YMMV / Equestrias Changeling Queen And The Abyssal Empress

• Base-Breaking Character: Empress Tethys. Her aggressiveness, confidence, and ruthlessness proved very divisive. Her indignation for the surface world is mentioned as being justified for multiple reasons and strains her as a leader struggling to keep her people alive, but her abrasiveness and complete lack of regard for non-Aquestrian lives caused her care of her people to sound like an Informed Ability to some. Ask the readers and she's either a genius, respectable, and determined ruler thrust into a bad situation; or an extremely overpowered, completely monstrous, war criminal whom is too destructive to be sympathetic.
• Broken Base: An action heavy sequel with good use of horror elements and mystery? Or a lackluster sequel with an overpowered villain of a species that becomes a Karma Houdini? Pretty even split.
• Nightmare Fuel: Plenty of the visuals and antagonists fit very well into this regard.
• Sequelitis: General consensus is, while opinions range from liking, disliking, or more extremes; it's not as good as the first story.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Really one of the larger debate points was to if the kelpies were overpowered or not. Some logical weaknesses like lack of numbers and light sensitivity are brought up and could have helped even the playing field, but never implemented.
  • It's brought up and shown kelpie do not come out during the daytime. However it never occurs to Celestia to, when the fleet comes under attack, to shift the celestials to put the sun back out and blind many of the attackers.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Some detractors are not very found of the kelpie species being shown as so extremely monstrous, only to be treated with sympathy later without major recourse for their prior deeds.