lady-beard: but where do the war boys come from?why aren’t there any war girls?when seed lady…
but where do the war boys come from?
why aren’t there any war girls?
when seed lady says ‘it could be a girl’ and dag shakes her head, it seems to signify maybe girls just don’t get made
how do you selectively breed like that?
where did the wives come from?
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how did furiosa become an imperator?
imperators were referred to in plural – ‘an imperator’s gone rogue’
who are the other imperators? the men near joe with the black foreheads?
what does the black forehead signify?
why did furiosa reapply her forehead grease when going through the mountain pass?
why would immortan joe, who clearly does not respect women (see: breeders, milking women), allow furiosa to be an imperator & drive the war rig?
furiosa’s tried to break out many times, was she punished? how did she get immortan joe’s trust back after her previous attempts?
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the war boys kind of just let the gang in at the end
how do they go from being reverent towards joe to not really giving a fuck when he turns up dead?
I’ll take a shot at these. Not claiming these are all particularly valid explanations; just the best explanations I can come up with on short notice or that I’ve read others talking about. Note that I’m couching these responses in terms of what I think might be going on in the (awful) society Joe has set up. I’m not defending those elements of the society.
When a male child is born to the wretched folk at the base of the Citadel, it is considered a great honor for him to be taken up and made a war pup, to have a chance of eventually taking his place (if he survives) as a war boy. It’s a pretty crappy life, but it’s way better than what he’d have at ground level.
There aren’t any war girls because girls are considered physically weaker and therefore inferior for fighting. So they don’t get the chance. Maybe a few of them get chosen to become milk mothers.
I don’t think it requires selective breeding to achieve a gender imbalance in terms of children. They could just be selective about who gets allowed into the Citadel. Maybe the Dag’s dismissive attitude toward the possibility she’s pregnant with a girl is a reflection of the institutionalized male-heir focus of Joe’s breeding program. Maybe they kill infant girls, so for a pregnant breeder it’s better not to even consider that possibility?
The wives are taken from surrounding areas, wherever physically superior breeding stock can be found. To the extent a trade network exists in the wasteland, Joe’s known obsession with healthy breeders probably brings a steady trickle of the anomalously healthy and attractive, who are captured and sold.
Furiosa became an imperator after she was deemed unsuitable for the breeding program (due to her loss of her arm? granted it’s not a genetic disqualification if it happened traumatically, which it apparently did, but maybe it’s enough for Joe’s not-entirely-rational thing about physical perfection). At a young age she was left to shift for herself, and worked her way into the society of the war pups, eventually rising to a position of power through repeatedly demonstrated badassery.
Yeah, imperators are the guys standing near Joe with the black foreheads. It’s some kind of badge of distinction. Furiosa reapplied the grease to her forehead as she was approaching the canyon because she wanted to be in-character and project an air of authority during the tricky negotiations with the canyon people.
Joe allows Furiosa to drive the war rig because he recognizes her talent. For the most part, yeah, he views women as property. But he views men as property too. He views everyone as property. For whatever historic reasons, he recognizes that Furiosa is useful to him as a military leader. Apparently his disrespect toward women isn’t an unreasoning misogyny, as much as a general megalomania and disdain for everyone’s innate human rights.
Furiosa’s “many times” line is hard to square with the position she holds as an imperator, it’s true. My head canon is that when she said that she didn’t mean she’d tried to _escape_ many times. Merely that she’d been out on many runs in charge of the war rig.
Joe led as a brutal dictator with a cult of personality sustaining him among the war boys. Most of the older war boys weren’t there when they returned (presumably their vehicles were trapped in the canyon by the wreck of the war rig and the Doof Wagon, at least for a while). It’s actually the war pups (the little proto war boys) who take it on themselves to raise up the returning Furiosa and the wives.
it’s a little tidy, it’s true. But I’m okay with it for narrative economy. Basically, Joe wasn’t liked by anyone. He was obeyed because he was feared. But once he was gone that fear evaporated and there was a major power vacuum. Furiosa was popular, and a known-to-be-awesome military leader, so she looked like as good a choice as anyone – especially given that she brought back Joe’s corpse, having apparently defeated him in battle. For all we know, defeating the previous warlord in battle is exactly how one secures legitimacy in the wasteland.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1QTTqmh.
Tags: fury road, text post, rambling speculation about the sociology and politics of the wasteland.
