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.

screechthemighty:

just-a-storyteller:

@battlenuggalope

I KNOW, RIGHT

Like “Mad Max” is essentially just a catchy franchise title, and the movies follow him because he’s a recognizable starting point. He literally tries to quit his job in the first movie. He never wants to be the protagonist. Leave him alone.

“He literally tries to quit his job in the first movie” as someone who has seen every Mad Max movie more than once, I can confirm this is true. Movie one is him realizing being the main character sucks, and every movie after that is him just being like “I don’t want to be here I don’t want to be here CAN I PLEASE LEAVE NOW.”

Which, tbh, makes him the most relatable male action movie protagonist ever.

All of Fury Road is Max basically going “I UNDERSTAND that shit is bad but I would like to LEAVE okay, like, shit, you can leave with me–ah, fuck, no, now they’re shooting at me, I JUST WANT TO GO.  All right FINE I’ll do something productive and THEN I AM LEAVING.”

(Source: justastoryteller, via fuckyeahisawthat)

lurkinghistoric:

blackstump:

notcuddles:

Since I know there’s probably a fair amount of you out there who haven’t seen the first three Mad Max movies, I’m here to tell you a li’l secret about them:

All the people complaining about how Max “isn’t the main character” in Fury Road are big ol’ Fake Fanboys cause Max’s primary character trait in literally every movie is “I hate this, why is it happening, please leave me alone to brood in the desert in peace”. 

He’s much more the central focus of the plot in the first movie but in Road Warrior and Thunder Dome he basically just gets kidnapped or beat up by wankers in weird bondage outfits and spends the rest of the movie trying to leave as soon as possible while other people are like “please solve our absurd post-apocalyptic problems”.  There is not one single point where Max actively seeks out being a hero until it is forced upon him.  He ACTIVELY TELLS PEOPLE WHO ASK HIM FOR HELP to take a hike.

Mad Max himself would like nothing better than to never, ever, ever be the main character.

He would also like for people to stop stealing his fucking car.

Nobody wants to escape his own movies more than Max Rockatansky. 

He understands better than his own fanboys that his life sucks and you don’t want to be like him, to be Max is humiliating and painful. Every time he gets dragged into a conflict, he ends up worse than he started. Max seems to realize no good can come of this, and is weirdly genre-savvy because he’s always trying to make a getaway at the first signs of encroaching Plot. I find this darkly comical and endearing – at no point does he snap off witty quips and save the day and get the girl. Ever. He’s perpetually a weird desert loser with terrible luck. It’s great.

What makes Max a badass is the ability to survive to the end of any movie he’s unfortunate enough to find himself in.

@blackstump’s tags:  one of my fave things about the series tbh mad max road warrior beyond thunderdome fury road lololol max rockatansky straight up the part in fury road where he chooses to catch up with furiosa and the vuvulini and convinces them to go back? i saw a lot of oldschool fans being like THIS SHOW OF AGENCY SEEMS A LITTLE OOC.

(via dyinghistoric)

lurkinghistoric:

blackstump:

notcuddles:

Since I know there’s probably a fair amount of you out there who haven’t seen the first three Mad Max movies, I’m here to tell you a li’l secret about them:

All the people complaining about how Max “isn’t the main character” in Fury Road are big ol’ Fake Fanboys cause Max’s primary character trait in literally every movie is “I hate this, why is it happening, please leave me alone to brood in the desert in peace”. 

He’s much more the central focus of the plot in the first movie but in Road Warrior and Thunder Dome he basically just gets kidnapped or beat up by wankers in weird bondage outfits and spends the rest of the movie trying to leave as soon as possible while other people are like “please solve our absurd post-apocalyptic problems”.  There is not one single point where Max actively seeks out being a hero until it is forced upon him.  He ACTIVELY TELLS PEOPLE WHO ASK HIM FOR HELP to take a hike.

Mad Max himself would like nothing better than to never, ever, ever be the main character.

He would also like for people to stop stealing his fucking car.

Nobody wants to escape his own movies more than Max Rockatansky. 

He understands better than his own fanboys that his life sucks and you don’t want to be like him, to be Max is humiliating and painful. Every time he gets dragged into a conflict, he ends up worse than he started. Max seems to realize no good can come of this, and is weirdly genre-savvy because he’s always trying to make a getaway at the first signs of encroaching Plot. I find this darkly comical and endearing – at no point does he snap off witty quips and save the day and get the girl. Ever. He’s perpetually a weird desert loser with terrible luck. It’s great.

What makes Max a badass is the ability to survive to the end of any movie he’s unfortunate enough to find himself in.

@blackstump’s tags:  one of my fave things about the series tbh mad max road warrior beyond thunderdome fury road lololol max rockatansky straight up the part in fury road where he chooses to catch up with furiosa and the vuvulini and convinces them to go back? i saw a lot of oldschool fans being like THIS SHOW OF AGENCY SEEMS A LITTLE OOC.

(via fuckyeahisawthat)