YMMV / Twenty One Pilots

• Accidental Innuendo: From "Clear": "It takes some chivalry and well-placed energy to subliminally get myself inside you."
• Awesome Music: "Heathens", "Ode to Sleep", "Holding On To You", "Tear In My Heart", "Heavydirtysoul", "Lane Boy", "Jumpsuit", "Chlorine"... most Twenty One Pilots songs easily fall in this category.
• Angst Aversion: Their heart-on-sleeve lyrics about depression and suicidal thoughts have made them extremely popular among people who suffer from those conditions but can make them difficult to appreciate for those who don't.
• Broken Base:
  • On a general level, the debate that rages on about whether the group should be considered a rock band. Though their songs have dominated the rock charts, almost none of them use actual guitars and often sound like they belong in entirely different genres.
  • The Reading Festival 2016 incident. During "Car Radio", Tyler attempted to crowdsurf out to a high platform in the middle of the audience, a stunt he had performed at countless previous shows. The attendees of the festival pulled Tyler into the crowd, tearing his shirt, stealing his mask and shoes, and delaying the set so long that they had to end it early. Much of the Clique reacted with horror, while other observers claimed that the whole thing was blown out of proportion and that Tyler should have had a better read on the crowd, as Reading is notoriously rowdy and many other performers have experienced similar abuse.^note For his part, Tyler referred to the incident as "one of his favorite sets ever", stating that he enjoyed the authentic energy.
  • The band's cover of "Cancer" sparked a little bit of Fandom Rivalry between TØP and MCR over whose version was better, what with how the cover took such a unique spin on the original's meaning. Many say that there was never a competition, and that each version is good in its own right.
• Continuity Lock-Out:
  • Blurryface indulged in this trope a bit, as Tyler only gave outright explanations for the namesake character in interviews, and the album's concept was only readily accessible after a bit of digging.
  • Trench kicked this up to eleven. The Alternate Reality Game used to promote the album is directly intertwined with the album's lyrics, song titles, and visuals, not to mention how Blurryface ties into the narrative as well. If you never checked out the information on the "dmaorg" site, a lot of stuff will be incomprehensible to you.
  • Scaled and Icy builds on the Trench mythos in its core concept, and the music videos for "Saturday" and "The Outside" explicitly tie into the Dema storyline set up by the "Trench Trilogy" of music videos. Anyone watching the Livestream Experience without this information would likely have no idea who the talk show hosts are supposed to represent.
  • By the time the band release Clancy, over half of their officially released discography will have been dedicated to Dema, with the album title referring to a character name only familiar to fans who have followed the lore for close to six years. As a result, the band had to release a video explaining who Clancy is and what the background story laid out in music videos and other media actually means.
• Ending Fatigue: "Lane Boy" appears to end with another 30 seconds to spare when another drum solo kicks in. The music video notably cuts out this outro entirely, although it's often played at live shows.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Speculation on exactly who/what Blurryface was and how he was manifesting in the album was rampant in the lead-up to the namesake album's release.
  • The Clique loves to pick apart every detail of stage presentation and social media for hints regarding future projects. Just one example: before playing a show at the 2016 March Madness Music Festival, Blurryface tweeted about wearing blue, calling it "a sign of defeat." For the performance, Tyler wore a blue jumpsuit, the only time after the release of Blurryface that he used that color on-stage. Fans speculated over what that tweet meant for months, but it was never explained or mentioned again.
  • The buildup to Scaled and Icy was filled with this since the album's name was first hinted at in a message written in the background of the "Christmas Saves The Year" YouTube thumbnail stating "SAI IS PROPAGANDA". Clique detectives quickly determined that the album title is also an anagram for "Clancy is dead" and began to interpret the album's divergent sound and the absence of the band's logo as hints that it is somehow a "fake" album produced under Dema control. This was all eventually confirmed almost a year after the album's release in the supplemental material for the music video for "The Outside".
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory:
  • The band has gotten hit with this hard due to their music being interpreted as Christian (although Christian themes are present due to Tyler's faith's influence on him, they're implicit at best), especially with Blurryface and Trench.
  • "Car Radio" is about the positive and negative aspects of distracting oneself from introspection or depression. It also is not just a metaphor — Tyler really did have his car radio stolen in college, and the quiet of his commute made him have to be alone with his thoughts much more than when he had music to listen to.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: The Clique is very adamant about the correct spelling of the band name: it's "Twenty One Pilots", not "21 Pilots".
• Fan Nickname: For Josh: Jishwa, Spooky Jim, and anything relating to space and/or aliens.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, and Paramore, mostly because a lot of their fans found out about them when they opened for these bands.
  • In turn, Mutemath, MisterWives, and Jon Bellion have all opened for Twenty One Pilots, which led to a lot of crossover between them, with members of Mutemath and MisterWives becoming associated acts.
    • Mutemath collaborated with the band for the TOPxMM remix EP in 2016, and their frontman Paul Meany has become Tyler's primary producing partner.
    • MisterWives trumpeter Dr. Blum was for many years the only other live musician to join the band for live performances (most prominently their version of "Fall Away").
    • Meany and Blum also joined the band for the Scaled and Icy Livestream Experience and subsequent tour.
  • There was a lot of early crossover between their and Halsey's fandom due in part to her and Josh's friendship in 2015-16, though this has since faded.
• Growing the Beard: After the band became the object of a lot of critical scorn from certain corners of the music community, Trench was met with almost universal praise for its more ambitious production and storytelling. Many reviewers, including Anthony Fantano, expressed outright shock for how much they enjoyed the album after outright disdaining most of the band's previous (and later) work.
• Harsher in Hindsight: "Legend", for several reasons.
  • "The Pantaloon", a song from the band's debut album, is about the inevitable cyclical process of watching your parents and grandparents becoming more mentally and cognitively impaired, a concept inspired by Tyler's grandfather Robert. Almost ten years and four albums later, Trench presents "Legend", a song dedicated to Robert, who passed during the album's production from dementia. At one point in the song, Tyler even apologizes to his grandfather as he could no longer bring himself to visit when his grandfather stopped being able to recognize him.
  • The song contains the recurring line "I wish she knew you", stated explicitly by Tyler to be about his wife Jenna and how he wishes she could've known the person his grandfather was before the disease set in. Now that the two have had several daughters — the first of whom has Robert as a middle name — the "she" works on multiple levels.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Tyler claims in "Fairly Local" that "this song will never be on the radio." Though it wasn't a radio single, the track was still played on the radio a number of times after it was used to announce the upcoming release of Blurryface. ^note Tyler has stated in interviews that he wasn't entirely happy with this; the song was written to be a tribute to fans who had been with them pre-Blurryface and thus would be removed from the setlist until about three years after the album's release.
• Ho Yay: There's a lot of this between Tyler and Josh, and it's whole-heartedly supported by the Clique.
  • During one Vine, Mark used Tyler's phone and asked Siri to call his boyfriend. Who did it call? Josh.
  • Discussing fanfiction.
    Josh: There's a lot of fanfiction that's super weird... it's more like fan-nonfiction. Stuff like Tyler and I buying matching Lamborghinis and driving really fast, working out together, stuff like that.
    Tyler: Yeah, that's the G-rated version.
  • From the same interview:
    Interviewer: Favorite pre-show ritual?
    Josh: Naps.
    Tyler: Together.
• Hype Backlash: At the height of the song's popularity, a number of long-time fans expressed resentment toward "Stressed Out" for overshadowing the band's earlier work and bringing in new fans who were only familiar with the band's biggest hit. This feeling in turn caused some degree of Creator Backlash from Tyler; he once performed the song with alternate lyrics criticizing its overplayed status when he felt that fans at their concerts showed markedly less enthusiasm toward "Stressed Out" than the rest of the setlist. The Trench single "The Hype" is partially about navigating this.
• Inferred Holocaust: The "Saturday" music video ends with a number of survivors from the submarine crash floating in the ocean. Only Tyler and Josh wash up on the island in "The Outside". ​Sure enough, Clancy's journal entry "022 03MOON 17" confirmed that "many lost their lives in the attack".
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: "Ode to Sleep" and "The Judge" are non-singles that both Tyler and Josh regularly say are their favorite tracks to play live. Tyler has also often claimed that the lyrics of "Taxi Cab" are some of his personal favorites, even though the band did not play the track live for years prior to its return in 2018.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • From "Tear in My Heart": "My taste in music is your FACE!"
  • Sarcastically treating "TB Saga" one of the band's most emotionally impactful songs or, alternatively, expressing bemusement at how it could have been written by the same person that wrote said emotional songs.
    • The same can be said with "Coconut Sharks in the Water".
  • The Clique adopted Tyler's "It's possible... but is it plausible?" line from the "Heavydirtysoul" behind-the-scenes video pretty quickly.
  • "What's a Blurryface?"^ExplanationComes from one particularly bad interview where one of the interviewers asked this question to Tyler with a research error and attempted Cringe Comedy.
  • Tyler's excessive clinginess over Josh.
  • "Excuse me, could you please leave?"
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The opening riffs of "Holding On To You", "Guns For Hands", and "Trees".
  • Try not to yell "SWAT!" when listening to "Holding On To You". It's physically difficult.
  • From every show: Tyler yelling "Give it up for Josh Dun on the drums!" and subsequent pounding percussion.
  • Tyler's Signing-Off Catchphrase: "We are Twenty One Pilots, and so are you!"
• Narm / Narm Charm: With the band members being who they are, it's no surprise that Twenty One Pilots can occasionally come off as pretty goofy. Their combined self-awareness and sincerity usually leads to this coming off as more endearing than anything.
  • Some of Tyler's "woahs", in "Fairly Local" and "Ride" in particular, are pretty silly, but they're also fun and work into the Lyrical Dissonance.
  • Tyler and the hazmat suits' dance moves in the "Lane Boy" music video.
  • Tyler and Josh riding tricycles and sipping Capri-Sun on the curb in the video for "Stressed Out". It's intentionally and undeniably ridiculous.
  • Some of Tyler's vocals, especially in early songs, can reach pretty high levels of angsty whine. The opening of "A Car, A Torch, A Death" in particular stands out.
  • The bit of Suddenly Shouting in "House of Gold".
  • The video for "Car Radio" features Tyler shaving his head alone in a bathroom, evidently in an expression of profound sadness. This serious tone is broken a bit when he starts singing into the electric razor like a microphone, though Tyler's performance reins this in somewhat.
  • From "Screen": "SO EXCUSE US WHILE WE SING TO THE SKY!"
  • The "I wasn't raised in the hood, but I know a thing or two about pain and darkness" line in "Lane Boy" has been singled out and joked about for its Unfortunate Implications.
  • The sheer extent of the band's dedication to tying all of their music to the Dema storyline across multiple albums (even retroactively looping Vessel and Blurryface in to the mythos) has reached pretty ridiculous levels and led to Continuity Lock-Out for many. By the time of Clancy's release, half of the band's available discography will have been dedicated to telling a very earnest and loosely defined story about Tyler's self-insert character escaping a YA dystopian fantasy world several years after the genre fell out of fashion. At the same time, however, many fans love the treasure hunt style of storytelling and appreciate the added layers of detail and the band's long-term dedication to rewarding those who put in the work to learning all of the lore.
  • The dance Tyler performs when seizing control of Keons' body at the end of "The Outside" music video is tremendously goofy, made all the more so by the dark and extravagant costumes both figures are wearing and the fact that it is meant to be the inciting incident in the start of a war against Dema.
• Portmanteau Couple Name:
  • "Jyler" for Tyler and his wife Jenna.
  • "Jebby" for Josh and his wife Debby.
  • Tyler and Josh themselves are "Joshler."
• Sequel Displacement: Vessel was the band's first studio album but is often incorrectly described as the band's debut by some media. Many fans don't know about the first two independent albums, which was not helped by the pulling of Regional At Best from distribution. Further confusing things is Tyler's inconsistent counting of the independent albums himself — he often refers to the self-titled record as "more of a mixtape" and acts as though Regional At Best doesn't exist.
• Signature Song: "Stressed Out" is their most widely-known and commercially successful song, though "Heathens", "Tear In My Heart" and "Ride" are close runner-ups.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • Several people online have drawn ties between "Car Radio" and Homestuck's "Sburban Jungle".
  • When sinning the "Heavydirtysoul" video, Jeremy Scott of Music Video Sins noted how similar the song's breakbeat drums sounded to those in The Prodigy's "Firestarter".
  • More than a few have drawn comparisons between tracks on Scaled and Icy to other songs ("Mulberry Street" and Elton John's "Benny and the Jets", "Formidable" and The Cure's "Friday I'm In Love", and even the bassline of "Never Take It" and The Go-Go's "Our Lips Are Sealed").
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: Invoked with the band's logo of all things. Tyler has said that there is no deeper meaning for the |-/ symbol, only that it represents the band. In other words, it was made for the purpose of... having a purpose.

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