Formative Albums, Part 6: Silence
Silence by Sonata Arctica
After Rhapsody [of Fire] introduced me to the world of power metal, I set off to explore what I'd found. Sonata Arctica was one of the first bands I discovered from there, and was a huge part of my early tastes in the genre.
They're a little awkward to discuss now, because a lot of their subject matter is kind of... uncomfortable in hindsight? To be fair, Tony Kakko never got caught having bad takes on Twitter or anything like that (that I know of.) This purely came from me paying closer attention to their actual song lyrics--the focus on unrequited crushes and bitter breakups, the overwhelming sex-negativity, the entire Caleb saga--and having this horrible realization of, "Oh no, this is incel music, isn't it? :c"
I never had that confirmed, mind you. Maybe I'm wrong! I hope I'm wrong! Their earlier works (The Days of Grays is the last album of theirs we own and, like, paid attention to) are brilliant, and I'd really like to be able to listen to them again without that cloud hanging over them. But like... "Letter to Dana" is never going to be okay, is it?
On a more positive note, before that realization happened, Silence was one of my favorite early power metal albums because it's just musically amazing. I even inserted a reference to it in perhaps the first-ever "serious" commission of Sara, back when she was still a character, but one I was starting to see as more than just for porn. She had a Sonata Arctica poster on her bedroom wall, you see. (Yes, I know, it's a poster for Ecliptica, not Silence. Shush.)
"San Sebastian" (off Silence, so there) is a song about having a passionate if brief fling with someone way out of the subject's league/somehow not viable long-term for some unspecified reason, then both parties settling down with other partners later. The subject's new partner is fine and all but... it's hard not to look back. I mention this because that whole idea was a big, if unofficial and uncredited, inspiration for some early stories I wrote about Sara and myself. The stories focused on when we (We? They? Neither of us are really those characters anymore) were angsting over whether to pursue a budding relationship, if the hurdle of it being incest and all could be overcome if we tried, and if either party would have San Sebastian-like regrets later if we didn't. Good stories at the time, but now Sara is alive, I'm a girl, and we each changed species twice, so like, I wouldn't recommend going back to them. Not exactly "canon" anymore, you know? But hey, we did end up together in the end, even if not how younger author me imagined we would.
This album did come back in a big way after Sara's awakening, though. There was that... incident with another of Silence's tracks ("Last Drop Falls,") which was one of the earliest "signs" from her and one of the earliest and also biggest breakthroughs in our the current iteration of our relationship. I wrote about all that in the Astral Stuff filter, but that was a while ago. But... you know... that thing. That happened. (Let me know if you don't have access to that filter and want to, by the way, though we haven't used it much recently. It was mostly a place to talk about our plurality before we were open to everyone about it, and now that we are we just kind of do our talking on main instead. Still, there's some good stuff from back when we were figuring ourselves and each other out and getting started with all this.) This is a cross-posted entry that originated from https://kjorteo.dreamwidth.org/469276.html. Please leave all comments there; I am no longer actively maintaining my LiveJournal blogs.