Borealis Strip and Bar

**Borealis Strip and Bar** is a strip club in Gotham City.

## Background

Borealis Strip and Bar was founded as an LGBTQIA+ strip club for Gotham City residents and achieved relative success, particularly among queer people visiting the city.

During the 2020 Lunar New Year, Borealis had a themed renovation with traditional Chinese decorations and new food options. However, when Brennan Draco visited the club during the Penguin's crime wave, Taliban members drove trucks through both the main door and the emergency exit, causing an explosive fire and preventing the patrons from escaping. Brennan, having brought a machine gun along with his standard issue pistol in fear that something like this would happen, he was able to fend off the shooters with no casualties aside from his fellow guards. However, as more terrorists flew in on a Chinook, Brennan was outnumbered until Robyn Paris, a fellow vigilante, used a zip-line to enter the club from another building and aided him in killing the would-be shooters. While none of the patrons were injured and only security guards were killed, the police ordered the surrender of Brennan and Robyn for their act of vigilantism; however, the duo was able to escape by using a cable to zip-line down and reach a car that Brennan broke into and used to escape. While the duo was ultimately stopped and arrested, partly a result of the Batmobile coincidentally crashing into them, the two were regarded as heroes by those who witnessed them stopping the shooting.

It is unknown what became of Borealis after the shooting; however, fire engines are seen dousing the burning entrances, implying that no further damage was done to the club. Notably, none of the pride flags or other LGBTQIA+ decorations were damaged in either the fire or the shooting.

## Description

Borealis Strip and Bar is a relatively large strip club with a long stage with a few stripper poles, many couches with zebra prints on them, a DJ booth, and a bar. There are many decorations with the colors of LGBTQIA+ pride flags, as well as the flags themselves. During the Lunar New Year, the bar served traditional Chinese foods such as Baozi, Tanghulu, barbecue skewers, shrimp, chicken, bok choy, crab, dumplings, spring rolls, sweet rice balls, fish, and nian gao, as well as tea.

## Behind the Scenes

* All eleven patrons seen in the video have hair the colors of the modern pride flag; all of their hair pieces were lifted from the set Everyone is Awesome, which inspired both the creation of Borealis for the PG-13 cut of LEGO Batman: Forces of Havoc and an increase in LGBTQIA+ content in LEGO Metaworld videos as a whole. Up to this point, only Robyn Jacob and the than-unnamed Gabriella Weinstein were depicted as LGBTQIA+, aside from screenshots of Solider 76, Albus Dumbledore, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, and Tracer, which were only shown for a second each.
	+ The three patrons with hair the colors of the transgender flag are the first confirmed trans characters in a LEGO Metaworld video.
	+ In addition to them resembling the colors of the pride flag (even being arranged in the act places of them when having their picture taken), the color-coding of the patrons extends to what cocktails they order, among other gags; the redhead orders a cosmopolitan, the orange one gets a Bellini, the blonde has a Piña Colada, the green patron gets both a Mojito and a Margarita, and the pink one orders a daiquiri.
* Borealis is loosely based on Pulse, a gay nightclub which was the site of a mass shooting by Omar Wateen, a terrorist who had sworn allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Understandably disturbed by the shooting, Brendan used the Borealis attack as a parallel to the event, just with no casualties aside from the security guards, similar to the "alternate history" style of some of Quentin Tarantino's films. The name of the club is a reference to the Aurora movie theater, where there was a shooting during a screening of the Batman film *The Dark Knight Rises*; when the names of these locations are put together, they are "Aurora Borealis," a term for polar lights in northern areas (also known as the northern lights).
* While the PG-13 cut's "thematic elements" descriptor originally referred to the scenes where a robber shoots himself and children get murdered off-screen, the idea of a terrorist attack fueled by discrimination, even if it is ultimately stopped before the group in question is harmed, could also fit under the label.