YMMV / Stand Still, Stay Silent

• Abandon Shipping:
  • Some downplayed version of this happened to Tuuri/Reynir after early Chapter 14. While the pairing is still alive and well (as evidenced in forums and the fanart output), a development from the first page of Chapter 14 greatly restricted what could be done with the pairing in Continuation-type fanfics, while authors who were already shipping Sigrun/Tuuri and/or Reynir/Onni weren't hindered by the development. The second of these even got an extra interaction between its members near the end of that same chapter, which put a little wind into the ship's sails. Because of this, the alternate pairings appear much more often in new fanfics written after January 2017, which can give the impression this trope happened to the more popular one.
  • Some readers saw Lalli's means of getting Emil out of the influence of the troll-spirit's Compelling Voice in Chapter 18 as unnecessarily aggressive and/or putting a spotlight on the less healthy aspects of their relationship, which caused some of the pair's shippers to have second thoughts about the idea of them as a couple.
• Accidental Innuendo: Reynir's phrasing while thanking Onni for being The Cavalry in Chapter 10 is a little unfortunate, and Onni's answer isn't helping:
  Reynir: First of all: Thank you for last night, that was awesome.
  Onni: Yes, yes.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Reynir's parents being Abusive Parents. At face value, it's easy to read them as having an extreme but justified case of Anger Born of Worry. However, some aspects of Reynir's interactions with them can ring alarm bells for people who had emotionally abusive parents:
  • The little characterization they get during Adventure I establishes that they lied to Reynir about the extent to which he was allowed to travel internationally to keep him home, even after he had reached adulthood.
  • The phrasing they use to scold Reynir for running off, such as his mother saying "If you loved me you would never have done this." and his father saying "How could you do this to your mother?" and "...my very unintelligent son.". It can be very easily read as them assuming Reynir specifically ran off to hurt his parents, even though that was the farthest from his mind. When combined with the first point, it makes them come across as controlling, oblivious to their own part in the situation and putting all the blame for it on Reynir alongside some emotional guilt.
  • His mother has shown some definite My Beloved Smother traits — for instance, when she assumes he's friends with Emil and Lalli, Reynir's reaction is to go along with the assumption in front of her, then apologize to them about the assumption once she's out of earshot.
• Angst? What Angst?: Emil after Chapter 15. To some readers, his apparent lack of reaction to the death of an actual member of the crew came across as a little out of character after the emotional reaction he had to finding the dead bodies of Kitty's siblings, her mother having to be put down and dealing with the infected dog in Chapter 7. Others have pointed out that the short-term lack of reaction could actually be a sign of the crewmate death being harder on him, and that what he has to deal with after the giant attack would fall into the "more urgent things to deal with right now" Truth in Television version on the trope.
• Arc Fatigue: The pace of the comic can easily make this happen for those following day-to-day, but things got a little worse during Chapter 21 of Adventure I. At the time, the artwork for Adventure II was already being produced and showing Emil and Lalli alive and well, which contributed to reinforcing the feeling they were taking their sweet time to get rid of the dusklings and/or to the pick-up spot.
• Archive Panic: The comic was just short of 1000 online pages and a little over that number in printed pages (due to double page spreads and the like being presented as a single online page) by the time Adventure I was finished. Adventure II has passed the 300-page threshold as of this being written.
• Awesomeness Withdrawal: It's somewhat of a running gag within the fandom to act as if reaching the latest page will consistently cause this, to the point that directions to the official forum and a link to A Redtail's Dream have become staples of the welcome package to first-time page commenters.
• Captain Obvious Reveal:
  • Tuuri's troll bite being infected with the Rash. The idea that it could not be the case was only introduced to the reader in passing after Tuuri was bitten, and mostly serves to explain how most of the crew can spend a few extra days hoping things aren't as bad as they look. In addition to this, The Law of Conservation of Detail made having Tuuri get bitten seem completely pointless if it ended up having the comparatively consequence-free potential outcome. This caused the suspense to be less "Will it be the better scenario or the worse one?" and more "How will everyone handle the bad one when it happens?". And a decent proportion of the audience did get a surprise when the latter question started getting answers.
  • Hilja being the vector for Toivosaari's Year 79 Rash outbreak. The character was literally introduced via one of their long-time friends mentioning that they've been acting strange, at the beginning of a flash-back that had a very dim chance of being anything else than the full story of what happened to the Hotakainens' hometown.
• Common Knowledge: A few things can betray someone being subject to this:
  • Lalli is Onni and Tuuri's cousin, not their younger brother.
  • Readers are sometimes surprised at casual mentions of Onni not being immune by others, despite it being mentioned upon his introduction. This may be due to Siv, Tuuri and Reynir all having had at least one scene in which they had to wear a mask, while Onni having physically stayed away from the Silent World for the entire first story arc has made the fact have little obvious impact on his storyline.
  • The exact source of the idea that Onni used to be a scout, which is mentioned in some of his Character page entries, seems to have been lost. More accessible sources of Word of God contain nothing outright contradicting it. The fact that the "Profession" line on his title card looks like it could have been altered to be made shorter at some point doesn't help matters.
  • Mammals other than humans and cats are sometimes assumed to have gone extinct, or at least gone extinct outside of Iceland, due to the Rash. In reality, healthy wild animals have made appearances in the Silent World portions of the story. The expedition's backers are even seen counting on their presence as early as the end of the prologue when trying to skimp on the food costs. Mikkel's comments on a particular colony indicates that this due to immunity being just as present among non-cat mammals as it is among humans.
  • The setting technically being a Zombie Apocalypse has resulted in predictions and Wild Mass Guessing being made based on tropes and clichés of the genre that are actually averted, played with or outright impossible in the comic itself. For instance, most of the crew being The Immune means that And Then John Was a Zombie type predictions can only apply to a couple of its members.
  • When it comes to the language tree's independent life on the Internet, both reposters and viewers tend to make the mistake of assuming that it's supposed to show all world languages.
  • Thanks to the in-comic narrative itself being ambiguous enough to make this a valid interpretation, many readers believe the expedition's organizers downplayed the dangers of the mission and/or otherwise tricked the members of the crew during their recruitment process. According to Minna, everyone was aware of the dangers, and the backers were rather looking for people who would do such a risky job for the very low salaries they were offering; hence they went for people who would generally care more about the experience than the pay. The situation being thus is actually reason for which there is no sign of anybody taking the organizers to task over the death that happened during the expedition.
• Continuity Lockout: This the kind of story where it can take several real life years for a Chekhov's Gun to fire and even the more forgetful members of the readership can get thrown off. Jumping in on whatever page is the latest is a very bad idea. On top of this, Tuuri and Lalli are extremely easy to mistake for siblings to readers unaware they are actually first cousins.
• Creepy Cute: The dusklings, with their almost fluffy looking bodies and childlike, easily excited dialogue. Too bad they’re trying to eat Emil and Lalli.
• Cry for the Devil: It doesn't take long for readers to join the cast in feeling very, very sorry for beasts, trolls, giants and murderghosts, despite their baseline antagonistic behaviour. Even the most enthusiastically murder-minded of them are in various states of horrible pain.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: In Lalli's case, signs of a possible disorder include No Social Skills, Cloudcuckoolander moments, a generally introverted personality, a tendency to withdraw or lash out when overwhelmed, and some degree of Hates Being Touched and cat-oriented Delusions of Doghood. He's otherwise able to do a job that entails being outside safe areas while the trolls are the most active on his own. It can't be entirely chalked up to his mage powers, as Onni and Reynir act quite normally in comparison to him. The author has attributed his behavior to "an extremely unconventional upbringing (and perhaps some underlying neural issues)" but also mentioned having no intent to put a name on it due to wanting to keep liberty both on how she writes him and how readers interpret him. The fandom generally agrees that he's somewhere on the autistic spectrum. The second adventure gives the reader more clues : he witnessed his grandmother get possessed by a Kade and knows the exact reason his hometown was lost, and then spent the following years with this mental scar festering and never healing properly. It should be noted that the relative roles of nature and nuture are made even more unclear by an overlap between the skills required to resist being enthralled by trolls and the coping mechanisms that can naturally develop in someone with Lalli's life experience.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • The Just Before the End Distant Prologue causes the existence of a ninety-year gap to fill. The fact that no less than three couples from the prologue have an Offscreen Romance and the future wife of one guy only got a name and a face when the family tree was published doesn't help.
  • With the webcomic's pace, plenty of people eager to see the aftermath of the first expedition took matters in their own hands long before Adventure I got to its canon end.
  • And, with the comic concluding at the end of Adventure II, there's a few plot hooks for potential Continuation Fic writers to work off of.
  • The possibility of other survivor pockets outside of the Nordics. The characters even discuss the possibility; Sigrun claims the rest of the world didn't have adequate places to hide in, but Tuuri points out a photograph that might well be from China (considering it's surrounded by other East Asian-style decor, including a book in Chinese). Countries like Russia, Canada and even the northern most states of the USA would have a cold enough climate to help with surviving Troll attacks. Australia, New Zealand or other island nations could have also imitated Madagascar and Japan (themselves fic material), closing their borders not that long after Iceland did.
  • As a mirror to the above, the possibility of people from non-Nordic countries who got stuck because of all the sudden closing of borders surviving the initial outbreak and having descendants in the main timeframe.
• Fandom Heresy: Because of a mix of the Misaimed Fandom situation below and a general sentiment on the part of some readers that his actions are judged more harshly that those of other characters, interpreting Lalli's level of No Social Skills as Jerkass behaviour has become a risky position. An exception exists for his Unintentionally Unsympathetic moment below.
• Fan Nickname: Fans of the webcomic have come up with names for many of the characters who weren't named in the story world at the time.
  • Braidy: The man on the title page with the big red braid. His real name is Reynir Árnason.
  • Captain Lady: The woman with the cropped red hair. Her real name is Sigrun Eide.
  • Medic: The man with the needle. His real name is Mikkel Madsen.
  • Derp Kitty: The cat on the cover and the latest addition to the team. Real name unspecified as yet. Also: "the purrito", for when she's towel-wrapped and cute with it.
  • Unflappable Train Lady and Unflappable Train Guy: Crewmembers of the Dalahästen. The woman's name was later revealed to be Agneta.
  • Hippo Shrimp: This fellow.
  • Miss Hearty Undead: The lovely woman that Emil punches in the face on page 170.
  • The Cat-tank, Cattank or Catmobile.
  • Handsy Moose: The creature that attacked Lalli in the dream world - the name references Hiisi Moose, a Monster of the Week from Minna's previous webcomic.
  • Mama Cat. Because she is a Mama Bear in feline shape.
  • And, we have the infected wolfhound most often nicknamed Cthulhund or Spiderdog with the possible Good Doggy persona locked inside that nightmare horror.
  • Sleipnope for the tentacle horse ghost thing leading the pursuit of our heroes, and its many, many friends are the murderghosts.
  • Reynir's mohawk-sporting brother was generally referred to as "Punkbruddir" until the family tree revealed his real name is Bjarni.
  • Notoro: The name for this weird vaguely adorable troll which Emil and Lalli encounter here
  • Sentinel mage Väinö Väänänen went unnamed for the first few pages of his appearance, and so was promptly nicknamed 'Seagull Santa'.
• Fanwork-Only Fans: City of Hunger already has a few fanfics despite being cancelled and having had almost nothing of its plot revealed.
• Fanon:
  • The ages of the children. Both Veeti and Mia were assumed to have been around ten years old in Year 0, before a stream made their ages closer to seven. Ten also seems to be the upper limit for Håkan, Sune and Anna Västerström's ages.
  • Håkan, Sune and Anna Västerström are triplets.
  • The Rash being referred to by that name in Year 90. Characters in that era are only ever seen calling it the Illness in the comic proper, while the "Rash" name only ever actually appeared in the Distant Prologue. Someone in the present day is seen using the "rash" name early in Adventure II.
  • Lalli is on the autistic spectrum. The author notes quoted in Misaimed Fandom can be interpreted as confirming this.
  • The Scandinavian language Icelanders of the post-Rash era learn is Norwegian, due to Norway becoming Iceland's "closest kin" and the only other country answering to the Norse gods ^note it's Danish in the present day. This got confirmed via the Icelanders that came to pick up the crew at the end of the first story arc, though a couple of Icelandic Swedish speakers have made very brief appearances as well.
  • Ensi having a personality extremely close to Lalli's, down to the possible autistic spectrum disorder mentioned above.
  • Fics featuring Reynir's birth tend to run with his suspicion of being A Mistake Is Born and go a little further by making him a pre-menopause or early menopause baby.
  • Because of the popularity of pairing same-sex characters, the comic's world tends to be assumed to be overall accepting of same-sex couples.
  • The first fanfic author to name Emil's nanny called her "Sofia". Subsequent authors to write about her rolled with it.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Shotgun Shuffle, due to a Worthy Opponent scenario in the finals of the 2014 Top Web Comic vote.
  • A one-way case has developed with Scandinavia and the World, due to the webcomic being a Nordic-centered version of Hetalia: Axis Powers and hence one of the less boring ways of getting a crash-course on those countries for readers who came to Stand Still, Stay Silent without knowing much of them beforehand.
• Genius Bonus: Thanks to the Sadly Mythtaken nature of the fantasy elements, there are plenty of bonuses for those who know their Norse and Finnish mythology.
• Ghost Shipping: The more dedicated shippers of pairings involving Tuuri didn't let the character's death stop them.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The comic was launched in late 2013, a few months before the European Migrant Crisis began in earnest. The general premise of the prologue, a disease carried by refugees entering southern Europe causing the collapse of Western civilization and that the only way European countries could protect themselves was to close their borders and sink refugee boats, eerily mirrors the rhetoric used by far-right parties and politicians that came to power on platforms of xenophobia and cultural nationalism.
  • The arguments raised around restricting travel in the face of the spreading Rash Illness (during the talk show scene of the Denmark prologue) become this as well thanks to the COVID-19 Pandemic, with one side arguing that taking drastic acton (Iceland closing its borders entirely) against an unknown illness is clearly rational, and the other highlighting such a decision's impact is a violation of individual rights — a debate that has permeated discussions of the response to Covid.
  • In-Universe, Omni can seem excessively hostile and paranoid in his behaviour towards the old pastor spirit when they meet in the dreamworld. Adventure II, however, shows us exactly what he was scared of, and as such his suspicion was entirely justified.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Emil is quite displeased when Lalli uses the skull of the turned dog to which he had given a Mercy Kill for a mage ritual. Later, we get the page explaining the ritual, that turns out to be intended to free beast spirits. Lalli was actually giving that dog exactly what Emil would have wanted for it if he shared Lalli's belief system.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The real Iceland unfortunately got a small outbreak of the measles in early 2019, due to an unvaccinated adult visitor. A satirical article inspired by the event had Iceland ban unvaccinated visitors in response, which is quite reminiscent of how the comic's version of the country dealt with the Rash while it was still officially non-lethal and the travel ban it later had on non-immunes for a time.
• Ho Yay: Enough of it to give the comic its own page.
• I Knew It!:
  • Writing romance fics between mages and non-mages resulted in fans speculating about non-mages having their own safe areas in the dreamscape long before it got confirmed in Chapter 17.
  • At least one commenter called Lalli's stay in Emil's dreamscape safe area resulting in Sharing a Body with him.
  • And another correctly guessed that the ghosts are the spirits of those treated with the failed 'cure'.
• Less Disturbing in Context: Several Encyclopedia Exposita pages are the Translation Convention version of documents written by post-Rash Icelandic skalds. Post-Rash Icelandic skalds tend to have a low opinion of Finland, which is Minna's country of residence. People who stumbled upon the pages out of context have mistaken them for the works of an actual person with a low opinion of Finland.
• LGBT Fanbase: The on-panel relationships between the main characters are intended to be completely platonic, leaving the readers free to interpret whether the pairs of characters growing the closest to each other are very good friends or something more. This makes it quite easy to interpret some characters as LGBT, to the point that some of them are so as far as Fanon is concerned.
  • Lalli is usually seen as having chemistry with neither Sigrun nor Tuuri, the latter of whom is not only his cousin, but quite possibly his genetic paternal half-sister due to their fathers being twins. Because of this, he tends to be paired with males even when it's not specifically with Emil, and is assumed to be gay.
  • If Emil is not paired with Lalli, he tends to be paired with Sigrun. This has resulted in him being overall considered to be bisexual. He's also the top pick for fics depicting one of the younger male characters as a trans man.
  • Between the fact that she wasn't married to her sons' father and the general trend of using Lalli as a template to fill any blanks about her, Ensi is frequently written as having at the very least a strong preference for women.
• Lightmare Fuel: Is there any other way of describing it? Even the most hilarious scenes can have a threat or two skulking quietly undercover if you pause to think. We know for certain the gorgeous scenery definitely has oodles of horror just waiting to pounce, even while we're up to our eyeballs in cute kitties and wonderful character interplay, too. Yup: if this work doesn't count, nothing does.
  • Nightmare assessments, interviews and tribunals where Everything Goes Wrong happen and can be panic-inducing things for those with a fear of assessment, paperwork and bureaucracy. But, not many of us manage hilariously placed inky hand- and fingerprints everywhere during one... and, yet, somehow (minimally) succeed.
  • A (former) lady who asks for help gets punched right in the kisser. It's both tragic and morbidly funny.
  • See the absolute example of Body Horror in a Spider-dog-thing-shape run using ribs and legs. Run, Spiderdog, run... See Spiderdog start wheezing like broken bellows as Emil handily outstrips it, even while A-Team Firing and screaming for Sigrun. Comedy and Surprisingly Realistic Outcome ensues: it seems that having your ribs in the usual places and doing normal, ribby things instead of that monstrosity can be more helpful when going for speed and precision.
  • Leaftroll doing a Bugs Bunny, and not making a wrong turn at Albuquerque. There's just something simultaneously amusing and creepifying about that flappy-flap's sense of timing. And, upon missing their target, their attempts at cursing in silent frustration thanks to being without a jaw to curse with. Or vocal chords. Or lungs.
  • The encephalomyelitis-afflicted lollipops of doom: very seriously silly in so many ways... until you look closer and notice the brain-eyes; and, although gawky, wobbly and downright badly balanced, their attempted deliverance on outright bloodlust is genuinely menacing, too. Not to mention us having to work out what it'd take to make Physics and Biology get drunk and cry together in the corner whenever they even twitch, let alone move at a clip.
  • Sometimes, being a multi-skulled, pin-legged murderpede has a hilarious downside or two: such as having no means to reach into your own mouth to extract a large, unexpected choking hazard. Cue frantic, ineffectual, high-speed bobbing-and-weaving hallway gymnastics. With papertrail.
  • Field testing anti-ghost runes made by a novice mage who doesn't know what he's doing, with a decent chance that none of them will work, is a quite risky enterprise. But when the batch includes a stick figure drawing, and you can almost hear the ghost staring right back at it saying "Really?", it's easy to chuckle a little.
  • The ghosts "setting up camp" near Sigrun, Mikkel and Reynir's group. Creepy to see them so close, somehow hilarious to see them all crammed in the back of an abandonned van like a bunch of friends on a road trip.
  • Having your friend conk out into a coma from overextending themselves saving your life? Not good. Stuck miles from anywhere you can recognise, surrounded by trolls and with no means to contact the rest of the team while trying to keep said sack-of-potatoes friend alive? Scary. Cue said friend accidentally moving into your skull and bickering like a champ: funny.
  • Having the classic "doing something right after being told not to do it" gag, except that the thing that Emil was told not to do was to look in the direction of the horribly deformed troll spirits.
  • Reynir bolting into a shadowy forest without warning right after Sigrun berates him for lagging behind the rest of the group for at least the third time: amusing in terms of timing, but still a worrying situation.
  • Notoro: everything about this little piglet/cat/mobile-turf-roof duskling is just adorafying. Yum-yum, *sneak sneak sneak*, kitty paws, Blank White Eyes and teeth. Oh, and friends. Quite a few of them.
  • Emil tries to threaten the dusklings by saying that he will shoot the first one to come through the door, but they only get part of the sentence. One of them decides that Emil said the first one through the door will get to eat him. Cue Oh, Crap! on Emil's side upon hearing them getting even more motivated.
  • You'd think the team would share notes and learn... Trapping the incredibly slow and clumsy vehicle-troll by use of Mikkel's #1 weapon of choice (pipes and bars) and the environment, satisfying and funny both together. Leaving it alone to pine away (much like they did the many-limbed future component of Sleipnope), perhaps not wise... if understandable and a little too cruel (however broken, there's at least one mind in there). Not wondering about possible friends it could maybe communicate with? Turns out to be a terrifying mistake, and indeed came back to bite them not long afterwards. At speed.
• Memetic Badass: Sigrun Eide, the self-proclaimed most best Hunter of Monsters.
• Misaimed Fandom: Minna's author notes commenting on the first time it happened sum up the situation that tends to arise each time Lalli being in a bad mood combines with his Brutal Honesty and lack of social skills:
  So judging from the comments yesterday a lot of people were a bit bewildered and/or dismayed by Lalli's reaction last page. An here's the shocking explanation for his behaviour: yes, Lalli is very socially and emotionally maldeveloped, and spending a week with a bunch of strangers really isn't enough to fix whatever an extremely unconventional upbringing (and perhaps some underlying neural issues) has shaped. In fact it is only going to force those problems to the surface. So if you're hoping for Lalli to just "grow up" as soon as possible I'll have to deliver the tragic news that it might be a lengthy journey towards that.
• Nausea Fuel: The Kade makes writhing maggots spontaneously generate on people's arms to intimidate them. When they are first seen, it's easy to mistake the person for starting to mutate into a troll.
• Never Live It Down:
  • The idea of eating Reynir if the crew ever ran out of food was only very briefly brought up, and Chapter 6 literally ends on orders to keep Reynir alive. Several real life years later, quips in the comments about the crew's food supply or cannibalism will still find a way to involve Reynir.
  • Håkan Västerström accidentally cutting a piece of Onni's ear off right when he was getting a similar injury in the spirit world has made readers expect something equally creepy to happen again during subsequent appearances of the Västerström children. Their scenes following the incident have so far been playing in the background and hovering over Onni during his Power-Strain Blackout coma.
• One True Pairing: Emil/Lalli, thanks to how Ho Yay filled their Odd Friendship is. The fact that Minna once called Emil Lalli's soulmate and spelled out that people in Lalli's family tend to call people they love "stupid" in the author notes doesn't help matters. They have actually reached a point where they can be referred to as a couple in the page comments without anyone batting an eye, despite the complete lack of a canon Relationship Upgrade.
• Paranoia Fuel: Each and every chapter has a little something to give you the urge to check your back
  • Prologue: Fast-spreading, harmless flu? NOPE!
  • Chapter 1: Keuruu's population list is a quiet eye-opener. 766 military to 162 civilians. Whatever is out there would have to be one hell of a threat for that proportion of soldiers. Then, tot the number of people up: this is a large settlement, bordering on a fortified city by Y90 standards. By Y0 ones, that's a town. If that. Many hub-villages can have around 800 people spread about the associated forests and farmland.
  • Chapter 2: We know there's some kind of superbug, but the decontamination procedures remind us that it is a major threat. The question is, what is it, and how do we kill it? It's real easy to get twitchy when you realize there's at least two things trying to kill everybody- and while it's quiet, whatever they did worked.
  • Chapter 3: It all starts coming home to roost here. Opening with a blood-covered Trainsaw, and then later showing you exactly what left that blood there, as well as what all those soldiers were needed for at Keuruu. Bonus point for the mage knowing exactly how it was going to happen
  • Chapter 4: Main battle tanks that could easily fit in a Warhammer 40,000 game are shown- while knowing that the army that used them was beaten back dozens of times. To think our heroes are going into the exact same place, in a glorified RV.
    • Seeing the way home fall apart after they cross it
    • That dead troll. Did we mention that those things are very common where our Ragtag Band of Misfits is going?
    • The Dead Have Names memorial.
  • Chapter 5: The... thing in the underbrush that Emil sees. Sure kid, it's only looking at you a little.
    • The dead scientist. Looks like he got killed in a gunfight, but with what?
  • Chapter 6: Running out of food, and then finding a untrained, vulnerable kid in the next food crate. Double points for getting The Load and a side case of parental fears at the same time.
  • Chapter 7: The dog's transformation into some spider like-thing after it's injured and also there is something looking for Hotakainen family, and that something has just become active again. This causes Onni to tell Lalli to avoid leaving his dreamspace safe area.
  • Chapter 8: Lalli misses one troll pod in a tunnel full of them. Its contents start following the team... oh, and the info page informs us that in rare cases, mages can sometimes die from overusing their power. Guess what Lalli just did with a magic spell as we get that information.
  • Chapter 9: The "weird spirits" turn out to be not-so-harmless.
  • Chapter 10:
    • Even the more light-hearted beginning includes everyone leaving a Deep Sleep ridden Lalli alone in the tank, Tuuri and Reynir doing so basically out of boredom.
    • Good news, turns out there is someone in the party who can pick up on the magic-related slack while Lalli rests. Bad news, nobody will listen to that person because he's the untrained, vulnerable kid mentioned in the Chapter 6 entry, and a threat only they can see coming is approaching.
    • A child decides to give Onni a haircut while he's in a magical trance, and ends up cutting his ear in the process. Why is it chilling? Onni just got an extremely similar injury while giving the crew a hand with the ghosts via mage-space.
  • Chapter 11: There are many ghosts following the crew.
  • Chapter 12: The reaveal about the cure is quite chilling: it works on the Rash, but ends up killing the patients for unknown reasons. It was sent out anyway because they thought it was better than risking turning into what would later be called trolls. Even that assumption was wrong, it turned them into the type of murderous ghost that is threatening the crew and nobody noticed. The issue revealed to exist in Chapter 11 catches up with the crew at the end, and it seems to have gotten even worse, to the point of making Lalli worried about it.
  • Chapter 13: Onni taking his turn at the magic coma and Tuuri's troll bite are gifts that will keep on giving for the next few chapters.
  • Chapter 14:
    • Lalli ventures into the wilds with only a bunch of runes that are not guaranteed to work and gods knows what for protection.
    • Having your only nightime company be an animal used to detect trolls when you're in quarantine for a potential Rash infection looks like the recipe for a sleepless night.
  • Chapter 16: A giant about the same size as the building in which it's hiding, anyone?
  • Chapter 18: Only a Flesh Wound, you say? I Can Still Fight!, you say? Unfortunately, being out in the wilderness, with limited medical supplies, limited access to antibiotics, and being irresponsible about keeping a wound clean, leads to an all-too-realistic demonstration of just how dangerous a flesh wound can get if not properly cared for. Add in being days to weeks away from the nearest hospital, and the fact that sepsis is a life-threatening emergency even under the best of conditions, and you've got the perfect recipe for a slow death in the middle of nowhere.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: According to Minna, all on-panel interactions between the main characters are supposed to be platonic. However, a couple of the pairs of closer friends are gaining Like an Old Married Couple dynamics and given several scenes in which they are doing stuff alone together. When the story gets close to a point where the main group would have every reason to split up, those pairs plan to stay together either by choice or because someone else wants them to.
• Realism-Induced Horror:
  • Separate the segments of the Distant Prologue by weeks or months instead of days, and the Rash outbreak gets a narrative surprisingly close to how media corverage and public awareness of the seriousness of Covid-19 escalated between late 2019 and early 2020. On a more individual level, there is a young man getting his grandmother to come live with him before the disease hits their area, people losing their job because of the preventative measures, parents keeping their child out of school, discussion of where a pregnant woman will be giving birth and people self-isolating to various extents. Of course, the similarity breaks down when "turning into an Undead Abomination" joins the list of unforseen complications of the disease in the main story...
  • In the backstory, a supernatural entity decimated an entire cluster of villages with an outbreak of the Rash. The entity's plan boiled down to smuggling an infected person into one of the villages, having the person be part of a large gathering during their Typhoid Mary phase (which is usually accounted for via putting new arrivals in quarantine), then having the people infected at the gathering continue the spread during their own Typhoid Mary phases. Avoiding an involuntary version of such a scenario with Covid-19 is the reason many countries put social distancing measures in place.
• Ship Mates: Emil/Lalli shows up quite a lot as a pairing, and without them the generally agreed upon pool of pairable characters consists of five people, two of whom only have one frequently seen option. Fanfics going the Slash Fic route will almost universally have the Sigrun/Tuuri and Onni/Reynir combination. Tuuri/Reynir makes Sigrun/Mikkel the most plausible third pairing, as neither of the two latter have any regular interaction with Onni.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Thanks to the Distant Prologue, it takes 57 pages to even meet any of the supporting characters, 70 to see someone from the main cast and the crew is in the middle of crossing the bridge into the Silent World at page 200. The comic is quite the test of patience.
• Spoiled by the Format: Mentions of a chapter being almost over in the author notes almost always mean that there is less than a week's worth of updates left to go, which restricts how much can happen between the page on which it's announced and the end.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The story has a character die at the end of Chapter 15, and manages to go downhill from there. It eventually reaches a point where the crew is separated in two groups travelling on foot, both containing someone unfit to travel on their own who could be in mortal danger if they don't get proper help soon. In addition to this, the situation seems to have made most of the characters prone to fixing problems the efficient way over the way that won't risk making their travel companion(s) hate them forever, which causes their less likable sides to become quite conspicuous. One of the storylines containing a few bonding moments was probably meant to keep this trope from happening to an extent. Unfortunately, that very same storyline also contains what is considered the worst case of someone choosing efficency in fixing a problem over someone else's well-being, causing the happier parts that came after it to have mixed results in lightening the mood. Things start getting a little better in Chapter 19, but only after several months of things consistently getting worse from the viewpoint of those following the story as it's published.

• Unconventional Learning Experience:
  • Understanding the Translation Punctuation at all requires to be able to tell the difference between the similar-looking flags of Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland at a glance.
  • The fact that some of the characters are able to talk to each other at all is extremely reliant on the similarities between Nowegian, Swedish and Danish. The similarities between the three, and how different they are from both Icelandic and Finnish, are even shown on a couple vocabulary sheets in Adventure I.
  • Enough effort was made to base the language tree on real data that some have used it as a teaching tool on its own right.
  • The inspiration for the fantasy elements can lead readers to seek Norse Mythology and The Kalevala, and chances are that people who have already read some of those works are hanging around in places where the comic is discussed.
  • Many settlements shown on the map are real places people are unlikely to have heard about before reading the comic if they've never been to the country in which they are located.
  • Many places returning to pre-industrial to early industrial lifestyles, while losing the benefits of global trade, has lead to people actually reasearching how each country did various things in older times, and being able to give quite complete answers if anyone else asks.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Lalli briefly crossed the line between Misaimed Fandom and this when freeing Emil from a troll Compelling Voice took the form of giving him a headache so crippling that he was unable to stand and using the same channel to give counter-orders. A few panels in particular can make Lalli come across as outright unwilling to try solving the situation any other way and making no big deal out of doing something harmful to Emil to save him, though it's left unclear whether other ways to do so were available to him. The story itself has Emil later react to the act by thanking Lalli for doing it, focusing more on the fact that it saved his life than on anything else.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The only comment section Minna, the author, has ever had to shut down was due to the extreme toxicity. The page? Page 549. In it, Emil calls the Chinese language "Ching-Chong", due to him not knowing the actual name of the language, but recognizing the calligraphy. While not completely innocent in Finland, the word is an even bigger no-no in many English speaking areas, resulting in many very negative comments. The author notes also allude to requests to remove the gag of the characters not recongnizing Chinese entirely, which Minna deemed unnecessary.
  • In the Nordic countries, any mourning past the actual funeral tends to be a quite private affair and the dead are very seldom talked about, even among close friends and family. This results in readers from cultures in which mourning and remembering the dead is more collective and/or visible getting the impression that Tuuri is getting the Forgotten Fallen Friend treatment.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Many fans were confused about the genders of Sigrun and Reynir. Word of God had to state that Reynir is a man and that Sigrun is a woman.
  • Tuuri has moments where readers think she's a ten-year-old boy. She's a woman in her early twenties.
  • The comic's character page provides a handy dandy gender guide.
  • Sune Västerström, who has the extra penalties of still being a child and not being covered by the gender guide. He's male.
  • Seems somewhat deliberate, as the male main characters are often drawn with longer hair and slender figures, typically indicative of female characters in other visual art, and female main characters tend to have shorther hair and stockier builds - again the reverse of what many readers would be accustomed to.
• Viewers in Mourning: The readership took quite some time to get over Tuuri's death.
• Writer-Induced Fanon: The author notes below the pages can range from spelling out facts that are only implied in the comic to a quick joke about the page's content that isn't meant to be taken seriously. The problem is that it can be hard to tell which is which, and the notes more obviously leaning on the joke side can be things that a portion of the fandom really wants to be true.
  • For instance, the widely accepted idea that Mikkel is melting candles into the food was brought up exactly once in the comic itself, and Mikkel denied it at the time. However, the following sentence is in the author notes of the page in which the discussion happens:
  The food is (mostly?) hearty and nourishing porridge by the way.
• Woobie Family: The Hotakainens, as the set of characters with the most obvious Dark and Troubled Past so far.

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