i guess follow me @bethposting on bsky or pillowfort


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bethposting

bugholdersepiphany
@bugholdersepiphany

Okay so I've been thinking about this for the past couple of weeks especially as I meticulously plan out and work on my own backrooms-inspired thing that'll tell the story of the supernatural, abandoned government contractors, exploitation of innocent people and the careless abandon given to prisoners, and in the midst of doing that I opted to look into how backrooms content is as a whole and my god is it just

bad.

My points aren't coherent I admit goes everywhere here and I made it while dealing with a headache, a stomach ache, and with no pre-thought-out plan other than "A rant on the backrooms" and my problems i've had with it. It's not organized but whatever

okay so for some people on here who use youtube and browse horror stories often, they should know what the Backrooms are but for those who don't it was a spooky thing of internet media that started on 4chan after someone posted this to one of the boards:

It's a simple yet horrifying concept, reminiscent of classic video game stories where you get out of bounds and enter a place you're not supposed to be in, applied to real life. The idea of being in a endless maze of nothing but you, yourself, and the distant hums of the lights above you. Oh, and the implication that there's something else in there with you.

I fucking love this concept, especially after having grown up enjoying the idea of game glitches and stuff.

At first it wasn't too bad, with people contributing by making up multiple different areas of The Backrooms-- although in hindsight this could've been what led to a lot of the problems it has now.

Ya had shit like the pool rooms...

... people taking liminal places like this and making them into backrooms places...

and cool things like that. It especially took off after Kane Pixels, a 17(!!!) year old dude decided on a whim that he'll make some backrooms content and basically made the best shit starting with this and it's own series involving the horrors done by people to exploit the backrooms and that within it.

So what's the problem?

Sigh

Well as is the norm with the internet, it becomes popular and everyone learns about it. If you've been on the internet long enough, you know how this tends to go. While there were some good things to come out of it, you got... Many horrible things. People taking the concept and throwing whatever at it.

Like slides, seriously, there are so many fucking videos that have people just, going inside slides, and I'm sorry but when I see a fucking yellow suited guy (that im also pretty sure was just taken from Kane Pixels videos, everyone latched onto them and everyone's using them instead of being even a little bit derivative) going into a slide, horror is the last thing on my mind. Especially when half the videos I've seen of them include either bad camera shit with the screen shaking, annoying goddamn audio, and oftentimes just lame attempts at scares and, oftentimes, the fucking unity default skybox.

Then you have apparent machines in the backrooms, like it's a goddamn cartoon trap factory where you'd have stuff like "SPIN THE WHEEL TO WIN" where you press a button and a wall spins and you either get another backrooms place or death, random signs everywhere that are "apparently" placed by the backrooms being a fucking trickster, and did I mention there are a lot of apparent fucking slides?

Oh and don't get me started on the monsters. Such highlights include... Spindly Johnny...

Okay he doesn't actually have a name and all things considered I don't have too much of a problem with him since he was used pretty well in the Kane Pixels things, not to mention it fit the bill of "something else in there with you".

Do wish it was more than a badly drawn stick figure though but whatever. It's fine.

BUT THEN YOU HAVE THIS SHIT

The... Bone thief.

Okay i don't want this to come off as me like, dissing people for making content, i don't mind, hell i like seeing people make things but. I just don't like this thing. It looks... not scary. And also got yassified into just being a fucking yellow cone with eyes in it by everyone else. Because of course.

Then you have 'Smilers' and i just

ITS JUST A FUCKING FACE THATS ALL IT IS

im sorry i just see it and i can't take it seriously

SO why do i bring these three up? Because apparently aside from the occasional other monster that I rarely see brought up (I think I've only seen one other fr), these are the most common monsters people have in The Backrooms.

I'm sorry. I just, don't get it. People have latched onto these and they're just... not scary at all, to me.

But then there's the problem I have with how people protray the backrooms itself. This malvolent fucking hellhole that'll constantly bring you to various traps and dangers where the walls will change and crush you, you'll get dropped into death pits and crushers and taken to rooms where a bunch of fucking Spindly Johnnies or Bone thieves or whatever the fuck are.

As a whole my problem is that people are utilizing the Backrooms in a weird and frustrating way that takes away from what should be the whole horror of the place. I mean for fucks sake you had people saying "TO SURVIVE YOU GOTTA DRINK ALMOND WATER" and not to mention you also had like, people organizing it methodically, like it's an SCP thing.

My problem is that it shouldn't be a place of logic where you can map it out easily, where you can label each place as a level, where you can make sense of a map, where you can easily assign a name that everyone can use for a monster.

I don't like the categorization of it being individual levels and how apparently you can meet an evil smile ghost or bone stealing mofo after riding a minecart or something.

What I'm basically saying is that the power of the backrooms should be a terrifying location but that's it. It makes no sense to be in. You shouldn't be here. But it's not malevolent. The horror comes from how little explaination there is to me. How you can enter it just by being unlucky, how you're forced to traverse it until the end of time or until you get lucky.

I think that's my main problem honestly now that I'm thinking about it: The horror of the backrooms and what it could mean if applied to reality, and the stories that can be told with them, are not being fully realized by a lot of people.

Kane Pixel's stuff has the spooky backrooms stuff, yeah, but there's also the horror in what people do to access the backrooms, what they want to exploit it for, and the costs of that, especially the human cost and the deaths and horrors involved with conspiracy stuff.

tl;dr: The Backrooms should embrace the mysteriousness and bizarreness of it, but also should be used to augment the stories told. It shouldn't just be weird monsters, it should be unexplainable. It should be incoherent. It should embrace the madness. I want madness. I want that feeling you get when you're a little kid lost in a mall, no where to go, I want that fear of being lost. I want that fear of something unexplainable.


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

This is just the outcome of the fannish obsession with Lore, which is completely at odds with horror. The backrooms as a creepypasta concept is cosmic horror: What if the universe just had a fucking backlot you could accidentally fall into with no way back? Why does it look like a disused hotel? What else is there? Is there anything there? The universe just broke for you and it's going to kill you not out of any malevolent intent or anything but because it doesn't care. It's not something you can weigh or measure. It's vacuum collapse but for you, personally, in short story form.

Cosmic horror breaks down if you can measure it, if you can impose Science and human understanding on it. A big part of the horror of the SCP Foundation was the Foundation itself and its futile attempts to control the universe, to explain away the inexplicable and put it in a box. The Backrooms gets it worse because there's not even a way to keep it horrifying on a human level: Even in boring fucking SCPs that are all Scranton Boxes and technobabble explaining exactly how the wonder was drained from whatever horror the document describes, the Foundation itself becomes even more horrific, fascism imposing itself not just on us but on everything that exists and everything that doesn't exist, shouldn't exist, can't exist. There's nothing like that in the Backrooms, they're just a fucked up place that isn't a place and as soon as you explain it away it might as well be the Midwest. Cataloguing levels and filling them full of categorized monsters just makes it seem like a bad video game.

That's lore in a nutshell, right? We can't just have a story, it must be Explained and Explainable. It has to be able to boiled down to a list of facts that people can memorize because a story can't just be a story. Wonder is no good, we can't turn that into a monetizable franchise!

And this is the current state of western liberal ideology and Science-as-religion and the way it kills stories: Everything must be explained, everything must be put in a box, everything can and must be conquered and made mundane and turned into a properly monetizable Property. All those Backrooms videos are like shitty Instagram videos of rich shitheads who go to Hawaii and take selfies of themselves standing on stolen and poisoned land, or Darth Vader Vadering around Disneyland shaking hands and taking photos with every random person who dropped a grand to be there. There's nothing horrific about that except for capitalism itself, which is not the fun kind of horror.


exerian
@exerian

have been to the midwest. can confirm. it's just the backrooms.


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in reply to @bugholdersepiphany's post:

Yeah. I try to ignore the broader "Backrooms Wiki" stuff as much as possible, and when I do read it, I kinda have to just embrace the absurdism. I made a post about it a little while back, and I just try to not let it annoy me because it's the same crop of people who would have made The Killer OCs in the creepypasta days. It will pass, hopefully the good stuff will rise to the top (as it broadly seems to, with Kane Pixels), and in 5-10 years we'll all cringe at the dumb levels we made up.

i tend to think of these kinds of random neat mystery-driven concepts as having a finite, very easy to accidentally deplete amount of fissile horror material and yeah, once they become Property Of The Internet it's a matter of days before some really amateur stuff just goes there and kills it. hadn't seen the Kane Pixels video before, it does a fine job of going right up to the mystery line and toying with it without overstepping.

and yeah the grammar and market-driven thinking of mainstream game design is just absolute cryptonite for these concepts, and it is definitely a travesty seeing gunplay in them.

I'd actually go a step further and say that even "the implication that there's something else in there with you" is already a move in the wrong direction from what actually makes the backrooms frightening -- being lost in an endless maze with no way out and no way to get food or water.

People don't understand how terrifying environments are when they aren't specifically designed to sustain life

in reply to @DecayWTF's post:

The best use of the Backrooms for a game was when Puppet Combo made a short game they didn't care for and it was just "someone fell in on their way home and they went mad after finally finding someone, only for some other guy to kill them to eat their body and drink their blood. So you kill them to eat them and drink their blood and went mad in the process."

Also the midwest is terrifying with it's vast nothingness and inconvenience

The lore thing is pretty much why I lost interest in Blaseball - it was a very cool experience when we were collectively observing the simulation and trying to make sense of it, but seeing the same 3 or 4 people in a discord actively working to crank out lore for new team members like they were checking items off a list, giving it all the same flavour, really soured me on the whole thing.