YMMV / The Idhún's Memories

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • It is not easy to sort out Zesshak as a cackling Card-Carrying Villain or a stern Punch-Clock Villain, as he legitimately has moments leaning towards both types.
  • Alsan: A Knight Templar or the Only Sane Man?
  • Is Goser a Proud Warrior Race Guy with a sympathetic background, or just an Ax-Crazy lunatic who uses the war against the Sheks as an excuse?
• Base-Breaking Character: Kimara. Some find her for being cool and refreshing, while others dislike for how entitled she feels in general and how badly she treats everybody who is not Jack or Victoria.
• Broken Base: Many years after the trilogy's heyday, the Spanish literary community keeps a spirited faction of Idhún fans and a minor but rageful faction of Idhún detractors. While fans praise its original setting and elaborated Worldbuilding, detractors critize its heavily idealized characters (including a female lead who is almost canonically an Author Avatar) and its Romantic Plot Tumor, which is also based on a worryingly toxic-looking relationship. The most general consensus is that it's partially a matter of target demography, very much like The Twilight Saga, and that liking unambiguously the trilogy is something that gets often outgrown.
• Cliché Storm: The trilogy crams up a ton of staples of teen fantasy fiction: improbably young characters saving the world, a lot of focus being put solely on their relationships, girls repeatedly falling for (very) bad boys, a rather neuter female protagonist with two love interests antagonistic to each other, stock European fantasy creatures like dragons, forbidden loves that reach cosmic levels... Interestingly enough, some of those traits weren't actually that popular yet back when the books were published, at least compared to how huge they would become later, meaning Idhún managed to predict an entire segment of literature many years before it happened.
• Designated Hero: Jack is possibly the only exception among the three leads; Kirtash is an unrepentant killer with heavy antisocial traits, which he doesn't bother to hide even at his most (anti)heroic moments, while Victoria can be easily perceived as a selfish girl with a very underhanded outlook and whose interactions with Jack and Kirtash border emotional abuse.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Kirtash/Christian is the main example, given that most fans tend to forget all of his crimes and his lack of remorse because he is so cool.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Some secondary characters, like Sheziss and Rando, have a bit of a following (which in the latter case became acerbic due to his Last-Minute Hookup with a divisive character).
• Informed Wrongness: Yaren ending up charged with corrupt magic is treated as an inevitable tragedy, and his last moments imply we are supposed to think that it was all his fault for insisting a depressed Victoria to make him a wizard. The problem is that Victoria knew perfectly her magic-infusing would not work as desired at that point, yet she did not clearly tell him this, only giving him very vague warnings about not being able to grant his wish or something - and even worse, she eventually acquiesced and tried to infuse him anyways despite knowing it could not end well for him.
• The Scrappy: Even people who unambiguously like the trilogy often admit Victoria is a bit too perfect as a character, rather uninteresting compared to others and not as moral and pure as the books treat her. Excluding characters who are explicitly meant to be hated, like Gerde, Evil!Ashran or the Gods, she might be perfectly the most disliked character in Idhún.
• Strangled by the Red String: Rando and Kimara have very little interaction before his encounter with the god Aldun, he shows neither interest nor respect to her at that, and she is in a relationship with Goser for most of the book. And still, they end up together, which is baffling at the best.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Victoria. Aside from having many traits associated to The Scrappy (being literally worshipped by the good side yet having relatively little character depth, good decisions or interesting arcs), she can be incredibly unreasonable towards other characters and is objectively a self-centered person despite how much the narrative tries to paint her as an All-Loving Hero. Her relationship with Jack and Christian is one of the biggest examples, not only because she is literally forcing them to be in a polygamic relationship they don't want to be in (and they both have pretty good reasons aside from naturally hating each other), but also because she has the nerve to feel rightfully jealous and even chew on them whenever they show interest in other women.
  • Kirtash/Christian. Regardless of how cool he is or the occasional good actions he does, he is still a killer of innocent people who is completely unrepentant about it and explicitly acts on his own benefit.
• Vanilla Protagonist: As mentioned above, the main trio is often considered bland, especially in comparison with the much more colourful secondary cast.