So... I just had a thought about Mad Max: Fury Road fandom terminology.
Just ran across this gifset on my dash, of the main female characters of the movie, & I liked it, so I was about to reblog it.
Started tagging, & unthinkingly went with the fandom catch-all for the Splendid Angharad, Toast the Knowing, Capable, The Dag, and Cheedo the Fragile...
Which is ‘the Five Wives’.
Except, I typed that, & then looked at the caption of the gifset, which was, unsurprisingly, “WE ARE NOT THINGS”... and had the mental equivalent of that record scratch sound effect.
Because, hang on a second.
Isn’t the entire point of the movie these women establishing their own individual agency, their rights to their own lives & identities & selves, to define themselves and their journey as something other than objects belonging to men?
It’s why Mad Max is such an important movie to me, that almost effortlessly deep reverence for that idea, of critical feminism & personhood, & the ways in which the patriarchy had chained all of the characters in the movie, and how they cast that aside & made something better out of it...
And it struck me that if we are going to celebrate this movie, and these characters, and their journey and what they mean...
We need to not define them as the wives of Immortan Joe.
We need to define them as themselves. As who they chose to be, how they chose to live & die, not what they were forced into being defined as.
Now, I’m very tired & on cold meds & an alternative group-title is currently eluding me & suggestions on that front are welcome but...
Food for thought, basically.
tl:dr we need a better title for the five women in Mad Max: Fury Road than the 'Five Wives' because it's kinda reductive & not really in keeping with the overall themes of personhood that define the film IMHO?
