The Meowrooms

French Author Page

(That's a cat not a camera reading a book)

Meow meow m- oh yeah right the author page.

Greetings flesh person!

For those who don't know me, I'm Praetor3005. I've been a fan of fictional worlds for years, and it was only natural that I was drawn into the dizzying world of the Backrooms. I'm currently an author for TS (and a former admin!), but also an author and translator for the French Branch. It's with great pleasure that I force invite you to discover the articles I've produced, as well as the translations I've made.¹.

Have a nice trip =)

Articles

Phenomenon 9 — "Blue Consumption": My first page on TS, published for the Phenomenon Contest. I went for my classic love for lore relevancy here, adding on the one of The Blue Channel, which is a crucial part of the overall universe that really deserves more love and development in my opinion. I also decided to use the Remodeling Company as the "narrators" of this article, mostly because of their interesting link with the Backrooms, as its natural reconstructors, almost a force of nature by themselves, using other phenomena of this place for their work. Although I like to see the Remodeling Company more like this natural element of the Backrooms essential to its ecosystem, I still tried to keep a corporate aspect to them, mixed up with the comical nature of the group. Even if the article was far from winning, I had a lot of fun with the formatting and concept alike!

Unnumbered Level — "Oneiroscape": If someone told me just six months ago that I would one day write for the Pantheon canon, I wouldn't have trusted them lmao. This canon always felt… out of place to me. Although I enjoy stuff like Greek mythology and collaborative writing, the overall vibe of the canon wasn't really for me. I disliked (and still do) the lack of overall Backrooms involvement in the story, as well as the gap between the overall vibe of the Backrooms and that of the Pantheon. However, as I got to discover the canon and its community, I'll have to admit I started to appreciate its lore. Oneiroscape represents the first iteration of my vision of a Backrooms god, being just this eldritch being dreaming of the universe, a style of character highly inspired by the Old Gods of WoW or the Eldrazi of MTG. I also liked the idea of an avatar wanting to give up his godhood, collaborating with the enemy to escape a place that, even with pure omnipotence towards it, doesn't feel right to him. It was also one of my first narrative writing for the Backrooms, which was an interesting exercise. The classic liminal, almost dream-like vibe of the level was also something I wanted to use in this canon, as a tentative to "reconcile" the Pantheon with the overall core canon of this universe. I got some help from awesome people for this page, and I look forward to continuing Morpheus's story!

Person of Interest — Callum Andrews: Oh well looks like I did a Pantheon thing again. This time, the page is heavily linked to The Iron Fist, a rather important group of the canon. In this universe, Backrooms Robotics actually is one of the team of the IF, Sol. It started as a community of craftsmen during the antiquity, but shifted to a technology-based company after some events in its history. The idea of Callum actually came first from Mctoran, with the base concept being a corporate leader inspired by the silicon valley CEOs of our world. I went with a biography article- quite litterally actually, as most of the page had been written as an article from a Backrooms journal. Like your usual success story, Callum managed to overcome the obstacles of life to get more and more power, starting as a simple B.N.T.G. collector, to become some years later the CEO of Backrooms Robotics. Since this page isn't as Pantheon-related as some other articles like Oneiroscape, I tried to use the core canon as much as possible, with some mentions of the Industrialization canon alongside it. It was also the perfect page to create a small timeline of events, which is something I like doing when writing about groups or individual characters, like with the Ariane Circle on the -FR branch.

You Cheated.: (contest authorpost below)

PLEASE ONLY READ THIS ONCE YOU FINISH THE PAGE

Well I mean I guess I'm not your father

Okay, so first up, thanks a lot for reading this page! It actually took lots of efforts to create, and I'm quite happy of how it turned out!

I also want to use this author post as a way to thanks once more the amazing people who gave me crits for this page:

CamaradeAlbabar for his defining help about the page concept. This wouldn't be as great if he didn't give me feedback about the initial concept.
Nikuchan for her vital first crit on both SPAG and concept. It helped me a lot in deciding how I wanted the page to be.
Aether48 for their help in the execution of the concept. Some parts were quite clunky at first, using ideas in the wrong way. Thanks to Aether, some elements of the page got changed to better serve the purpose of the article
BlueSignet for her massive help on the narrative execution. Between lackluster paragraphs and weird sentences, it was through her help that the parts were developed well.
C-Graph for his massive narration expertise. Some parts really needed some important tweaks to really immerse the reader in the story. Not only this, but Graph also helped A LOT on the SPAG part. If the page feels immersive to you, that is thanks to him.

Now, I want to talk a bit about the elephant in the room. This article is a narrative format screw. Why did I choose this, even though this form of writing was discouraged (but not forbidden)? It's simple. Classicon is not a contest about a format. It was not supposed to be a clinical contest, but instead one about the use of the old feelings of the wiki. Liminality, dread, survival, insanity, human insecurities. The Backrooms, from the beginning, have been a world where we could write about the fears of mankind. Disconcerting nostalgia. The dread of the unknown. The fear of one's own weakness. All of this can be found in a particular image that was rather popular in the early years of the wiki.

This always has been fascinating to me. The clash between the nostalgia of the empty room, compared to the fear of the unknown, the scare of what existed beyond the door. Beyond the threshold, into the darkness. Unfortunately, it seemed that the early writers of the Backrooms just didn't use this image to its full potential. As much as this sounds like a liminal purist talking… the use of entities… quite disrespected the image in itself. Yet another bland concept where a person is attacked by creatures that came from the void ahead. So original. But this image does not need scary monsters to create a feeling of uneasiness. It is already, without any presence, giving the watcher a sense of dread, as they witness the unknown ahead of them. there is a feeling of something waiting for your end, yet you don't know what it truly is. You feel trapped in this room, and your attention is driven only by the vast expanse of darkness. You can't go anywhere else. yet you are scared of what will happen beyond that threshold. This feeling is what I wanted this image to be used for in a Backrooms writing. Sometimes, you don't need scary creatures or even lethal environmental dangers. Sometimes, the fear just comes from yourself, from the realiztion you will not escape, and from the madness of your own despair.

This is what I wanted to develop for this image. Obviously, the original image isn't CC-compliant, as it was used and popularized through Fandom. But I found a great replacement over on Creepystock, a really great website hosting really great liminal CC-compliant images. I actually prefer this image over the first iteration, at least for my narrative. It is taken at the moment when the wanderer notices a potential exit from this place. But they don't know what lies beyond. Unlike the original images, this one doesn't show what exists beyond the door, yet the feeling of the unknown persists, even if it's not a feeling of creep yet.

Now that I talked about the image, let's speak of the writing. As I said, I wanted, with this article, to use the potential of the original You Cheated image that I felt was wasted over bland concepts. But the original concept was about the idea of cheating in the Backrooms, so let's talk about this a little. If you have been active on Fandom, or just read their lore occasionally, you may have seen a rewrite of level You Cheated named The Game (a rewrite I wasn't aware of back when I wrote the first draft of this contest entry). But I'm bringing that up because it is using a key part of the original level concept (or at least in the designated room section): the idea of cheating. Both in the original page and rewrite, the cheating aspect has been used in a videogame way, showcasing a more digital idea of the Backrooms.

But that's not how I saw the concept. Let's talk a bit about the Backrooms overall. A massive ecosystem where humans aren't supposed to be. But, with time, humans started to noclip from the Frontrooms into the Backrooms. But they were never supposed to take part in its ecosystem. The Backrooms were a world of twisted reflection, copying Earth in a disturbing way. But every creature, every landscape, served a purpose in the overall Backrooms ecosystem. It didn't make sense to the human mind, but this place was self-sufficient. However, humans started to change this world, just like they did on Earth. Instead of entering into the ecosystem, they used it for their own gains. That's what cheating in the Backrooms is to me. A species that, instead of blending in and contributing to a virtuous yet strange cycle, instead exploits those unknown shores for themselves.

They abused phenomenons regulating this world to disrupt the following of events, cheating death by escaping from situations where they should have perished. Without the fear of death, they developped themselves far more than they were supposed to. Humans became a parasitic species of the Backrooms.
They industrialized resources from the Backrooms. Mass-producing items like Warpberries. We saw in the object page that those fruits were never supposed to be created on such an immense scale. By doing so, humanity majorly disrupted the local environment of Level 10. Yet again, they are cheating by using items they were not supposed to, which creates a negative impact on the universe.
They used their knowledge to create twisted contraptions like the Hermes Devices. Those tools are very controversial even amongst mankind. They are an immoral way of getting the upper hand over traveling in the Backrooms. By horrible means, humans are disturbing how core properties of the Backrooms work, by exploiting and forcing them. Again, they never were supposed to do this, and this cheating aspect is yet again disrupting this universe.

I won't tell the identity of who or what was behind the level, and to be honest, even I don't know. But something grew bored of a species that was parasitizing the Backrooms, and endangering it for their own gain. Humans felt too… confident. Too superior. And the person you just read about, in particular, was one of them. Someone who thought with pride and overconfidence. Someone who cheated, using unstable contraptions, mass-produced food, and phenomena of the Backrooms for themselves. This person, by their feeling of superiority, represents really well how mankind in general behaves in the Backrooms. Prideful, arrogant even. They cheated and did not deserve their lives. And cheaters deserve to be punished. And while they are punished, something will gorge over their distress, feeding on how their prideful mind quickly turns into fear, then despair, as they understand they are nothing more than simple creatures that, by cheating, thought to be gods. But they aren't powerful at all, and this level is here as a way to remind them how weak and pitiful they actually are, destroying them little by little.

And everything I said, the context, the feelings… everything has to be felt by the reader. it is a story, based on emotions. And clinical tone can't give any of those. This kind of writing has pros, for writing descriptions about landscapes, groups, creatures… but it can't convey feelings enough. Narration exists to show a feeling, to translate emotions to the reader. It is an incredible tool to use when talking about nostalgic, scary feelings. And those feelings were the true theme of the contest. They were the old vibes that failed to be used well by the lackluster clinical tone of 2020. And where clinical tone fails, narration shines.

I very much hope this story succeded in conveying those feelings to you. A classic concept with a classic image and classic emotions, but revisited with new eyes and new ways to write. That's what I wanted to achieve for classicon. And I hope I did.

Entity 19 — "The Disease": Although this rewrite came in November, it actually started back in… probably April if I recall correctly. For context, out of all the early entities of this wiki, this one was probably the article I hated the most. Not only did it feature a fungi image for a virus (yes this is VERY RELEVANT in my opinion), but it also was terribly cliche in its gore aspect, while also having horrible inconsistencies in its own page. I thought this page could use some more scientific development, while also updating it with newer information from other pages. My plans were divided into two parts.

First, the narration part. With this entity, I wanted to tell a story. A tale of an old group that saw the (somewhat) birth of this disease. This part shows how groups were before the rise of factions like the M.E.G, very scarce and with little communication. Yet some people tried to run institutions to help wanderers. Obviously, they weren't really good, which explains why the disease uprising was such a terrible event for them. Because they didn't know how to deal with it properly, they unfortunately spread it on other levels. For the format of this part, I decided to use several archive formats, like mails, journal notes… to vary the different tone and writing structures to make the narrative more evolved. I also used some purely narrative parts with the thoughts of a simple man who witnessed the events. And finally, I linked all of this to the M.E.G. (kind of, people from the FR branch may know Katya from another group), using the group showed on the Level 109 page as a lore element

Then we got the clinical M.E.G database part. I always wanted to try to create a Backrooms disease with scientific roots to make it more believable, while still keeping the original tone of the page. Needless to say, the latter didn't really work, as a lot of things changed for its behavior. Old symptoms didn't make any sense, and I therefore had to remove most of them, keeping the one that made sense with the mode of operation of the species. It even became a bacteria, as opposed to a virus. But as I wanted to make sure I made no contradiction to any other page, I checked every article mentioning this page in order to keep the elements it showcased, but also by mentioning the links of those pages in the rewrite. I'm proud to say that all pages that linked entity 19 when I made the draft are mentionned on the rewrite! It was quite interesting to see how people developped such a bland and boring entity in their own writings. I also tried my best to keep this page friendly for people who didn't care about scientific explanations, mainly by showcasing the effects separated from how the entity worked.

Overall, I'm quite happy with how it turned out. It may have taken almost six months and… a lot of people to crit it, but the final render was great! I really liked working on this rewrite, and I hope to do it again, as lore expansion is one of my favorite things to do on this wiki.

Also fun fact about this one I translated it in french at the same time I wrote it to "save some time" and actually had to apply the crits to both original and translation during those six months to keep both up to date and… yeah I'm not doing that again lmao.

Level 5.3 — "Promethei Bibliotheca": One of the many pages I made whose idea started as a random thought while I was working on something else. The idea has always been a library with seemingly infinite knowledge, but who starts taking yours if you spend too much time there. With time however, the idea started to take form in both concept and format.

The sublevel was a perfect opportunity to expand on one of if not the least used group present in the Terror Hotel, the Lost Hall Society. I always loved to expand those small and seemingly unimportant groups with some bullet points on their parent page, as using their potential and linking it to other Backrooms elements has been a ton of fun every time I did it (Homely Hotel and Housekeeping mainly). Out of the four groups mentionned on the Level 5 page (Housekeeping, Homely Hotel, The Originals and the Lost Hall Society), this one is the only exctinct faction, long gone from ancient times (not as old as The Lost however). They spent their time in the past collecting information and tales in the Backrooms, using the properties of the library to their advantage. There was a place with a gimmick, and this gimmick had consequences for the wider universe. This library had implications.

This sublevel is also my first page on EN where I used both the Ariane Circle and my characters from the Hermes Saga. French readers of the FR wiki will be quite familiar with Anthony Kelvin, Katya Hall and Charlie Drake, as they have seen them evolve over the years as the Hermes Team and the broader Ariane Circle started to spiral down from the golden years of the group. However, I never really used them over there outside of slight mentions here and there, and a sublevel of an English page was a great way of finally doing so. The love of Anthony for history clashed with his extreme coward nature, but he managed to overcome it for the first time, which is the start of his character arc regarding bravery. After its discovery, it lead him to a regular use of the Library, for example in For Christmas or in [fr-backrooms-wiki.wikidot.com/the-archipelago The Archipelago] arc.

I also got to make some more links with existing Backrooms elements, for example the use of the Backdoors chatting application, or the mention of Anemophosis, my entry for the Tradicon2024 on the FR branch. Finally, the bit with the Gentleman of Level 5 was a way to make the stakes open-ended, but that hasn't been developped too much, outside of the fact the Beast met Anthony Kelvin later on, and seem to take a particular interest on the situation. Perhaps I'll develop this more in the future. Overall, while this isn’t a big page or a big project by any mean, it allowed me to set some worldbuilding elements for other projects, while still being able to set up a story developing my own series.

Tale — " Another Day At The Job": Did I ever say I loved the Terror Hotel? Well, if I didn’t I think my writing makes it quite obvious. Level 5 has been my favorite level of the main 12 since basically forever. Everything from the aesthetics of the place to the groups present there was interesting to me and still is to this day. And this included the Terror Hotel staff. What an amazing canon this is! And you’re telling me my only contribution to it at the time, Level 5.3, was only loosely connected to it? Surely we can do better than this.

During Canonicon2024, my choice of canon was clear, but the theme wasn’t exactly. Our team went through some ideas for a series, but it is VivamusLudio who gave the idea we stuck to immediately. A murder mystery with the staff being the suspects. There was born the No Laughing Matter series. And boy, saying it was an incredibly fun experience is an understatement. I got to work with amazing people in a big collaborative series with new and old characters, using the preexisting lore to give the Terror Hotel canon a storyline like it never got before. Basically my dream of what the wiki can potentially create. Collaborative stories using preexisting foundations from other people, something the wiki is craving, seeing the goal of the broader Backrooms wiki project, yet doesn’t get a lot. While we got quite pressured by the time, which didn’t allow us to make the best out of each of our tales, I am nonetheless extremely proud of the story we made and the entities we created for the occasion.

In addition to all of this, this was the opportunity to use The Gentleman of Level 5, one of my favorite characters on the website, being the perfect “Gentleman who can kill you” trope I love so much in fiction. I’m happy I got to use him in the first part of the series. He truly is the best murderous squid in existence.

translations

Phenomenon 2-FR — "Numberation"
Phenomenon 1-FR — "Noclipping" (Collaboration with Greencell and Stixiiee)

plz guys read translations more, international wikis do awesome stuff that are still canon in this universe sdfrzesdfgrt

Titre	Auteur
Test	scutoid studios

Titre	Auteur	Rating	Publication
Whispered From The Mother	RoseMonsignor	7 (+7, -0)	11 Sep 2024 12:30

Titre	Auteur
Level 34	Stretchsterz	-25 (+59, -84)
Level 292	Maxtric	5 (+17, -12)
Entity 139 - "The Puppeteer"	GrandTemplarVigilant	6 (+21, -15)
Entity 699 - "Greinophones"	scally leantno	6 (+29, -23)
Entity 186 - "The Singer"	makaraig	12 (+31, -19)
Level 112	Aether48	16 (+38, -22)
Object 44	YellowISlol	18 (+51, -33)
Level 141	CrustiesAuto61	22 (+42, -20)
Level 718	Willis Millis	22 (+25, -3)
The Puzzle Maker	Nikuchan	27 (+38, -11)
Level 248	LiminalDoctor	28 (+31, -3)
Level 36	Stretchsterz	29 (+68, -39)
Entity 167 - "The Party Hosts"	Stretchsterz	45 (+56, -11)
Level 8	Stretchsterz	130 (+153, -23)
Level 974	jikupa	141 (+159, -18)
Level 4	Stretchsterz	187 (+222, -35)
Level 11	Stretchsterz	237 (+277, -40)
Level 1	etoisle	343 (+367, -24)