YMMV / Crest of the Stars

• Adorkable: Passage of the Stars has Dubeusec edge into this near the end, when he lets himself stop being The Stoic. His awkward attempts at flirting with Lexshue and the meaning of Lafiel's name being inspired by the incident with the derelict in particular ring of this.
• Designated Hero: The Abh Empire is pretty awful on a macro-level, and even on several individual micro-levels, being a racist, militaristic, aristocratic, expansionist empire whose foreign policy looks an awful lot like bullying anyone who can't fight back while never picking a fight with anyone who can. So of course rather than make them not fundamentally awful, the author just based their rivals entirely on Japanese World War II war propaganda about arrogant, swaggering Type II Eaglelanders, so that the Empire's comparatively light hand (much lighter than virtually any of their historical analogues mind, even the Romans they take some inspiration from) can look better by comparison.
• Ho Yay: When Jinto says goodbye to his best friend before heading to the academy, he remarks that "I'd rather be with you than with any beautiful flight attendant."
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Morioka's decision to do away with Good Republic, Evil Empire in favor of Grey-and-Gray Morality has been misinterpreted by some readers as the writer romanticizing and whitewashing the imperialism, colonialism, aristocracy, militarism, and other negative qualities about the Empire.
  • It doesn't help that he's also sometimes seen to have gone too far in trying to pile on the negative qualities onto the Abh Empire's rivals so they look better by comparison. The deeply unfortunate decision to base United Mankind on Japanese World War II propaganda about Americans almost begs the audience to compare the Abh Empire to Imperial Japan rather than the Space Romans the author probably intended them to be. Through that lens things like Midgrat choosing to side with the Empire because the Alliance were a bunch of arrogant assholes about their governmental structure and eating cats look like a super-whitewashed portrait of the Imperial Japanese conquest of Korea. Far from the light-handed leadership of the Abh, Koreans were promptly subjected to cultural genocide and near-slavery as the Japanese military machine used their country as an advance base to begin aggressively expanding into Asia because of a greed for glory, resources, and territory under a fig-leaf of anti-colonialism and high-minded ideals about world peace... which also immediately draws to mind unfortunate and hopefully-unintended comparisons to the Abh.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: While the individual stories and drama of the main cast mostly averts this, on a macro-level many have found that a noble effort at averting Black-and-White Morality goes too far and creates a world where there's basically no one worth rooting for. The Abh Empire, even with the deck stacked in their favor to give them positive qualities no militaristic despot-state in history had, are a bunch of racist, unrepentant conquerors whose foreign policy looks suspiciously like never picking fights with anyone who can fight back rather than the esoteric reasoning the author attributes to them. Their democratic rivals are a bunch of arrogant, unpleasant imperialists and racists with all the social skills of a brick in a desperate effort to try to make the Empire look better by comparison. For all their positive qualities, none of the main cast really express many reformist sentiments or seem all that concerned about trying to amend the Empire's status quo.

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