#root creep

To start things off, I believe that the mutated residents of apartment 16 were part of a gardening club that just happened to meet the morning all this started happening! A collection of people from different walks of life who shared a passion for botany, meeting up to show off their favorite (and in a few cases, quite exotic) plants!

A trickier matter to explain is the how of their mutations! A fairly large the elephant in the room is that there are NO WINDOWS on F1, and thus no easy way for anyone in apartment 16 to have looked outside! The easier answer is simply that they looked outside before F1 became an endless labyrinth with no windows, and in fact they would have had to in order to make sure their plants are getting adequate light.

Personally, however, I like to think that everyone got exposed in the early morning hours JUST as the Visitor’s effects began, while its influence was at its weakest. Delaying the onset of the changes until everyone had moved their plants into the apartment for their meetup.

With the basics out of the way: I think it’s a clean 50/50 on whether or not any individual we’re looking at in here is a human mutant fused with a plant, or a plant mutant puppeting human remains.

The Skull Flower and Ribcage Bloom are two examples where the plant is definitely the witness to the Visitor as opposed to a human!

One of the Skull Flower’s attacks is spitting hard seeds at you, which is likely how it creates more Skull Flowers! The bullet-like projectile acts as a means of getting the seed into the skin, where it then germinates.

It would also explain WHY all the plants are so hostile: you and your party are potential fertilizer.

Plants being affected by the Visitor despite their lack of eyes is really cool, and there is precedent for it with Sam’s houseplant (assuming you move it into the light)!

My understanding of this process is that the Visitor's changes are brought on by perceiving it, and thus being perceived by it, right? Well! Plants don't have traditional eyes, but they can tell whether they're in light or not! Is that not, in its own way, a form of perception? An awareness of a thing, even if a plant knows nothing more than that there is a thing?

I suppose that’s all the Visitor’s influence needs.

Moss Freak is another likely pure-plant mutant! Despite being human shaped and possessing bones, the lack of flesh and the fact that it’s face is merely an approximation of what a human face should look like makes me think this is more mimicry of human features than an actual resemblance.

Moss using a sketal frame as a mimic also ties into its battle strategy! You approach the smiling, waving plant man, and BAM: two more reveal themselves from within! It’s not just an ambush… it’s an ambush!

Root Creep is a bit of a gray area. Is it a human twisted into the shape of a plant, or a plant growing through a human body? I could see it being argued either way.

I think I lean slightly more towards Root Creep being a plant using a human body as a sort of ‘pot’. Mostly due to how the roots are just bursting out of this poor (hopefully dead) guy’s head.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to comment on just how gnarly Root Creep’s eyeball stamens are.

Grass Creep, Seed Creep, and Great Flower are where we get into what are more overly human-turned-plants!

They possess very human shapes and features, invoking the imagery of a human body being stretched and warped and folded into plant-like biology to match the greenery they’re not fused with.

Just look at Great Flower! That is a human head stretched into the shape of a corpse flower. Marvelously fucked up. This is the sort of thing the Visitor does to humans all the time, and the screaming face makes it clear that even if there’s no human consciousness anymore, a human was definitely used as a part in the creation of this monstrosity.

I like to think that Grass Creep was a crotchety older gardener. Suffered from joint problems only made worse by their transformation, resulting in their uniquely rooted state. They were very glad to find that their body no longer hurt to move, even if it stopped moving altogether.

Seed Freak gives the vibe of (at lest two) siblings fused together! Maybe they weren’t even in the gardening club, they just live elsewhere in the apparent. Happened to be passing by and figured they’d offer help with carrying one gardener’s heavy potted cactus into the building. Only to find that they started merging with it when they go to set it down.

Lastly and not leastly, we have Crimson Bloom!

They seem to have made a lair for themself in the bathroom, with lots of of skulls decorating the interior as well as the entrance. Fashionable!

Equally fashionable are the swarms of flies clogging the air around them. It makes sense: a rafflesia (the plant Crimson Bloom seems to have fused with) stinks like rotten mean with the explicit purpose of attracting carrion flies. To eat? No! The flies are the rafflesia’s helpful pollinators! While they’d be irritating to the average human, I’m sure Crimson Bloom is having the time of their life surrounded by their swarming friends!

Both Great Flower (corpse flower) and Crimson Blossom (rafflesia) are fused with exceptionally uncommon plants, so my assumption is that they were both the heads of this gardening society. Founders and organizers, now fused with their prides and joys.

For that matter, they’re still doing their best to make sure their precious plants are cared for. There’s no windows in apartment 16, remember. And plants do, historically, need sunlight to live. But without sunlight, other sources of nutrients will have to do… hence all the skulls.

Apartment 16 sure has a lot of skulls, huh?? Like, it’s a LOT of skulls! A frankly unreasonable number of skulls. Wow. One has to wonder how.

I do have a theory on that: the ambient noise!

Apartment 16 sounds like a busy swamp, with all sorts of noisy insects (and frogs??) creating a jungle-like atmosphere.

Consider where you find apartment 16. In the middle of a literally endless maze of rooms. So if you're lost and being chased by, hypothetically, a massive mass of rats that stalks the outer halls? Yeah, you're gonna try and get out of there.

I think it’s fairly likely that people think that apartment 16 leads outside, and all of those skulls are the remains of people who ducked inside hoping to escape the Rat King or to find a way out of the maze.