YMMV / Fragment

• Angst? What Angst?: Nell displays very few signs of the mental trauma you'd expect from someone who went through the hell she witnessed. None of her friends' horrific deaths triggers more than some cursory introspection on her part before she's right back to joking, flirting and business as usual. Most of the other protagonists act similarly. It becomes particularly bad when they encounter the hendropods, with everyone pretty much instantly dropping all caution and fear in favor of trusting and socializing with an obviously highly intelligent species they know absolutely nothing about, on an island where everything else so far was trying to kill them horribly.
• Complete Monster: Thatcher Redmond originally comes across as just a Smug Snake with a nihilistic worldview, but only pages after we meet him, we find out that he killed his love child to avoid paying child support. He drips with contempt for humanity, and when faced with the incredibly deadly Henders life forms, he sees the opportunity to advance his plans. He leaves his fellow scientists to die on Henders' Island, does everything he can to eliminate the intelligent and gentle Hendropods, and releases five Henders Rats onto the ship with the intention of unleashing them on an unprepared humanity.
• Designated Hero: Geoffrey Binswanger. Despite spending most of the story at a university mocking the existence of the island where the other main characters endure great dangers and suffer the loss of many friends, he is clearly set up as a hero who gets the girl despite only showing up in the third act and doing almost nothing heroic.
• Moral Event Horizon: Thatcher arguably crosses it right off the bat when we find out how he set up the death of his own son to remove the inconvenience of a love child. However, if this doesn't count, he steps over once again when he deliberately releases Henders Rats onto the ship, hoping that they'll lead to the extinction of humanity. Or at least lead to the ship being scuttled so his theory won't be discredited.
  • In Pandemonium, Kuzu is a far more sympathetic villain than Thatcher Redmond ever was, but by the time he's become convinced humanity needs to be wiped out with Henders fauna so he and his fellow Sels can inherit the Earth, he's well over the line of no return.

---