Reflections on the Storyworld Blog (Post 10)
When I was first contemplating which storyworld to choose, I was inclined to study a dystopian world. Dystopian worlds often explore my academic interests—political science, environmental science, and philosophy. I settled on Mad Max because I thought it had a deceptively wide storyworld to explore and some particularly complex social narratives. I thought that I could discover some interesting things if I spent some time in this storyworld.
I was also very intrigued by the prospect of studying Mad Max because of how I first was exposed to the film. I did not see Mad Max when it first came out. As a result, my perception of the film was skewed by what I had heard about it. The two things that had the greatest impact on me before I saw the film were the trailer and the way people talked about the film at the oscars. I remember Mad Max cast and crew members talking about what this film meant for feminism and for environmentalism during their acceptance speeches. Had it not been for the trailer and the acceptance speeches, I probably wouldn’t have watched Mad Max. I’m actually not a big action movie fan, but, as I said in the introduction post, Mad Max is an exception.
When I began conceiving of blog posts, I wanted to pinpoint why the film was so worthy of praise beyond it’s cinematography. I think because of this I may have inflated the important of social narratives in the film and I was hesitant to criticize the film in general. I also wanted to obtain a deeper understanding of character development in Mad Max because it un-apologetically does not make this the main focus(the plot is literally driving in one direction and then driving back).
I don’t have many regrets about what this blog became. I think the biggest issue was that nine posts is a deceptively small number. As a result, there are a lot of things that I didn’t get to examine. I realized just how much there was to write about around the fifth post. There were a few posts that I kept delaying that I never got a chance to write. For example, I wanted to write about Max’s redemption arc and Nux’s three attempts to sacrifice himself. I also thought that it would have been nice to dedicate a post solely to the older adaptations.
The main challenge of this blog was that it took a few posts to get my legs under me. I hit my stride in the ‘Witness Me!’ post about six posts in. I think that the post was my most successful, but by that time, I was already looking to rap the blog up. Because the first third of the blog was dedicated to an introductory post, a mapping post, and a characters post, it took me a while to get around to the main ideas. I think these posts were all essential to have, but, after I had written them, I needed a couple more to explore the purpose of the blog. At the end, I also thought that it would be useful to write something about the fandom and the possible sequels. These became my last posts. As a result, my last posts were dissimilar to rest of the blog. They felt like a late shift that I had not intended. I do think, however, that it was important to widen the scope of the blog for my last few posts.
One of the things that I found useful was rewatching the film twice during the semester. The first time I watched it alone and the second time I watched it with my girlfriend. It was the first time that my girlfriend had ever seen the film. As a result, I got what felt like a second chance to watch the film for the first time. It was interesting to see what she had noticed and what her questions about the film were. This helped me to find a new direction in the later posts.
I could have been better at developing a clearer focus earlier on in the process. I realized that the blog started off ambiguously when I was reading my peer-critiques and the two reviewers gave totally different ideas of what they perceived the focus of the blog to be. Frankly, it was not a question I could have answered myself at the time either. I needed more time in the storyworld to nail down the main idea and I had only written three posts by the time my blog was reviewed. Defining the purpose of the blog became one of my main objectives in the middle stage of this assignment.
Overall, it was a really fun experience and I think I learned a great deal about both Mad Max’s storyworld and the process of building/analyzing a storyworld through this assignment.
