Tori Amos/YMMV

• Acceptable Targets - She claims her favorite pastime is "shocking the Christians".
• Alternative Character Interpretation - She is either a goddess or boring, pretentious, crappy at covering songs, and/or a Kate Bush rip-off.
  • Tori herself has acknowledged that she is an acquired taste.
  • Most people thought that "Ireland" was either a good song, or her worst song ever.
• Archive Panic - While 11 studio albums may not seem much, they're often over 70 minutes. Also, she has over 30 official bootlegs, and lots and lots of b-sides and covers. Good luck.
• Awesome Music - The long 'girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl' in live performances of "Precious Things".
  • Toriphiles & ex-Toriphiles can agree that her first five albums & Scarlet's Walk fall under this trope. A devoted Toriphile would say that virtually everything she has done is this.
• Broken Base - Tori's fanbase can be summed up as 1/2 devoted fans and 1/2 ex-fans who complain too much that Tori's not making depressing piano music anymore. That's just touching the surface.
  • Slightly below that surface you'll find the rather infamous theory that the only remedy for Tori's decline would involve her daughter and bin liners...
• Crazy Awesome - She's quite awesome, and quite mad, and these are codependent traits; She dresses up as different personas and plays two pianos while straddling the bench. She speaks of fairies and making love to 'the Wolf' in interviews. Delirium of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman is partially based on her in later volumes, though in the beginning she just happened to resemble the Anthropomorphic Personification of Crazy Awesome.
  • In fact, 'Brief Lives is even better if you read it as Neil and Tori going on a roadtrip to find Brian Blessed, which is in itself Crazy Awesome.
  • Of course, anyone who writes a song like "Happy Phantom" would HAVE to be Crazy Awesome!
  • Let's not forget that she named a song "The Power of Orange Knickers"!
• Critical Backlash & Critical Dissonance - Boys for Pele was panned by critics, but it's considered one of her best albums by her fans.
• Darker and Edgier: Many of the songs on "Strange Little Girls" are darker and more troubling than the originals. Notable examples include "Raining Blood" and "Bonnie and Clyde '97", which freaked out the original performers.
• Ear Worm - Toriphiles tend to get a lot of her songs stuck in their heads.
• Epic Riff - "Professional Widow" (harpsichord), and "Precious Things" (piano).
• Fan Dumb - Look at the comments of a popular Youtube video of Tori from 2007 onwards. People tend to rant about how she supposedly got plastic surgery, instead of writing about the video itself.
• Fanon Discontinuity - Subverted. Instead of refusing to acknowledge the albums that they hate, ex-Toriphiles will bash them. Although it seems to be played straight with Strange Little Girls, even with Tori herself. On her 2009 tour, she only performed material from this album twice.
• First Installment Wins - Little Earthquakes, and to a lesser extent, Under the Pink.
• Funny Moments - Now has its own page.
• Hate Dumb - Some people refuse to believe that an eccentric piano-playing musician with a vagina isn't a rip-off of the aforementioned Kate Bush.
• Les Yay - "Raspberry Swirl".
• Misattributed Song - No, "Kissing in the Rain" on the soundtrack for Great Expectations is neither written nor sung by Tori, though she did contribute to other songs in the film. This track is written by Patrick Doyle with vocals by Miriam Stockley.
• Moment of Awesome - Now has its own page.
• Nightmare Fuel
  • Me and a Gun. Also her song "Juarez" is already eerie, but it becomes this when you find out it's based on the violent homicides of hundreds of women in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico. It's kinda difficult to listen to it now.
  • The dreadful implications of one simple line from Juarez:

No angel came

• • Let's not forget her insanely creepy version of "Raining Blood".
    • Even Slayer was creeped out by it.
  • Amos' '97 Bonnie and Clyde needs its own entry. It's bad enough when Eminem does it, but Tori actually puts it to what sounds like a horror film theme. Then consider the lyrics in general: "Where's Mama? She's takin' a little nap in the trunk. Oh, that smell? Da-da musta runned over a skunk."
    • Tori sounds like a psychopath. It is said that she takes the perspective of the dead wife.
  • At one of Tori's concerts, a fan had an emotional breakdown. She was brought backstage.

I just said, "So what's going on with you?" And she said, "I want to come and join the tour." I said, "What's so bad that you want to do that, like now?" And she said, "Because my stepfather raped me last night. He'll rape me tomorrow night, and he's going to rape me tonight when I get home."

• Squick - What some people think her song "Raspberry Swirl" is about: having sex with a woman on her period. The "raspberry swirl" is a mixture of menstrual blood and semen.
  • Actually Tori said the song is about how she's always got her friend's although her being Tori she probably invoked such imagery on purpose.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel - Under the Pink is considered by some to be a vastly superior effort than Little Earthquakes.
  • On the other hand, if you count Y Kant Tori Read as her solo debut, then Little Earthquakes, is much better.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks - What a lot of her fans think of her last four albums, which drift away from her piano-based sound (except for the most recent one). While Midwinter Graces is her most piano-based album in years, there are some who hate it (because it's a solstice album, and not another angry piano album).
  • It's been joked amongst some fans that the quality of her music is directly tied to how angry Tori is, leading to some to darklishly joke that Tori won't make a good new album until she gets divorced or she loses Tash.
• True Art Is Incomprehensible - Most of her lyrics are very hard to decipher.
• Win Back the Crowd: With Night of Hunters. She managed to unbreak some of her Broken Base and most of the unpleasable fans are enchanted by the album, with some naming it as one of her best albums ever.