![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Duplicity Inbox
Aug. 9th, 2023 09:06 pm[There's silence, and then a beep. Leave a message. If you know you know.]
(no subject)
Jun. 17th, 2023 01:43 pm« « « FERAL » » »
Name: Max Rockatansky Door: Left Canon: Mad Max: Fury Road Canon Point: End of the movie where he's returning to the Wastelands Age: 38 Appearance: image Max is 5'9 and roughly 170 pounds. He looks rough from years spent in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but his hair is cut short (against his will; he will let it grow and grow and not care), and he's clean shaven (also not something he tends to care about). He always wears a one-armed leather jacket, which is a remnant of his former life as a police officer. History: Mad Max wiki Personality: Positive Trait: Altruism Max might be a pessimist after everything that's been done to him, and everything that's gone wrong around him. But given the right moment he will always believe in doing the right thing, even if it means he dies in the process. He's willing to go from stealing Furiosa's truck to taking off in the dead of night to fight alone, all to keep her and the wives safe. His franchise sees him do this over and over: trying to help people, and often being taken advantage of because of it (as in Mad Max 2). And yet, the opportunity comes along to do the right thing, and he takes it. He can forgive having his blood drained out of him if it means a better chance of survival for everyone. It's pragmatic but it's also evidence of the compassion Max still has. Negative Trait: Feral 99% of the time, Max is an animal. Max lives minute to minute. He is, as the show states, a man reduced to a single instinct: survive. He will do almost anything to stay alive. He has spent so long focused on it that he's all but forgotten how to speak by the time he meets Furiosa. He communicates in grunts and mumbles and small sentences, and a lot of his communication is nonverbal. He reacts to things very much like a wild animal does, with no thought for anything like the future. Like an animal he is easily won over by small acts of kindness, like when Furiosa offers to remove his muzzle. Max began as a man who just wanted to bring some justice into an increasingly chaotic world. That desire to make something right has never left him and it leads him to trust people he shouldn't, to help people he realistically can't save, and these two things drive him mad over time. He hallucinates, he's all but forgotten how to speak (though thanks to his time with Furiosa he can hold a conversation if you're patient). We see many of his flashbacks and to him they are as real as anything else he sees. But even outside of those, Max is seen mumbling to himself, and jerking his head as though startled, implying he has smaller, more consistent flashes. This is not that unusual in his world. Furiosa is there for more than one and sees him jerk awake with a fist raised, and she handles it by simply, calmly assuring him he can go back to sleep. Max himself learns to listen to the voices better by the end of the film. He allows a vision of his daughter to convince him to go back and help Furiosa when he could have just left. That same vision later causes him to startle in such a way it saves his life. They aren't always convenient and never seem pleasant in any way for him, but he makes peace with it. Negative Trait: Stubborn Once Max decides to do something he sees it through. Or, rather, he tries. He sees it through until there is nothing left to do, often because everyone he tried to help has betrayed him or died; we see this in his numerous flashbacks, especially at the beginning of the movie. This stubbornness can override his good judgment and take him straight into danger, as when he goes after the Bullet Farmer alone. He witnesses Furiosa learning that everything she had stayed alive for and fought for had been gone for years. He never talks about it to her (he doesn't talk much to anyone, about anything) but as the camera focuses on him we see it clearly does affect him. When he comes to her later with a suicide mission he tells her quietly that together they can find redemption--the thing she had said she wanted most. For the rest of the film Max seems lighter, and more confident, despite the odds being so high against them. Negative Trait: Violent Max is a wild animal and as such he responds to unexpected stimuli with violence. He is conditioned to expect pain and danger, so he sees threats and reacts to them with a gun or a blunt object. He isn't cruel but he has no issue killing people in painful ways, and it's worth noting that the dead who haunt him are not people he killed, they're people he failed to save. He has no remorse for the lives he takes while pursuing his goals. Powers and Abilities: Max is a man with "high octane" blood, but he is just a man. He is strong and fast, and he's a talented fighter and a highly skilled mechanic. He has some knowledge of medicine, as he's able to fix a pneumothorax and give a blood transfusion and construct a brace for his bad knee. Inventory: Max will come in with a gun and the clothes on his back (notably his leather jacket). Samples: Thread one Threads |
for thecanarylives
Jun. 2nd, 2023 09:06 pm[continued from here]
He leans closer, but he doesn't kiss her--he rarely ever kisses her first, like he hasn't quite remembered how to finesse it. So instead he leans his head against hers and his hand comes up and carefully touches her cheek.
"Have to keep your eyes closed."
He leans closer, but he doesn't kiss her--he rarely ever kisses her first, like he hasn't quite remembered how to finesse it. So instead he leans his head against hers and his hand comes up and carefully touches her cheek.
"Have to keep your eyes closed."
AC TRACKING
Aug. 9th, 2019 08:03 pmSEPTEMBER 2016
- Max post, after torture
- Jesse, Amnesia!
- Eggsy, Amnesia!
- Shiro post-Cold death
- Bull's hot chocolate
- Tarkin
- Shiro Blood Art
- Max Post
- Tristan, family
( Older )
- Max post, after torture
- Jesse, Amnesia!
- Eggsy, Amnesia!
- Shiro post-Cold death
- Bull's hot chocolate
- Tarkin
- Shiro Blood Art
- Max Post
- Tristan, family
( Older )
Memory Drabbles
Feb. 7th, 2016 09:50 pmCAGE
It's not the first time he has been hunted down and caught. So he knows as his car rolls--this car he's risked everything to restore--that he is damned. And that he has lost, again.
He tastes blood in his mouth but he isn't sure if it's his or if it's just the leftover lizard flavor clinging to his tongue. He can't stand, and so he crawls, trying to crawl his way away from his hunters. A heavy black boot kicks him in the ribs, knocking him over, and he curls up to protect his stomach. If he can't escape right now, he's at least not going to throw up the only nourishment he's had all week.
The war boys tie him up when he thrashes, and so Max bites, and no matter how they hit him he keeps biting every piece of living person he can reach. They throw him into the cabin of one of the patrol cars, and it's so cramped that he has his pick of where to sink in his teeth. The war boys are tough; it's not much of a problem for them until Max bites off someone's finger.
After that, they scrounge up something to gag him with.
"He's crazy! Totally feral," one growls, when they get to Citadel. Never mind that they're the ones painted like corpses, while Max is wearing a genuine cop jacket--which they strip off of him as he howls and kicks.
Next is a nightmare version of a doctor. Max's teeth are counted. His eyes are tested. Then they give him water, and more water, and more--until they force him to piss in a bucket so they can test if his kidneys are damaged. They test his blood and are elated at what they find.
They check his bad leg, and his good one. They check to see if he has been castrated in any way, and the organic mechanic declares him "in tact", an ominous statement in a city that clearly needs new breeders.
The nine fingered war boy comes in and has his wound cauterized, and it's decided Max will be "muzzled" at all times.
And then they tattoo all of this on his back, and when they try to brand a symbol on him with a white-hot iron, Max manages to kick his way free. He runs with hordes of war boys after him--but it means running through his ghosts, who leap and grab and scream at him, startling him so badly that twice he is caught again.
His last bid for freedom is a leap off of a cliff, in the hopes that he can grab hold of a hook with his still-shackled hands. And he does; and seconds later he is hauled back inside anyway, and suffocated with a long strip of yellow plastic.
He wakes in a cage too small to stand or turn around in. He wakes up as a living blood bag, waiting to be sucked dry.
It's not the first time he has been hunted down and caught. So he knows as his car rolls--this car he's risked everything to restore--that he is damned. And that he has lost, again.
He tastes blood in his mouth but he isn't sure if it's his or if it's just the leftover lizard flavor clinging to his tongue. He can't stand, and so he crawls, trying to crawl his way away from his hunters. A heavy black boot kicks him in the ribs, knocking him over, and he curls up to protect his stomach. If he can't escape right now, he's at least not going to throw up the only nourishment he's had all week.
The war boys tie him up when he thrashes, and so Max bites, and no matter how they hit him he keeps biting every piece of living person he can reach. They throw him into the cabin of one of the patrol cars, and it's so cramped that he has his pick of where to sink in his teeth. The war boys are tough; it's not much of a problem for them until Max bites off someone's finger.
After that, they scrounge up something to gag him with.
"He's crazy! Totally feral," one growls, when they get to Citadel. Never mind that they're the ones painted like corpses, while Max is wearing a genuine cop jacket--which they strip off of him as he howls and kicks.
Next is a nightmare version of a doctor. Max's teeth are counted. His eyes are tested. Then they give him water, and more water, and more--until they force him to piss in a bucket so they can test if his kidneys are damaged. They test his blood and are elated at what they find.
They check his bad leg, and his good one. They check to see if he has been castrated in any way, and the organic mechanic declares him "in tact", an ominous statement in a city that clearly needs new breeders.
The nine fingered war boy comes in and has his wound cauterized, and it's decided Max will be "muzzled" at all times.
And then they tattoo all of this on his back, and when they try to brand a symbol on him with a white-hot iron, Max manages to kick his way free. He runs with hordes of war boys after him--but it means running through his ghosts, who leap and grab and scream at him, startling him so badly that twice he is caught again.
His last bid for freedom is a leap off of a cliff, in the hopes that he can grab hold of a hook with his still-shackled hands. And he does; and seconds later he is hauled back inside anyway, and suffocated with a long strip of yellow plastic.
He wakes in a cage too small to stand or turn around in. He wakes up as a living blood bag, waiting to be sucked dry.
For The Last Wolverine, by James Dickey
Dec. 11th, 2013 09:40 pmThey will soon be down
To one, but he still will be
For a little while still will be stopping
The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
The last red meal of the condemned
To extinction, tearing the guts
From an elk. Yet that is not enough
For me. I would have him eat
The heart, and, from it, have an idea
Stream into his gnawing head
That he no longer has a thing
To lose, and so can walk
Out into the open, in the full
Pale of the sub-Arctic sun
Where a single spruce tree is dying
Higher and higher. Let him climb it
With all his meanness and strength.
Lord, we have come to the end
Of this kind of vision of heaven,
As the sky breaks open
Its fans around him and shimmers
And into its northern gates he rises
Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel
With an elk's horned heart in his stomach
Looking straight into the eternal
Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all
My way: at the top of that tree I place
The New World's last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving
Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame
And mingle them, crackling with feathers,
In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary
Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice SCREAMING that it cannot die,
That it has come back, this time
On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:
That it will hover, made purely of northern
Lights, at dusk and fall
On men building roads: will perch
On the moose's horn like a falcon
Riding into battle into holy war against
Screaming railroad crews: will pull
Whole traplines like fibers from the snow
In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.
But, small, filthy, unwinged,
You will soon be crouching
Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion
Of being the last, but none of how much
Your unnoticed going will mean:
How much the timid poem needs
The mindless explosion of your rage,
The glutton's internal fire the elk's
Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,
The pact of the 'blind swallowing
Thing,' with himself, to eat
The world, and not to be driven off it
Until it is gone, even if it takes
Forever. I take you as you are
And make of you what I will,
Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty
Non-survivor.
Lord, let me die but not die
Out.
To one, but he still will be
For a little while still will be stopping
The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
The last red meal of the condemned
To extinction, tearing the guts
From an elk. Yet that is not enough
For me. I would have him eat
The heart, and, from it, have an idea
Stream into his gnawing head
That he no longer has a thing
To lose, and so can walk
Out into the open, in the full
Pale of the sub-Arctic sun
Where a single spruce tree is dying
Higher and higher. Let him climb it
With all his meanness and strength.
Lord, we have come to the end
Of this kind of vision of heaven,
As the sky breaks open
Its fans around him and shimmers
And into its northern gates he rises
Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel
With an elk's horned heart in his stomach
Looking straight into the eternal
Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all
My way: at the top of that tree I place
The New World's last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving
Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame
And mingle them, crackling with feathers,
In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary
Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice SCREAMING that it cannot die,
That it has come back, this time
On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:
That it will hover, made purely of northern
Lights, at dusk and fall
On men building roads: will perch
On the moose's horn like a falcon
Riding into battle into holy war against
Screaming railroad crews: will pull
Whole traplines like fibers from the snow
In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.
But, small, filthy, unwinged,
You will soon be crouching
Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion
Of being the last, but none of how much
Your unnoticed going will mean:
How much the timid poem needs
The mindless explosion of your rage,
The glutton's internal fire the elk's
Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,
The pact of the 'blind swallowing
Thing,' with himself, to eat
The world, and not to be driven off it
Until it is gone, even if it takes
Forever. I take you as you are
And make of you what I will,
Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty
Non-survivor.
Lord, let me die but not die
Out.
(no subject)
Jun. 29th, 2006 08:07 pmIt starts with Max simply wanting to remember how to soothe someone he loves. He's absolutely useless at doing that with his words, and his efforts at comfort food involve the food still wriggling, so he turns to something he hasn't done in nearly two decades.
He doesn't set up candles and music. That's simply not a thing that occurs to him. But he has lotion (unscented, utilitarian lotion) and he has clean sheets on his bed that he never uses. And he has his own two hands, which never tire of feeling Rey's skin.
He sends her a simple text: Come over after dinner. The garage.
The garage, which is Max's space, which no one will interrupt.
He doesn't set up candles and music. That's simply not a thing that occurs to him. But he has lotion (unscented, utilitarian lotion) and he has clean sheets on his bed that he never uses. And he has his own two hands, which never tire of feeling Rey's skin.
He sends her a simple text: Come over after dinner. The garage.
The garage, which is Max's space, which no one will interrupt.
Holidays 2015
Dec. 15th, 2005 06:52 pmFuriosa: a poisoned knife, because violence first. But also knitted slippers, a lovely bath robe, and a set of bath salts
Eggsy: a handmade bracelet made of paracord, woven to stash a small set of lock picks
Nina: A handwritten note (in Russian) that he will see if the Admiral will let him take her off ship for a break in a place she chooses. And if the Admiral refuses, a surprise.
Pietro: Shoes designed for people who run faster than the eye can see, and directions to an empty cabin's fridge, where Max stashed an extremely pink drink and its recipe. (And ingredients, in small sizes.)
Bull: an invitation to spar. Because he still likes it, but most important, he still believes Bull can pull himself out of this mess.
Alfie: A pack of cherry cordials, filled with liqueur instead of just sugar syrup.
Beyond: A metalwork bee the size of an apple, crafted out of scrap metal. And because Max is extremely practical, it's also a lock box to hide (very small) items.
and for Dean: a set of car keys
Eggsy: a handmade bracelet made of paracord, woven to stash a small set of lock picks
Nina: A handwritten note (in Russian) that he will see if the Admiral will let him take her off ship for a break in a place she chooses. And if the Admiral refuses, a surprise.
Pietro: Shoes designed for people who run faster than the eye can see, and directions to an empty cabin's fridge, where Max stashed an extremely pink drink and its recipe. (And ingredients, in small sizes.)
Bull: an invitation to spar. Because he still likes it, but most important, he still believes Bull can pull himself out of this mess.
Alfie: A pack of cherry cordials, filled with liqueur instead of just sugar syrup.
Beyond: A metalwork bee the size of an apple, crafted out of scrap metal. And because Max is extremely practical, it's also a lock box to hide (very small) items.
and for Dean: a set of car keys
(no subject)
May. 21st, 2002 11:02 pmOne thing that the Barge did was open up the possibility of wandering not just around the jagged continent he was born on, but into other worlds.
His own world has been given new life, and he honestly thought he'd never want to see another sand dune again. But one night on the deck, while he is still deciding if he wants to wait for a new inmate or leave for good, he asks Rey: "If I was there, would you show me Jakku?"
He says it with a tip of accent, hard to say which one; he shifts between a few. It isn't his native Australian. But it's not her accent, either, and it makes him sound even more uncertain.
His own world has been given new life, and he honestly thought he'd never want to see another sand dune again. But one night on the deck, while he is still deciding if he wants to wait for a new inmate or leave for good, he asks Rey: "If I was there, would you show me Jakku?"
He says it with a tip of accent, hard to say which one; he shifts between a few. It isn't his native Australian. But it's not her accent, either, and it makes him sound even more uncertain.
User Name/Nick: vilify
User DW: lavanille
E-mail: hatofrabbits@gmail
Other Characters: Lark Tennant
Character Name: Max Rockatansky
Series: Mad Max: Fury Road
Age: 43
From When?: From the end of the movie, as he's leaving Citadel.
Warden: He understands all about regret and mistakes, and how far you can go in order to suppress them, so it won't be hard for him to understand an inmate. Max is known as The Road Warrior in the stories told about him. He tries to avoid other people's fights, but once he's in it, he doesn't stop until something is better. He would bring that tenacity to an inmate pairing.
Item: A worn piece of paper on which he's drawn a map.
Abilities/Powers: Fantastic driver, pretty good shot, ridiculously talented at staying alive. Otherwise he's baseline human.
Personality:
Once, I was a cop. A road warrior searching for a righteous cause.
In the very first scene of his latest movie, we see Max stomp a mutated lizard and then eat it raw. Max is a survivalist. He will do, endure, or kill anything he has to in order to keep going. He has always had that ruthlessness in him: in the first movie, he seeks revenge for his family by torturing a gangster. Prior to losing his family, Max runs bikers off the road and to their deaths and is commended for it. He never loses that ruthlessness.
However he is also a deeply compassionate man. When he realizes he's taken a dark turn he tries to leave, to seek a quieter life where he can raise his family in peace. And when that doesn't work and he heads out alone and deeply embittered, he is still a man who can be convinced to stay and help those in need.
Of course, he always demands a payment. For much of his life onscreen, Max's motivation, in the absence of home or loved ones, is stuff. You don't take his car. You don't take his jacket. You don't take his boot(s). If you do, he will get them back and (because he's an action hero) you will probably be dead.
In the course of the movie he loses the few things he still had. His jacket, his car, his boots, and his autonomy. He is branded and then tattooed with hideously intimate details about his anatomy, none of which he ever gets to read, and then he's flipped upside down in a cage to be a literal blood bag for a dying man.
Max endures this and mutters to himself about it as they tie him to the hood of a car and drive him through the desert. "How much more can they take?" He asks himself, and he seems more angry than anything.
When he gets a chance to run and is stopped by the chain still connecting him to Nux, we see him lose the anger and turn to something closer to panic as he struggles to find a way free. Compare this fear to the almost reserved bewilderment he has during his branding and inking. Confinement seems to scare him more than anything that can be done to his body.
Later on, when confronted with the idea that Nux wants to help, Max accepts this and even gives Nux a boot to wear (after Max recovers a pair for himself; he had stolen one of Nux's while the man lay unconscious). It's the first sign he gives that he has accepted Nux into their group.
When it comes to living people, Max lives minute to minute. He can forgive having his blood drained out of him if it means a better chance of survival for everyone. It's pragmatic but it's also evidence of the compassion Max still has.
When the opportunity arises he attempts to steal Furiosa's rig. He could have taken hostages, or held out for a reward (although he probably knew at most he'd get a bullet in the head), or he could have killed Furiosa at the last. But he doesn't. He accepts an offer of getting that "thing" (a muzzle fashioned out of a garden fork) off his face in exchange for helping out. In the end, Max doesn't want blood on his hands; he just wants to go home. Even though there is no home anymore.
If you can't fix what's broken, you'll go insane.
Unfortunately for Max, he remembers the world before it was broken. He cites his old career and presumably the adventures afterward when he mentions being a cop and the road warrior, he has numerous flashbacks to people he failed, and it all simultaneously spurs him on, and makes him worse.
We see many of his flashbacks and to him they are as real as anything else he sees. But even outside of those, Max is seen mumbling to himself, and jerking his head as though startled, implying he has smaller, more consistent flashes. This is not that unusual in his world. Furiosa is there for more than one and sees him jerk awake with a fist raised, and she handles it by simply, calmly assuring him he can go back to sleep.
Max himself learns to listen to the voices better by the end of the film. He allows a vision of his daughter to convince him to go back and help Furiosa when he could have just left. That same vision later causes him to startle in such a way it saves his life. They aren't always convenient and never seem pleasant in any way for him, but he makes peace with it.
You know, hope is a mistake.
Max lost everything that mattered to him even before the apocalypse. At the start of Fury Road, he's basically an animal. His only desires are food, water, and escape. He has almost forgotten how to speak, and communicates mostly with facial expressions and grunts and monosyllables.
His time with Furiosa changes that.
She coaxes him to let her and the Wives join him in the rig by offering to get his muzzle off. Shortly after, she gives him the kill sequence so he can drive the rig by himself, trusting him to get the whole ensemble to safety if she dies. Bear in mind just a few hours before, he had fired three bullets within a few inches of her head. But her trust pays off: from then on he hands her guns, trades off with her as they drive, and helps her move everyone to safety.
He witnesses Furiosa learning that everything she had stayed alive for and fought for had been gone for years. He never talks about it to her (he doesn't talk much to anyone, about anything) but as the camera focuses on him we see it clearly does affect him. When he comes to her later with a suicide mission he tells her quietly that together they can find redemption--the thing she had said she wanted most. For the rest of the film Max seems lighter, and more confident.
When they save the day, Max and Furiosa share a look and a nod, and he heads out alone, a little more redeemed.
Barge Reactions: Max will remember his year and a half aboard the ship, so he'll be well prepared for the craziness that is Barge life. He'll still be disoriented by the major events, especially for the first month or two, but his experiences and his innate ability to just keep going will pull him through.
He will probably ignore the more minor concerns of day to day life, and he's focused on end goals to the point that he'll get annoyed with diversions, but Max will enjoy the break from worrying about food and water and safe places to sleep.
Deal: Max wants Sylvanas Windrunner's people to get a more fair shake. As she explained it they are damned regardless of what they do or who they are as people, and he wants there to be a possibility for something better.
History: http://madmax.wikia.com/wiki/Max_Rockatansky
Sample Journal Entry: [Max has never used the video function. The voice function he's only tried out a couple of times, with the predictable result of a lot of dead airtime. Writing isn't easy, either, for the combined reasons of Max finding it hard to put things out there, and because he never learned to type. Whenever he does need to send a mass transmission, he finds a quiet corner and pecks out the messages with a grubby forefinger.]
If you crack these things open you'll find them run by the debris of some secretary's old desk. Twisted paperclips, candy gone stale, bits of old pink rubbers, all covered with silver glitter. It makes me wonder what runs the engines down below us, what keeps them rumbling along as we sleep. If we're gliding along on nothing but bubblegum and smoke.
[Afterward he feels he needs to add a second entry:]
Anyone found breaking the engines to get candy will be punished.
Sample RP: The first real discovery Max makes on the Barge floors him.
The deal he'd made with the Warden is still a far away dream. The deck, when he ventures out there, is as disorienting as any vision he's ever had. He takes his meals and fights to remember to nod, to offer a thanks (in the form of a grunt and a nod), and he eats fast as he can with his hands before vanishing to explore the rest of the ship.
The gardens overwhelmed him. Still do. He can handle up to two full minutes in there before the whispers around him rush in and he has to run for quieter ground. The library, though, is at once familiar and foreign. He'd been to a library before. He'd borrowed baby books, videos, the occasional novel that he never had time to read.
This library puts the dingy back-of-the-mall one to shame. When he understood how vast it was, he'd sat there watching people read and felt very small.
Max doesn't go after entertainment here. The day he knows what he wants to research, he also knows he'll never find alone among all those spines on the shelves. He shuffles up to the only face he's observed working here and points up, toward the towering collection of books.
"Space travel. Worst cases, ghost ships. Where is it?"
SAMPLE RP #2:
He actually likes his cabin, which has a rusted lift-up garage door in lieu of the standard plank-and-doorknob fair. Inside it continues the garage theme, with oil stains on the cracked concrete floor near his bed.
There’s a shower stall with no door or curtain to it, which will mean water running out into the room to trickle down the drain on the floor. Not that that matters, since Max hasn’t touched the shower yet, except to drink and drink and drink his fill. Just because he can. Because this is his now.
But a funny thing happens when you spend long enough with nothing but steel sheeting and a glass windscreen between you and the sky. You start to miss the stars.
At home they had been the one thing the bombs hadn’t destroyed. When the dust had settled, the stars had been there, like shards of light peering in through a grimy window.
When he’s on the deck, he can’t tell direction because it’s just a sea of stars and the Barge is always moving. But when he’s kicked himself awake and come up fist raised, ready to fight only to find nothing but air, he always heads up to the deck. It's where his thoughts are clearest.
The day after he gets his first inmate file, he spends part of the night reading and re-reading, and then heads out to the deck. The things he read aren’t all that different from the struggles he has seen at home. Everyone wants the same things if you break them down enough.
He’s not sure where, exactly, the need for security translates into the need to murder large numbers of people but it’s not a foreign concept.
He had re-read it to see if being among people here and then seeing the numbers again might shock something out of him. Outrage, horror. It hadn’t. And worse than that, it doesn’t scare him that it hadn’t. It’s as if the part of him that once feared identifying with the gangs and the bastards who had dropped the bombs has been cauterized.
Does that mean he is more like them than ever? He can’t tell. Everyone does what they have to do in order to survive. He will fight and kill to protect himself or other people, but he has a hard time faulting anyone for their crimes, including his inmate.
His job, as he sees it, is not to make them suffer for it. He's just here to teach them a better way to go about it. His way, which has always meant killing only when he had to, has allowed him to find a modicum of peace. He’d be strung up as an organ donor now if he had done what most would have and killed Furiosa where she lay in the sand.
There is value in life even if he doesn’t know how to properly qualify it. There is meaning in having at least one ideal beyond ‘eat, sleep, run’, and if he could learn that, anyone here can.
He looks at the other person on the deck with him, someone who might be a warden or might be an inmate; he can’t tell. Once upon a time in Australia, they’d used jumpsuits and uniforms to tidy up that confusion. Not having the uniforms hasn’t helped the ‘us against them’ mentality much from what he can tell. Maybe experience will close the gap between his inmate and himself. If not, he’s starting to think that’s why the Admiral takes them through dangerous space: there’s nothing like bonding over terror and adrenaline.
The other person notices him, and Max nods a greeting—then decides to turn it into a farewell and heads back inside. The task ahead is still daunting, but he thinks he knows how to say ‘hello’.
User DW: lavanille
E-mail: hatofrabbits@gmail
Other Characters: Lark Tennant
Character Name: Max Rockatansky
Series: Mad Max: Fury Road
Age: 43
From When?: From the end of the movie, as he's leaving Citadel.
Warden: He understands all about regret and mistakes, and how far you can go in order to suppress them, so it won't be hard for him to understand an inmate. Max is known as The Road Warrior in the stories told about him. He tries to avoid other people's fights, but once he's in it, he doesn't stop until something is better. He would bring that tenacity to an inmate pairing.
Item: A worn piece of paper on which he's drawn a map.
Abilities/Powers: Fantastic driver, pretty good shot, ridiculously talented at staying alive. Otherwise he's baseline human.
Personality:
Once, I was a cop. A road warrior searching for a righteous cause.
In the very first scene of his latest movie, we see Max stomp a mutated lizard and then eat it raw. Max is a survivalist. He will do, endure, or kill anything he has to in order to keep going. He has always had that ruthlessness in him: in the first movie, he seeks revenge for his family by torturing a gangster. Prior to losing his family, Max runs bikers off the road and to their deaths and is commended for it. He never loses that ruthlessness.
However he is also a deeply compassionate man. When he realizes he's taken a dark turn he tries to leave, to seek a quieter life where he can raise his family in peace. And when that doesn't work and he heads out alone and deeply embittered, he is still a man who can be convinced to stay and help those in need.
Of course, he always demands a payment. For much of his life onscreen, Max's motivation, in the absence of home or loved ones, is stuff. You don't take his car. You don't take his jacket. You don't take his boot(s). If you do, he will get them back and (because he's an action hero) you will probably be dead.
In the course of the movie he loses the few things he still had. His jacket, his car, his boots, and his autonomy. He is branded and then tattooed with hideously intimate details about his anatomy, none of which he ever gets to read, and then he's flipped upside down in a cage to be a literal blood bag for a dying man.
Max endures this and mutters to himself about it as they tie him to the hood of a car and drive him through the desert. "How much more can they take?" He asks himself, and he seems more angry than anything.
When he gets a chance to run and is stopped by the chain still connecting him to Nux, we see him lose the anger and turn to something closer to panic as he struggles to find a way free. Compare this fear to the almost reserved bewilderment he has during his branding and inking. Confinement seems to scare him more than anything that can be done to his body.
Later on, when confronted with the idea that Nux wants to help, Max accepts this and even gives Nux a boot to wear (after Max recovers a pair for himself; he had stolen one of Nux's while the man lay unconscious). It's the first sign he gives that he has accepted Nux into their group.
When it comes to living people, Max lives minute to minute. He can forgive having his blood drained out of him if it means a better chance of survival for everyone. It's pragmatic but it's also evidence of the compassion Max still has.
When the opportunity arises he attempts to steal Furiosa's rig. He could have taken hostages, or held out for a reward (although he probably knew at most he'd get a bullet in the head), or he could have killed Furiosa at the last. But he doesn't. He accepts an offer of getting that "thing" (a muzzle fashioned out of a garden fork) off his face in exchange for helping out. In the end, Max doesn't want blood on his hands; he just wants to go home. Even though there is no home anymore.
If you can't fix what's broken, you'll go insane.
Unfortunately for Max, he remembers the world before it was broken. He cites his old career and presumably the adventures afterward when he mentions being a cop and the road warrior, he has numerous flashbacks to people he failed, and it all simultaneously spurs him on, and makes him worse.
We see many of his flashbacks and to him they are as real as anything else he sees. But even outside of those, Max is seen mumbling to himself, and jerking his head as though startled, implying he has smaller, more consistent flashes. This is not that unusual in his world. Furiosa is there for more than one and sees him jerk awake with a fist raised, and she handles it by simply, calmly assuring him he can go back to sleep.
Max himself learns to listen to the voices better by the end of the film. He allows a vision of his daughter to convince him to go back and help Furiosa when he could have just left. That same vision later causes him to startle in such a way it saves his life. They aren't always convenient and never seem pleasant in any way for him, but he makes peace with it.
You know, hope is a mistake.
Max lost everything that mattered to him even before the apocalypse. At the start of Fury Road, he's basically an animal. His only desires are food, water, and escape. He has almost forgotten how to speak, and communicates mostly with facial expressions and grunts and monosyllables.
His time with Furiosa changes that.
She coaxes him to let her and the Wives join him in the rig by offering to get his muzzle off. Shortly after, she gives him the kill sequence so he can drive the rig by himself, trusting him to get the whole ensemble to safety if she dies. Bear in mind just a few hours before, he had fired three bullets within a few inches of her head. But her trust pays off: from then on he hands her guns, trades off with her as they drive, and helps her move everyone to safety.
He witnesses Furiosa learning that everything she had stayed alive for and fought for had been gone for years. He never talks about it to her (he doesn't talk much to anyone, about anything) but as the camera focuses on him we see it clearly does affect him. When he comes to her later with a suicide mission he tells her quietly that together they can find redemption--the thing she had said she wanted most. For the rest of the film Max seems lighter, and more confident.
When they save the day, Max and Furiosa share a look and a nod, and he heads out alone, a little more redeemed.
Barge Reactions: Max will remember his year and a half aboard the ship, so he'll be well prepared for the craziness that is Barge life. He'll still be disoriented by the major events, especially for the first month or two, but his experiences and his innate ability to just keep going will pull him through.
He will probably ignore the more minor concerns of day to day life, and he's focused on end goals to the point that he'll get annoyed with diversions, but Max will enjoy the break from worrying about food and water and safe places to sleep.
Deal: Max wants Sylvanas Windrunner's people to get a more fair shake. As she explained it they are damned regardless of what they do or who they are as people, and he wants there to be a possibility for something better.
History: http://madmax.wikia.com/wiki/Max_Rockatansky
Sample Journal Entry: [Max has never used the video function. The voice function he's only tried out a couple of times, with the predictable result of a lot of dead airtime. Writing isn't easy, either, for the combined reasons of Max finding it hard to put things out there, and because he never learned to type. Whenever he does need to send a mass transmission, he finds a quiet corner and pecks out the messages with a grubby forefinger.]
If you crack these things open you'll find them run by the debris of some secretary's old desk. Twisted paperclips, candy gone stale, bits of old pink rubbers, all covered with silver glitter. It makes me wonder what runs the engines down below us, what keeps them rumbling along as we sleep. If we're gliding along on nothing but bubblegum and smoke.
[Afterward he feels he needs to add a second entry:]
Anyone found breaking the engines to get candy will be punished.
Sample RP: The first real discovery Max makes on the Barge floors him.
The deal he'd made with the Warden is still a far away dream. The deck, when he ventures out there, is as disorienting as any vision he's ever had. He takes his meals and fights to remember to nod, to offer a thanks (in the form of a grunt and a nod), and he eats fast as he can with his hands before vanishing to explore the rest of the ship.
The gardens overwhelmed him. Still do. He can handle up to two full minutes in there before the whispers around him rush in and he has to run for quieter ground. The library, though, is at once familiar and foreign. He'd been to a library before. He'd borrowed baby books, videos, the occasional novel that he never had time to read.
This library puts the dingy back-of-the-mall one to shame. When he understood how vast it was, he'd sat there watching people read and felt very small.
Max doesn't go after entertainment here. The day he knows what he wants to research, he also knows he'll never find alone among all those spines on the shelves. He shuffles up to the only face he's observed working here and points up, toward the towering collection of books.
"Space travel. Worst cases, ghost ships. Where is it?"
SAMPLE RP #2:
He actually likes his cabin, which has a rusted lift-up garage door in lieu of the standard plank-and-doorknob fair. Inside it continues the garage theme, with oil stains on the cracked concrete floor near his bed.
There’s a shower stall with no door or curtain to it, which will mean water running out into the room to trickle down the drain on the floor. Not that that matters, since Max hasn’t touched the shower yet, except to drink and drink and drink his fill. Just because he can. Because this is his now.
But a funny thing happens when you spend long enough with nothing but steel sheeting and a glass windscreen between you and the sky. You start to miss the stars.
At home they had been the one thing the bombs hadn’t destroyed. When the dust had settled, the stars had been there, like shards of light peering in through a grimy window.
When he’s on the deck, he can’t tell direction because it’s just a sea of stars and the Barge is always moving. But when he’s kicked himself awake and come up fist raised, ready to fight only to find nothing but air, he always heads up to the deck. It's where his thoughts are clearest.
The day after he gets his first inmate file, he spends part of the night reading and re-reading, and then heads out to the deck. The things he read aren’t all that different from the struggles he has seen at home. Everyone wants the same things if you break them down enough.
He’s not sure where, exactly, the need for security translates into the need to murder large numbers of people but it’s not a foreign concept.
He had re-read it to see if being among people here and then seeing the numbers again might shock something out of him. Outrage, horror. It hadn’t. And worse than that, it doesn’t scare him that it hadn’t. It’s as if the part of him that once feared identifying with the gangs and the bastards who had dropped the bombs has been cauterized.
Does that mean he is more like them than ever? He can’t tell. Everyone does what they have to do in order to survive. He will fight and kill to protect himself or other people, but he has a hard time faulting anyone for their crimes, including his inmate.
His job, as he sees it, is not to make them suffer for it. He's just here to teach them a better way to go about it. His way, which has always meant killing only when he had to, has allowed him to find a modicum of peace. He’d be strung up as an organ donor now if he had done what most would have and killed Furiosa where she lay in the sand.
There is value in life even if he doesn’t know how to properly qualify it. There is meaning in having at least one ideal beyond ‘eat, sleep, run’, and if he could learn that, anyone here can.
He looks at the other person on the deck with him, someone who might be a warden or might be an inmate; he can’t tell. Once upon a time in Australia, they’d used jumpsuits and uniforms to tidy up that confusion. Not having the uniforms hasn’t helped the ‘us against them’ mentality much from what he can tell. Maybe experience will close the gap between his inmate and himself. If not, he’s starting to think that’s why the Admiral takes them through dangerous space: there’s nothing like bonding over terror and adrenaline.
The other person notices him, and Max nods a greeting—then decides to turn it into a farewell and heads back inside. The task ahead is still daunting, but he thinks he knows how to say ‘hello’.
