Internet communities, Remember your origins.
As many of you may know, a small segment of the population complained that the new Backrooms movie didn't have much of the lore that had been built up over the past two years. However, I hadn't explored much of the site; I'd only read a couple of levels, and that was before Backrooms went viral.
So I decided to go to my trusted site, TV Tropes, to look for some information about it, whether it was characters, creatures, lore, etc. And while I already knew some of the creatures, I suddenly found myself dealing with topics related to multiverses, gods, parallel realities, wars, and too many other things that at a certain point I felt made it quite generic.
That's not the first time something similar has happened to me. A while ago, I decided to try and find something related to Slenderman and the blogs that preceded the entire Slenderverse in videos, and all I could find were the same old parallel universe stories, gods, etc. At this point, I've simply been wondering why the hell we, as people and authors, always end up using the same tropes when there's a concept that sounds quite original.
Did you know that one of the possible origins given for Slenderman in ancient times was that he was literally a Greek god? Do you know that there is a pantheon of gods that remain connected through the parallel universes of the backroom wikis?
I didn't until recently. And I don't like it.
Perhaps it's because of my obsession with the original and the fact that I think most of the two concepts are quite unique. So seeing them fall back on exactly the same tropes is already annoying to me.
There are examples of this where it doesn't bother me much, especially because the idea is that everyone creates their own timeline, or rather, that there are several, and you can choose whichever one you want. An example of this is the SCP Foundation, in which my version completely discards any mythological references or stories related to the three deaths or the origin of the Scarlet King. However, it maintains organizations like Are We Cool Yet?, the COG, or the Chaos Insurgency.
Another example I like is Samosborn, a collaborative writing community of Russian origin that has a fairly closed standard of quality and lore; that is, there are things you are explicitly forbidden to touch in the universe in order to maintain its essence, and it's something I quite like because no matter what kind of ideas you put in, in the end they will always maintain the same feeling.
I'm quite aware that the fact that these stories can diversify into many things so that they can remain alive and influential throughout history is more than necessary; however, I feel that too many changes also cause what originally made them special to become diluted over time, making people initially wonder why on earth this is so popular.
In fact, I find it ironic how many of these went viral over time, thanks to works that are direct adaptations, not so much of the universe created by the community, but of the core concept. Marble Hornets with the Stalker feeling of Slenderman. Kane Parsons with the Liminal madness in the Backrooms, Containment Breach with SCP and the games of the Samosborn complex.
