Don't Panic (OK Maybe Panic a Little)

Jessica, she/they, 27 A simple trans woman trying to thrive in the belly of the imperial beast The Horrors Persist But So Do We

[j3553x3]

thinking about how the backrooms went from a post on 4chan, a site pretty much dedicated to misogynist radicalization, to a big screen story about male loneliness.

Clark started as a regular guy, but he literally turned into a monster by the end. the same type of cycles we see in the alt right pipeline map onto the cycles of hurt and hurting that Clark experiences in his decline. he falls deeper and deeper into a fascinating maze as it slowly morphs into something that only twistedly resembles the original. he's following the American dream. It's a false promise that slowly corrupts him and turns him into an agent of his own destruction. He is already a ways into his decline by the start of the movie.

[j3553x3]

the real villain in Backrooms was white women and capitalism

[earthyleo]

Clark is the best written character i've seen in a movie in the last years, the fact that people would rather pay attention to the white blonde non-character, rather than Clark, is so unfair and kinda racist. Chiwetel Ejiofor played his character perfectly, in my opinion he deserves an oscar nomination for that role!

[j3553x3]

i see lots of siding with Mary and Clark's wife and just straight up calling Clark a "bad guy" or the villain. I think this is overly simplistic and also stripping those women of their complexity. Both women are active participants, displacing their unprocessed trauma/grief/dreams onto a black man

by financially and materially using him. we don't know the history with Clark's wife, but he has obviously sacrificed to help her. Mary is clearly a vain hack, staying up late to watch her own commercials for her probably unsubstantiated theory of healing based around a trite metaphor for her own unprocessed grief (I have the same aversion to hokey therapists peddling tapes that some of y'all seem to have for black men). neither woman is doing anything (effective) we can see to support Clark, and is actively taking from him. All of this is against a backdrop of American capitalism, an impossible situation on its own, especially for a back man. He's left with nothing but his base emotions and broken dreams. they strip mined his body and mind, and he fell into that pit, directly into the Backrooms.

i found Clark deeply sympathetic. was he questionable at the beginning? yes, being around angry people is hard and sometimes triggering or traumatizing. does that make him inherently a bad person? absolutely fucking not! He was busting his back working and going to therapy to support his wife's dream. once you start falling, it's hard to stop. he broke, and continued pursuing escapism until he literally fell into his own mind. the backrooms themselves are a progression of his drinking and sleeping at the store. he embraced the shadow of himself, and created a shadow life, grasping for any sense of control or efficacy. I don't think the redhead still life was supposed to be his wife, but just a random entity he imprinted on bc of familiarity (yes she ran from the Clark entity, but she was shown to be active before).

Is Clark blameless? absolutely not. he is of course complicit in the patriarchy, but that is mediated by his race. He is responsible for any abuse he may have done, but the worst we know of pre-backrooms is yelling and maybe throwing a glass? He is a human being who made decisions and promises, and is responsible for those consequences. he blinked, and found the life he has been building to be a hell of his own making. this version of the backrooms seems to also be a creation of his own pysche. But Clark is also being acted on by outside forces- an extractive marriage, a hack therapist, and an economic system that would rather see him locked away. and while many men are broken by this and end up locked away in prison, Clark instead finds himself in the solitary confinement of his own mind, which becomes yet another wing of the Backrooms.

all of this really applies to pre -backrooms Clark. by the time we get to his "house", he's completely snapped and doing things that are undeniably sick and twisted. if he wasnt being acted on by the maddening, supernatural backrooms complex, I don't think he would ever be driven to that level of violence. If anything that makes him more tragic, because he never gets a chance to heal.

tldr: the real villain was white women and capitalism

[were--ralph]

i tune out for one day and what the fuck is this

[were--ralph]

i thought maybe it was shitpost but no

[ralfmaximus]

He's turning The People's House into Six Flags Over Washington

[perpetual-laowai]

I guarantee that this is being built in a rush by non-union labor, so we have a real opportunity for a Final Destination scenario here.

[were--ralph]

like to charge reblog to cast

[cartoonrival]

im completely addicted to Open Link in New Tab

[cartoonrival]

if Open Link in New Tab is wrong then baby i dont want to be right

[puppygirldick]

Viktor Lyapkalo Artwork: 'Blowing bubbles' & 'Evening' Painted 9 years apart.

Same woman

[infantisimo]

the will is weak the flesh also is weak and me i am not doing too good either

[covid-safer-hotties]

[thespacesay]

ID: the trolley problem image with text reading the following. You can pull the lever, but to do so you must wear a mask at the grocery store. End ID

[just-deer-things]

what a beautiful time of year everyone is growing veegtables for me spacifically, one problem though you need to make fences shorter im sure its a mistake but i cant reach some of them

[just-deer-things]

hello imptortant message from deer youyr doing it agen. i cant eet the vegbals you are growing for me like this

[kuylar]

robotgirl with a scraped off company logo

[kosmogrl]

this is so cool!!

[kosmogrl]

[bordeauxlips]

[inkskinned]

oh, i am finally old enough to know why my parents took so long to grab their coats. why they would ask us to get ready to go only to sit down for another round of coffee. what would i tell myself, at 10 years old? it’s okay. sit down with them too. take in the extra hour with your friend and her family. when you get home, write down every moment in your diary. one day you will be older and you will be waving goodbye to your best friend, and you will turn the key to start your beat up little car engine, and you will look back over your shoulder. her hair will be blowing in the wind and she will be beautiful and you will be, for a moment, struck by all of it. what you will feel is so wide and nameless that it will engulf you. and you will think of being 14 and kicking her under the table in math every time you wanted to whisper something behind the teacher’s back. you will think about how long the days felt, and how you could hold her hand whenever you wished, but you didn’t. and you will think about all of the people you could have lingered with. and you will wish, more than you have ever felt a wish, that the universe just gave you that - more time to linger. more time to say - i love you. i know i need to leave, but i don’t want to leave you. and when i go, i am leaving a piece of my heart that lingers too. 

one more round of coffee. the days are so short, and you are so lovely.

[lunamonchtuna]

— Mikko Harvey, from For M (via lunamonchtuna)

[feaftlikeabeaft]

I wish depression were an emergency. I wish someone could take one look at how sick I am and go “oh my god, we need to get you to a hospital!” and then when we get there I get rushed into surgery and the surgeons say “it’s a good thing you brought her here when you did, this is a seriously advanced case” and then they put me under and spend the next ten hours pulling metres of long, sticky black strands of gunk out of my body, throwing it immediately into an incinerator so that it can’t infect anyone else. And then they could stitch me back up and I could rest a few days, and when I leave the hospital everyone can see how much better I am and they congratulate me saying “well done, you’ve been so brave, I’m so glad you’re ok. I love you.”

[shouty-y]

Lesbian knights ⚔️ - Prints

[memories-of-ancients]

Drinking horn with gilded copper mounts, Europe, 15th century

from The Hunt Museum, Limerick

[tarvek-sturmvoraus]

[localxenospores]

i was compelled

[beastoftheblackhole]

I was also compelled

[thememedaddy]

[gaycop]

STOP SANITIZING THE INTERNET