YMMV / Owl City

• Awesome Music:
  • "Fireflies", "Alligator Sky", "Deer in the Headlights", "Galaxies", "To the Sky", and, if you're not part of the people giving flak about his post-Shooting Star material, "Good Time".
  • From The Midsummer Station, “Metropolis” and “Embers” are also pretty awesome.
  • "When Can I See You Again?" from Wreck-It Ralph definitely deserves mention.
  • He also has a habit of teasing the crowd when he plays "Fireflies" by playing the chord progression as a punk-pop song for a few bars before launching into the main hook.
• Broken Base: The Shooting Star EP, as well as The Midsummer Station. One half of the base feels They Changed It, Now It Sucks! and criticizes Adam for adopting a more 'generic' style, while the other half defends Adam by pointing out that he's just experimenting and developing his style.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In the music video for "To the Sky", which was made for the Legend Of The Guardians The Owls Of Ga Hoole film, Adam randomly turns into an owl at the end. Thematically appropriate, random as all hell.
• Epic Riff: The famous synth intro of "Fireflies."
• Fan Community Nicknames: Hoot Owls (with Owl Citizen being a less commonly used nickname).
• Fan Nickname: The male-Lights by fans of Lights. In turn, Owl City fans tend to refer to her as the female-Owl City.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: The lyric "What's up with this Prince song inside my head" from "Good Time" got laughed at by listeners who thought it was a lame attempt at sounding cool. As it turns out, Adam Young had always felt a kinship with the fellow Minnesotan and had an opinion piece published by CNN shortly after the Purple One died detailing how much respect he had always had for him.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks! / They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Ironically, Adam's attempt to avoid the former resulted in the latter, starting by collaborating with professional songwriters for The Midsummer Station. Many fans called a watered-down version of the Signature Style defined by Ocean Eyes. See "Tough Act to Follow".
• Memetic Mutation: "Fireflies" reached memetic status on YouTube with many videos remixing it with other songs or putting loud distorted clips of it in random scenes. "You would not believe your eyes..."
  • it also became a meme on Tumblr with the line "you would not believe your eyes, if ten million fireflies..." being snowcloned ad nauseum.
• Narm Charm: Let's face it, despite how goofy his songs can be, there is something that makes them all endearing.
• Signature Song: Easily "Fireflies."
• Sweetness Aversion: His shameless sentiment is an easy target for critics. "Strawberry Avalanche" seems to mean this literally, being about an avalanche of strawberries falling from candy-coated clouds.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: One of the first criticisms he got slammed with was a comparison to The Postal Service's musical style. Young even tried to put a positive spin on this by saying that, because The Postal Service had only ever released one full length album, his music can be seen as the continuation of the act's sound which fans otherwise would never have gotten, though it's clear some of his stylistic changes starting with his forth album was a direct response to this.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: "Deer In The Headlights" was hyped as a Back to the Future tribute, but doesn't have much more than Adam skateboarding and driving the DeLorian. Not to mention with his looks, he could easily pass for George McFly.
• Tough Act to Follow: Opinions on nearly everything he's done since Ocean Eyes have been divisive, and fall at either end of the criticism spectrum of being too samey or too different, based on the groundwork that that album laid. It's clear that Adam Young, who's still a low-key enough act to be directly effected by this, has felt the brunt of it and tried to please as many different parties as possible, eventually taking a much-needed hiatus from the project to do his "Adam Young Scores" series.
• The Woobie: From the opening lyrics of "Honey and the Bee", the bee Adam's using as perspective. Lonely, watching other insects splatter on car windscreens. He even says 'but boy I need a hug'... but, arguably this is what makes "Honey and the Bee" so touching. The fact that Adam sets up a poor lonely Woobie type, and then gives him a loving companion.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: Many of the project's songs allude to or blatantly reference Adam Young's devout Christianity. "Meteor Shower" is a prominent example.

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