These are what we call the 'YMMV items.' Things that some people find in this work. We call them 'your mileage might vary' because not everyone sees these things in the same way. This starts discussions in the trope lists, a thing we don't want. Please use the discussion page if you'd like to discuss any of these items.
Creepy Awesome: In the paraphrased words of one reader, Demidov may be a creepily calm and erudite sociopath, but he's a badass motherfucker all the same.
Rooting for the Empire: The whole point of the series was originally to write military SF with the USA as the antagonist. Of course, it has changed since its inception.
Tear Jerker: Again, subjective, but the author thinks it's safe to say at least one.
The Woobie: Huong, primarily. Eliza, Kuang, and the Laredo Incident hostages are woobie-ish, too.
Particularly Huong. Her government official parents are blown up at 13 by pro-democracy rebels in Vietnam, then said rebels chase her for three days through ruined countryside while she's on a bike and unable to even sleep because the rebels will shoot her if they find her. Then when she finally gets to Saigon and runs to People's Army troops, they ignore her and keep shooting at the rebels. When one of the soldiers shows enough decency to get her out of the war zone, she's immediately dragged off by the government to join some kind of military academy, which she accepts to some degree until she gets sent out to fight the war at 18. She goes to the European front and fights bathing in mud while napalm explodes around her and people get ripped apart by machine-gun fire, completely loses any idealism about her country she had, and ends up mentally scarred. Then she saves a girl's life, only to have her step on a landmine and presumably die though the girl gets better. Huong is injured by the landmine too, and is captured by American soldiers, who hand her over to some kind of secret intelligence division that tortures her, only to release her and send her into a Heroic BSOD. When she's rescued from that, she's drafted into an alien-exploration program as a mook. There's a small Hope Spot once she arrives at the training area for the space program, because the girl that she saved earlier reveals her lesbian love for her and a comic relief character shows up, but then the comic relief character reveals himself to be a cold-blooded Colonel Badass who is very contemptuous of Huong and the girl she saved once they get to the alien planet. Then she sees the colonel slaughter ten American soldiers, including a girl who was begging for her life and who she was assuring that the colonel would be merciful. And finally, the girl who she rescued dies in a nuclear explosion.
