YMMV / mewithoutYou

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Ten Stories features a mob coming together to stage a Public Execution of an Elephant. Horrifyingly enough, it's happened before.
• Awesome Art: The artwork for Ten Stories by Vasily Kafanov has a wonderful storybook aesthetic that nonetheless feels grim enough to fit the narrative. Many of the pieces done for individual tracks are full of relevant details from each story for listeners to spot.
• Bizarro Episode: "Aubergine", being a story about a fish falling in love with an eggplant, is completely divorced from the overarching narrative of Ten Stories; if anything, it seems like a holdover from It's All Crazy! given that its named after and has a chorus about a vegetable.
• Broken Base: Given the inherently eclectic nature of their music, there's a mild divide within their fanbase between fans who prefer their heavier, more emotive style and fans who prefer their lighter, more Folk-influenced sound. Their music post-It's All Crazy! more or less married the two styles together to general fandom appeal.
• Contested Sequel: It's All Crazy! for the reasons mentioned above. While its reception upon its debut was largely negative due to its heavy deviation from the tone of their works, it's accumulated more fans since the release of successive albums who enjoy the more Folk-ish aspects of their music.
• Creator Worship: Aaron Weiss gets this a lot for several reasons. One, his status as the band's frontman. Two, being the primary songwriter of music with incredibly unique, poetic, and intellectual lyrics open to a wide range of interpretations that often form fairly complex narratives. Three, giving incredibly passionate, memorably intense live performances, often leaping around the stage while he sings. And four, despite his following, being an altogether Humble Hero who doesn't seem to view himself as a sage and who most fans describe as being pretty down-to-earth.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Julian from Ten Stories, despite only showing up in one song on the album's B-Side, is well-remembered due to his pitiable circumstances and delivering an absolutely cutting speech towards a mocking crowd.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Sure, Bear's Heroic Sacrifice will mean that Fox will live on for a while longer, but it's still quite some time before spring comes, and Fox doesn't seem to have any experience living in the wild. It's likely that she'll still end up starving to death if she isn't able to find sympathetic animals or make her way to human civilization.
• Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory: mewithoutYou's lyrics tend to involve heavy amounts of symbolism, references to spirituality and literature, and surreal narratives which are rarely meant to be taken at face value. This has led to many of their songs attracting detailed analyses and interpretations over the years.
• Fridge Horror:
  • There are some seriously disturbing implications regarding the role of animals in the world presented in ''Ten Stories''. Animals are sapient, capable of communicating and even forming relationships with humans, with Rabbit even mentioning holding a job and writing letters. Yet the animals in the main narrative are still treated as nonsapient creatures, and as such may as well be slaves to the Circus, if not viewed as lesser.
    • Furthermore, the Circus clearly travels around the country, and seems to have an audience wherever they go, meaning that their treatment of them isn't seen as out-of-the-ordinary in at least several towns.
    • Bear and Rabbit's situations are also nightmarish when given context. Bear was more or less completely integrated into human society, while Rabbit had a family he was evidently close to, but at some point they were captured by the Circus and forced to perform for the benefit of humans.
• Genius Bonus: To give you an idea of the sheer literary complexity involved in some of their songs, one particularly dedicated fan put together annotated notes for Ten Stories and Pale Horses that analyze the use of language and references to philosophy, religion, literature, culture, and geography (among other subjects) in the lyrics. Together, they're a whopping 253 pages in length.
• Growing the Beard: Catch for Us the Foxes is generally seen as the album where the band gained their signature style, both in terms of their instrumentation and lyrical content. While parts of it kept the chaos and angst of [A→B] Life, it was on the whole more subdued and introspective. It also had their first real Signature Song in the form of "January 1979", which won an award from MTVu.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: All of the relationship-induced angst in [A→B] Life, Catch for Us the Foxes, and Brother, Sister eventually became this when Aaron ended up marrying as of Pale Horses. All of his fears and anxieties about being alone ultimately did not come to pass. Additionally, many of the darker, more nihilistic lyrics present in the tracks ended up being swapped out in favor of more positive ones during live shows that reflected both a change in circumstances and a change in mindset.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: It's All Crazy! received a largely negative reception from an audience who disliked the new direction the album had taken, with many feeling as if it was a bizarre artistic decision for the band to take, that they were being untrue to themselves, or that it was just some kind of experimental phase. But with the release of later albums, It's All Crazy! was reevaluated as an interesting experiment that gave the band more tonal depth. In other words, the full title of the album^*  It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All a Dream! It's Alright ended up describing the future fan reaction.
• Iron Woobie: Bear from Ten Stories, who, despite clearly having a Dark and Troubled Past and being forced to wander the wilderness with Fox, never complains about their situation and tries to comfort Fox throughout the entire ordeal.
• Literary Agent Hypothesis: It isn't hard to read Ten Stories as an exploration of Aaron's own psyche, with each animal representing a different facet of his beliefs and life story (e.g. Bear's past involving a failed romance, Walrus's eremitic desire).
• Narm Charm: "Lilac Queen" describes villains from Thundercats of all things as harbingers of an oncoming apocalypse. It should come across as totally ridiculous, but the song's overall gravitas and Pale Horses' motif of childhood innocence gives it a surprising amount of power.
• Signature Scene:
  • The Beetle King plunging himself into the fire in the climax of "The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate".
  • Elephant derailing the train in "February 1878".
  • Bear's Heroic Sacrifice via jumping to his death in "Bear's Vision of St. Agnes".
• Signature Song:
  • "January 1979" from Catch for Us the Foxes
  • "In a Sweater Poorly Knit" from "Brother, Sister"
  • "The Fox, the Crow, and the Cookie" and "The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate" from "It's All Crazy!"
  • "Fox's Dream of the Log Flume" from Ten Stories.
  • "Julia (or, ‘Holy to the LORD’ on the Bells of Horses)" from [Untitled].
• Song Association: "The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate" is often associated with Hollow Knight due to this fanmade PMV.
• Spiritual Successor: Catch for Us the Foxes is more or less an Indie Rock version of the Book of Ecclesiastes.
• Squick: The Interspecies Relationships present in Ten Stories aren't too concerning considering the allegorical nature of the narrative, but nonetheless, the artwork for "East Enders Wives" includes a depiction of Rabbit in bed with a naked Fortune Teller.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Ten Stories was released to general fandom acclaim, seeing it as it brought back their harder rock from before It's All Crazy! while still harnessing Folk influences.
• Unconventional Learning Experience: Ten Stories features a variety of different philosophical schools of thought presented in the context of a Beast Fable.
• Vindicated by History: ''It's All Crazy!'' is generally more warmly received since the band's audience has expanded far beyond its original Post-Hardcore roots and because in the contexts of their entire discography, the album doesn't seem as radical of a shift.
• The Woobie: Several in Ten Stories
  • Fox, who was likely in the Circus for her entire life, and following the train crash is is left stranded in the wilderness with Bear. Her situation gets even worse when it's implied she had to eat Bear's dead body to stay alive.
  • Rabbit, who evidently lived with his family prior to ending up in the Circus, falls in love only to be abandoned in the middle of the night. After struggling to make ends meet he's finally able to make it back home only to find that his father died while he was away, exactly as the Fortune Teller predicted.
  • Julian, being a deformed man put on display as a Freak Show and relentlessly mocked by both the carnival barker and his audience. If the barker is to be believed, it's something he'd endured all his life.

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