YMMV / The Saxon Stories

• Anti-Climax Boss: Ivar the Boneless dies off-page having had relatively little impact on the actual plot of the series. His descendants pick up the slack however.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Uhtred frequently remarks before he tells how he did something awesome that it was actually really stupid and risky and it only worked because of luck/fate.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Ragnar, Finan, Pyrlig, and several other supporting characters are all highly popular with the fandom.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Ragnar the Younger's second-in-command is named Rollo.
• Iron Woobie: Father Judas. He handles his father's brutal scorn with nothing but dignity and grace, something which earns admiration from everyone (as Aethelstan puts it, how many people have the courage to stand up to Uhtred?) even gives Uhtred his last rites after his near-fatal confrontation with Cnut Longsword, and in War Lord (now known as Bishop Oswald, a Good Chancellor to King Aethelstan) finally says that he's sorry he could never be the son that Uhtred wanted him to be. Uhtred responds by tearfully apologising for everything he's put his son through, and tells him that he is sincerely proud of him and everything that he has achieved.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: To some, Uhtred may come off like this. Granted, he was never intended to be a paragon of kindness, but his repeated betrayals of Alfred, his self-pitying angst, his poor treatment of his eldest living son, and general jerkassery can make him very difficult to empathize with. Mitigated by the facts that he gets over the angst, he does have genuine ties of loyalty to those he betrays Alfred for, and is generally entirely self-aware and up front about his own faults. For instance, when he first enters Alfred's service, Alfred gifts him some rather fine armour, and Uhtred observes that looking back on it, he hadn't actually done anything to deserve any favours like that, unless to be general Jerkass is a qualification. Of course, as he also notes, Alfred was hardly acting out of the goodness of his heart either. And as it looks like he's dying, and his eldest living son, Iron Woobie Father Judas, insists that he was a good father, Uhtred's first thought is a rather irritable, 'what the hell are you talking about? I was a terrible father.'
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Uhtred's father doesn't survive the prologue of the first book. In that time, he was shown to be a formidable warrior and savvy politician, even having designs on the throne of Northumbria. He wasn't the most loving father (to put it mildly), but characters who knew him seem to imply that had Hidden Depths, and he has a large impact on later books in terms of the post-mortem influence he has on Uhtred's own character.