Sword of Truth/YMMV

"V: What about my wrinkles?
 * Alternate Character Interpretation: Richard is canonically the hero, but to many readers, he is a brutal Knight Templar in the later books.
 * Authors Saving Throw: Of a sort. The last three books seem to be a deliberate effort on Goodkind's part to recapture the first few books' feel, while toning down the heavy handed Author Tracts.
 * Anvilicious: Goodkind does not believe in ambiguity. The heroes are (written as) Right, almost every villain is a Complete Monster, and, in later books, the series' Objectivist themes become far more prominent.
 * Badass Decay: Jennsen becomes much less formidable after joining up with Richard, almost to the point of being The Load.
 * Canon Sue: Richard is basically a perfect human being: strong, incredibly handsome, good at pretty much everything, . He repeatedly wins over enemies with his unconditional love, including someone who tortured him for months. Taken to an even more ridiculous extreme in the last few books, when Richard, armed with only a regular sword (not his usual Infinity Plus One Sword), kills almost a hundred armed soldiers by himself. Following that, he is conscripted into a Ja'La team, where despite being more or less new to the game (he played it with children in previous books), he takes the most important position on the team and becomes, to paraphrase a character, "the best point man we've seen in the last hundred years". Keep in mind, this sport is run almost exactly like current day sports, so the equivalent would be someone who's played a few Pop Warner games stepping onto an NFL field and becoming the greatest quarterback in the history of the sport in the space of a few months.
 * Cliche Storm: Everything from a common man of mysterious lineage, to a wise old wizard with robes and white hair, to a character that was turned into a small, fanatical creature when deprived of the artifact that was precious to him.
 * Crazy Awesome: Nathan
 * Complete Monster: Darken Rahl, Demmin Nass, Emperor Jagang, the Keeper of the Underworld
 * Designated Hero: Richard, Kahlan and Zedd, especially in the later books.
 * Ensemble Darkhorse: Gratch is awesome, which is sad because he's absent from the later books. Or maybe fortunate that he doesn't get caught up in the Author Tract.
 * Evil Will Fail: One of the main complaints with the series is that the later books turn this into an anvil to be dropped repeatedly on the reader's head in exposition and monologue form.
 * Family Unfriendly Aesop: Exactly which of the series' many Aesops (broken or otherwise) are Family Unfriendly has been a matter of much dispute, but many readers can point to at least one.
 * Magnificent Bastard: Dalton Campbell.
 * Memetic Mutation: "This looked like a chicken, like the rest of the Mud People's chickens. But this was no chicken. This was evil manifest."
 * Moral Event Horizon: At least three or four acts in Demmin's resume, any one of which could be taken as the final crossing for any other character.
 * Never Live It Down: The chicken thing is pretty much all people remember about the Chimes of Death. A lot of people overlook them killing women and children via drowning, burning, and falling off cliffs.
 * Michael's usually remembered for his speech against fire.
 * Listening to some critics you'd get the impression that killing peace protesters is all Richard does in the later books.
 * Nightmare Fuel: Chickens aside, the idea that the Chimes of Death can just suddenly show up and make you drown yourself can be frightening.
 * Nightmare Retardant:
 * The Chimes, demonic entities that exist to choke the world of magic, eventually almost causing the end of the world, are first introduced to the main characters... in the form of a chicken.
 * When Naked Empire's Big Bad is introduced, all attempts by Goodkind to make him seem terrifying are undermined by his name: Nicholas the Slide. Just try not to imagine him as a brightly-coloured, anthropomorphic piece of playground equipment.
 * Only the Author Can Save Them Now: Jagang, Darken Rahl and Nicholas the Slide would have had no problems achieving their goals if it wasn't for Deus Ex Machina. This is most blatant in the case of Nicholas and the vial of antidote.
 * Seasonal Rot: The books see a general decrease in quality as the series goes on, although there remain a few good books later in the series.
 * Snark Bait: exist websites and forums that mock passages from the books.
 * Squick: The Sisters of the Dark get their powers of Subtractive magic by having sex with "nambles" -- monsters with barbed penises.
 * Straw Man Has a Point: Several. The most obvious is probably Shota, the witch woman. Towards the end of the series, Richard comes to her demanding her help. She explains to him that, by his own principles, she has no obligation to help him, and really just wants to be left alone. How does Richard react to being called out on his hypocrisy? He ends up steamrolling her and accusing her of "posturing". Eventually, he has to trade his sword for the information he wants.
 * Tear Jerker: death in Temple of the Winds.
 * death in Faith of the Fallen, seriously sucky timing there.
 * Also  the juxtaposition of what they used to be, to what they have now is incredibly moving.
 * And this exchange in Stone of Tears:
 * And this exchange in Stone of Tears:

W: Someday, when you get wrinkles, I'll love them, too."


 * The Untwist: Zeddicus is the great wizard, of course.
 * The Woobie: Rachel, Jehnsel