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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   21596 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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Kino Review: Backrooms

Spoiler warning obviously.

Backrooms the movie is superficially based on the 4chan meme “the backrooms”, and yes, there are lots of fun found-footage scenes visually exploring the aesthetics of liminal spaces, but good horror movies are never about the monster, they are about what the monster represents. Backrooms is about the fear that no educated professional white woman will ever love you.

Male Lead is a black entrepreneur who runs a local furniture store. Female Lead is his upstanding attractive white PhD therapist. Male Lead is in therapy primarily because his financially dependent law student wife (who is also an attractive white woman) left him.

It is hinted that Female Lead is also lonely and wants children. From a purely narrative perspective, it might seem as if Male Lead and Female Lead are destined to get together at some point. Taking into account their respective biographies, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA of course that wouldn’t happen. He is a schlubby loser from a lower social class and an unprestigious career. You can practically taste the ick she feels behind the professional facade in every scene they have together. It's great.

The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.

The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.

I'm reminded of a Spongebob meme I saw a while ago, a comic made up of screenshots where, IIRC, Spongebob is ordering from Squidward, with alternating frames, saying, "In my medieval fantasy story, it turns out that the church is actually evil," "How original," "And the demons are actually the good guys!" "Daring, are we?" It's quite possible and even likely that there's some valuable insight and even challenge there, but this is such well-trod ground that comports with the general thrust of basically all media in the mainstream that this description, in itself, makes it sound boring, if not tiresome. That said, it all comes down to the execution, of course.

I used to have fun asking people if they could think of a few examples of evil priests in fiction. No problem of course; there are many. Then I'd ask if they could think of any non-evil priests in fiction. Crickets.

Over the years a couple of examples have come up, of course, but mainly it's a landslide in the other direction. Particularly for anyone who mainly consumes contemporary media as opposed to reading Chesterton or something.

There's a large amount of contemporary fiction where there's a priest character who is a bastard/failure, but everyone else is basically a bastard/failure as well.

Ignoring Japanese media for reasons others have alluded to.

David Eddings' Elenium has at the very least Sephrenia, Dolmant and the Cammorian pastor, and more broadly essentially all the non-royal Good Guys (there's some degree of question whether explicitly-religious crusading paladins count as priests or not). The main bad guys are a corrupt priest trying to take over the fantasy stand-in for Christianity (but not succeeding), a corrupt paladin, and a priest of an evil god. There are a couple of good priests in the Malloreon, too, but the vast majority of the priests in the Belgariad/Malloreon are bad (unless you count Belgarath/Polgara as priests, which is complicated).

Terry Brooks' Elfstones of Shannara has one of the characters be a straight-up religious martyr, overcoming a crisis of faith and all. I'm not sure it'd entirely pass reactionary muster, though, seeing as she's a priestess and men explicitly couldn't accomplish what she did for vague magic reasons. The Word and the Void trilogy is also to a large extent about a paladin.

Babylon 5, of course, has a whole pile of good priests including some actual Christian ones. I think the only evil priest is the insane Soul Hunter who's explicitly disavowed by the rest of the Soul Hunters.

Deep Space Nine has a few non-evil priests, although the Space Pope is evil for 70% of the series. Sisko himself is, again, complicated.

I've only played Morrowind of the Elder Scrolls games, but in Morrowind the Imperial Cult are straight-up good guys, and despite the main quests of vanilla/Tribunal taking a wrecking-ball to it, the Tribunal Temple clearly has a lot of good in it as well (just also a fair bit of rot).

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is... complicated, since all the faction leaders are supposed to have good and bad qualities, but Deirdre Skye and Miriam Godwinson are canonically two of the nicer ones, and they're both priests, Miriam a Christian one (though in-game the AI for Miriam keeps trying to kill you for not being a theocracy).

Look at the dates on those.

Elenium: 1989-1992

Elfstones of Shanarra: 1982

Babylon 5: 1994-1998

Deep Space Nine: 1993-1999

Morrowwind: 2002

Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri: 1999

And even then, for culture war purposes, priests of fantasy religions shouldn't count.

I thought about mentioning the dates, but I've not actually consumed much post-2010 Western media.

If we're not counting priests of fantasy religions, then we shouldn't count evil fantasy priests and evil fantasy religions, either. I think that would cut down the initial grievance by a lot.

That's fair, but on the other hand there's also the tendency for evil priests to include the things that people hate the most about religion while there is no corresponding tendency for good priests to include the things that people find positive about religion. An evil priest who is a demagogue is not really balanced by a good priest who is just a spell battery.

Dolmant, the Cammorian pastor, the girl from Elfstones of Shannara, a decent chunk of the priests in Babylon 5 (though not so much the Minbari religious caste), Bareil, the Imperial Cult, the Tribunal Temple, and Miriam Godwinson, at least, do priestly stuff on-screen.

Then I would count them, with the caveat that it's still all from so long ago that it isn't part of any modern trend.

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The Cleric in Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God? Um... huh. This is more difficult than I expected, and I expected there to not be many. Oh, the priests - both Catholic and Protestant - in The Quiet Man. I'm actually kind of surprised by the lack of chaplains in media I consume... the only ones I recall are from The Longest Day (good), Bill the Galactic Hero (evil), and Phule's Company (Elvis). If nuns count, there's a good nun in Our Flag Means Death, and there's the titular Vicar of Dibley...

In addition to Frieren already mentioned by @ChickenOverlord, there's other examples of a 100% good church in anime:

https://myanimelist.net/anime/48761/Saihate_no_Paladin (Good Paladin)

https://myanimelist.net/anime/52082/Shiro_Seijo_to_Kuro_Bokushi/ (Saint romcom)

Though, it is common trope that the church is evil too.

Are we talking about Christian priests or just any priests at all?

William of Baskerville from Name of the Rose comes to mind. Also Padre Benicio Del Toro from Machete. Father Paul Dure and Father Captain Federico de Soya from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos.

The church in the anime Frieren is objectively good. The priest character you first encounter is a bit of a colorful character (he likes his alcohol a bit too much, among other things) but he's a good person generally. And there's another priest who shows up later who has a gambling problem and similar issues but is, once again, a decent person overall.

Trigun, trivially, but that’s Eastern media and probably doesn’t count.

Shepherd Book works, although he’s a little harsh.

“Father, don’t the bible have something to say about killin’”?

“It does. It is however a mite fuzzier on the topic of kneecaps.”

Such a squandered character. Idk, Firefly used to be the best thing ever to me but at some point in the last couple of years I seem to have gotten over it.

I can think of a number in anime. Ghost Hunt has one, for instance. Of course, the factors which make there be a lot of evil priests in fiction don't apply to anime.

Particularly for anyone who mainly consumes contemporary media as opposed to reading Chesterton or something.

There is a pretty popular Father Brown TV show on the BBC that’s been running for ten years, so regular people may have more familiarity with the character than you might think.

non-evil priests in fiction

Zadok is the obvious example. Father Ted and Co. as well, although I accept there is scope for disagreement here.

Zadok from the Old Testament? Is this one of those "move all the Bibles into the fiction section of the bookstore" things?

Admittedly at first I got him mixed up with Zardoz and was like man I guess I should have finished watching that movie.

Yep, that Zadok. Although I was mostly thinking of Handel's Zadok the Priest anthem and his Solomon opera where Zadok is a character.

Father Ted and Co. as well

So we have:

  • the titular character, a greedy, embittered narcissist, sent to Craggy Island as punishment for his assorted financial improprieties – his catchphrase is literally "That money was just resting in my account!"
  • Father Jack Hackett, a violent, greedy alcoholic routinely implied to harbour ephebophilic tendencies
  • Bishop Len Brennan, a cantankerous bully who takes pleasure in humiliating the protagonists, and who does not take his oath of celibacy remotely seriously
  • Father Dick Byrne, Father Ted's opposite number and hence like him in almost every way.
  • Father "Todd Unctious", who becomes so obsessed with trophies and trinkets that he tries to steal one of Ted's (and steals a fellow priest's vestments as a disguise despite himself being a priest and having vestments of his own, seemingly out of spite)

There is also Father Dougal, who can't be called evil only by virtue of being too stupid to understand the consequences of his actions.

I genuinely can't think of a single sympathetically portrayed priest in the show.

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