YMMV / Destroyermen

• Complete Monster: Captain Hisashi Kurokawa of the Imperial Japanese ship Amagi is a brutal sadist and madman. Allying with the monstrous Grik, Kurokawa kills thousands when his ship destroys the Neracca home in an attempt to get at the USS Walker. Torturing his own crew at the drop of a hat, Kurokawa also gives one tenth of them to be devoured by the Grik in exchange for his own life after a defeat, before managing to climb the ranks by offering the Grik Japanese military technology. Conducting horrible experiments on the Grik, Kurokawa frequently orders their suicides for his own failures and consistently tries to kill both his enemies and innocent people. When he captures his Arch-Enemy Matthew Reddy's pregnant wife, Kurokawa tries to compel her assistance by threatening to have her comrades raped and later orders all prisoners besides her executed. Treacherous to the end, Kurokawa dies scheming how he will ally with Reddy before betraying him after Reddy thinks he is trustworthy.
• Designated Villain: Contre-Amiral Laborde is demonized by the Allies for sinking SMS Amerika, which was operating as a hospital ship and fully loaded with wounded troops at the time, in "Blood in the Water", but what's never really acknowledged is that Amerika had actually fired the first shots on the orders of her Scatterbrained Senior captain, and was trying to ram Laborde's battleship when he gave the order to return fire — all this after formally yielding to Laborde's demands, i.e. attacking under the flag of truce, which is an extremely serious war crime. Laborde is a French Jerk and a bad guy for sure, but any one of the Allies would have done the exact same thing in his place.
• He's Just Hiding: Given the number of people lost at sea in explosions or sinking (and how occasionally characters thought dead do turn up alive, like Tony Scott in Storm Surge), it's nice to hope others survive their apparent deaths from time to time, like with Sato Okada and his crew in Iron Gray Sea or Perry Brister in Winds of Wrath.
• Jerkass Woobie: Gravois is a pretty sleazy and ruthless guy but it can be hard not to pity the sheer scope of what he's put through in Winds of Wrath.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Inverted with USS Walker herself in the final book, "Winds of Wrath". According to the afterword, every book reader Anderson talked to just assumed that the ship, and perhaps Captain Reddy as well, would make the ultimate sacrifice and be Killed Off for Real. In the end, though, he just couldn't bring himself to do it.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • That racist asshole who raped a 'Cat in book two. Walker's other enlisted men lynch him for it.
  • If destroying Neracca Home in "Crusade" didn't do it for Kurokawa, sending hundreds of his own men to the Grik cook-pots to save his own hide absolutely solidified him as one of the most vile villains in the series.
  • Walter Billingsley wades into this territory when he abducts Rebecca, Sandra, Sister Audrey, Silva, and Lawrence and blows up the dock's fuel reserves, killing 17 people. He steps up a notch by ordering the captain of the Ajax to fire upon two Lemurian ships because the female Lemurian captain of the frigate dared to speak to him and concocts a plan to "dispose" of all hostages but Rebecca and have the captain and the men loyal to him executed by a Kangaroo Court for "firing upon a defenseless ship".
  • Don Hernan presumably crossed it long before the series started, what with him being a Blood Cardinal, but his Cold-Blooded Torture of Fred Reynolds and Kari-Faask in the months between "Firestorm" and "Iron Gray Sea" confirms beyond any doubt that he's an irredeemable monster.
  • Gravois crosses it in "Blood in the Water" when he hands Laborde's Alliance prisoners over to Kurokawa, along with a League battleship, in a bid to lure the Allies into an apocalyptic battle that will wipe out both sides and ensure nothing can challenge the League.
  • General Allegria, Don Hernan's son, absolutely plows over it in "Pass of Fire" when he rounds up hundreds of El Corazon's children, turns them into Child Soldiers, and throws them at the Allied forces as Cannon Fodder to protect his own Blood Drinkers. Needless to say, this is treated as a This Is Unforgivable! moment by Blas and most of the city's population.
• Narm: The Dominion is so over-the-top evil and hammy that it's hard not to laugh at some of its atrocities, especially when the heroes invoke And That's Terrible (which they do a lot). The same is true of the Grik, but they can get away with it thanks to being a different species and thus having Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• Nightmare Fuel: How much time you got?
  • At the climax of book one, Matt and his crew team up with the Lemurians to board a Grik ship. The battle is horrific enough (though not without several badass exploits from humans and Lemurians alike), but then everyone goes belowdecks and find a "brig" where Lemurian captives are being butchered alive for food, and the survivors are Forced to Watch.
    • They're perfectly willing to do the exact same thing to each other if there are no prisoners around. And they're so damned casual about it...
  • And then there's the twisted, torture-happy sonsofbitches of the Holy Dominion.
  • "Superlizards" in the jungles of Borneo.
  • "Flashies," basically man-eating tuna that act like piranha. Also the plesiosaur-like gri-kakka, also man-eaters. Basically, falling in the water is a death sentence.
  • The Mountain Fish/Leviathans. Maelstrom opens with Princess Rebecca Anne McDonald having a nightmare about her ship being attacked by one of these huge bastards, only to wake up and find that her ship really is being attacked and devoured by one. She and O'Casey are the only survivors.
    • USS Mahan ran into one of these west of Java following Kauffman's mutiny. With half of her boilers already knocked out, Mahan could only run away at 16 knots, and the damn thing still almost caught her. It finally gave up when the destroyer reached shallow water.
    • The first one that chased USS Walker took a dozen 4-inch high-explosive rounds and a pair of depth charges. They still don't know if they actually killed it or just pissed it off. Silva still claims bragging rights either way, though.
    • At least active sonar will scare them off...
  • The “greater dragons,” enormous allosaurids that are the apex predators of South America. The Dominion even uses shackled ones as war beasts, and they are not at all tame. What’s worse, even the elephant guns used by Imperial militia volunteers, who are used to taking down dinosaurs, are a No-Sell against them. Only heavy artillery will bring the damn things down.
    Capt. Blas-Ma-Ar USMC: Cease fire! We just pissin’ it off! RUN!!!

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