YMMV / The Dark Forest

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Just how affiliated is Zhuang Yan with the PDC? She continually attempts to motivate Luo Ji do do his job and she eventually allows herself and her child to be entered into hibernation by the PDC until he comes up with a masterplan. Luo was more or less manipulated by the PCD to fall in love with her before even knowing she existed. It's possible she was a PDC agent already at that point. Her having left him by the time of Death's End could be seen as a case of You Have Outlived Your Usefulness.
• Catharsis Factor: After two books of the Trisolarans being untouchable, evil bastards, it's immensely satisfying to see Luo Ji finally turn the tables on them at the end of The Dark Forest, getting them to call off their invasion by threatening to Summon Bigger Fish and sic them on their homeworld.
• It Was His Sled: The Dark Forest Theory, which was the big twist of book two, is by far the most talked about aspect of the series.
• Shocking Moments: Two:
  • First is Rey Diaz's plan to stop the Trisolaran invasion: threaten to destroy Earth's solar system — as in, de-orbit every single planet into the sun — using strategically-placed hydrogen bombs unless Trisolaris calls off its fleet. Small wonder that he got stoned to death in his native Venezuela, where he'd previously been a Universally Beloved Leader, as soon as word got out.
  • Second is the sequence in which the "droplet", the first Trisolaran probe to reach the solar system, slaughters Earth's entire space fleet (two thousand stellar-class warships, each powerful enough on their own to flatten continents) without getting so much as a scratch. The text describes the massacre, and humanity's complete inability to resist or even escape, in horrifying detail. Most shocking is the fact that the probe isn't armed with any conventional weapons: it just takes Made of Indestructium to its logical extreme.
• Signature Scene: The Cosmic Horror Reveal scene when Luo Ji explains the Dark Forest theory, is the most talked about and most quoted aspect of the series.