brainwashes her for decades, convincing her that Kina is her actual mother, yet having no care for the young girl except as a tool. Though her cult believes she will bring everlasting peace to much of the world, Kina in actuality plans to kill everything she can upon her revival, with visions of her planned future showing nothing but wastelands of corpses and bones that Kina dances throughout, adorned in infant skulls. After beaten by Croaker, Kina gets one final revenge by taking full control of Booboo and trying to murder her mother, forcing Croaker to either kill his daughter or let his beloved wife Lady die.
• Fridge Logic: Croaker has a moment of it in Shadow Games - when he realized that if it was so hard to kill Limper, then how can they be sure other Taken died so easily during battle of Charm? Turns out some of them actually didn't.
• Inferred Holocaust: We don't actually see what happens between when the killer shadows from the Plain of Glittering Stone are unleashed on the Voroshk homelands (which Croaker erroneously called "Khatovar") and when the shadows are defeated, but what is shown before and after these events makes it very clear how much the victory cost the Voroshk.
• Magnificent Bastard: The Lady is one of the strongest sorceresses in the world. Once the wife of the monstrous Dominator, the Lady left him to rot in his prison while she took his minions, the Taken as her own, setting out to conquer the world. Brilliant and ruthless, the Lady forms a curious bond with Croaker, the historian of the Black Company while also using her wits and skill to stop her husband's return and defeat him forever. Later losing most of her power and becoming simply "Lady," she helps lead the Black Company in the South, even organizing a massacre of unfriendly religious leaders who are an obstacle to stopping the Evil Sorcerer Longshadow.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Shed flirts with, and ultimately crosses the line in Shadows Linger.
    "Murder no longer bothered Shed."
  • Mogaba crosses it over the course of the siege of Dejagore. Murgen recalls a skirmish as the first time in Company history that Brothers knowingly raised arms against one another. He eventually pulls a full Face–Heel Turn and becomes a General to Longshadow.
• Narm:
  • The Dominator, the Greater-Scope Villain for the first trilogy, driving force behind most of the plot and a man so powerful and so evil he makes the Lady look like a benevolent dictator, gets only one line in his first appearance: "ARDATH, YOU BITCH!" And he didn't even get her name right.
  • He gets another line in the next book trying to bind Lady's powers. And he gets the name wrong again.
  • There's also the tendency for most of the fights involving magical or superpowered adversaries to take the form of gigantic, prolonged dog-piles.
• This Is Your Premise on Drugs: Steven Erikson, author of The Malazan Book of the Fallen, wrote in a review that The Black Company was "like reading Vietnam War fiction on peyote."
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: Goblin spends most of She is the Darkness separated from the Company proper on a secret mission, which Murgen occasionally checks in on. It's revealed late in the novel that the mission's purpose was to keep Goblin and One-Eye separated so that their feud couldn't complicate any critically important missions.

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