Everything from Nightwish is so over-the-top that it dances on the edge of narm, and what one person finds to be Awesome Music can easily fall flat for someone else.
The reasoning behind Tarja's dismissal as well as Anette's departure from the band is up for debate, too. Of course, many fans on either side of the argument just read one letter or the other.
Also, whether the creator breakdown songs are Tear Jerker material or Wangst / Deus Angst Machina material is dependent on the listener.
YMMV entries related to Tarja go to her YMMV page.
- Anvilicious:
- In a song that is quite atypical of their cryptic and indirect lyrical style, "Master Passion Greed" is six solid minutes of the band laying it out on Tarja's husband Marcelo Cabuli.
- "Bye Bye Beautiful," just in case you didn't get that the male band members "hate" Tarja. Amusingly though, only Marco's lines are this, so maybe the band realised how mean spirited it would sound coming from Tarja's replacement. (The band claim the song has nothing to do with her. Few people believe them.)
- "Yours Is An Empty Hope" is about how people who argue on the internet suck and need to get a life.Tear me to bits enjoy the scene
Of screen name verbal vanity
Churning the words imbued in filth
Your tongue oily water under my bridge - Ditto "Noise", especially the video, which is pretty much a six-minute scathing rant about how social media distracts from the real world and turns people into assholes.
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In the form of a keyboard homage to "Moskau" during the instrumental break of "Sacrament of Wilderness."
- Broken Base:
- Back in 2002, when Century Child was released, a lot of people didn't like the change in the band's style, and Tarja's less "operatic" vocals on that album.
- Tarja Turunen, Anette Olzon, or Floor Jansen? Even years after Tarja and Anette left Nightwish - which in Tarja's case, is since the year 2005 - there's still arguments over who is the best lead vocalist for the band, and very little middle ground between each singer's fans.
- For example, in 2022note Floor posted a clip of one of her solo songs to Instagram and was promptly met with a commenter who wrote "It's okay, but I'm used to Tarja and she was better anyways".
- With the firing of Anette debates promptly began over whether the band was justified in letting Anette go or not, with things becoming even more thorny after Anette made some controversial statements (about performing in Greece and about her replacement, Floor), resulting in a massive backlash against her.
- Contested Sequel: Apart from all the arguing over the vocalist changes, Human. :II: Nature got a mixed fan reception compared to the more traditionally Nightwish-sounding Endless Forms Most Beautiful. The band made an unusual move in using much less orchestration than normal for many of the A-side songs, instead saving much of the orchestral works for the thirty-minute instrumental/spoken word B-side All the Works of Nature that Adorn the World.
- Covered Up: "Over the Hills and Far Away" was originally performed by Gary Moore. The Tarja-era cover is much better-known (among other things it's the only version available on karaoke service KaraFun) and she frequently performs it in her solo career.
- Crack Pairing: Tarja/Anette is a pretty popular pairing among members of Team Switzerland.
- Death of the Author: Discussed in "Dead Boy's Poem".If you read this line
Remember not the hand that wrote it
Remember only the verse - Die for Our Ship: Tarja/Tuomas supporters can be... weird. Also comes in Ho Yay flavor, but it's far harder to find. Somewhat fueled by the recurring Beauty and the Beast theme in Nightwish's own lyrics. In this regard, the following lines of "Bye Bye Beautiful" did not really help.Did you ever hear what I told you?
Did you ever read what I wrote you?
Did you ever listen to what we played?
Did you ever let in what the world said?- And then there's these lyrics from "Ever Dream":
Ever felt away without me
My love it lies so deep - Ending Fatigue: A few of the Epic Rocking songs have points that they could've ended at much sooner.
- Almost every YouTube video for "The Poet and the Pendulum" cuts it off at the ten-minute mark, at the point where most would assume the song would end, since the singer has just been sliced in half by a giant pendulum blade. There's one more slow verse after that one, where the singer goes to the afterlife and is greeted by the spirit of his mother.
- And the "misheard lyrics" spoofs sometimes have a pic of a dude looking at his watch during some of the especially drawn-out bouts of epic rocking.
- "Slow, Love, Slow," from Imaginaerum has an ending consisting of a ticking clock/metronome that goes on for over thirty seconds. Though it sort of makes up for it by having the clock/metronome setting the tempo for the following song, "I Want My Tears Back".
- The Greatest Show On Earth is an impressive 24 minutes long, the longest song in their catalog. It's a mostly instrumental track with some narration. The band don't even come into it until past the five-minute mark. The song could have easily ended with the band's exit from the track, but instead goes on for a further eight minutes before it actually ends.
- Estrogen Brigade: All of the boys have one, but most ladies gravitate towards Tuomas. Tuomas' case is arguably made more difficult by the fact both Marco and Jukka are married with children, and Emppu has a long-term girlfriend, leaving Tuomas as the only single guy (until he, too, married Johanna Kurkela in 2015).
- Fandom Rivalry: Tarja fans, Anette fans and Floor fans are constantly at each other's throats. A lot of the time it's not pretty.
- Fan Nickname:
- After announcing in 2016 that they were expecting their first child, Floor and her husband Hannes Van Dahl (drummer for Sabaton) were quickly dubbed "Ultimate Metal Parents" by their respective bands' fans.
- "Floorgasm" whenever someone is wowed by Floor's singing.
- Fanon Discontinuity:
- Some fans discard Dark Passion Play, because of the lack of Tarja.
- Some others discard everything before Dark Passion Play.
- Rarer, but not unheard of, is the belief that nothing before Marko joined the band counts, and that a few notable tracks such as "Wishmaster" or "Sleeping Sun" were demos.
- And even on the flip side is the belief that Tuomas went through with ending the band after Wishmaster. This belief isn't out of a hatred for Marco, but more of a distaste in the band's music shift beginning with Century Child.
- Friendly Fandoms: A lot of fans of Nightwish are also fans of their label-mate Sabaton. The bands co-headlined for six weeks in 2014, and Floor fell in love with their drummer Hannes Van Dahl and sang in the choir on The Last Stand.
- Growing the Beard: Once is when the band really took off, as well as when their modern sound took shape. Rolling Stone rated the album 89th of the best 100 metal albums of all time
. Unfortunately it was also the last time Tarja would be in the studio with them. - Harsher in Hindsight: The last concert with Tarja was released on DVD as End of an Era.
- It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A common criticism of Human. :II: Nature is that it just feels like a stylistic re-hashing of Endless Forms, down to the lyrical content and even the structure being considred Endless Forms but more so; with a good chunk of the album's runtime being a single suite. It doesn't help that there already exists a version of "The Greatest Show On Earth" that's just the orchestral backing, so many saw "All The Works of Nature Which Adorn The World", as if the comparisons weren't rampant enough already based on the length, as being particularly redundant.
- Memetic Mutation:
- The "epic maneuver" YTMND meme uses a clip from "Ghost Love Score" (specifically, the crescendo that starts at 5:35) and the song has gone on to become a Standard Snippet for other Mundane Made Awesome moments.
- The intro to "Wishmaster" really is this for some fans as well, though it's largely because there's been so many joke ways to write the lyrics.
- "Planet Hell" has seen quite a bit of this amongst players of the fantasy MMORPG RuneScape following its use in a video chronicling the Falador Massacre, one of the most infamous glitches in the game's history. On June 6, 2016, the game developers released an in-game event celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the glitch, including background music similar to "Planet Hell."
- Floor's unexpected death growls in "Yours is an Empty Hope" lead to a lot of jokes that she uses the same voice when her kid refuses to go to bed.
- Memetic Troll: According to a meme on the band's forum, Troy Donockley is none other than Turunen's husband Marcelo Cabuli in disguise, plotting to stab the entire band in the back at the first occasion; occasionally other people are conjectured to be Cabuli in disguise as well.
- Misattributed Song: Let's just say that they tend to fall victim to this in regards to similar-sounding musicians.
- Mis-blamed: Tuomas gets some of this for mishandling Tarja Turunen and Anette Olzon's dismissals, to the point where when Marko quit the band in January 2021, he made a point of saying flat-out that Tuomas had nothing to do with it.
- Narm:
- Their first video with Floor (Élan) is this in a nutshell, featuring the band◊ performing in front of elderly people◊ (including a shirtless man◊ performing odd swimming exercises in an empty pool), and then magically teleporting them all to where Floor is performing in an empty bar. They then proceed to dance in the most ridiculous fashion - including one woman who just flails her arms around while her companion is trying to waltz with her. Then there's this woman◊. It Makes Sense in Context, given the song is about life being too short not to live as you please and ignore what other people think of you, but it doesn't look any less silly for it.
- "Sagan", which is dedicated to Carl Sagan and features such masterful lyrics as "Listening to Sagan, dreaming Carl Sagan, unseen streams".
- The second half of "Song of Myself", an extended spoken word section, due to the overly-dramatic and poetic wording and delivery and the strong accents of some of the readers, and the fact that some of the lines are read by children who clearly don't speak English. Then there's this bit which Crosses the Line Twice with squick:
"An old man gets naked and kisses a model-doll in his atticIt's half-light and he's in tears.When he finally cums his eyes are cascading."- "Bye Bye Beautiful" contrasts Anette's verses (which use veiled metaphors about Tarja Turunen's time with the band) and Marco's choruses (which are so blunt that they couldn't be less subtle unless Marco was screaming "Fuck you, Tarja!" every line). The result is a song that, while catchy, feels disjointed and jarring.
- Tuomas' dreadful, off-key and out of tune vocals on Angels Fall First, which even he has said he feels highly embarrassed by and will never do again.
- Their first video with Floor (Élan
- Narm Charm: Nightwish's fondness for the overdramatic, combined with Tarja's limited proficiency in English and Tuomas' liberal use of Truck Driver's Gear Changes, result in songs that are extremely cheesy, but that's part of the charm for their fans.
- Once Original, Now Overdone: Nightwish was formed during the 1990s, an era during which there weren't a whole lot of female-fronted symphonic metal bands like them and more or less created the blueprint for epic heavy metal with a lush symphonic sound and ethereal female vocals. These days, Symphonic Power Metal is so commonplace that if you heard Nightwish first, you'll easily recognize Nightwish's influence in all of them. But if you happen to be a younger fan who didn't hear Nightwish first and haven't looked up their history, you might find yourself in the position of wondering how Nightwish is so unique or special compared to all the other female-fronted symphonic metal out there.
- One True Pairing: An example of Real Life Shipping where some fans swear that Tarja and Tuomas belong together.
- Retroactive Recognition: Guest vocalist Tapio Wilskanote later joined Finntroll.
- Song Association: In June 2006, a bug in RuneScape allowed one player to go on a rampage and slaughter innocent players in his path. A video that captured the carnage was set to “Planet Hell”, which quickly became associated with the massacre. In 2016, a knock-off version of the song played during the 10th anniversary event.
- Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Imaginaerum, the second (and final) album with Anette (seventh overall), is a vastly different album than the first go-round with her, Dark Passion Play.
- Suspiciously Similar Song:
- "Forever Yours" sounds a lot like Céline Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." The flute after the first chorus seals the deal.
- "Where Were You Last Night" may not be an original Nightwish song, but it deserves a mention for its similarities to Bon Jovi's song "You Give Love a Bad Name" and Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven is a Place on Earth."
- The middle section of Scaretale suddenly transforms the song into a riff on Grim Grinning Ghosts
- The main hook to "The Greatest Show on Earth" sounds a suspicious lot like "I See You" by Leona Lewis.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
- Tarja fans have been stockpiling flamethrowers for the coming arockalypse since Tarja's dismissal. So have Anette fans since her dismissal.
- Human. :II: Nature is a rather large departure from their normal sound, and it's their lowest rated album on both Encyclopedia Metallum (54%) and Rate Your Music (59%), and did not do nearly as well in terms of sales and chart rankings as the other studio albums they've released over the last ten years. Part of this is due to Troy's increase in prominence - while the majority of fans appreciate his contributions, there's a section of the fandom that thinks he's just too different and bland compared to Marko.
