hiii!!! my name is dominic, i use she/they, and i analyze media and write fanfic.
my requests are always open!! i can write for a ton of fandoms and i’m always down to do some research if i’m not familiar. i love to write so it’s good practice. my faves at the moment are mha, creepypasta, and utmv.
my spacehey and ao3 are under the same handle as my tumblr, pinkpxtches, so don’t be afraid to come say hi!!! i’ll definitely be uploading some OC stuff onto ao3 soon, so stay tuned for that!
thoughts on movies/tv shows/books: #minnie's notes app ✮⋆˙
i really love the motif of windows in Backrooms. mary’s book being called “the window within”. the curtains in her office always being drawn. the shot of her behind glass in her own home during the gathering at her house. clark looking through the window into his own house. him being unable to see kat through the glass she can see him through. the window in mary’s mother’s house. the windows in the hospital her mother is brought to that only look out to another building. the drawing that mary finds of captain clark reaching someone up towards a window. the fale window in clark’s “home” in the backrooms that just looks out to more of the same empty space. the window in the interrogation room that’s too high to see out of (and thus to determine if it’s real). the fact that the backrooms lacks any windows to a true “outside space”, and how terrifying that makes it. there is no window within. or, at least, not one that any of them can find
literally though if you feel like your life is slipping through your fingers and every day goes too fast… try doing hard things, not just taking the easy route, like reading and making art and exercising and cooking a meal from scratch and journaling, doing these things without distraction, without being absorbed on a screen… the time will stretch and you’ll be reminded that life is long and beautiful if you make it so.
another backrooms parallel i really like is how clark’s furniture store being a rip-off of another furniture store (i forgot the name but ykwim) is like how the backrooms is a rip-off of people’s memories. it’s fake, it’s wrong, and it’s so obviously a mockery of something solid and real. this is especially clear when clark’s insistence on refusing to change gets him eaten alive by the mascot that he ripped off of someone else. clark’s still life looks like clark if you squint and tilt your head, just like all the still lives (and the entire structure of the backrooms) look like something else through the faded lens of memory, but they are decidedly working against the real thing. clark is profiting off of another person’s business, he’s luring people in (not maliciously, but still definitely shadily) under the guise of looking like something familiar, just like the backrooms brought him comfort by bringing him back to a part of his life that he can’t let go of. just like he would have to change himself in order to escape the backrooms, or the cycle of traume he’s caught up in, he would have to overhaul his entire store in order to make it his own.
another thing is both the backrooms and cap’n clark’s are both bad rip-offs. they’re obvious, and it’s pointed out by multiple people. just like cap’n clark’s is a bland, tasteless imitation of the other furniture store, the backrooms is a soulless mimicry of real life settings that used to have feeling and emotion attached, with the only real appeal of them (and any other liminal space) being the nostalgia attached to it. but nostalgia is a perishable good, which ends up with cap’n clark’s being a failing business and the backrooms being an endless loop, both requiring it’s tenants to keep digging and digging, searching for another hit of the feeling instead of moving on and looking for something different. it’s easier to keep walking through the endless maze rather than to turn around and accept how lost you are, it’s easier to sleep inside of your unoriginal, failing business rather than to go home and apologize, and it’s easier to place blame on others rather than to take responsibility and change.
LOVEEEE wish!nikki being faceless. her face being backlit or her entire body being shadowed in darkness. wearing clothes that are completely removed from her style before the wish. having a higher pitched voice than she did before. not being able to smile the same. it’s not just that nikki’s face hidden in shadow, everything that made her HER has also been covered up with something else. wish!nikki doesn’t have a face of her own, she just has what bear wants projected onto her.
when we’re with clark as he travels through the backrooms, the camera angles feel claustrophobic. there are a lot of tight shots of his face, and POV shots than any other character.
when we’re travelling with mary, the shots are agoraphobic. she’s out of her depth, and it gives you such a wide pan of the backrooms that you instinctively search every corner of the camera for Something.
clark feels trapped in his life. he works a dead end job, he’s been kicked out of his house, and overall feels very defeated. the camera angles reflect that, clark is afraid of being trapped.
mary, on the other hand, is still struggling with her mother’s agoraphobia. while she doesn’t have any massive indicators that she too has it, as the movie progresses and she starts dwelling on the trauma of her mother’s abuse more and more, she almost uses her mother’s fear as a way to cope with the backrooms.
i think this may also be connected to that first therapy scene we see, where we’re immediately introduced to the theme of the movie; in order to change your life, you need to change. if you don’t change your own behavior, you’ll be stuck in the cycle forever. we’re also shown two contrasting shots of mary and clark; mary with her back to a closed window, and clark with his back to an open one. this reflects their claustrophobic and agoraphobic parallels, but it also parallels the final shot of the movie, where mary is the one with her back to an open window. before each character gets sucked into the backrooms, they turn their back on the window. they turn their back on any hope of changing, and instead decide to stay stagnant. they can question people (phil or mary), they can complain, they can mourn, but if they refuse to exit the window, they will be trapped in the loop forever.
i feel like this connection doesn’t make sense on paper but it lines up in my head idk. a lot of analyzing this movie feels like theres something just beyond my reach that i cant really articulate.
immediately post-viewing, i have a few thoughts about costuming from backrooms 2026.
clark is almost always seen wearing purple, but the shade gets darker as the film progresses. it starts off as a washed-out lilac that blends in with the backrooms color scheme, but in the dinner scene it’s closer to black than purple. purple is the color of royalty, which could be seen as his ego swelling through the movie. in the therapy scene, he’s almost willing to accept his issues with his wife, but the backrooms provides him an almost echochamber type environment where he doesn’t have to acknowledge his shitty behavior. (this is also just a smaller scale of what i believe to be the point of the movie; that dwelling in the past and having nostalgia for moments that were better/worse than you can remember doesn’t help you, it just keeps you in the endless loop (that is the backrooms). in order to escape your behavior, uou need to put the memory to rest (or open the window of your shitty mom’s house), or else the cycle of trauma will consume you. (like it did mary at the end))
mary always wears patterns, but in the final scene when she’s speaking with phil she’s just wearing a blank tank top. it’s like a preamble to her finally blending into the scenery of the backrooms.
in the final scene, phil is wearing a blue shirt and holding a blue folder, the same color as the artificial sky behind mary. it makes him feel just as artificial as the sky backdrop, and it makes me think that it’s an immediate visual indicator that he’s lying about something. maybe async knew that mary would become a still-life, and they were trying to get as much information out of her before she finally melded into the backrooms. maybe he wasn’t going to tell her anything even if she did survive. maybe he’s never been into the backrooms as he claimed, and that’s why he hasn’t molded into it yet, because the same type of person that runs into the backrooms to escape the real world is the type of person to fall victim to it. phil has a family to run to, a family in the blue sky outside the window, one that mary and clark lacked, which is why they ran to nostalgia and memories.
i might be talking out of my ass with this because i saw it three hours ago and its past midnight as im writing this but these are just some surface level observations.
okay consider and imagine aoyama and hagakure being co-workers
ik their manager HATESSS to see these two coming
ik i put aoyama at the MAC counter and hagakure at the claire’s but the only environment i could see them mixing is a makeup store like ulta or sephora.
they walk into work fifteen minutes late every morning without fail
he carpools with her because that french motherfucker CANNOT drive. she drives a cute little vw bug with a my melody steering wheel cover. yuuga takes his aux privileges very seriously. he pays her in starbucks.
hagakure has never once signed someone up for a sephora membership. aoyama has the store record and he does not let her forget it.
i think he usually sticks to the register. he makes all the older women laugh and has reused the ‘mademoisellle, i’m afraid you’ve made a wrong turn! the beauty pagaent is just down the street!’ line atleast twice a week.
yuga also likes psyching out the guys who are obviously there to buy gifts for their girlfriends. he’ll interrogate them about her preferences and look down his nose, regardless of their hight, at them if they dont know whether or not their girlfriend prefers floral or gourmand scents.
hagakure’s favorite customers are the tweens buying essence lip gloss and their first mascaras, because she likes hyping them up. she remembers when she was that age, sans the facial features with which to decorate, but still finds their enthusiasm cute.
they spend their lunch break in her car, and what was once a thirty minute lunch break quickly turns into an hour and a half of gossip.
these two will drag somebody through the mud and beat the hell out of a dead horse and then end the conversation with ‘and that’s none of OUR business’.
as said in the previous post, aoyama will evacuate the premises if he catches even a whiff of someone he knows outside of work walking into the store.
toru, on the other hand, is ecstatic. she’ll sneak her friends employee discounts and walk around like their own personal shopper, giving her honest opinions on all the products. also spends WAYYY too much time talking at the register, her manager will get onto her after her shift but she’ll insist it’s good for customer service. (it’s not.)
when the friend leaves, hagakure has to coax aoyama out of the break room.
they’re SOOOO annoying in the work gc. aoyama complains about the schedule and hagakure uses wayyy too many reaction images.
what real-life j*bs would the mha characters have?
class 1A’s part-time / summer jobs.
aoyama: he works at the MAC beauty counter in your local macy’s. spends half his shift doing his own makeup and will deny it profusely despite walking out of the mall at 8pm with a full beat. has a tendency to slack off, but gives really good makeup advice. hides behind the nearest display and army-crawls away when he sees somebody that he knows.
ashido: employee of the month at build-a-bear. initially wanted to work at victoria’s secret, but the perfumes give her a headache so she went with her second option. gets wayyyy too into the process of stufffing the bears but the kids love it anyway. has them doing burpees and dance interpretations of the car dealership inflatables to bring that stuffed bear to life, and the kids eat it up everytime. has a small, albeit growing, collection of build-a-bear’s at her house because she gets a discount.
asui: i couldn’t see asui working retail, but she is definitely the go-to baby/dog/cat sitter for her neighborhood. she just thinks that kids are cooler than adults. anybody that even mildly insinuates that they may need someone to watch their goldfish (and/or small child) is immediately pointed in the direction of the asui household. she genuinely cannot go to any local playground without getting surrounded by children that revere her.
iida: definitely one of those people to get an internship instead of a job and them never shut the fuck up about it. he interns at a law or accounting firm and go on unprompted tangents about the value of the experience and how good it looks on his resume. has an unbreakable bond with the front desk lady that shoves butterscotch candies into his hand and feeds him all the office gossip.
uraraka: waitress at chili’s. her quirk comes in unexpectedly handy because of the party tricks she does for the kids, which always gets her a good tip from the parents. unfortunately, always gets stuck with the bigger tables because she can carry a lot of plates. can do tricks with her pen and pad and is VERY proud of them. has cute pins on her apron. her favorite coworker is the old guy working at the bar because he gives her shirley temple’s on her lunch break and meanmugs the customers that are rude to her. is the most dedicated during the birthday song.
ojiro: definitely the ‘cool’ counselor at his local summer camp. on top of being just a kind and understanding guy- he makes a killer s’more. will be having a normal conversation with someone while three younger kids are scaling him like a jungle gym. four time gaga ball champion.
kaminari: pizza delivery guy. waze is his best friend, even though he misses one out of every three turns. he drives around an old shitbox his parents bought for his sixteenth birthday- something like a chevy impala or a honda civic that was definitely made before he was born- that he affectionately dubbed ‘janet’. his car permanently smells like ‘eau de pizza’, which is either good or bad depending on your stance on pepperoni. blasts music, so when you order a pizza you’ll probably hear shinso or jiro’s playlist long before you hear the doorbell.
kirishima: hot topic. grew out of his emo phase in body but not in spirit. tokoyami put spikes on his crocs for him and he wears them almost every shift. his coworker did corpse paint on him once and now thats his tiktok icon. has matching skeleanimals bracelets with denki.
koda: has been volunteering at the same animal shelter since the age of eleven, and he’ll be damned if he stops now. doesn’t need to lift weights as much as his peers considering how often he has to lift animals, whether that helping the bigger senior dogs into the bath or the misbehaving ones out of the playpen, he’s always the one that’s called over to lend a hand. likes hanging out with the new litters of puppies or kittens and starfishing in the middle of the floor, both so the animals can be desensitized to larger individuals such as himself and so that he can destress via a kitten (or two) purring on his chest. genuinely treats animal beef like it’s his own personal soap opera. whenever there’s new gossip, he’ll text the group chat a long paragraph about it. mina, denki, and shoji are deeply invested.
sato: his parents own a bakery, so him working there is less so a part-time job and more of a requirement. likes setting up the pretty displays but can’t do any of the labels because he has worse handwriting than his three year old sister. very proud when his baking experiments actually make it onto the menu. gives out wayyy too many free samples.
shoji: works at a starbucks but specifically the one in the barnes and noble. currently holds the record for ‘most frappuccinos made in under sixty seconds’. likes the quiet atmosphere and also is a really big fan of the way coffee smells. cannot spell people’s names correctly for the actual life of him, but makes up for it with little octopus doodles on the cup.
jiro: record store. has a monopoly on the playlist. gives elite music recommendations. has limited herself to one new vinyl per paycheck. spends her break with the shop cat. all of her friends get cd’s for their birthday.
sero: works at an amc theatre. he’s that one video of the guy spinning the popcorn bucket around under the butter dispenser- he has the technique down pat. not a huge cinephile, but likes to watch the new movies as they come out because he hates spoilers. almost got fired when he snuck denki into the booth so that they could watch the minecraft movie tigether while sero was on the clock. gives his friendsbthe employee discount when his manager isn’t looking.
tokoyami: cryptid that works at your local publix. likes zoning out to music while stocking shelves with dark shadow. HATES register duty, if he has to tell one more middle-aged woman to tap her card and not swipe it, (because this register is BROKEN- no, don’t insert it- TAP it. tap-), he’s going to die of old age in his late teens. dark shadow does a startlingly good impression of the ‘insert card to select payment type, or insert cash to complete transaction’ voice. up and down refuses to wear his nametag- insists that it ‘inspires intrigue in onlookers’. to his credit, it does.
todoroki: cryptid that works at your local kroger. it’s across the street from tokoyami’s publix, and the two of them have an oddly tense rivalry considering that it’s over grocery store chains. prefers to work the floral stand, shares tokoyami’s hatred for register duty. takes shopping cart retrieval VERY seriously, genuinely cannot understand why people just leave them sitting around. has never texted in the employee gc.
hagakure: claire’s WARRIOR. assistant manager. will chase a kid through the entire damn mall if she catches them stealing a squishmallow keychain. is NOT to be trusted with the piercing gun. is also not to be trusted with the store playlist after the ayesha erotica incident.
bakugo: cannot, should not, and will not work in customer service, for obvious reasons. eventually found his calling as a pool lifeguard. spends half his day yelling at kids for running and the other half yelling at adults for not wearing proper sun protection. always wearing 90 spf. doesn’t even read or doomscroll on his shift, just rawdogs the boredom. takes it very seriously despite the fact that he’s surrounded by toddlers in duckie floaties all day.
midoriya: mcdonalds. was the FIRST to get the all might meal. likes working in the back so he can play papa’s burgeria the whole shift, and because he once got yelled at by a minivan mother of three. the ice cream machine never works. used his first paycheck to buy his mom flowers.
mineta: unemployed.
yaoyorozu: her parents wanted her to do an internship but she insisted on working a job to ‘build character’. finds a tiny, local tea shop with a ‘wanted’ sign in the window and decides that that’s where she wants to spend her summer. takes memorizing the menu very seriously, so much so that she makes a quizlet and studies it every morning on the train ride there. spends way too much time on the chalkboard signs out front, but nobody’s mad because it ends up looking really good.
shinso: cat-themed coffee shop. talks to the cats more than he does the customers. once challenged shoji to see who could make the better drink and lost by a landslide. comes home every day covered in fur. aizawa visits once a week. leaves the job with a hatred for latte art and a cat names espresso martini. (‘tini’ for short).
