YMMV / Empire of the Pacific

• Moment of Awesome:
  • Stitch fighting and defeating Emperor 626.
  • The rebellion fighting the elite Super Soldiers.
• Moral Event Horizon: Emperor 626 crosses the line when it's revealed he completely destroyed Honolulu and turned it into a large-scale graveyard displaying the severed heads of his victims, with Lilo's parents as the centerpiece. And if that wasn't enough to show how deplorable he is, 626 later (thankfully, unsuccessfully) attempts to rape Lilo, with the strong implication that she's not the first child he's done this to.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The car accident scene was terrifying, especially considering it was largely told from the perspective of a confused and scared little girl.
  • The fic has some gruesome deaths depicted or mentioned. Alt!Lilo was said by Alt!Nani to have been burned alive after being shot with a plasma gun, her and Alt!Nani's parents were horrifically tortured by Emperor 626 and had their rotting decapitated heads put on display, and Alt!Gantu is completely incinerated to the point where there was nothing left but a skeleton. Lastly, there's Emperor 626 drowning in the Pacific. He totally deserved it and his death was probably the tamest in the whole comic (perhaps barring Alt!Jumba's suicide since there's no explicit detail beyond that), but still not a very pleasant way to go out.
  • Honolulu having been turned into a mass graveyard made by Emperor 626, with severed heads and spines preserved in massive stasis chambers. And to twist the knife further, Lilo's parents are the centerpiece as a warning to those who oppose 626, since they formed the alternate timeline's resistance.
  • Emperor 626's attempted molestation of Lilo. He even uses the tragically real life tactic that many sexual abusers use on their victims of giving her a false opportunity to escape and run all around the room looking for a way out so she would be too tired to resist him. And he doesn't even have to do it since he's way more powerful than her. It's a good thing that the resistance used their sound weapon to incapacitate him before he could even grab her.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Lilo losing her parents in a car accident, which, unlike in the canon, is fully detailed here (albeit in a modified form).
  • In the Alternate Timeline, Emperor 626 took over Polynesia and became a dictator. Everybody's lives are completely miserable and those who oppose him are sentenced to immediate death.
  • Alt!Nani telling her tragic story to Stitch about how she lost her sister and got her scar.
  • Alt!Jumba's story, and then him being Driven to Suicide.
  • Lilo and Stitch's visit to the mass graveyard that used to be Honolulu, with Lilo's parents as the centerpiece, which not only shows just how much Hawaii has fallen but also how Lilo's attempt to save her parents was All for Nothing.
• The Woobie: Lilo. She just wanted her parents back, yet her actions create a timeline where Experiment 626 never reforms and becomes a completely awful and brutal dictator, and she has to deal with a lot of trauma from experiencing the timeline she unintentionally created.