hoodornament | app for clockbox

PLAYER INFORMATION

PLAYER: V.
AGED 18+? Yes.
RESERVED? Yes.
IN-GAME CHARACTERS: Lynn invited me; no current characters.

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Max Rockatansky
CANON: Mad Max: Fury Road
CANON POINT: End of film
ARRIVAL TYPE: Rescued.
IC USERNAME: hoodornament
HISTORY: Here.
PERSONALITY:Max Rockatansky is a walking mess. A chronic loner, he spends as much of his time as he reasonably can simply surviving. Part of this is an inevitable consequence of the world in which he lives — there's always something from which to run, whether be it hunger and thirst or any of the bloodthirsty, ruthless bandits who roam the wasteland he inhabits. Most of all, though, he runs from himself — from past failures, and from the sort of involvement with any other person which might lead to new ones. At this he is overwhelmingly unsuccessful, because for all of his amorality, developed by necessity through years in the post-apocalyptic desert — morality is the luxury of people with enough time and resources to sit and consider it — he is fundamentally decent. This is the primary source of his madness: that in a world gone to hell, he can't help allowing himself, when fate provides an opportunity, to become just the faintest bit invested in anyone he encounters who proves worthy of investment. It's an instinct he fights — the film demonstrates repeatedly that he has no desire to involve himself any more than is necessary.

He's reticent even to speak, particularly to strangers but also to the people with whom he throws in his lot. This, along with his hard-earned survival skills makes him an imminently practical ally in difficult situations, but perhaps not the best company otherwise, even to himself. He has, after all, driven himself mad — he experiences guilt-fueled hallucinations of people he perceives as having been let down by him, in particular a young girl whose death is briefly displayed in a flashback and who refers to him as 'pa' in another hallucination. Whether it not she is actually his child is arguable and never neatly established, but certainly he thought of her, at least in part, as such. These hallucinations pursue him relentlessly, appearing again when he is at rest, when the danger is not imminent — except in a notable instance in which a vision warns him of impending danger not consciously noticed and in doing so saves his life. Most often, however, they find him in stillness, which is a primary motivating factor feeding his desire to keep moving, to remain aloof and uninvolved.

As previously mentioned, these attempts to distance himself from other people rarely go as planned. He is not, in and of himself, a hero — not even of his own story. Max is a wanderer in the wastes, too absorbed in the immediate realities of his world to be invested in changing it. He's just as inclined to perpetuate the cycles of violence which have shaped the wasteland as he is to remain aloof: life doesn't often provide him a choice, but when it does, callousness and cruelty still remain the easiest options. At the outset of the film he's been wandering on his own for so long, in fact, that his cognition has become more animalistic and instinctual than intellectual, and his capture by the War Boys and use as human livestock hardly helps matters. He's wary, twitchy, a nameless, rootless creature, a state to which he ultimately leaves to return at the end of the film, though not unchanged. Though he is not the hero of any story, he finds himself in Fury Road tangled up in the stories of a group of women who are, and though he throws in his lot with them out of necessity initially he quickly becomes invested in their success and their survival, and in doing so rediscovers his humanity. That is not, of course, to say that the process is finished — in the end he returns to the desert alone, off to stumble across another story, another somebody who will, in spite of all his trying, inspire him to help them, and in doing so help himself.

INVENTORY: His clothing and everything in it (a makeshift map on a scrap of cloth, tubing and other sundries for repairing automobiles or people, nothing explicitly dangerous), the brace for his bad knee, a small musical box. I'd like for him to have his useless shotgun and no shells, but no big deal if you guys would prefer not.
CHANGES: Nada.

SAMPLES

ONE: Several prose threads.
TWO: Max's (very sparse, sorry) tag at Systemwide.
THREE:
The obvious conclusion is that he's dead, that he's packing this all in his last few seconds of consciousness, neurons sputtering on towards their inevitable halt in the mixed-up soup of his brain. It isn't necessarily the conclusion that Max draws, but it is still the obvious one, one that floats dizzily around his head along with all the other probabilities, impossible to ignore, which tell him in no uncertain terms that this is, in one way or another, all in his head. It's not the first experience he's had that has been and if it's the last it'll be a mercy.

Ultimately, though, that means very little next to the gut-wrenching, inside-out sensation of finding oneself in one place one moment and abruptly another in the next, without the accompanying pain normally associated with dizzyingly rapid translocation. Hell of a windscreen to be thrown through, is what he means, and hell of a place to end up.

The rest is instinct: he sees a form in his periphery and without a weapon to level he raises his fist, whirling about, though disinclined to use it if he doesn't have to. Basic rule of survival: keep your hands in good nick if it's at all possible, and it is. There's always another alternative: he can run. And so the hand he's raised to ward off the form, which he's too shocked, too startled to process, drops and he takes to his feet, heart pounding. In that way it's just like anywhere else: just keep running and there'll be a way to get on. If nothing else the air in his lungs and the impact radiating up through his body with each footfall is its own sordid sort of proof: still alive. Somehow still alive.