YMMV / Spectacular Seven

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Is Moondancer a Yandere that's rightly seen by Twilight as Beyond Redemption for what she's done to the Spectacular Seven, gleefully throwing herself over the Moral Event Horizon? Or is she a Jerkass Woobie who's been Forced into Evil by her dark benefactor and harsh home life with no chance to be anything else? The ending of Volume II paints her in a much more tragic light when it's revealed that Apalla Lulamoon, Moondancer's mother, is still alive and having her soul held hostage by Tempest. What Moondancer wants to do is free Tirek to destroy him and ruin Tempest's plans.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Lamia is the Butt-Monkey of the villains who ends up being constantly forced into terrible situations that ruin her body and her mind. The "Phoenix Rising" chapters are especially bad to her, revealing that she had part of Sunset's soul implanted onto her own, she can't control Scarlet Inferno whispering into her mind, and that Tempest made her kill people as Scarlet while she was Forced to Watch as a prisoner inside of her own body. Even Sunset feels sorry for Lamia after all that.
  • Moondancer has been forced to work for her dark benefactor, and is constantly wearing a mask. The one time that Artemis is genuinely nice to her, Moondancer's guilt flares up, and she wants to tell him everything, but doesn't out of fear of retribution. Later, her father's soul is ripped away from him, her mother is turned into a vessel for Tirek, and she's forced to run her father's company.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: In the post-script for Volume I, Albi admitted that they were hoping that the audience would hate Moondancer, and wrote her with the intention of making the audience love to see her fail. However, they later admitted that this had Gone Horribly Right, as the the post-script for Volume II revealed that Albi was upset that people hated Moondancer more than the Big Bad or The Dragon. As for why, while the average person doesn't know too many people like the dark benefactor or The Man Behind the Man who want to Take Over the World, a lot of people have experience with someone like Moondancer — a snide, catty, rude Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who wants to make someone's personal life miserable over a perceived slight.
• Love to Hate: In the post-script for Volume I, the author admits to making Moondancer with this in mind, though the postscript for Volume II revealed that they were a bit disturbed by the sheer level of vitriol that Moondancer received throughout the volume, making it a meta-case of succeeding a little too well at making a character the audience is supposed to hate. This gradually becomes downplayed in later chapters as Moondancer's plight becomes more and more evident.
  Albi: Oh my God, you all hate her so much and it's great! If she seems like an unbearable and overly-dramatic bitch, then I'm doing my job right."
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Volume I has been noted by commenters as a chore to get through. The fic keeps piling up angst and stress on top of Sunset Shimmer, from being the only person not affected by a Hate Plague, to making her an Unwitting Instigator of Doom with the Sirens, to having a Third-Act Misunderstanding with Twilight Sparkle. The heroes all act like jerks to each other, the villains seem almost impossibly hard to defeat, and the few ways that everything can be fixed keep becoming vanishingly less likely. Things ultimately work out well, and latter volumes made fixes in the way their conflicts were resolved to avoid stressing the audience out too much. Even so, the author admitted Volume I lost so many fans that they had to disable the fic's ratings just to maintain the drive to continue the work.
  Albi: I already lost half my audience just by writing a sequel, and a third of that audience left during Volume I because it was so fucking apathetic!