Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Anonymous asked: Do you mind doing Max from Mad Max Fury Road for the headcanon meme?

Hell yeah headcanon meme.  Full disclosure: I have not seen the other Mad Max movies, and I am Out Of It right now.

A: what I think realistically

It takes time for Max to return to the Citadel for good—time to feel less like he’s breaking apart at the seams when people speak to him—but that’s not to say he doesn’t return.  He hasn’t had what he might call Real Feelings in long time, longer than even he really knows, but bending over Furiosa in the truck, cupping the nape of her neck in rough hands made gentle through sheer desperation, feeling her flesh hand clutch at him as she tries to say bring them home—he knows, in this blinding stroke of insight, exactly how screwed he is.  He let this woman touch him, let her help him, let her rest a rifle on his shoulder and without thinking twice trusted that she wouldn’t turn it on him.

He leaves the Citadel, with a bike loaded with water and rations and ammo.

He comes back again with a kid on the back of his bike and a grenade belt and a new set of points on his map, and wordlessly turns the former over, keeps the second, and shows them the latter.

The next time he comes back, he has a truck and no explanations and no kids, but he shows up two days ahead of a small exodus of desperate people who need help—we were told that there was water—and who have this story about how the man in the truck got sucked into their drama and then told them about the Citadel and never gave his name.  Max is gone by the time Furiosa hears this story, and she sighs, and sets about finding these people something to do.

This is how it will be, then, she decides the third time the hail goes up from the watchtowers—incoming! Incoming!  It’s the Road Warrior!  Get the Imperator!

She sighs, and walks down to meet him.

B: what I think is fucking hilarious

Everyone expects Max, having returned properly to the Citadel, to immediately take on a role of prestige and grandeur.  He’s the Road Warrior, the man who helped save the Sisters and Furiosa from Immortan Joe’s grip, the man who’s been sending them survivors and bringing them supplies, the man who was a blood bag and a hood piece and survived a great sandstorm.  Obviously he’s instantly going to be promoted to the highest role save for Furiosa and the Sisters themselves.  Alternatively, they would also accept ‘concubine’ as a reasonable answer, but they understand that the Sisters might not be comfortable with that.

Um…except he’s not.  He runs supply missions still, sure—sometimes he and Furiosa run them together and everyone knows that’s Serious Business—but as far as the majority of the Citadel is concerned, Max’s main job is…furniture?  It’s his honor, of course, they always rush to add, his honor to be favored by the Imperator, but they have questions.  

Furiosa can just reach out a hand, getting ready to leave on a mission, and snap her fingers at him, and Max will appear beside her as if by magic so that she can balance herself on his shoulder to get her boots on as fast as possible. When they’re out on the Wastes, Furiosa gestures behind her and Max compliantly sits down on the ground so that their backs are pressed together as a support.  Trying to plot a map by spreading it awkwardly out on her hand, Furiosa gruffly calls him over and he lets her spread it out against his back, an impromptu table.  At her absolute most relaxed among the Sisters and no one else, Furiosa will sit on the floor in front of Max (in a chair in deference to his leg) and use his thighs as a lounge chair/throne.  One time when she was heavily concussed and a little blood-loss-y, she dropped onto a pallet with a huff and wordlessly flapped her hand at Max until he came over and took a seat where she could use him as a pillow.

Max jumped out of his skin the first time she did this (he isn’t aware that Furiosa spent three days psyching herself up to be able to lean against him and fix a boot), but like…he’s good with it.  This is a kind of physical contact he is learning to be good with.  

And of course, he tells Furiosa in his slow, quiet way, it’s his honor to be favored by the Imperator.

Furiosa thumps him in the shin, but doesn’t get up.

C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

It’s just so distressing to think about how Furiosa is almost certainly unconscious by the time Max tells her his name.  His most precious secret, given to this woman as a gift, and she…she doesn’t hear him.

D:  what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

Max is an immortal fey avatar of the desert and Furiosa is becoming an immortal fey avatar of green places and they’re soulmates. It is what it is.

Unrelatedly, I really like the idea that Furiosa, Imperatrix of the Immortan Joe, is a ‘blackthumb’ of far greater skill than Max, while Max is significantly better at sewing and clothing repair than she is.  Furiosa has to know every inch of the War Rig and that means that she HAS to help maintain it, and the War Rig is undoubtedly one of the most advanced pieces of machinery they’re working with.  Obviously when she’s driving it, she can’t do repairs, but Furiosa is an A-grade mechanic.  Max…just finds it kind of restful to do minute peaceful repetitive tasks like sewing, and, having done them A Lot to keep his clothes intact, he’s gotten pretty good.  Furiosa, on the other hand, has assembled her outfit in significant part out of the ruins of a wife’s outfit, all long strips of fabric wound and pinned in place, and more than that she holds status and doesn’t care for repetitive tasks.  She’s competent, but doesn’t care for it.

Rewatching Fury Road while tipsy because houseguest, and SOME THOUGHTS: 

• The Doof Warrior is so fucking extra, I love him with my whole heart because.  What.

• Furiosa straight up tries to kill Max in that first fight.  Like, he KNOWS the shotgun isn’t loaded and furthermore he wastes THREE bullets on nonlethal warning shots.  SHE, on the other hand, does NOT know that, and tries to blow his head off with the shotgun, bash his skull in with the boltcutters, and shoot him in the temple with the handgun.

• There is nothing I love more than that scene where Immortan Joe is coming up on them and they’re Definitely Screwed and then the door opens to reveal Angharad clinging to the outside of the rig to shield them with her body.  So fucking good, God I love her so much.

• The Vuvalini make me so happy.  “I’m eighty years old heRE COMES THE HURRICANE.”

• This movie is a really good exercise in one of my favorite lines: There’s nothing more dangerous than a true believer.  And not just with the War Boys!  Joe has totally bought into his own propaganda, that’s WHY he’s so dangerous.

• This movie is also ALL about Actions Speak Louder Than Words.  It doesn’t matter what Nux or Max says, it matters that Max warns Furiosa about the oncoming war parties and is willing to drive the rig to save them all, it matters that Nux helps them escape the Bullet Farmer, it matters that Max lets Furiosa use him as a rifle rest.

• “Remember me?”  FURIOSA.  MY LOVE.  FUCK ME UP.  FUCKING ICONIC.

• The loop of “Witness me” from the kami-crazy War Boy death chant to Nux’s final whisper before he saves the Wives and Max and Furiosa always wrecks me, I almost bawled in the fucking theater the first time I saw this.

• Toast is a stone-cold Slytherin and I will not hear debate.  “Don’t damage the goods.”  Come on, y’all.  Which is not to say I have strict headcanons for the others.

• HA I lied, I totally do.  Furiosa is a Slytherin/Gryffindor split who by nature of her situation chose Slytherin and falls back on that Gryffindor self over the course of the movie, Max is a Hufflepuff (a deeply traumatized Hufflepuff, but still).  Angharad is a Gryffindor to the core, using her own body to save the others because she believes in the cause.  The Dag is a Ravenclaw, exactly the kind of lunatic brilliance that Ravenclaw adores, and Capable is a Hufflepuff who throws herself into the cause for love of Angharad and for love of her people and for love of herself.  And here’s the controversial one: Cheedo is a Slytherin.  Her ambition is to survive, and she does whatever she believes must be done for that–flee the Citadel, return to Joe, lie to Rictus, all of it to achieve her goal.  Nux earns a Gryffindor for turning his back on Joe, but the War Boys are mostly not…person enough to be sorted, just puppets, an old man’s battle fodder.  Incidentally the Vuvalini are a general mix, most of them with Slytherin as an option if not a primary house, much like Furiosa.  Valkyrie is the only straight-up Gryffindor, and Keeper of the Seeds is a Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff split, a rarity in the Vuvalini.

• Immortan Joe is a Slytherin/Ravenclaw split, which makes him very dangerous.

Anonymous asked: TALK TO ME ABOUT FURIOSA I LOVE HER SO MUCH

So I’ve been planning a fic for a while and I was gonna just write it here but then I realized that HA this is an ask and you seem too nice for me to dump a few (like maybe ten) thousand words in here.  So instead here are some headcanons for the fic I am writing where Max is the immortal unaging fey avatar of the desert who fetches up at people’s doorsteps and loses himself in months and lonely years without water or company, and is delighted to find Furiosa, who is growing into the immortal unaging fey avatar of green places and oases.

• Max doesn’t stay places, he leaves places, and Furiosa knows someone who leaves when she sees them.  So it shocks the hell out of her when she gets a Fury Boy (the name wasn’t her idea, it was the Dag and, well, they had to call them something other than War Boys) rushing up to her and insisting that there’s a bike coming toward them, and it’s the road warrior who fought on their side.  And she meets Max when he pulls up through the Wretched—not Wretched anymore, just people, people who look better than ever with Capable and Cheedo piecing together a cistern for the water—and he offers her the faint shadow-smile she remembers as he brings his (wrecked) bike to a halt.  He’s loaded down with a small bag of seeds, an assortment of weapons, and a sheepish expression.

• She takes herself by surprise as much as him, when she strides forward without a pause and presses their foreheads together.  His eyes are as blue and burnished as the scorched sky overhead.

• He comes back…not often, but not rarely, never gone for more than a year or so. Furiosa flatters herself that he’s glad to see her, when he returns, and her heart tightens when he begins to initiate the gentle forehead-touch of the Vuvalini.  (The third time he comes back, they have found another underground current, and they have enough water for a public bath.  She worries that Max might have drowned himself, after the third hour of him sitting in the water, but he’s still breathing.  He tells her, in his quiet, stilted way, that it’s the first time he hasn’t been thirsty in he doesn’t know how long, and she wonders about that. She wonders how he’d known that, a hundred and sixty days out, there was nothing but salt.)  

• People start to trickle in, drawn by the siren-call of water and food, because with the Wives—the Sisters, now—in charge, there is more than enough.  And Furiosa begins to hear stories, about how the Road Warrior saved people or killed tyrants or, more often than not, was dragged into a fight not his, quite against his will, and did the right thing anyway.  Here’s the thing, though.  Some of the stories are recent, just months or years past.  Others…well.  She talks to a child, who claims that her grandfather was a child when he knew Max. But Max can’t possibly be much older than she is, and she’s…Furiosa doesn’t really know.  She tries to count back in her head, but…  The Dag’s daughter Angharad is walking well, talking well, maybe seven years old.  When did that happen?  Shouldn’t Furiosa be greying, shouldn’t there be lines at her eyes and aches in her joints?

• The next time Max comes to the Citadel, she asks him how old he is.  He tells her, in his quiet way, less stilted now than when they met because he’s more at ease with her, that he doesn’t know.  But he tells her that he had a child, once, and they played in grass, and he and his wife had all the sweet clear water anyone could want.

• Furiosa goes out on a mission.  She runs out of water in a sandstorm, and she waits to die.

• She strides back into the Citadel two weeks later, and her throat is not even dry. She drinks, and it’s good, but not necessary.  Max is there, and while everyone else marvels over the fact that she’s alive, little Radi—Angharad who is not so little, who is thirteen now and as mad and gifted as her mother—touching her unlined face in wonder, Max watches her and nods.  He doesn’t need to marvel, doesn’t need to question, because he has stood in her place and felt time trickle by like water, like sand in a clenched fist.

• Furiosa remembers being a little girl, screaming for the loss of her mother and her arm and her innocence, and wishing that, if nothing else, she might live to see victory.  She has. And it seems she will live to see a good deal more.  She leaves the Citadel more and more, and she never grows thirsty, never grows tired. She has an impossible talent for finding water, for finding places where seeds will take root, and Max trails after her like a desert wraith.  (She’s not sure how long it’s been since they met, when she kisses him.  But his breath is as hot and dry as the wind under the sun, and she is growth and water and life to his desert, and he melts under her touch.)

• She leaves for good, when Radi is old enough to take her place as Fury, the Citadel’s Road Warrior, and she and Max wander.  They will not die.  The desert has been fed for too long to be taken by the green places, but life is tenacious and neither will Max’s desert swallow Furiosa’s green places whole.  It’s an uneasy truce, between his and hers, but it stands.

lierdumoa:

I made these points in a reblog, but I want to re-state them in their own post, so that it shows up in the main tag.

Mad Max: Fury Road is a story about sexists, told by non-sexists.

I know it’s a bit confusing, because we’re so used to seeing stories about sexists told by sexists. We’re so used to sexism being portrayed by sexist male filmmakers for the sake of a sexist male audience, that we’ve been fooled into thinking this is the only way sexism even can be portrayed.

eabevella’s review of MMFR pointed out that the villains never call women “bitches,” nor are they shown overtly leering at the women in the film, and took this as evidence that the villains in the movie are not sexist. That they objectify women, but only in the way that they objectify everything, and their objectification is in fact quite egaitarian.

While the assessment that the villains are not shown leering or spitting gendered slurs is correct, I’m going to go ahead and say that the conclusion eabevella drew from this is wrong, wrong, so very wrong.

See, there’s a great lie we’ve been told – that in order for an audience to understand that a character is sexist, women must be humiliated on camera.

The truth is this:

When a male character calls a female character a bitch in a movie, that is not the filmmaker’s way of showing the audience the character is sexist; that is the filmmaker’s way of showing the audience that the character’s sexist point of view is worth hearing.

Read that paragraph over and over until it sinks in.

Mad Max: Fury Road makes it absolutely clear that the villains are sexist, and it does so without ever once implying that their sexist point of view is worth hearing. Instead, we learn that they are sexist second-hand, through context and world-building.

We see that the wives have been dressed in ridiculous, impractical gauze bikinis. We see that the wives are not only young and healthy, but also model-pretty. Through these subtle details, the narrative makes it clear that Immorten Joe, the villain, chose these women not just as useful stock, but as sexual objects in which he took sexual pleasure.

In contrast, when the movie introduces the audience to the wives, the movie makes sure to portray them in as humanized, and non-sexualized a manner as possible. Even when they are literally bathing together, we don’t see any water running down chests while the models arch their backs and run their fingers through their hair and sigh pleasurably. Instead we see a bunch of women perfunctorily rinsing off legs and feet, looking exhausted. When they see Max for the first time, they take on fearful, closed off expressions, and project fearful, closed off body language.

Compare this to, for example, Theon Greyjoy’s castration in HBO’s Game of Thrones. We know he was castrated, even though no one ever says the word “castration” and the camera never shows a penis being lopped off. The filmmakers manage to convey that the mutilation has taken place, but respect the character enough not to make a lurid scene out of it (and yet proceed to make lurid scenes out of every possible denigration and mutilation of every possible female character they can cram into their commercial free timeslot).

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As for Imperator Furiosa, it is hard for us, the audience, to not see Charlize Theron as a beautiful woman. But when we compare her appearance in the movie to that of the wives, it’s clear to see that Imperator Furiosa is, in fact, the opposite of what Immorten Joe and his war mongering culture view as desirable, beautiful, or womanly. They do not sexually objectify her because to them she is sexless.

If we ignore our own biased understanding of Furiosa – as a character that a beautiful actress is portraying – and instead immerse ourselves in the culture of the Miller’s world, it becomes obvious that Furiosa has taken great pains to make herself genderless under the villains’ gaze, and that her efforts have succeeded.

From Entertainment Weekly:

It was Theron herself who unlocked the image of the androgynous warrior—a woman who has escaped the fate of other women by erasing her gender.

“I just said, ‘I have to shave my head,’” Theron recalls. Furiosa is a war-rig operator living in a place where all other females have been enslaved as breeding and milking chattel. But Furiosa is barren and therefore of no value to the despot Immortan Joe and his soldiers. She is considered worthless. ”They almost forget she’s a woman, so there is no threat,” she says. “I understood a woman that’s been hiding in a world where she’s been discarded.” [x]

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The villains in the movie are absolutely misogynist. They are absolutely sexist. They do absolutely view beautiful women as sexual objects that exist purely for the male gaze.

But the movie is not about them.

The movie, instead, portrays sexist men as obstacles for the heroes of the movie to overcome.

(via yea-lets-do-this-shit)