Sapphire Sapphics

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🦋Arcane: Season 1 + 2

🎪The Amazing Digital Circus

🚪The Backrooms

Normally I wouldn’t care. If you don’t like how something ended, then make fan fiction. That’s what it’s there for. Have fun. Etc…

But what’s bugging me is that Jax’s abstraction and abuse and self loathing and downward spiral is something that is deeply personal to Gooseworx. A trans person.

Goose wrote Jax to be a sort of self insert of what could’ve happened had she not gotten the help she needed and so much of the way Jax behaves is all of the negative dirty gross aspects of being a super repressed trans person. It’s deeply connected to struggles that real trans people go through every day and seeing it play out is important for trans representation.

So whenever I see someone say they’re gonna rewrite the ending because they didn’t “vibe” with it, I feel like they’re actually trying to rewrite and erase a deeply personal trans story by a trans creator.

Found footage 1 begins with a bunch of teenagers filming a monster movie. It starts with a guy in a mask shambling towards the camera and clawing at someone around the corner. This is a direct parallel to the way the monsters in the backrooms behave, especially Pirate Clark who is seen groping futilely at Mary in the narrow passageway at the end of the film.

Pirate Clark in particular has a terrified shocked expression on his face. But while he is scary and extremely dangerous, in that hallway passage he is almost sad and pitiful. This closely mirrors the Rolling Giant from Kane’s other series The Oldest View, where the giant is seen as a threat but once you learn more about the history of the giant you start to feel sad and sympathetic towards it.

Speaking of the Oldest View, there are multiple musical motifs and references to that series in the movie. Several musical tracks play out during creepy moments. The mall’s ambient music plays in Clark’s abandoned store. And the stairway that Mary has to traverse over the pit is very reminiscent of the stairway Wyatt climbs down in the Oldest View. It’s even complete with a hole in the ceiling as if the stairs were meant to continue upwards beyond that point.

Memory, and being forgotten play a huge role in the movie. Seeing Clark’s store in its entirety in the backrooms is highly reminiscent of the Texas Mall that was buried below the ground in The Oldest View. Likewise the leaves at the beginning of the film in the found footage portion remind me of the leaves you see outside one of the mall’s storefronts in the Oldest View.

The musical choice for the end credits of The Backrooms is ominous. If you listen to it, it’s a sort of techno track that describes the way a fetus evolves in the womb, starting at cell division and working its way up to a pumping heart. If we tie this song in to the Backrooms as a concept that seems to imply a lot of these misremembered rooms dividing themselves apart and reiterating on themselves is like the cells of an organism. The people and entities running through could be like blood or neural pathways. Does that mean that the Backrooms is gradually growing up and becoming a fully fleshed out creature? Is that why it started off so bland but it’s becoming more and more complex to the point that it’s starting to copy people?

I really love the themes of memory playing a role in how the Backrooms operates. With the MRI tech of Asynch, it’s almost like they accidentally gave the Backrooms the ability to scan people and places in slices and recreate them. That might also explain why certain rooms have furniture and geometry that seem to cut through other rooms and walls so much. It’s remembering new slices and overlaying them in top of one another.

Absolutely LOVE that shot of Mary’s childhood room being misremembered more and more, gradually losing detail, until it’s just a blank empty room with a crack. But then even that crack starts to get misremembered and it turns into a doorway.

BITCH, we aren’t talking about how YOU would’ve done it. We are discussing how THEY did it. It’s THEIR creative project, so it’s much more interesting to dissect the how and why THEY chose to go in the direction they did. Doing so offers you insight into the mind of the creator and the message they’re trying to convey.

“I would’ve made the characters do this”

Cool… but you’re not in charge. The characters DIDN’T do that. So instead of critiquing a hypothetical story you didn’t get, how about we instead focus on what we DID get and discuss what that creative decision MEANS.

If the characters didn’t do a certain thing, what does that say about the characters and more importantly what does are the creators trying to say through their characters actions/inactions?