YMMV / The Inkworld Trilogy

• Accidental Aesop: As Roger Ebert sarcastically put it in his review of The Movie, "I never knew reading was so dangerous. No child seeing Inkheart will ever want to be read to again, especially if that child loves its mother, as so many do." Ironic considering the overall intended message of the books. Then again, how many people have the ability to read characters out of books?
• Anvilicious: The power of the written word and the magic found in books.
• Broken Base:
  • The book series changing genres from Inkheart's Urban Fantasy to Inkspell and Inkdeath's Medieval European Fantasy. Was that a good shift? Was it part of the alleged decay the books went through? Was there even a decay in quality at all?
  • The shipping arguments came to a head in Inkdeath, wherein Maggie ends up with Doria instead of Farid. Was it a case of Derailing Love Interests? Was Doria given enough characterization in the span of one book to show him as a better suitor than Farid who'd been characterized for three? The entirety of their romance subplot is within Inkdeath and only Inkdeath was it handled convincingly? Was it a Romantic Plot Tumor?
• Crack Ship: Strangely enough, Basta/Meggie has gotten some attention. Some don't pay attention to the Squick of an older man being with a girl young enough to be his daughter or the fact that he's threatened her and her father.
• Die for Our Ship: Let's just say that people weren't too happy about Meggie getting together with Doria instead of Farid.
• Draco in Leather Pants: In the books, Basta is a sadistic murderer and arsonist who once sliced up Dustfinger's face (and much more recently murdered one of his oldest friends), and has threatened to do similar things to every single protagonist he's come across. In fanfiction, Basta is commonly portrayed as a somewhat misunderstood, but still a sweet and good-at-heart guy. (Part of this did come from the first book's implications that he was a more complex character than the other Fire Starters - Dustfinger even notes that Basta never enjoyed killing animals and hurting people like the rest of the group - but this aspect is never explored much, and some fans still gloss over his worse deeds.)
• Fanon Discontinuity: A portion of the fanbase prefer to pretend that Inkdeath never happened, thanks to the controversial story choices and Romantic Plot Tumor involved. (And some even swear off all the sequels entirely, given the significant Genre Shift that takes place between the first book and the rest of the series.)
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • Some people were on board for the Meggie/Farid ship even after Inkdeath where Meggie gets together with a different character.
  • Despite both of them being Happily Married to their spouses, especially when they were in different universes, Dustfinger/Resa is pretty popular.
• Fridge Logic: It's been demonstrated that people in stories can write their own stories, which you can in turn read into and out of. People in those stories can do the same thing, ad infinitum. This means that it's not only possible, but virtually certain, that our world is not at the top of the stack: that we are just the results of a story written somewhere else, and that that somewhere else is just another story, and so on. Lovely indeed.
• Magnificent Bastard (2008 film adaptation): The gleefully evil Capricorn is a bandit leader accidentally summoned from Inkheart alongside his henchman Basta and the heroic Dustfinger by the Silvertounge Mortimer "Mo" Folchart who quickly grew to love the real world and desired to conquer it. Forcing the Silvertounge Darrius to read his army out of Inkheart, Capricorn took over a castle but desired to capture Mo as Darrius’ stutter made anything he summoned imperfect. When Mo finds a copy of Inkheart but refuses to send Dustfinger back into it, Capricorn uses Dustfinger to track down and capture Mo and his family. Capricorn then destroys the copy of Inkheart to prevent anyone from sending him back, mocking Dustfinger for trusting him given his deceitfulness. After learning that Mo’s daughter Meggie is also a Silvertounge, Capricorn kidnaps her and reveals that he saved a single copy of Inkheart and intends to summon forth the monstrous Shadow from it so he can use it to conquer the world. Threatening Meggie's mother to make her summon the Shadow, Capricorn comes dangerously close to succeeding in his plan.
• Squick: The Meggie/Dustfinger pairing. Meggie is young enough to be Dustfinger's daughter, but this is strangely popular.
• Tear Jerker: Dustfinger's (and Farid's incredibly temporary) death.

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