[ SECRET POST #3358 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3358 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 093 secrets from Secret Submission Post #480.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Nah. Don't see why people have to write grimdark fiction. Especially for Fury Road which, like. The movie has a pretty unambiguously happy ending, yeah?

[(Anonymous)]

It's Mad Max. One of the most well known and influential examples of apocalyptic fiction. Each film presents a worse situation than the last.

Fic doesn't have to be grimdark but it sure as shit should at least be realistic to the setting, and everything OP said is correct.

[(Anonymous)]

Does Fury Road have or does it not have an unambiguously happy ending

[(Anonymous)]

A bunch of characters on the good guys' side are dead and the living ones have a lifetime of accumulated trauma to deal with and a lot of work ahead of them but sure, peachy.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah but that's just fucking life. People die and people have to deal with the weight of lived experience and trauma. I don't think writing a story about human togetherness and coping and figuring those questions out together is at all inconsistent with Fury Road. It probably doesn't look like contemporary ideas of self-care but i profoundly disagree with what looks to me like OP's suggestion that Fury Road fic should be centered on Immortal Joe's cult or be bounded by the idea that everything falls apart and everyone is alone. That's not what Fury Road is.

[(Anonymous)]

...I'm sure that part in the secret about the War Boys being unbrainwashed overnight is just, you know, an example that OP thought would illustrate the kind of trend they dislike and not in fact a demand for Fury Road fic to be centered on the cult. Seriously, I'm impressed by your ability to somehow read that into the secret's message. And also this: "the idea that everything falls apart and everyone is alone". Slow clap for drama.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah it was super overwritten but I was in a hurry.

I think I'm focusing particularly on the language of "There's no room in this world for". That's what I really disagree with here. I'm sure that there are people who are executing the idea poorly - and I agree that it would be unrealistic, given their lives to that point, to expect any of the characters to become clones of people from our world.

But the idea that there's no space for those kinds of things - that's what I think is rubbish, there's absolutely space for being together and empathy and construction and reconstruction and recovery in the end of Fury Road. The whole end of Fury Road is about the promise of that, to me. It feels super reflexive and wrong to just dismiss that out of hand as impossible, and that's how I read OP.

Like, people trying to figure out those kinds of things in a really hard world - to me, that's what Fury Road is about, on the most basic level. I'm sure people are writing about that clumsily, but they should definitely be writing about it.

[(Anonymous)]

OP
That... wasn't my suggestion? You're reading a lot into my complaint. All I'm suggesting is that fic authors take into account that the values and virtues coded into the Citadel's people cannot be rewritten like a thumb drive. Toxic masculinity was not defeated on the Fury Road. That wasn't even the goal. Furiosa and the Wives accomplished the goal of breaking Immortan Joe's chains, but they're still bound by a lot of other constraints. At the end of the film the citadel is virtually undefended. Furiosa's responsible for destroying the object of the War Boys' cult; it isn't likely that even the children will forget that entirely. There are a lot more things that Furiosa and her squad will have to deal with before they can start loving their bodies and learning about healthy sexuality and so on.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd say ambiguous. For one thing: Furiosa's true dream was shattered, the same as Max's past. That's why Max doesn't stick around: as in all the Mad Max movies, he acknowledges that the damaged shards glued together to become a society are a fractured reflection of the utopia that was the past. This is the apocalypse. In the final shot, we have the war boys looking at Furiosa and gang like...what? Really? And thousands upon thousands of people all reliant upon a sketchy water source (where is it coming from? Why was Immortan Joe rationing in the first place?) and a complete social structure to rebuild from scratch. So I'd say ambiguously happy. The future is theirs to make, but it won't be easy and it will never be Furiosa's dream.

[(Anonymous)]

But that's what makes it a brilliant ending! That's life, man! And the kind of stuff that OP doesn't like is just as valid a response to that situation as anything else. I mean, not naive idealism, but idealism, yes, absolutely.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT. It's the ending Miller always picks. I get the sense sometimes that 90% of the people who love Fury Road have never seen Thunder Dome and don't realize how similar the two are.

I do agree with OP that it's unrealistic to expect the war boys to flip on a dime with their attitudes. Especially the ones who live to fight and fuck (and are dying), and expect everything to be handed to them. That will take some narrative work on the writer's part to convince me as reader.

[ketita]

Really? I'd argue that Fury Road was leaning towards one of the better situations we've seen in the MM universe. They have clean water, they have seeds, they have a reasonable defense force, and even some women who aren't tumor-riddled.

[(Anonymous)]

Better than the ending of Thunderdome? Seriously?

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah see, I don't think these kids grew up in the 80's. There's a darkness to them that even game of thrones can't touch. The fourth wave feminists on tumblr would have fits over these old movies. I came to realize how young the tumblr crowd was after seeing how few of them had even watched the original Ghostbusters movie.

I almost want to laugh at people's attempts at pushing sugary, idealistic characterizations for series like that.

[(Anonymous)]

OP
I grew up watching the older films, which I'm sure colors my reaction to the fic. But even so, you don't have to see the original trilogy to understand that it'll take a hell of a lot more to convince the War Boys not to rape and pillage than a frank and warm-hearted conversation about bodily autonomy and consent.

"We are not things" is as sophisticated as the dialogue gets in the film, and that's written by the Wives who have apparently been reading and discussing pre-apocalypse books in all the free time they have when they're not being raped by a cancer-riddled despot. The feminist narrative coming through in the fic is far too developed for the society depicted in the film; the authors forget that there's a massive series of steps between surviving a trauma and learning how to heal from it, especially when you don't have Dr. Internet to guide you.