YMMV / The Black Witch Chronicles

• Crowning Moment of Funny: Near the end of Wandfasted, Tessla and Vale finally sleep together. The book describes how they lovingly and passionately have sex... and then the next morning, Tessla goes downstairs and realises that everyone else in the cottage heard them fucking all night.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Wandfasted has one when you remember that Tessla and Vale will be dead when their daughter is young, and Gardneria will turn into a dictatorship.
• Fridge Horror: The wandfasting spells used by Gardnerians will inflict terrible pain on any fasted woman who sleeps with someone who isn't her fastmate. But that would also apply to innocent rape victims, and there's no way the spells can be removed.
  • In the same vein, the spells can only be applied to pure-blooded Gardnerians who are virgins. So any Gardnerian woman who was raped can't be fasted, even though what happened was no fault of her own.
• Like You Would Really Do It: As if Forest would really kill off Yvan barely a few chapters into The Shadow Wand before he can do anything.
• Nightmare Fuel: The series makes absolutely no bones about the kind of atrocities people will commit on anyone who isn't one of them. The accounts of the people murdered in the Pyrran Isles is one example, including children.
  • Malkyn Bane torturing and killing innocent Kelts with ice.
  • The condition of the Selkies after the Amaz free them from sex slavery.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Ariel. Yes, Lukas Grey killing her pet chicken horribly was terrible, but that doesn't change the fact that she destroyed Elloren's quilt, one of the last things she had of her parents, and never apologised.
  • In-universe, Elloren comes off as this in The Black Witch during her war with Ariel because she doesn't actually explain the significance of the things Ariel and her chicken destroyed to anyone, thus making her look like she jumped straight to Disproportionate Retribution over some minor possessions.
• Tear Jerker: Tierney breaking down over the boy she loves being fasted to someone else.
  • Wynter's whole life. She's an amazing artist who'd do anything for her people, but they universally hate her for being an Icaral.
  • In The Iron Flower, there's mention of a Gardnerian woman who gave birth to an Icaral daughter. The daughter was forcibly taken from her because the Mage Council decided that all Gardnerian Icarals were to be murdered for existing, and the woman was so distraught that she killed herself in grief. It gets worse when one remembers that Yvan and Elloren rescued the little girl, so had her mother not killed herself, they could theoretically have been reunited.