YMMV / The Last Battle

• Audience-Alienating Ending: The book concludes with an Apocalypse destroying Narnia and all of the recurring characters save Susan dead. As one may gather from the rest of this page, this is probably one of the most contentious books Lewis wrote.
• Base-Breaking Character: Tirian is either a huge Woobie who saw everything he loves fall in front of his eyes or an absolute idiot who is guilty of everything that went wrong in the last book for his tendency of attacking without thinking of the immediate repercussions.
• Broken Base: There's a significant divide in the fandom of those who view Susan as being denied entry into Aslan's Country for embracing "nylons, lipstick, and invitations" as a critique of femininity. Writers like J. K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, and Philip Pullman are fond of this interpretation, with Gaiman writing a rather brutal satire on the subject. Others point out that the characters criticize Susan's attitude towards those things, not taking up the things themselves — namely, that she's obsessing over them to the point of becoming shallow, dismissive, and gossipy — and that she's deliberately rejecting Aslan and her profound experiences of faith and wonder, denying that she ever believed. Further muddying the issue is fans trying to parallel it to real life people who lose their faith, which doesn't quite land as a metaphor, because Susan genuinely did experience a life in Narnia and tried Gaslighting her siblings that it wasn't real.
• Common Knowledge: No, the book does not condemn Susan to hell. Given that Susan is still alive at the end of the book, her eventual fate is unknown, and Lewis himself later said she would probably reach Aslan's Country someday. Whether or not the book intended to disparage traditional femininity as a whole or simply to scold Susan for considering her old beliefs "childish" continues to be a matter of great debate among readers, but claiming that she's definitely damned forever is not supported by the text.
• Complete Monster: Shift convinces his "friend" Puzzle to wear a lion skin so he can pass Puzzle off as Aslan. When Calormen invades, Shift is too eager to switch sides and sell out Narnians to mass slavery. Helping to facilitate Calormen, Shift is responsible for the deaths of countless Narnians, including the massacre of the dryads, while plotting to see all of Narnia rot under Calormen as long as he profits.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: A fairly well-known and debated one. Everyone died and went to Heaven, er, Narnia. But not Susan, because since she no longer believed in Narnia, she didn't join them on the journey where they all died. C.S. Lewis stated in a letter that she could get to Narnia "in her own time." Apparently this was actually a Sequel Hook.
• Fan Fic Fuel: Susan's fate has kept writers intrigued, most notably Neil Gaiman who wrote The Problem of Susan.
• Genius Bonus: The dwarfs who refuse to believe they're in Aslan's Country and see only the stable they were originally in are nods to the Platonic Cave, which is lampshaded by the Professor.
• Ho Yay: There are many yay-inducing moments between Tirian and Jewel the Unicorn, but this one takes the cake:
  "Kiss me, Jewel," he said. "For certainly this is our last night on earth. And if ever I offended against you in any matter great or small, forgive me now."
  "Dear King," said the Unicorn, "I could almost wish you had, so that I might forgive it. Farewell. We have known great joys together. If Aslan gave me my choice I would choose no other life than the life I have had and no other death than the one we go to."
• It Was His Sled: Everyone knows that this is the Narnia story where everyone except Susan dies and goes to heaven.
• Love to Hate: Shift makes for perhaps the most memorable villain since the White Witch, a horribly manipulative and cunning ape who's always ready to spin a situation to his advantage and has a ready-made answer to any objections that could be raised to his plans.
• Never Live It Down: The line about Susan being "more interested in lipstick, nylons, and invitations" has been taken as a critique of female sexuality.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The descriptions of Tash. If you've heard Patrick Stewart's audiobook recording, the character voice Stewart uses for Tash's words gives the monster a whole new dimension of terrifying. The illustration of Tash is also by far the most terrifying picture in the books.
  • Special mention is the scene where Ginger the cat sees Tash - and runs out of the stable so terrified that his ability to speak is gone.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Early in the book, Tirian and Jewel are visited by a dryad who tries to warn them about the danger but dies in front of them as her tree is cut down. This image was going to be used in the Prince Caspian film but was deleted.
  • Tash, implied to be the Narnian equivalent of Satan. He only appears for barely a page, but boy does he make the most of it.
• Salvaged Story:
  • In The Horse and His Boy there were some Unfortunate Implications in the depiction of the Calormenes. This book shows more good Calormenes, and Emeth is adopted as his own by Aslan, who says that those who serve Tash for good purposes are really serving him.
  • There was some Fridge Horror regarding Polly's fate after The Magician's Nephew, since she isn't mentioned in any of the other books. Here she's alive and well, called Aunt Polly by the Pevensies and involved in the plot.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Tash. His only short appearance in the book (and indeed, the entire series) is seemingly for the sole purpose of teaching his followers not to invoke him in vain. This is in spite of him being described as Aslan's opposite: the The Anti-God and Satan analog of Narnia, which would make it interesting to know how he has influenced the story and the world beforehand. Then there’s the fact that an entire country worships him as their god; how did that happen if he's supposed to be the ultimate embodiment of evil? Possibly justified in that the Narnia books are Christian allegories and Satan is rarely elaborated upon in canonical Christian sources, but then again, that’s also left a lot of people wanting more, which is why we have Word of Dante.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The development of Susan is extremely interesting. She was one of the four Pevensies to help save Narnia from Jadis's tyranny, and ruled over it for fifteen years before returning to England as a child once again. Between growing up in World War II and with the knowledge of a fantasy world, she's convinced herself it was All Just a Dream and tried to convince her siblings of the same, meaning she turned her back on her entire family. This information is given to us in only one paragraph when Tirian asks where Susan is, and the actual context behind it is never elaborated on.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: We're meant to understand that Susan has become shallow and materialistic, but since she doesn't appear in person and we only have the other characters' criticisms to go by, many readers think she's treated too harshly - especially since the events of the story and the fact that she's not with the other Friends of Narnia at the end mean that she's just lost her parents, all three of her siblings, her cousin, and several family friends in a horrific tragedy.
• Values Dissonance: The scene in which Tirian, Jill and Eustace go undercover in the Calormene army by dyeing their skin to look like them raises eyebrows today.
• The Woobie: Puzzle, who is Shift's pawn throughout the entire ordeal. He only dresses up as Aslan because the ape forces him to, and he's too simple-minded to protest. Luckily Aslan forgives him for it.

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