is that it has to perfectly occupy the space in between “earnestly trying to make weird and cool music about wizards or another world or whatever” and “trying too hard to do those things” to be great, and it is REALLY easy to fuck up
don’t try enough and it’s just like… okay man. try too hard and you get like 80% of the genre output
but when it pays off, you get to have a singer scream a line like “CALL THE NAMES OF ALL THAT WE’VE LOST” in the last song of a 6-song 45-minute album and it hits so good
