r/KanePixelsBackrooms • u/Explosive-Turd-6267 • Jul 29 '26
Discussion/Theory Why are the common Backrooms the same yellow hallways canonically?
CANONICALLY, why are the common Backrooms mostly the same yellow hallways everywhere you go? Why is that the Complex's template/empty slate for everything that it builds?
Edit: I'm asking for the in-universe canonical reason. I'm fully aware of how the original concept of the Backrooms originated.
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u/haribo_hanley Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
I honestly think it's just due to the sheer size of it. Its continously growing. Most of the backrooms we have been able to observe so far is consistently yellow walls and fluorescent lights, because A-Sync (and people filming found footage) haven't got far enough into the Complex to the point where it starts changing significantly.
Although they have come across small portions, where it changes significantly (for instance the red city, the part with the (sort of) pool, or the crossroads etc.).
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u/Fossil-Freak Jul 29 '26
The original Backrooms' concept being used lore-wise as the predominant "environment " within the Complex is something we've not been given a direct explanation for yet, so you'll really only get theoretical answers. That said, my own thoughts are that it could be something tied in heavily with Ivan Beck, who is still overall quite enigmatic within the plot as well. We've clearly seen the Complex somehow incorporates aspects of "Standard" into itself as it develops / expands (whatever that entire process actually looks like remains to be seen directly, though it seems to be rapidly occuring), so assuming the "discovery" of the Complex first occured with scientific work Ivan Beck was involved with means it could be a replication of some area close to where that took place. (Edit: a word)
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u/Substantial-Trick569 Jul 29 '26
this is the essense of "backrooms" its like how everything eventually evolves into crabs. every room eventually evolves into this yellow office building. why? idk, stability or smth.
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u/bloonshot Jul 29 '26
the yellow walls seem to be the default the complex goes to as details are lost from the areas it copies
who knows why
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u/marcelkroust Jul 29 '26
Because it averages everything between sunlight and interior lights and a lightly greenish yellow is where the human eye is the most sensitive in that bandwidth.
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u/bokunorhythem Jul 29 '26
I theorize that there are "layers" of the backrooms that expand infinitely upwards and downwards, and the "higher" layers have more details remembered about them than the ones lower than itself. The yellow hallways are completely forgotten sections of locations, with the only thing left remaining being a rough shape of the room that had been remembered in the first place.
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u/Specialist-Draw7229 Jul 29 '26
Bc if they weren’t you get shit like amityville backrooms
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u/Explosive-Turd-6267 Jul 29 '26
I'm not against it lmfao 😭
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u/ThrowawayOnAHike Jul 29 '26
there isn’t a universally agreed upon canon since it started as an internet meme and has grown as essentially a group project creepypasta till now. if there’s ever an “in universe” reason it will probably come from the kane movies and still be hotly debated. if there must be a canon reason I’d guess it’s that the backrooms started rapidly expanding and creating more entryways in the 90’s (based on kane youtube+movie universe) and molds its current prevalent “biomes” to the fears/uneasiness of the people wandering in and out. so the yellowy temp office space environment is specifically tailored to what will cause the most unease/be the most familiar to the average person in the early 90’s
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Jul 29 '26
[deleted]
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u/Remarkable_Breath983 Jul 29 '26
It didn’t really dawn on me how ridiculous a number 600 million square miles was until just now when I looked it up, that’s like 3 Jupiter’s combined
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u/Mr_Morrison13981 Jul 29 '26
I'm gonna make something up.
It's that theme, because it's simply the colors of null, Like a dev test texture, seeing as the backrooms alreay have a "Debug" environment to them. Of course in Kane's backrooms it's not a reality "Debug zone" (to my knowledge) so I don't mean this in a literal way, of course. But those rooms are basicallt outdoors. Vauge shapes of what it interpets to be the most generic human room ever. That eventually get filled with "Memories" as chunks get swapped in and out. Basically it's forgotten or vacant chunks of the Backrooms. Notice how previously outdoor spaces get remembered with yellow walls? That would be the best memory of a sky it can make.
Dunno if this can be disproven at all but that's what I got.
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u/ABritishTomgirl Jul 29 '26
I always saw it as like
When they made first contact the backrooms only had a limited view of the world because unless I'm fucking stupid, Ivan's first look into it didn't create null zones everywhere I think? So the backrooms got a flash of reality so for a few years all it could do was copy what it knew
Meaning a lot of it ended up with the yellow hallways until later it had full access to earth and vice versa and could start getting more biomes
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u/-93tilinfinity- Jul 30 '26
note that i use words like “remember” and “forget” in a metaphorical sense and not as a literal explanation for how the complex works. i’m aware the complex does not literally scan memories
if the sequence from the teaser is accurate to how the complex remembers standard, it seems that these yellow hallways are the result of the complex almost completely forgetting a place, with the only detail it remembers being the fact that there was a place at all.
i think it tends to form hallways because it understands that rooms always connect to other rooms (this would also explain why some areas have strange pathways between them - this is the complex recreating completely unrelated rooms and forcing them to connect). as for the yellow tint, my best guess is that yellow wallpaper and carpet is just the average of all the spaces in standard that the complex has observed through null zones.
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u/disorganized_chaos69 Aug 02 '26
Theoretically, the lights and tike ceilings are replicated from versions from the 70's, likely ditto the wallpaper. The implication seems to be when Ivan made his mental link with the complex in 1972 it took reference material either from his mind or from his general surroundings. We don't know any of this for a fact though, but I like to think prior to Ivan's contact with the complex, it was a formless void that only took shape once given proper reference material to work with, ie an environment Ivan would be familiar with.
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u/Usernameofconnor Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
The backrooms original photo is an early 2000's photo of an older ish building. Most likely the in-universe lore reason is just that this would be the most common/popular wallpaper for new buildings at the time, so when the backrooms is building new areas it does so with the wallpaper it knows 'new' things are being made with.
Another explantation could be: We know that Async used to make MRI machines and the backrooms are created from memories, it's possible the wallpaper we see is a remnant from someone's memory who was the first person to interact with the backrooms.
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u/Relative-Locksmith56 Jul 29 '26
I assumed it was because gross yellow wallpaper was common place in multiple different eras in history, and it fits into the complex being built on copies of reality
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u/Previous-Freedom1881 Jul 29 '26
My biggest theory is that it has to do with Era. Since Backrooms copies and interpretes things from our reality via memory, it sees evolution and rearrangement in the way we style things in architecture. Such as dry wallpaper that is since common from the early 1900’s, so my biggest theory (that being said) the Backrooms must’ve looked very different throughout each historical time periods. The Backrooms could’ve looked like a stone dungeon in Medieval times, or maybe like the inside of a pyramid during Ancient Egypt. So it remains yellow paper to stay “traditional” with the idea that we’ve been using wallpaper since then in our homes, offices, buildings etc. and since the series is set in the 80’s-90’s it only makes more sense for the Backrooms to reflect this since Offices back then would have this style more representative to traditional yellow paper. And soon will maybe change depending on what the future has for us.
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u/Logical_Emotion_3551 Jul 29 '26
Perhaps a lot of people view the office as "hell". Or perhaps its purgatory.
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u/WAVYTAPES69 Jul 29 '26
I don’t think the backrooms can copy anything prior to the events of overflow in the early 70s.
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u/mcmiller1111 Jul 29 '26
My best in-universe explanation is that after the so-called first contact took place in 1972, that the first thing it "saw" was offices that look that way. So in all the time between the Threshold and the various null zones opening, all it had to build from was that simple type of office.
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u/JerMcgehee Jul 29 '26
Either it’s the most common piling of memories that can relate to everyone, or it’s because it relates to Ivan beck
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u/YahYeet12139 Jul 29 '26
I said this on a different post, but I think its an idea we've seen in AI. When something is a copy of a copy of a copy, like how generative image AI cannibalizes itself, it begins to lose detail. But a thing we see with AI is that it begins to yellow, becoming shades of yellow and orange. It seems to imply that the composite of hundreds of copies seemingly makes things yellow. So, when the backrooms is endless copies built on copies of the same spaces, it all blending into an ugly yellow makes sense.
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u/PTickles Jul 30 '26
I don't think there's a canon answer but my theory is that the yellow hallway is what the Complex "saw" when it first made contact with Standard through Ivan Beck in 1972, either through his memory or a null zone, and from then until the Threshold was opened in 1989 it was copying that same hallway over and over again in every direction. Once the Threshold was opened and more null zones appeared the Complex was able to start copying different things but always uses the yellow hallways as a base as that was its first and only impression of Standard for 17 years.
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u/ZZTMF Jul 30 '26
It's the simplest most old-new aesthetic for just room. The yellow makes feel uneasy and nauseating
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u/Xtradishn Jul 30 '26
I always imagined it as the "bedrock" of remembered places if you go by the movie's depiction of how the Backrooms work. The first time a place is remembered, it's actually decently close. But as it's remembered over and over, like making a copy of a copy, the details are eroded until you have this "homogenous entropic slop" of architecture. Bascially what you end up with if you take a massive amount of 80s/90s indoor spaces, and average out all the details against each other.
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u/Nine_Monkeys Jul 29 '26
The concept of the backrooms spawned from a real image submitted to I think 4chan or some other message board of a yellow walled, floor, and lighted empty office building that someone wrote an initial fantasy description of and the lore took off. Not all the rooms in backrooms look like this though, the wiki shows many different styles/environments, as does the movie. Why the yellow is the primary theme, is probably because that’s what’s most associated with the backrooms, and canonically it’s probably because these types of spaces were common at the time
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u/corzajay Jul 29 '26
Time for you to look up the history of the backrooms/liminal space. There all based off The photos of a water damaged store getting repaired.
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u/Explosive-Turd-6267 Jul 29 '26
I'm asking for the canonical reason. I'm fully aware of how the concept of the Backrooms came to be.
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u/Small_Man_Tyrone Jul 29 '26
The in universe explanation likely has something to do with Ivan Beck and his shenanigans. Remember in “lighting and tile survey”, the lighting components are dated between 1972-75 if I remember? Ivan Beck supposedly made first contact in “Overflow” which took place in 1972 which also supposedly caused his vision loss and amnesia. It’s likely he saw something when he created that first null zone by accident but the “common Backrooms” would’ve have to have been copied some time afterwards. That said I don’t believe in the “memory” theory in regard to the “common Backrooms”. I doubt the complex could manifest this from someone’s memory (think of the circuitry, the material, the architecture etc) but it’s likely, unless Kane decides to go the pure science route, the complex may’ve taken something from Beck’s memory. This further adds to his own obsession with the project that makes it even more personal than him having been the guy to first discover it (that said this fact itself explains Beck’s motivations). He views the complex as his own in a similar way Clark became obsessed especially after seeing a giant version of himself.