Black Company/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Canon Sue - Raven comes across as one of these for the first couple of books, but eventually is revealed as a person who has a lot of deep flaws, just like everyone else.
    • Not to mention he suffers from a particularly nasty case of The Worf Effect.
    • Even in the first book, the attitude the rest of the Black Company has towards him is always more like wary suspicion than respect, precisely because of the attributes that would normally make him a hero. The way Croker writes about him makes it clear that he does not trust people like that.
  • Complete Monster: All of the Taken are considered to be such, but the Limper is nearly-universally regarded as the worst of the lot. Though he doesn't get a chance to do much on-page, everyone who talks about the Dominator consider him to be far worse than any of his ex-minions.
  • Fridge Logic: Croaker has a moment of it in Shadow Games - when he realized that if it was so hard to kill Limper, then how can they be sure other Taken died so easily during battle of Charm? Turns out some of them actually didn't.
  • Narm: The Dominator, the Bigger Bad for the first trilogy, driving force behind most of the plot and a man so powerful and so evil he makes The Lady look like a benevolent dictator, gets only one line in the series: ARDATH, YOU BITCH! And he didn't even get her name right.
    • He gets another line in next book trying to bind Lady's powers. And he gets the name wrong again.
    • There's also the tendency for most of the fights involving magical or superpowered adversaries to take the form of gigantic, prolongued dogpiles.
  • Scary Impractical Armor - Croaker consistently describes Lady's Lifetaker armour and his own Widowmaker armour as being "ugly." Most people would probably describe it not as ugly, but badass.