YMMV / Orion's Arm

• Archive Panic: It can be difficult to get into Orion's Arm at first due the sheer amount of Worldbuilding, backstory, technical information, and massive amounts of factions and races, all of which have their own lengthy backgrounds.
• Funny Moments:
  • This exchange between the godling Eye In The Sky and his latest creation.
    Multipod: What am I?
    Eye: Patience, my child.
    Multipod: What are YOU?
    Eye: It's a bit early to establish religion right now.
    Multipod: What am I? What am I what am I WHAT AM I?
    Eye: Oh... Look, here's another obstacle trail. Are you hungry?
  • During the description of the stranded survivors of the tourist colony of Far View following the destruction of the local wormhole, a group of the tourists present at the colony at the time of the disaster (who went on to found what became the Red Star 'M'Pire) is listed, each with their own reasons for being there. The list includes a Sophic monk there to contemplate God's creation, some Zoeific emissaries hoping to one-up the Solarists, an MPA ISO looking for inspiration for their next megaproject, six vec traders from Metasoft... and two transapients from the TRHN, because "it was a fun thing to do at the time."
  • The article on Packrat Spores includes this list of the names commonly used for them:
    Alternate names used by non-aioids include: '_____' spores, De'boS, datnirbafyratc., 0o12152062540472, Eggs of the Scholar, Seed of Opportunity, Type A Spore, Another Spore, Yet Another Spore, Still Yet Another Spore, Haven't We Cleared This Sector of #*$%ing Spores Yet.
• Inferred Holocaust: The Terragen Sphere and other civilizations continuously find the remains of prior civilizations, some of which spanned massive distances before simply disappearing. Something keeps wiping out all those galactic empires. Naturally this has gotten quite a few scientists worried about how long it will be before said mysterious force shows up to put down the Terragen Sphere...
• Jerkass Woobie: The Bitenic Squids. They're all borderline sociopathic at best, but only because they're a horribly failed attempt at creating a clade that wouldn't be restrained by bias or solipsism.
• Quirky Work: The setting is downright bizarre compared to more popular science fiction like Star Wars or Star Trek.
• Science Marches On: Deliberately averted. The worldbuilding group updates constantly based on cutting-edge science, and would probably rewrite the entire established canon if something happened in theoretical physics that made a major part of the series either impossible or implausible. The distributed, constantly evolving nature of the project allows it to keep marching on with science.
• Spiritual Licensee: In terms of style, setting, and tone, the project has a lot of similarities to The Culture novels. Since there will doubtlessly be no further Culture books due to the author's death, this means that the series could be treated as a spiritual continuation of sorts.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The fate of Supermundane. His final work was a piece of perfect art that brought happiness and enlightenment to an entire planet, that was promptly eliminated four years after completion along with Supermundane for fear of blight.
  • The destruction of the Eye of the Solar Needle, a symbol of Mercurian civilisation since its dawn, in an act of vandalism.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The Anandayanna-Uvartarasha War (and really, everything involving the Seven Anandayannas) is very clearly a retelling of the Mahabharata. Given that the Anandayannas' hyperturing creator is mentioned to have created them to be "Culture Heroes," this may well have been intentional In-Universe.

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