YMMV / Death's End

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Cheng Xin. Depending on the reader, she's either a weak, selfish, irrational Karma Houdini who dooms humanity to genocide due to a combination of arrogance and weakness, then destroys their one chance of escaping the genocide she herself created (and is rewarded for this with the closest thing to a happy ending, to boot) or she's the Only Sane Man in a universe that has essentially poisoned itself and is ultimately proven right in the end. For what it's worth, both of her terrible mistakes were enabled by others; she was democratically voted into the position of swordholder by a population that collectively chose the young, maternal All-Loving Hero over the sort of hardened borderline-psychopath who would actually pull the trigger on both civilisations, and her second decision could have been completely disregarded by the borderline-psychopath himself, but for reasons nobody can be entirely sure of he chooses to accept her ruling. The multiple characters who reassure her that she did nothing wrong because the people who put her in that position (in full knowledge that her conscience would compel her to accept any burden she was tasked with, but balk at ruthless violence) should have known better can be read as the author endorsing this viewpoint, but many readers will be unconvinced.
  • Similarly, Wade is either the pragmatic hero humanity needs in a cold, terrifying universe and ultimately, despite his General Ripper attitude, the only man who could have saved humanity, or a callous, sociopathic monster who would have traded the very qualities that make humanity worth preserving in exchange for survival. Wade even gets this in-universe, being the only man the Trisolarans legitimately fear so a perfect choice for swordholder, yet is regarded as something of an embarrassment by humans; the point where Xin points out that he was the driving force behind sending Tianming's brain to the Trisolarans and should be acknowledged for it is met with stony silence by the people who've just thanked Xin herself, and the meeting goes on without anyone acknowledging what she said.
    • There is also the question of why he kept his word to give Cheng Xin a veto on his scheme; Xin wonders if "masculine pride" required him to keep a promise, or if there was some other reason. Other possibilities are that he also has some sort of personal warped devotion to/obsession with Xin (evidence for which is that he fails to assassinate her because he uncharacteristically wastes time explaining himself and telling her he feels terrible about it rather than simply blowing her brains out, and for the rest of his life he never replaces the arm he lost trying to shoot her despite the easy availability of prosthetics), or that (just as her election to swordholder was a reflection of humanity's collective softness and gullibility) he sees her reaction as an indication of how society in general will respond to his plan, and that if he can't get her support he won't be able to get enough support to make his plan viable.
  • Rey Diaz also invites much of the same speculation as Wade, albeit to a lesser extent because we see less of his personal interactions and his plan had no chance of success, even if elements of it were useful later.
  • Were the Trisolarans truly intending to let humanity continue to exist on the reservation, or was this a lie to get them to winnow down their own numbers and defences and concentrate themselves into small areas that would then make extermination effortless? It is shown that they have gained the ability to deceive and manipulate, while on the other hand the sincere and unpragmatic respect shown to Luo Ji and Yun Tianming, and Sophon's interactions with Cheng Xin, show that Trisolarans are certainly capable of truly valuing human individuals, but that may be different from humanity as a whole. Also, there is not enough information about their current state of government (compared to what we saw centuries ago in the first book) to know whether there is much internal disagreement or where the decision-making power currently lies, making it completely impossible to know for sure.
• Les Yay: AA specifically says she's not romantically interested in Cheng Xin and has numerous male lovers throughout her life (none of whom she has much emotional connection with), but her comments on Xin's beauty and instant, extreme loyalty to her, to the point of putting herself in danger and using violence to defend Xin from people abusing her, definitely invites comparisons with Yun Tianming's galaxy-spanning devotion to her.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: To be fair, to cover it properly would take an entire other book; but some details of how Tianming was discovered, revived and integrated into an enemy alien society so well that he was allowed to monitor sophons, became a bestselling author, granted a final conversation with Cheng Xin and acquired sufficient resources to order construction of a baby universe and transport it to Planet Blue would have been interesting.