YMMV / The Eternal Cylinder

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Why did the Mathematician turn against the Cylinder and destroy it? Did his defeat awaken his remaining humanity enough to rebel? Did the Narrator take control of him? Or was it the Cylinder's own equivalent of Suicide by Cop knowing its plans were foiled?
• Anti-Climax Boss: Zigzagged with the final battle against the Mathematician, and only for one reason - there is absolutely nothing you can do to hurt him, instead relying on the Trewhaala present to fight him.
  • Bosses like the Liberator and the last Unifier go down absurdly quickly if you've stored enough large Glickbol bombs with the Mixer Body mutation.
  • The battle with the first Frozen Sklaa can become this, as you can kill it without even waking it up by not bringing any heat sources near it and attacking its exposed heart directly with bombs.
• Game-Breaker: There are some mutations that make all parts of the game except for outrunning the Eternal Cylinder and its minions trivial.
  • In the beta, it is actually possible to bypass the entire first encounter with the Cleanser if you have the Leaping Legs mutation. A carefully-timed jump can help you bypass the Cleanser without waking it up to lower the bridge, thus sparing any potential deaths or loss of mutations (the bridge still does have yellow lights, so be careful).
  • The cylindrical body allows you to hurt any creature you encounter by colliding with it. This includes predators like the Omnogrom, meaning you can hunt virtually every creature in the game in order to access their mutation parts. This even works on the Tonglegrop, though be wary of its collision damage.
  • The Toxic Trunk may also count, as it lets you kill larger predators very early on if you get lucky enough to take down a Tonglegrop.
  • Obtaining the Mixer Body lets you create bombs out of unneeded items, which can allow you to take down enemies from range without having to worry about getting too close to them.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The Eternal Donut^ExplanationMany have questioned the logic of how a cylinder that stretches from horizon to horizon could possibly crush a planet if planets are circular, causing many to joke that the Cylinder is actually donut-shaped.
  • Fleshnut ^Explanation This is a nickname coined by Youtuber/Twitch streamer DarkEdgeTV when describing the Omnogrom due to its body resembling the outer shell of a pistachio nut. Beware of any Freudian Slips that come with the way she refers to it as.
  • Calling the Trebhums "remastered Q-Berts" is common on threads.
  • The mimicking Treghrum, which pretends to be a Trebhum before attacking once it infiltrates a group, inevitably has drawn many jokes pertaining to Among Us.
  • With the Jojos Bizarre Adventure fandom infamously finding references in everything, the rolling Cylinder has drawn joking comparisons to Dio Brando's "ROAD ROLLER DA!"
  • The Trebhum inhaling the crystal dust as currency has drawn numerous comparisons among streamers as the Trebhum snorting "crack dust" or "crystal meth" and Trebhum are sometimes memetically portrayed as junkies looking for a fix. The surreal visuals also draw jokes that the Trebhums are just "tripping".
  • Fan art often depicts Wheel-Body Trebhum are terrifying their kin due to looking like the Cylinder, with some even implying that these Trebhun are becoming the Cylinder. This might actually be true in the game, too - the compendium entry for the Wheel Body's catalyst makes it plain that the Trebhum don't know where the plant that produces these items comes from.
• Narm: Some creatures are far too ridiculous-looking to take seriously, such as the Cleanser, which is played off as an powerful servant of the Cylinder...and it's literally a car with arms.
• Narm Charm: The designs of the Servants of the Cylinder clash very heavily with the Trebhum and other creatures of the planet, yet it manages to work in its favor and play up the dissonance: even managing to make a battle between long-nosed Q*Bert creatures against things straight out of Silent Hill seem convincing and compelling.
• Scrappy Mechanic: If you're really unlucky and get captured by a Vuushlop who has a nest outside the border, they can activate the Cylinder against your will.
• Ugly Cute: The Trebhums are strangely adorable despite their odd proportions and weird lumpy texture.
  • Glickbols have surprisingly adorable pug-like faces despite being embryonic frogspawn.
  • The Foosh resembles a Bedsheet Ghost and is somewhat endearing despite having empty holes for eyes.
  • Infant Gaahrlings. They look like some bizarre, lumpy fusion of an elephant, an octopus and a potato attached to a floating blimp, and despite their ribbon-like upper jaw loosely flailing around their round shape, surprisingly expressive eyes and floaty bouncing locomotion at least make them somewhat cute.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
  • The recognizably human body parts possessed by the servants of the cylinder are unsettling, to say the least.
  • The Omnogrom's oddly human-like eyes and teeth certainly count.
• Woobie Species: The Trebhum are at the bottom of their planet's food chain, are the last living descendants of a once-advanced ancient civilization, and are being hunted down by an unstoppable eldritch force of destruction. They do, however, get somewhat better once they get mutations and abilities to help them fight back and escape their enemies.
  • Glickbols. They're basically sentient, mobile eggs that are easy prey for virtually everything else in the environment, including the Tongelgrops of which they are the infants of, and even Trebhums are fond of catching them and using them as bait for predators so they eat the Glickbols and not them. And once you discover that they make good bombs with the Mixer Body mutation, you're bound to start killing them on purpose...
  • The grasshopper-like Hophopops drop small orbs when startled, but if they drop all four pods their bodies break in half and kills then instantly. As these pods are a source of a useful mutation, expect lots of Hophopop bisection in a typical playthrough.
  • Great Gaaahrs, being impressive and majestic Gentle Giants that are far too slow to escape the Cylinder, and upon death slowly and pathetically roll over the Cylinder in a drawn-out and depressing manner. To make things worse, they completely stop appearing after the Desert Biome, implying that the Cylinder has driven them into extinction.
  • The mighty Celestial Trewhaala, surprisingly, counts as well. They are ancient friends of the Trebhum who are a slowly dying race, who know the end of their kind is at hand, and fear that they will be forgotten. They help the Trebhum defeat the Cylinder, and all they ask in return is that the Trebhum sing to them, and preserve their memories: so they live on through the songs and stories of their people.