YMMV / The Open Door

• Broken Aesop:
  • In Thousand Shinji, Shinji suffered a lot because the Emperor wanted him developing empathy and learning that mortals suffer when gods are assholes. In this story, Shinji and the other gods have forgotten about it completely.
  • The Chaos Gods don't move their followers to other universes because they don't want their people to go down the same road that Old Chaos did and make their same mistakes, and they want to be around to watch their followers' evolution... still New Chaos makes the same mistakes and is going down that same road!
• Broken Base: Due to New Chaos themselves and how they come across to the readers. Fans of the series point to their savvy tactics, Crazy cool characters, and the sheer over-the-topness of the very premise (much less the execution) as reasons the series is awesome. People who dislikes it, on the other hand, point to numerous well-liked characters to whom New Chaos has done some extremely objectionable things. More than a few fans that read and enjoyed Thousand Shinji became diehard members of the second group after a character they liked wound up on New Chaos's bad side and suffered greatly for it.
• Contested Sequel: It's not actually a sequel but an non-canon side-story, and many fans of Thousand Shinji refuse to acknowledge its existence due to turning them into Villain Protagonists that spend the whole time committing atrocities rather fighting their alleged enemies as they supposedly set out to do at the end of Thousand Shinji, and got their spotlight stolen by author's pets.
• Creator's Pet: Lars got whole lengthy arcs devoted to show off how awesome he was by kicking the butts of both evil guys and likeable characters, converting a good-aligned goddess to Chaos and getting married with her, giving -hypocritical- moral speeches and eating Eldritch Abominations. Meanwhile the main characters all but disappeared from the story. A good number of readers got pissed off due to this.
• Epileptic Trees: Pretty dang heavy "planting" in the StarDestroyer.net BBS forums, to the point where even Academia Nut himself called the forumgoers out on being disruptive. Ironically they were showing more love and care about the story and the main characters (Shinji, Asuka, Rei and Misato) that Academia Nut himself did at that point.
• Fanon Discontinuity: It is less popular than Thousand Shinji because many fans felt that it ruined the original story, disregarding the original themes and plotlines and turning Jerk with a Heart of Gold characters in blatant villains that had forgotten all what they learnt in Thousand Shinji. At any rate the author has stated that it was not a sequel but a side-story intended to be silly and non-serious and it is non-canonical.
• Fan Wank: Being a Mega Crossover, this was inevitable.
• Fridge Logic: New Chaos has standards about abusing children. Do they have the SLIGHTEST idea of the number of children's lives they likely done more damage to than the majority of child abusers anybody will every meet?
• Memetic Badass: Academia Nut makes an in-story argument for Keiichi Morisato being a badass, and Lars declares that he is one of the best people ever and he would be treated like a celebrity for New Chaos' four realms... which is strange, since Keiichi is exactly the kind of person that New Chaos loves to bully, trash and mock.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Marella crosses this when she destroys Silverymoon.
  • The Praxis also cross this when the name of their flagship, the Bombardment of Delhi, is introduced. The reason why? It's crewed by humans.
  • New Chaos may have crossed it when they brainwashed Vita into joining them (although to be fair, Academia Nut said that scene was not meant to imply Vita had been brain-washed or mindraped). Or at any number of points before or after that.
• Rooting for the Empire:
  • Given the murkiness of morality in this story supporting New Chaos fits this too.
  • "People cheer for Darth Vader and he's pulled worse shit than me, but everyone lets him get away with that because he's the 'bad guy'."
    • That was a very hypocritical rant delivered by an author that used Shinji in order to whine about the people that hates his history. If Shinji has said over and again that he is evil, a monster, and he never claimed being the good guy... then why does he complain when other people deems him and his actions evil? Have you ever seen Darth Vader complaining or giving a damn when someone denounced his shit or called him evil?
• Squick: Whatever Think does to Selvetarm. While we never explicitly see what happens, what we know is that it disgusts both sides so much the battle immediately stops for a while.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Academia Nut considered writing the real official sequel to Thousand Shinji narrating the war against the Necrontyr and the C'Tan with no dimensional-hopping. Hence, the story would consist in the Well-Intentioned Extremist main characters fighting their clearly eviler and more powerful enemies to save their galaxy rather than a bunch of morally defective villains bullying the whole multiverse. It might have been an interesting history and it would be free from the most of criticism made against the side-story. Sadly, it never happened.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The antagonists are tyrants that enslave people and suck their souls. The main characters are Villain Protagonists guided by assholish Eldritch Abominations that are barely better than their adversaries, call themselves evil, and have committed many atrocities, INCLUDING enslaving people and sucking their souls. They insist that they are evil people but of the kind that targets eviler people, but instead of fighting their supposedly eviler adversaries they spend the whole fic looking for other universes to wreak havoc on (deliberately choosing targets that are weaker than them) and beating up both good and bad people. In a nutshell, it is very hard caring for this conflict when both sides are horrible and the main characters are unlikable and despicable.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: New Chaos is supposed to be seen as A Lighter Shade of Black compared to the the C'Tan, but the fact they spend more time committing pointless evil deeds against the inhabitants of various universes makes it impossible to see them as worth rooting for.

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