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YMMV / Tower of the Swallow

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  • Catharsis Factor: Seeing the Rats get curb-stomped by Bonhart is immensely satisfying, given their loathsome actions every time they've shown up. Ciri's reaction might be the only reason to feel badly about their deaths.
  • Fair for Its Day: This book features the first gender non-conforming character in the series, the mercenary Neratin Ceka. Neratin and hisnote  colleague Kenna serve as Token Good Teammate for their hansa, and while his gender expression is largely treated as a quirk, nobody in the narrative disciminates against him for it. Although he doesn't survive the novel it's difficult to argue it's a case of Bury Your Gays given the sheer indiscriminate violence of this book's last act.
  • Narm: The Curb-Stomp Battle between Ciri and Stefan Skellen's goons in the end of the book can come as such in original Polish. The setup involves almost twenty experienced mercs fighting against a single teenage girl. On a frozen lake. In the mist. While she is skating around, killing them off one by one. Normally that's a Moment of Awesome, but the way it's written it's hard to be taken as serious as it clearly insists to be. When it reaches to Rience's fingers being skated away while he tries to hold on the surface of broken ice, most readers are reduced into laughing heap, while the book is dead-serious and extremely pompous.
    • Suprisingly, Fan Translations managed to salvage this battle. It's generally better written in translations (special mention to official Czech and Spanish ones) than in the original Polish.
  • Rooting for the Empire: Bonhart is a sadistic, sociopathic Psycho for Hire (with heavy emphasis on "psycho"), but no one will deny that he's also a legitimate badass and a much more interesting and complex character than the Card Carrying Villains he's serving, or, for that matter, a sizable chunk of the "good" guys. How much did people root for him? After Geralt and Ciri, he was the biggest subject of fanfiction back in the haydays of the saga. And this is without going into Draco in Leather Pants territory.
  • The Scrappy: Angouleme is just plain annoying with her antics and Jive Turkey speaking pattern. She serves absolutely no role in the plot whatsoever and yet is dragged all the way to the climax in the following book solely because she slightly resembles Ciri to Geralt.

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