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nonsurvivorUser 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’.
