Post Apocalyptic Purls

some of this months patreon rewards

max, please, wtf r u doing

TBH, I’ve been in the “Sorry, but Nux is dead” camp pretty much since I walked out of the theater on the first of embarrassingly many viewings. I’ve enjoyed watching everyone come up with stories of survival, but–Nux is dead.

But just recently I realized there’s another way to think about it. This may not be even remotely new to anyone else, sometimes I’m kinda slow on the uptake–but I’m all excited: We can stop worrying right now about how our favorite MMFR characters can still be alive for our fics!  

Let’s call it the Interceptor Rule of Survival.  (Some of y’all may know, I have a bit of a thing for the Interceptor.)

Remember, in Road Warrior? The Interceptor is Max’s whole world–until Wez catches up with it. Max wrenches the wheel to get away and the car goes flying, rolling over and over off a cliff and all the way to the bottom. It’s smashed. Totaled. No way anyone’s ever going to drive it again.

Yet there it is in the opening scene of Fury Road. Doors undented, roof intact, bedroll spread out beside it. The paint’s not even that much worse for wear.  

By the end of MMFR, the Interceptor’s been rolled, Razor-Cola’d, and pulverized between two tanker trucks.  

But see, I’m not mourning. I’m not even worried. Because I can picture the scene after the last scene in the movie.

Max slips away, makes his way past the throngs of ragged men and women, all the way through to the other side of the crowd. And there it is, next to the dirt track that Joe’s army rumbled out on, that bleeds into the Fury Road. It’s right there, black paint dulled by the desert, auxiliary tanks in the back, hidden explosives rigged to blow if you don’t know where the switch is. The last of the V8 Interceptors is waiting for him.

It isn’t a question of whether the Interceptor is dead. Because by the end of MM:FR, it’s definitely dead.

It’s that it doesn’t matter.

When the Interceptor is needed to tell Max’s story, it will be there. It will always be there, no matter what happened last time, no matter how much it got banged up or crumpled or smashed or changed into something else. It doesn’t matter if it died last time. It will be there.

And so suddenly I’m understanding: Nux is dead, that truck did run Valkyrie down, the Keeper of the Seeds did bleed out in the front seat of the War Rig. But it’s canon that we can bring them back to life and we don’t have to justify it.

These are myths, these are legends, these are stories of the swirling dust of the Wasteland that lives in all of our minds.

I don’t know if this qualifies as meta, but it’s just a few links that I was nerding out on months and months before I even saw MMFR and had lengthy discussions on here about the Australian accent and slang and regionalisms. I don’t know how interested anyone else is in this, but I’ll put them up here just in case.

Macquarie University Department of Linguistics: Australian Accent. An overview of the Australian accents, talks about accent variation and has audio examples of broad, general, and cultivated accents as well as links to audio samples that show how the accent has changed over time.

Macquarie University Department of Linguistics: Regional Accents. An interactive map with examples of (very, very subtle it has to be said) variations in regional accents.

Australian Word Map. In Australia, regionalisms (words and phrases used by people from a specific geographical area) are much more of a marker of where someone’s from than accents. This interactive map has hundreds of examples.

Dialect Blog: The 3 Types of Australian Accents. Focuses more on the differences between the three general Australian accents: broad, general, and cultivated. For once I’d recommend you actually do read the comments on this post - some of them are really interesting.

The 100 Most Australian Words Of All Time. What it says on the tin. Best and most comprehensive list of Australian slang I’ve seen so far. And before you ask, no, it is not a piss-tak. Bar regionalisms, I know, and/or have used 90% of the words/phrases on that list.

[edited to add]

A Pub With No Beer: Australian slang that foreigners* misuse. Pretty self-explanatory really, also includes video of Actual Australians using actual Australian slang. Inspired by non-Australians in the MMFR fandom misusing slang and making some Australians grumpy (also re coffee shop AUs: no Starbucks in Australia, well, virtually none).

Precious Dag and her utter lack of upper body strength

(…) And Theron does that here in such a powerful, heartbreaking way that I found myself in awe of how she was able to communicate so much in a glance.

There’s this moment when she re-enters the rig after Max drives it away from an attacking motorcycle gang, and she looks him up and down as he scoots over, and she has this tiny – not smile, but almost approving or knowing glance that lets us know: she knows she’s won him over. And he’ll be on their side now.

Fury Road Mad Max Interceptor

1974 XB Ford Falcon Coupe

mannn i admire your dedication. and that thing i drew wasnt even very good probably, so heres some more (hopefully better) Nux for you friend! I need more mad max in my life anyways ;D

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