call us legion

Mary and Clark are foils. They reflect one another. Both characters have deep personal traumas, but they choose to deal with them in very different ways. Clark chooses resentment and deflection. Mary chooses introspection and an attempt to help others not suffer the way she has suffered.

Clark starts off the film with a nicely buttoned up shirt. As the film progresses and he gets more and more sucked into the backrooms, he starts opening up his shirt and his color palette gets darker.

Mary is the opposite. She starts very conservatively dressed with skirts, long sleeves, dark colors, and tied up hair. By the end of the film she sheds all those layers and she’s essentially in a light tank top with hair down.

Both Clark and Mary run TV ads. You could even say that both are in some ways trying to scam the audience. Clark in trying to get people to buy his shitty furniture, and Mary for selling her self help book series. Both of them seem ashamed of having to debase themselves to get by. And both of them are lonely and alone.

Clark can’t live in his own house, whereas Mary is stuck in the memory of her house. You see multiple times through the story that for all of Mary’s bluster about “opening the window” she can’t do it. Not even after Clark visits her in a frenzy and storms off. It’s like she’s still trapped in that moment from her childhood.

Throughout the film we are shown many times how the characters handle their mental loops and how they keep ending up back where they were. That’s the narration that Mary gives in the opening monologue. Incidentally… The first and last thing Clark says is that he hurts people, because it’s “just the way he’s wired.” How appropriate that Clark is SO unchanging in his mind and SO ready to follow those loops down to his own destruction that he starts the film admitting violence only to end by being destroyed by his own violence through Captain Clark.

And let’s talk about Captain Clark. He too is a foil for Mary. He’s the exaggerate version of Clark personified. Captain Clark walks around on a peg leg, and during the final confrontation Mary sprains her leg. It’s even the same leg.

I would even say that this is the final confrontation between Mary and Clark, even though it’s through Pirate Clark. The film begins with Mary being the one in control in the therapy session. Then we get the moment where Clark is crazed and Mary loses some control over him. Then we have the insane dinner scene where Clark physically has control over Mary’s autonomy. And then we have the final confrontation between Mary and the worst version of Clark.

You could even say that at the beginning of the film Clark is trapped with Mary in her therapist office, and by the end of the film Mary is trapped in a warped version of Clark’s furniture store.

And the solution is for Mary to escape is to literally use her past trauma that she’s been physically holding on to her whole life (the concrete handprint and one of the last good memories she has of her mother) to BASH THE SKULL of the Backroom’s manifestation of Clark’s ego and aggression.

And through it all…. Mary is back where she started. Even though she tried to help others and move on from her trauma, she still ends up being trapped by A-Synch. And the film ends on a distorted sad catatonic memory of her stuck in the backrooms… forever.

you know, i don't think i want to change. then don't.  ⤷ Backrooms (2026) dir. Kane Parsons

It's like describing a dog to someone who's never seen a dog. And then asking them to draw it.

note: I (the owner of this blog and maker of wheels) am not into warrior cats! I just thought this would be fun to make

Some CHARACTER SHEETS I did for my Antler Boys Visual Development! :D Finally have some legit character stuff for my comic!

This is also one of the things we're doing on my Patreon! If you're interested on how I do these Character Designs as well as Environment Painting, feel free to subscribe to my Patreon! Link below!

MY PATREON

it turns out the uploader is in fact the woman in the photo (she's uploaded a few other pictures of herself to other articles) and she ran an extremely web 1.0 site on the topic of bondage

this was apparently a long-standing fantasy of hers and she in fact did an entire video plus accompanying photoshoot about it, which was run in a bondage magazine in the 90s and did in fact take place on an abandoned train track. they committed to the bit hard enough that there's even a shot of the sinister villain looming over her with a big document labeled DEED and a pen

the best part is that according to this page, there were two "villains" involved (the woman's two partners, apparently), and the other one was dressed as a gorilla. sadly there are no images of the gorilla kidnapper because that sounds like. even funnier.