YMMV / Starsight

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Spensa kissing Jorgen. Though they become friends in Skyward, there is no indication that their relationship progressed since until she kisses him, and they never see each other again — and barely think about each other — for the rest of the book. M-Bot even comments on how out of place the kiss was.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Spensa thinking at one point that monarchies are silly, and that the superior form of government is military autocracy.
  • Spensa's confusion at hearing that the Superiority government can't outright censor the media the way the DDF can.
• Memetic Mutation: Delver flight school.^Explanation The Recycled Script has led some people to joke that in the third book, Spensa will join her third flight school, this time with delvers as squadmates.
• Nightmare Fuel: The recording of Detritus' previous inhabitants' last moments provides plenty.
  • The woman within the delver's kill-zone is described as folding before vanishing out of existence, all the while clearly in incredible pain.
  • The increasingly panicked screams as the people on the planet start shooting at the space station doing the recording, trying in vain to hit the delver.
  • The image of the delver itself seemingly turning to stare right at Spensa, despite the video being hundreds of years old. Worse still, it apparently sees her.
• Tear Jerker: Spensa has to abandon M-Bot on Starsight to go and warn the Defiants about the upcoming attack. When she returns he's managed to stay alive, but only at the cost of abandoning his star fighter "body" and having to survive inside a droid whose more primitive hardware cripples his ability to think. While he tries to stay practical, it's clear that he's absolutely crushed at his best friend having essentially left him to die, and that it's triggering all his "am I just a machine and not a real person?" insecurities something terrible.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • One of the issues people have in the book is that other than M-Bot, pretty much the entire supporting cast from Skyward either vanishes from the plot entirely after the first few chapters or is relegated to bit parts while the new, non-human squadmates take on their plot roles.
  • Alanik, the first friendly alien and fully-trained cytonic the humans of Detritus meet, passes out after giving Spensa coordinates to Starsight and spends the rest of the book comatose, relegating her to a curious prop.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The book begins with Cobb planning to train a group of pilots to infiltrate Superiority and steal their hyperdrive as a team; this is abandoned the moment Spensa teleports to Starsight, leaving most of the characters behind and out of the story.

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