YMMV / Serina

• Alternate Character Interpretation: The Sea Stewards are either an idyllic multi-species Ocean Punk civilization that are the paragons of environmental stewardship and cooperation, sustaining their civilization for longer than human history, or naive sophonts who have so thoroughly molded their environment to suit them, such as driving all large predators to extinction, that it will completely collapse if just one part breaks, having taken their stability for granted and painting themselves into a corner on top of a house of cards. These views are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • The Ultimocene section of the site is twice the length of any other. The increasingly bleak tone and the fact that the ending has already been said it will be a downer one may send some fans firmly into the area of not caring anymore, possibly out of the fact that it's easier to stop caring than to suffer over the sorrowful and bleak drawn-out end of Serina.
  • For harder speculative evolution fans, the entire saga of the sea stewards took the project off the rails and distracted from the "main" story of natural selection for far too long.
• Ass Pull: Despite being built up over months, no one really thought that the observer would get involved in the project in the way that it did. The sudden swerve into Magical Realism was meant to be a win-win, saving the sophonts that many readers got attached to (except for some) and returning the project to its intended course as natural history, but it also came across as a cop-out.
• Awesome Art:
  • You know all those drawings that look like actual field guide sketches, or wildlife photography showing the animals in their natural habitats? All of them were drawn only using Microsoft Paint.
  • TrollMans, a co-commissioner artist of Sheather's also designed species such as the sea mittens, trunkos and snarks, which they drew with an astounding level of diversity.
• Designated Monkey: All sorts of bad things happen to baby circuagodonts in the slice-of-life narratives, from the baby circuagodont that gets its back leg broken by the bludgebirds and is quickly abandoned by its mother to be eaten, or another baby forest circuagodont that is eaten alive and stripped to the bone by the billion-stinger ants, or yet another baby herbivorous circuagodont that was adopted by carnivorous circuagodonts, imprinted on a predator, and ended up being eaten by other packs of carnivorous circuagodonts that didn't recognize it as a friend but as food. They just can't seem to catch a break... it's Truth in Television, with the young of herbivorous Earth mammals being more frequently preyed upon than adults, but still.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: A common theme in fanart depicts Serina's sophonts, primarily the gravediggers, interacting with sophonts from other speculative evolution projects such as All Tomorrows, usually after becoming space-faring and leaving Serina.
• Fanfic Fuel: With the sea stewards whisked away to another planet without the risk of extinction or contradiction of the main narrative, fans are now free to imagine any path they may take, even to space.
• Hype Backlash: While still considered an excellent work of speculative biology, the series has received significant criticism as of 2021, mainly due to the improbable designs of some of the animals, and how it seemingly supports Goal-Oriented Evolution.
• Narm: As much as it is played in a dead serious tone with all its consequences, the idea of a talking bird literally saying "fuck you" to a Physical God kind of comes off as absurd and unexpected enough to be darkly humorous.
• Nightmare Fuel: Enough for its own page.
• Squick:
  • Parasitic changelings:
    • The aptly-named squicks, tiny fly-sized changeling birds with a parasitic larval stage similar to a botfly. It lays its eggs on the wounds of larger animals and the flesh-eating young start to feed upon the living tissue upon hatching, leaving the victim with grisly wounds. In fact they are arguably worse than botflies since botfly maggots are stationary while squick larvae will actively burrow through the flesh of their host.
    • The ruffed rasp, a distant cousin of the squicks living millions of years later, parasitizes cygnosaurs with a similar botfly method while being a nearly person-sized bird.
  • Baby bumblets are described as being rubbery and almost boneless, due to hatching from internal shell-less eggs and thus lacking calcium for bone development.
  • The larvae of changeling birds barely look like birds at all, looking like some grotesque fusion of a newborn marsupial and a pink maggot of sorts, or a disembodied fetus. Imagine peering into a crevice or tree hollow and seeing the thing at the top◊ crawling around in a pile of carrion.
  • The mother Omniphages don't produce milk for their young like true mammals do. Their equivalent is a pus-like substance made from the lining of their first stomach, sloughed off like a menstrual period and regurgitated to feed their young.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some readers felt that a story where the sea stewards had to adapt to climate change and a collapsing ecosystem, possibly saving it even, would have made a more interesting plot than simply vanishing from the equation.
• Ugly Cute: Many of the more derived species, as a result of looking almost but not quite like Earth animals:
  • Many of the tribbetheres, especially the Canitheres (dogbeasts). The painted repandor, looking somewhat like an opossum crossed with a Tasmanian tiger. It's somewhat adorable with its wide mouth and beady eyes... until it opens said mouth, that is.
  • The owl-like moonbeast, a predatory nocturnal tribbat with a strangely grumpy-looking face.
  • The gibbets also count, looking like some bizarre cross between a spider, a tree-frog and a lemur, yet managing to be somewhat adorable.
  • Babbling jay fledglings◊ with their wide eyes and scruffy plumage, much like baby crows.
  • Many of the tentacle birds manage to look surprisingly appealing despite their squid-like faces. Of particular note is the Squork, it's mentioned that when the adults hold their offspring in their tentacles the babies will sometimes squirm around while the parent will comically try to get them to hold still untill the baby tires out and sleeps while resting their head on their parent, the picture even has a mated pair accompanied by a small fluffy chick.
  • The wormy mitten is very strange-looking, but Trollmans' illustration of a reunited family happily wiggling their huge facial tentacles at each other is adorable in an alien way.
  • Nest Goblins are a species of primitive tribbet best described as looking like an awkward mix of a frog, a bat, and some sort of featherless baby bird (which in fact they mimic to trick parent birds into feeding them). Despite or because of their awkward, ungainly appearance, they manage to be somewhat hideously adorable.
  • The poppit, a type of molodont that looks like a bizarre chimera of a bug, a frog, and a gopher.
  • With their long gangly limbs and big eyes, the lizard-like stage of the Ornimorph manages to be somewhat endearing. Then it gains fuzzy chick-like down while retaining said attributes in its arboreal glider stage, and comes to resemble some sort of dinosaur-muppet.
  • The lumphead grumpus is a large clam-eating swordwhale fish that has a fierce and yet adorably-cranky expression.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
  • Some of the creatures look like familiar animals on Earth... but not quite. Notably, there are the Tribbetheres, which strongly resemble such familiar mammals such as rodents, ungulates, or canids, except that they have frog-like eyes, seven toes on each forepaw, and a single hind leg modified from their tail, leaving them with a tripodal, seemingly-tailless design that looks almost like an incomplete drawing of a mammal.
    • The circuagodog in particular can be somewhat ghoulish to look at◊ as its face somewhat looks like some kind of cat or canine, but with serrated mouthparts and a jaw like exposed bone.
    • Merwals, a type of aquatic canithere, look like a very uncomfortable fusion of dolphin and seal, with their tail fluke, having been derived from the single hind leg of their terrestrial tribbethere ancestor, still possessing ankle and knee joints. The effect is almost like a human wearing a mermaid costume.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: For many years this project has straddled the line, being Lighter and Softer than many contemporary speculative evolution projects and featuring rather elegant and cuddly avian megafauna (minus the occasional gore). But the Ultimocene has gone increasingly darker, with themes of existential dread and genocide, culminating in a Precision F-Strike.
• The Woobie:
  • Brighteye, the first and last sapient bluetail. The rest of his kind are no smarter than chimps, with the aggression to match. He is the last spark of the fork-tailed babbling jay's sapience, millions of years in the making but destined to be alone and soon, also gone.
  • Poor guy somehow gets it even worse in the aptly named When All Falls Apart. Holy shit, does it get worse. To wit, after years of raising and protecting his non-sapient brother, the latter's instincts kick in and he tries to fight Brighteye for dominance, leaving when he fails. Then, Blaze passes away while he's gone, all while he's suffering the pressure of being the prophesized third wing of the daydreamer myth and being forced into a diplomatic role. In his grief, he flies away, only to find Whitecrown leading a large flock while wielding fire - Fire that Brighteye taught him to use. This ends up starting a massive coal fire that kills Whitecrown and his flock, the wumpos, and Brighteye himself. When the Mysterious Watcher of Serina feels guilt over its actions and apologizes to Brighteye, all he can manage is a pointed "fuck you." with his dying breaths before finally expiring.
• Woobie Species:
  • Porplets. These cute little herbivorous dolfinches are near-sapient, with capacity for complex thoughts, emotions, and social bonds comparable to that of a young human child, and frequently preyed upon by the equally intelligent Seastriker. Specifically, their calves are frequently used as toys and training dummies by young Seastrikers while they're still alive and screaming. It should be noted that this was inspired by real-life dolphin behavior.
  • The mourner-in-the-mist, last of the boomsingers. Being confined to a small, mostly barren island has led them to grow stunted and inbred, it's noted that they only survive at all due to a total lack of predators there. No more than 150 of them are alive at any given time, with short life expectancies and high rates of stillbirth. While their cries may sound as though they're lamenting their fate, at least they lack the intelligence to be aware of it.
  • In the Ultimocene multiple apex predator endlings such as the last Sea Rex and the last scissortooth may count, given their status as among the greatest of carnivores, and seeing how the mighty have fallen is a surprisingly heartbreaking conclusion given that they too were the last remnants of entire clades.

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