  We investigate the relation between the Fermi sea (FS) of zero-field carriers
in two-dimensional systems and the FS of the corresponding composite fermions
which emerge in a high magnetic field at filling $\nu = \frac{1}{2}$, as the
kinetic energy dispersion is varied. We study cases both with and without
rotational symmetry, and find that there is generally no straightforward
relation between the geometric shapes and topologies of the two FSs. In
particular, we show analytically that the composite Fermi liquid (CFL) is
completely insensitive to a wide range of changes to the zero-field dispersion
which preserve rotational symmetry, including ones that break the zero-field FS
into multiple disconnected pieces. In the absence of rotational symmetry, we
show that the notion of `valley pseudospin' in many-valley systems is
generically not transferred to the CFL, in agreement with experimental
observations. We also discuss how a rotationally symmetric band structure can
induce a reordering of the Landau levels, opening interesting possibilities of
observing higher-Landau-level physics in the high-field regime.
