OKAY NO I literally got out of bed and stopped falling asleep to ask you guys why are we not talking about this here proof of War Boy literacy?
Or is this merely proof of War Boys learning how to code their (relatively short) names in letters-as-symbols but remaining otherwise illiterate?
Reblog a reblog because damnit, this kept me from sleeping and no one has any comments? You guys choose to fail me now??
The Organic Mechanic tattoos English onto Max (and presumably other blood bags). Is that only for his (the OM’s) benefit? I think it’s likely that others are able to read that.
The Dome has piles of books (swamps of books). Miss Giddy has tattooed hundreds (thousands?) of words onto her body. The wives/sisters doubtless spent a lot of time sealed away in there. I bet that got pretty boring. They, at least, knew how to read (and write, as the parting graffiti shows).
I think some high-ranking imperators can probably read. Warlords are literate; the People Eater keeps track of expenditures and reads them off a ledger.
War Boys fetishize aesthetically pleasing remnants of pre-collapse civilization. (I know there’s that stuff in the prequel comics about burning all the books and “wordburgers”, but I’m treating all that as suspect and only provisionally canon, subject to agreement with the more fully imagined world of the film.) So I know they would have appreciated things like typographically stylized vehicle logos and brandnames. I’m not sure that they’d have had much access to things to read beyond that, though.
That leaves me thinking your second supposition is probably close to the mark: War Boys know how to code their (relatively short) names, but are unlikely to be very literate beyond that.
On the side topic of short War Boy names, only four of them are explicitly named in the film, right?
Nux
Slit
[The] Ace
Morsov
That Morsov, breaking the curve with his two-syllable, six-letter name. What a show off.
