YMMV / The Cruxshadows

• Awesome Music: The Cruxshadows have produced their share of this, but the crowning track has to be "Winterborn."
• Friendly Fandoms: The Cruxshadows' almost annual appearance as a star attraction at Dragon Con makes them a fixture on a circuit that includes such demographics as anime fans, science fiction and fantasy readers, and furries, many of whom appreciate or even love their music without necessarily being part of their core group of fans in the Goth/Industrial crowd.
• LGBT fanbase: The Cruxshadows understandably have a sizable one - Rogue spent a lot of time as a well-known DJ at two LGBT nightclubs, the cover art on Ethernaut and Dreamcypher was created by MANDEM (a design team consisting of a lesbian couple), and transgender author Caitlin R. Kiernan (a noted fan of The Cruxshadows' work) is thanked in the liner notes to Dreamcypher.
• Signature Song: "Winterborn."
• Tear Jerker: The acoustic version of "Winterborn" is probably the saddest rendition of the song you will hear.
  • "Matchstick Girl," as fitting the Hans Christian Andersen tale it was inspired by.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic?: A fairly straightforward example. Most of the lyrics borrow from Carl Jung in their use of archetypes, and from Plato and Søren Kierkegaard in their philosophical message/s.
  • Archetypal characters such as gods, mythical heroes, knights, and angels are used in a symbolic manner reminiscent of a Rider-Waite Tarot deck throughout multiple songs, with each character representing either a guide (to both the listener and narrator) or an ideal that they can adopt and aspire to.
  • Parallels can be drawn between the title character of Wishfire and Khalil Gibran's title character in The Prophet (a book that Rogue has gushed over repeatedly in interviews). Both are archetypal spiritual paragons who serve as a guide to the listener on a metaphorical journey.
  • "My Telescope" borrows from Plato's Allegory of the Cave, but treats the narrator's knowledge as a tragic reality rather than an eye-opening journey to an outside world.
  • Plato's concept of perfect forms is a recurring ideal. "The Eye of the Storm" talks about how a perspective on reality that is too critical and grounded in a cynical view of history serves to "hide what we can become" in a hypothetical version of the world in which perfect forms of the self exist.
  • "Sophia" and "Winter Born" reflect the Kierkegaardian aspirational ideal of a "knight of faith" who seeks to be more "Christ-like" in character and values.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: In the broader cultural sense rather than specific issues. "Resist/R" is an anti-racism song and probably the closest thing The Cruxshadows have ever created to a Protest Song, not counting a cover of an anti-war song by John Lennon[1]. "The Eye of the Storm" and "Helios", meanwhile, contain lyrics that rely on a tacitly conservative appeal to tradition. Rogue lists "Socialism" and "Liberal Extremism"[2] as personal dislikes, but the views are clearly not shared across the board by all of the band's members. That said, it's probably best to just focus on the spiritual and mythological themes in The Cruxshadows' work, since, politically, their lyrics are all over the map.

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