#<- yk on my main I just put in my description that I post spoilers and don't bother but I don't think that goes in this fandom does it

[discordghost]

also y'know I'd been looping three-eyed hex!'s shinyduo animatic last night and woof did that recontextualise the finale. "I've got time" no. no, no you don't

[doodleybugg]

barbarian (2022) ramble!

cw: SPOILERS!!, rape, murder, incest, strong violence/gore descriptions, this horror movie is rated r so :///

so---- ive not been able to shut up about this movie since i've seen it.. i have so many goddamn theories and this is prob my fav one.

i KINDA stole this idea from my friend who watched it with me, but we were both high at the time and neither of us rlly remember much about that convo so they gave me permission to post it here and go into more detail. tyyyy <3

so the backstory of this movie is that this guy, frank, would kidnap and rape these women, then rape their children and their children in the tunnels under the basement of his house. he kept them in cages, abused them, likely murdered them, all that fun jazz. and the main "villain" of the movie is the mother, the byproduct of all that incest and poor living conditions, etc. i put villain in quotes, not because i believe she did nothing wrong, but because i don't think she knew any better and although her actions were extremely fucked up and not okay, i can see the reasoning behind it.

the mother's first victim is keith, who she banged his head against the wall of a tunnel repeatedly until it was nothing but a pulp. then she screams at tess, and the story takes a twist without us rlly knowing what happens next because the focus is on aj.

and when aj, finally shows up in the basement, he's found his way into a pit where, surprise surprise, tess is alive and doesn't look majorly injured. the mother was so quick to kill keith, and if your mind went where mine did, you were probably wondering why the same wasn't true for tess.

tess's sympathy is another huge theme in this movie. going back to the basement to (try to) save both keith and aj, etc, so it makes sense that she picked up on the mother's habits, also shown when she calms aj in the pit and goes "if you get upset, she gets upset".

and when the mother comes along with the oversized baby bottle to feed them, tess graciously accepts the drink whereas aj refuses, leading to the breastfeeding scene after the mother hugs tess. it's so fucking creepy, it's disgusting and fucked up and i had to look away when i watched it.

but looking back, i can kinda see a pattern. i'll get to that later.

tess escapes the basement, and the mother is so close to catching her but when she gets through the window the mother recoils, cuz yk monsters can't go in the sun bla bla. the homeless guy who gave us one of the first jumpscares of the film helps her out and tries to convince her not to go back in there when she hysterically reminds him that ajs still down there. and when the cops are no help, ofc she heads back into the basement to save this douche.

and while aj is still in the basement, he runs from the mother and at some point, she backs away in fear, and aj walks into a room with an old man on the brink of death in it; this is frank.

time skip; now both tess and aj are out of the basement and homeless guy is telling them to stay put, not to go to the hospital until morning (aj had shot tess in the stomach thinking she was the mother), and that he knows all about the mother. she's been in that house some 40 years, and she's never gone into the corner they're at, he tells them before she jumps in, rips off his arm and beats him to death with it.

yk? that pattern im talking about? just hold on.

aj and tess run up to the roof of some building as the mother chases them, and seeing a possible escape, aj throws an injured tess off the roof, buying himself time as the mother jumps after to catch her.

aj goes back down with his gun, and finds tess on top of the mother, alive cuz she broke her fall. he apologizes profusely and says it was the only way, bla bla, and the mother (also alive) gets up and kills him by squeezing her thumbs into his eyes.

the next scene was to me, at first, disturbing. the mother cradles tess, calls her baba (baby), and tries to drag her back to the house as tess insists she can't, and ultimately shoots the mother and the last thing the mother did was kiss her fingers and press then on tess' forehead. the movie ends with tess stumbling away into the night.

now you may ask, where am i going with this? let me explain. all of the mother's victims, if i'm correct, were males. specifically, males she considered harmful, as she first tried to baby aj and only killed him when he proved dangerous to tess.

remember her backstory?

the mother was born in the basement, where her along with many other females were subject to god knows what frank put them through along with the forced breeding and births. it's only fair that she's scared of men to the point where she'll kill them the first chance she'll get. and when aj got closer to franks room and she backed away, she knew he was there and she knew he was still alive, and most likepy she knew what he was capable of.

this is probably me reading between the lines, but she was the only thing other than frank that survived down there. that was probably because she helped take care of the babies, she learnt from him and from the tapes how to do so so that he wouldn't kill her too. and even when frank was stuck to his bed, she kept that coping method with her.

"if you get upset, she gets upset", because if the babies were to cry or misbehave, or if they weren't letting frank hooha in their heehoos, he'd probably kill them. or worse. so that was how she'd force them to be good, so hopefully they'd stay alive and she wouldn't be alone down there, and also so franks focus wasn't on her. as fucked up as it is, it makes sense.

my sibling argued about "why'd she try to keep them in the basement then?"

well, she was born down there. in the dark. if she went outside in the day it would most likely kill her at that point. and she came to the conclusion that frank wasn't the only one of his kind out there, but she couldn't go with tess to protect her outside. so although frank was down there in the basement, so was she and she knew how to survive him. she was trying to protect her. in the most fucked up way possible.

thanks for coming to my ted talk :)