YMMV / Remnants

• Awesome Art: Mutation's cover art features Kubrick◊, a character who had his skin removed and replaced with a translucent film, rendering his muscles and organs visible. Mercifully, the cover is not that graphic, but you can still through the skin on his face. Kubrick's pose subtly conveys his discomfort with him moving his hands along his now unnaturally smooth skin.
• The Chris Carter Effect: Infamously. While the first half of the series is pretty tightly plotted, once Te is defeated and the treaty is signed, the second half of the series increasingly begins to fall apart. Character arcs go nowhere, there's a lot of Plot Holes, lots of unanswered questions (Why do they have super powers? Who or what is the Ancient Enemy? What happened to the Shipwrights?), and the plot becomes increasingly incomprehensible and confusing leading up to a Gainax Ending. The series even seems to be aware this is happening; Jobs repeatedly insists he saw Earth break apart into pieces in the first book, and he did, but somehow Earth is intact and still has people living on it.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: 2Face, D-Caf, and Violet are the most popular, but there are definitely plenty of others.
• Epileptic Trees: Tons and tons and tons, especially since a lot of the major questions go unanswered.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The books begin in approximately 2011 and are surprisingly prophetic for how culture in the New 10's would turn out, just a few years off the mark.
  • Narration mentions that computer-controlled self-driving cars are a thing, and while the legal age to drive manually is the same, the legal age to be alone in a self-driving car is several years lower. Self-driving cars are indeed being created; we'll have to wait and see how the legal system reacts to them.
  • There are "link" devices that act as a combination cell phone and video camera with internet access, can be operated by voice controls, and a character wears such a device to a wedding so she can stream the event live to relatives that couldn't make it. While nothing exactly like the link exists yet (it is vaguely described as hooking over someone's ear), all of these capabilities are achievable with smartphones and bluetooth devices, and livestreaming events online is a common practice.
  • In a more minor case, in 2011 the US president is a black woman. Well, the author was half-right...
• Nightmare Fuel: Arguably the whole point of the series. Listing it would be tantamount to listing the details of the story.
  • The main character watches as the Earth is destroyed, in extravagant detail.
  • Look up Heironymous Bosch. A series of his paintings are the only security system necessary for the Tower, and they're chased by nearly every Body Horror and Hybrid Monster in the paintings. Also the unmasked Reapers, or Tamara's Baby, which is Nightmare Fuel long before the readers find out just what it is.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • 2Face's scars on the cover of Nowhere Land are clearly just a photoshop filter over the model's face◊. It even goes over her hair and sweater.
  • The Earth on the cover of No Place Like Home is just a stock photo of Earth that's had a chunk of it crudely erased◊, making it look like the Earth is two-dimensional and just had a hole poked through it. Even the oceans appear to be unaffected.
• Unconventional Learning Experience: The series introduces tweens and adolescents to the novels of Jane Austen and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, among many other things.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The first book has several instances of gun violence, one instance of a character getting Impaled with Extreme Prejudice and dying, and ends with the entirety of Earth being destroyed, with no idea of what's going to happen to the colonists. It just gets worse from there.
• The Woobie: Billy Weir.
  • For that matter, Mother (in a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds sort of way), once you find out that she's sapient and went insane from enduring hundreds of years of isolation.
  • Also, 2Face. The way she talks about her facial burn is pretty sad.

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