Imperator Furiosa

I content warn with Furiosa pretty actively for the sexual exploitation and body horror in mad max but if you need an overall opt out I understand completely; hit me here.

Also this is an overall HMD.

User Name/Nick: Steph
User DW: knights_say_nih
AIM/IM: UndrwO (plurk)
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: Ricki Tarr

Character Name: Imperator Furiosa
Series: Mad Max. Mad Max Fury Road, plus supplementary tie in comics.
Age: mid thirties, 34-39
From When?: Post-canon

Warden: Furiosa, fresh off canon, as just completed her own redemptive arc. She’s tough as hell, and can be ruthless, but has a way with humanizing people who have been pushed right up to the very edge. She understands what violence and circumstance can do to a person, and does a very intuitive job of knowing when to mistrust and when to take the kind of leap of faith that will inspire people to be trustworthy. Because she has survived all these years in a total post-apocalyptic hell she is pretty seriously commanding of respect, but offers it as well. She definitely stands a chance at redeeming an inmate, particularly one with a history of violence.

Item: Furiosa’s many-faceted mechanical arm will be modified to include a compass-needle on the hand-attachment.

Abilities/Powers: Furiosa has human abilities at a baseline, but with action-movie eerie fighting prowess, particularly around shooting, driving cars, shooting while driving cars, driving cars while hanging bodily out of the drivers side doorway and shooting backwards, driving cars with a punctured lung while shooting, and all other variations on this theme.

Furiosa is an excellent mechanic, as well, and not only keeps her rig running but has installed a kill-switch sequence to keep anyone from being able to steal it from her.

She has had one arm partially amputated, and operates with the use of a cobbled together post-apocalyptic-grunge prosthetic, which has been designed for functionality and ferocity, and not at all for comfort.

Personality: Furiosa is an Imperator, a Road Warrior, a driver on the post-apocalyptic Fury Road and a holy terror, when she puts her mind to it. She is ruthless. A good driver, a better shot. She has no time to provide comfort to the emotionally shaken, telling her travelling companions to get used to pain and to keep their heads on their shoulders. When anyone gets in her way she has no mercy to spare, shoots first and asks questions later when presented with any sort of a threat, when the stakes are high enough. This is all a necessary product of the post-apocalyptic hell that Furiosa survives in, and a life of torture that has whittled her down to two bare instincts; survive, and escape.

For all that she’s ruthless, and for all that she doesn’t stop to coddle anyone, she can also be incredibly patient. Furiosa knows the distinction between when someone needs to toughen up (Splendid, with her shot leg, Cheedo, waving her arms to hail the Warboys on the bike, following them) and when someone is genuinely at the end of their rope (Max, 90% of the movie.) While the people in her world cope with PTSD, flashbacks, startlement reflexes that lead to waking up in a jerking, blind panic, Furiosa remains soft voiced and patient, careful and steady. She also isn’t afraid to take her time in the long term; it takes her seven thousand days as Joe’s prisoner to manage her escape properly. For her first few years in captivity her tenacity has her trying again and again, but eventually she switches tactics, feigns obedience, and earns his trust, working her way up the ranks of his troupes until she is given command of the War Rig, the armoured vehicle that will make it possible for her to make her long drive home. It’s a long con that lasts probably nine years, all told, from the moment she starts to feign obedience to the day she can finally leave. While she is with Joe, Furiosa counts the number of days that pass, and when she returns home to her people is able to identify that seven thousand have passed, that she has memory of.

In the comic tie in, set immediately pre-canon, we get a glimpse of the woman Furiosa had to be to be Joe’s Imperator, and much more of a sense of her armor and how the wives are initially quite afraid of her. She is taciturn, barely says a word for pages and pages, just sits and watches and waits patiently when they yell at her. She has a reputation as a ferocious warrior, and she has Joe’s complete trust- around the girls, likely, because he doesn’t suspect her of a sexual interest in the women who he views so protectively. While she is there, Furiosa is sometimes impatient with the girls, but ultimately deals with them protectively and generously, including them in her escape plan.

Despite how much stake Furiosa has put into her plan, one interesting aspect of the film is that she actually puts the whole thing at risk, in order to seek redemption. When Furiosa escapes Citadel, she takes Joe’s captive ‘Wives’ with her, provoking his frenzied chase after her across the desert. If she had escaped alone, her pursuit might not have been nearly so frenetic, and certainly would not have involved having the armies of three cities called out after her. She’d had to have known that she was making things incredibly worse for herself by bringing the girls along, but had done it anyways. There is a part of Furiosa that is unquestionably, in that respect, noble. She had wanted to help these women, even possibly at the cost of her own life (and not just life- it’s referenced that Joe will ‘shred her,’ the Warboys who hunt her are trying hard to take her back alive, reference ‘sticking her in the spine’ to paralyze her for him- the cost of failure would have been horrendous.) The reason she gives for this is a vague hint that she is seeking a kind of redemption- that by freeing these women, she can compensate for something. Cinematographically it’s suggested, through the play of shadows in the moment, casting the black marks across her forehead, that she’s referencing things that she did while she was one of Joe’s Imperators. Given what the position must have demanded of her in order to earn his trust, and her formidable reputation for strength and violence, this does seem likely.

It’s also interesting that she has such a close relationship with Joe’s wives. In the tie in comic, we explore a little more of her relationship with those women, which initially begins as quite cold. In the end, when they have spent more time together, Furiosa offers to take her with them, implying a level of trust between them all. When she believes something is the right thing to do, she is willing to try. She has enough of a relationship with these girls to have told them all stories of the Green Place, the land where she grew up, and they have believed her enough to adopt it as their mantra, the point of focus for all their hope. She’s more quiet about it, but it serves the exact same purpose for her.

Her relationships with women are very different from her relationships with men. She obviously gives time, energy and care to Joe’s wives, and grew up, her first fourteen years, as a member of the Vuvalini, the ‘Many Mothers,’ a matriarchal, separatist gang of female bikers, who value mentorship and intergenerational support, woman to woman. The Vuvalini trade lore and tell stories, and keep seeds safe for planting, and generally have an ethic of a supremely violent but benevolent kind of motherhood. When Furiosa approaches them, they welcome her back into their arms, but are immediately suspicious of her male traveling companions, only relaxing when she voices for them. Once they’ve heard her story, they too take Joe’s wives under their many wings, and many die protecting them on their way back to Citadel at the end of the film. Furiosa emphasizes the names of her mother and her initiate mother, when she identifies herself to the women, as well as her clan name- though of course by that time the Vuvalini are so diminished by the violence of the last twenty years that this is the last clan left, all merged into one.

Because of the circumstances of her life at Citadel, she is likely to continue to experience gender in her relationships very keenly; the main plot of the movie operates around her desire to free these women who have lived as sex slaves, intended to be impregnated. She is likely to respond aggressively and poorly to male attempts at flirtation.

Furiosa, in large part, is also weary. It’s the kind of bone deep exhaustion that doesn’t go away in a few weeks or a few months. This is from not just a life as Immortan Joe’s subject (object) and her constantly having to fight tooth and nail. It’s also from the events of canon, which have hit her on a personal level that’s hard to deal with. During the film, she learns that her home has been destroyed by the decay in the world around her. The Green Place, that she has been telling the girls about for years, promising herself she would go back to, has long been lost, and all her efforts to claw her way back home have been for nothing. When she finds out, she walks her way out into the sand, and screams and screams. It brings out a kind of exhaustion in her that she struggles to shake off for the rest of the film.

Despite this last setback, and the fact that her faith is very nearly broken, Furiosa is a character that has, and that embodies, quite a lot of hope. She hopes, for seven thousand days, that she will make her way back home and to the Green Place. She hopes the wives will make it with her, and she will live happily. She hopes, when she proposes to set out across the salt flats in a wild bid to find anything other than ruin. She hopes for Max’s sake, when she knows him a little better, that he will come with them, or at the very least not walk quite so alone. And when he offers her a chance for a last, mad, suicide run to try to carve themselves out a little corner of peace and green, she takes it. She knows that it is almost probably certain death for many of them, and that even once they take Citadel their chances of being able to hold it are probably fairly slim, that when they return they will have to deal with Joe’s old supporters, but even through her exhaustion and her disappointment (and you can see it, the crushing weariness all over her face) Furiosa clasps his hand and shakes, and makes one last run, because she is more comfortable with even a sliver of hope, even if it means fighting, than she is with giving up and biking out on a death run into the dust.

Ultimately, Furiosa is a woman possessed of tremendous strength and perseverance, who is terse without being bullying, reserved, while simultaneously generous, and cautious and reckless in equal turns. She is shrewd, she is private, she is complicated, and she is upright and inspires the loyalty of others. She is just learning what it is like to have the freedom to be her best self, and the pleasure of watching and helping someone on the same path.

I think you see most of that in her relationship with Max, who sort of serves as an interesting proto-Inmate in the context of the film. Max and Furiosa meet and try to kick the everloving shit out of one another. She tries to shoot him in the head, twice. He finally gets the drop on her and tries to hijack her rig, leaving her to certain death. She holds him hostage with a kill switch sequence on the engine, so no one can drive the truck but her.

Initially, he is ready to take his chances, to try to earn Joe's good favour by turning him in, but Furiosa talks him into driving away with her and the girls. It's a close thing, but she's urgent, convincing, and just so with him, enough that he decides to take a chance with her. He keeps a gun pointed at her head the first hours of the trip, but when he expresses a willingness to help solve problems with the truck, Furiosa extends a reluctant bit of trust to him. She assesses him quickly and knowingly as competent, but damaged. Still, the next time they're in trouble, she takes a tremendous leap of faith, and offers him the sequence that will let him drive away and leave her and the girls to die, if he so chooses.

Max doesn't. Instead, from then on, they're cautiously mistrustful allies. They fight side by side. She saves his life, he passes loaded guns to her, learns and respects that she is the better shot. He wakes up gasping from nightmares, and she soothes him. She has the worst news she's ever had in her life, and he tries to offer her a broken kind of consolation. She gives him a bike and gas and enough food to get him wherever he decides to go next, and Max stays with her, offers to help the both of them find redemption.

Some of that is Max himself, some of it is circumstances, but in important ways, Furiosa is what takes him from a snarling, flashback consumed 'feral psychotic, muzzled' to the antihero triumphant that Mad Max used to be, before he cracked a little too far. He puts his blood in her veins, and saves her life.

Furiosa is quiet and serious, and sometimes violent, and has a past as checkered as the best of them, but moves people to great trust and great loyalty.

Barge Reactions: First and foremost, Furiosa is going to go through culture shock like you would not believe. Coming from a post-apocalyptic wasteland where she paints her face in engine grease, is constantly dehydrated to the point of courting kidney failure, and has faced branding, amputation of limb, and abduction, control, objectification, getting to the Barge is going to be ridiculous. This is an environment where multiple characters casually eat lizards and bugs, so seeing the mess hall is going to floor her. She is going to have a shower. She is going to have to adjust to the luxury of getting in the shower, every morning. No one may see her for the first three weeks, because she may very well be living in her shower- not really, probably, but she will be tempted. When she sees the pool she is going to possibly need to sit down.

Adjusting to the comparative lack of violence will also be a big one for her. Maybe if she arrives in tome for some shoot-em-up plot stuff she’ll be all right, but if things are in a quiet spell when she gets in then there will be severe ‘no one is trying to kill me’ culture shock. She will be the kind of warden who goes around armed. She may be involved in physical altercations, when inmates are the sort to get violent. She will take an active role in keeping the Barge physically safe.

Ports will be challenging for her, for the exact same reason as she is going to need some time to adjust to the pool. Greenery, natural greenery, is going to astonish Furiosa, as is civilization and all aspects of modernity. She will reel a little bit whenever she gets off the boat.

As for the people, well, that’s going to be an interesting challenge. Furiosa isn’t going to have a lot of time to spare for other people’s problems, particularly not if they don’t strike her as particularly important, and since the stakes in her world are so high it may be difficult for her to connect with anyone who isn’t fighting for their life on a semi-daily basis. She isn’t exactly going to go out of her way to be mean to the modern day kids about the scope of their issues, but there will be a certain element of ‘when was the last time you saw someone skinned alive?’ to her interactions with them.

I also sort of think at a certain point, she's going to start just casually conversationally dropping horrible shit in whenever people are bothering her. 'I don't like the food in the mess. The meat is always tough.' 'I suppose. There was a tribe of cannibals back home that liked to beat their victims before they ate them to improve the tenderness. Maybe you could suggest impact as a solution.' '...' It's a sort of post-apocalyptic 'in my day we had to walk two miles to school every morning, uphill both ways' but it may be hard to resist.

One of her downsides as a Warden is going to be a lack of flexibility. Many of the other people working at the Barge are great in terms of being able to read a situation and do what is called for. With Furiosa, it will be more a question of finding someone who needs to rail against a person made out of iron, who clicks well with her particular brand of staunch, wicked, mean toughness. She will not be great at tailoring her approach, so it is going to be a question of finding the right fit.

Deal: Furiosa will ask the Admiral to heal the world. Not to put it back to a time before it was destroyed; she doesn’t have nearly enough faith that this is going to stop it being burnt down again. Instead, she’ll ask him to purge Earth’s pollution, heal her seas, suck up her radiation, leave her wet and damp and planted, as rich and lush a natural environment as would have existed before mankind came to the planet and started sucking her dry. Everything else can stay the same, but if the whole world has a fresh start as one large, lush green place, then she can go from there.

History: Furiosa grew up as one of the Vuvalini, the Many Mothers. When she was fourteen, she and her mother were snatched by Joe’s men. Her mother died three days after capture, and Furiosa was taken to serve some purpose in the Citadel. Some time after the age of fourteen and before the age of thirty nine, Furiosa transitioned from young captive to the Imperator and driver of the ferocious war rig.

In the comic tie in, there is a scene where Splendid sits, cradling her heavily pregnant stomach. She asks Furiosa “You were one of us, once, weren’t you? One of his wives?” Furiosa remains standing silently. Splendid continues, promising to carry the pregnancy through to term (referring to an attempted self-induced abortion she’d attempted) and Furiosa flinches terribly, then announces, “Good.” Splendid goes on to point out that Furiosa got out of the Vault where the wives live, and so can they one day, that she will raise her baby in freedom.

Given what we know about Joe’s strange breeding program, it seems likely that Furiosa began her time as a wife, was unable to conceive or else took her reproductive control into her own hands and terminated the pregnancy (or perhaps both) and eventually was transitioned out. How she went from wife to warrior is still a mystery, though the comics look set to reveal it, if they continue to be printed- and I choose to assume it’s a reflection of her total ruthlessness and powerful strength of character and will. She tries to escape multiple times, and is recaptured over and over again. Eventually, she decides to bide her time until she is more trusted, and until the moment is just right.

Years pass. Furiosa, now one of Joe’s most fearsome warriors, is sent to stand guard over his wives. His son, Rictus Erectus has made an attempt to touch Splendid, and while Joe does not want to harm him, knows that the women need capable guardianship, and wants someone who will not be sexual competition. Furiosa, as the lone female Imperator, is a natural choice. The wives hurl accusations at her, accuse her of being Joe’s pet and Joe’s stooge, reminding her of her nick name among the people; ‘Bag of Nails.’ Gradually, their relationship begins to improve. Furiosa transitions out of her silence and informs them that they are selfish and spoiled, out of touch with the suffering in the real world, the starvation and thirst that exists out there. She intervenes when Splendid tries to perform an at-home-abortion. They realize that Furiosa herself had initially been stolen to be one of Joe’s wives.

Being back in the Vault, Furiosa is confronted with the horrific sexual violations that take place there, and comes to know the women who live there as people. She begins to tell them stories to comfort them, about her home, about the Vuvalini, and when things get bad enough with Joe loses track of who she is supposed to be protecting them from and who she is supposed to be keeping them for.

Joe finishes manufacturing the chastity belts that you see the women wearing in the movie, which will serve as protection enough from Rictus. He informs Furiosa that she is dismissed, and has been reassigned to the War Rig. Having gotten to know the wives, now feeling especially culpable for her cooperation with Joe, Furiosa decides to take them with her, in her flight back to the land of her mothers. She sneaks them out at night and hides them in the belly of the machine, and leaves for her mission the next day apparently ‘as normal.’

On the way, Furiosa deviates from the course she had been set on, and cuts out across the desert. During the pursuit, she picks up Max as a passenger (actually, he hijacks her rig and she only barely convinces him to keep the girls and her on board.) Splendid is killed in the flight. They’re joined on the rig by Nux, one of Joe’s Warboys, who initially tries to kill Furiosa. Everyone eventually join forces to escape Joe and make it to the Green Place. When they reach the supposed oasis, they find what is left of the Vuvalini, a bare handful of women, and the plants themselves destroyed by pollution. Furiosa has a short, brief breakdown, and screams and screams.

Later that night, she has a quiet conversation with Max, where they firm up some of the quiet, understated communication that characterizes the rest of their relationship. The next morning, he approaches her and convinces her that rather than keep running, they should turn back to Citadel, and recapture it while Joe’s forces are spread so thin, since his entire army poured out to chase after the wives. Furiosa, badly exhausted, looks reluctant, but seeing his conviction and the hope of the others around her, she agrees. As Max puts it, it’s a way for them both to seek a kind of redemption.

They set out across the sand. Max falls from the top of the rig, and Furiosa manages to grip him by the leg, thanks to the locking function on her prosthetic arm. This badly extends her body, though, shoving her up against the window and leaving her side exposed. One of Joe’s men succeeds in stabbing her in the side. Max makes it to safety, and Furiosa hands the wheel to Nux, badly hurt. She clambers forward, over the front of her moving car, and makes it from vehicle to vehicle until she reaches Joe. There, she looks him in the eye, asks, “Remember me?” and then kills him, violently, degradingly, and painfully.

After this, hauled back into the rear of Joe’s truck by the help of her friends, and begins to exhibit the signs of a collapsing lung. Many of the Vuvalini have been killed, as well as Nux, but Max manages to save Furiosa by stabbing her in the side to release the bubble building in her chest cavity, and then gives her an ad hoc blood transfusion using cobbled together tubing and needles. He whispers reassurances to her and apologies throughout, and listens while Furiosa mumbles garbled nonsense, the only part of which is audible is the word ‘home,’ repeated.

They arrive back at Citadel, and reveal Joe’s mangled body to the awaiting crowd. Max helps Furiosa out of the car, and helps her to stand, staggering badly, as the crowd begins to chant her name. The wives take over her care, as Max slips into the crowd. The clear sense is that she will be the new leader of Citadel, that she already has the adoration and respect of many, and as Joe’s killer it seems to be her rightful place.

Still bleeding, now stabbed twice in the lung, with one eye swollen completely shut, she glances over her shoulder at Max and gives him a nod as he melts away into the crowd, before being lifted up into the Citadel, radiant with dizzy hope.

Sample Journal Entry:

[Honestly, there is very little that could get Furiosa talking more than a few terse words at a time. She mistrusts this place, and many of the people in it. But when the blessed water that they take so very much for granted runs dry with a rusty stammer and a clatter of pipes, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon, she takes a couple of the wardens aside onto a private filter the next afternoon and instructs them;]

Suspend bathing, or have them use water that isn’t potable, from the pool. Move fast and drain anything you can find that may have pooled in the system of pipes. Collect what you do have and ration it closely, expect the worst. No more heating anything with it, tea or coffee or any kind of cooking. You don’t want to waste it to steam. Cook things down with the liquor if you have to, but lock it up otherwise; it just dehydrates.

[She doesn’t often long for her crew, but the Warboys would do better in a situation like this than most of the Barge.]

Get everyone with any kind of background in science into the lab and see if they can strip the poisons out of samples from the pool. A population this size, this unused to rationing? We aren’t going to last two weeks otherwise, and there will be riots three days from now. If that happens, things will get bad. You think life without drinking water is uncomfortable, try surgery without it.

[She has a grim look about her, and her prosthetic clicks on the table to emphasize her point. Good way to go about losing an arm.]

Sample RP:

Coming out of her meeting with the Admiral, Furiosa is quite honestly a little dazed. Her wounds have resolved themselves, though she doesn’t remember enough time passing between the run down the Fury Road and now for this to be the case. When she checks, there’s still a slice in here dusty shirt from where the knife went in. Her arm, which she swears she saw fall under the wheels of a car somewhere in the wild ride, rests comfortably and easily on her shoulder. She is filthy; Furiosa is always filthy, but she is not blood stained, and she is certainly not bleeding to death.

Her bottom is on the bottommost floor of this place, and she’s found herself starting from the top, apparently. She turns the situation over and over in her head as she descends the many stairwells down. Furiosa may be losing her mind. Maybe this is pain-induced hallucination, and this belief, that she has the power, here to put the world back to life, to bring plants up out of the soil, to siphon the poison out of the rain, to raise and clean the rust-choked seas and end the radiation that poisons them all? How can it be possible?

So, scowling, she continues down, until she comes to her hall, then storms out at what she thinks is the right doorway. Her boots snap against the floor, and she walks with the presence and gait of a marine, really, except for the uneven swing of the prosthetic arm against her side. To the average resident, she probably looks a terror, in motorcycle boots, leather pants, leather waist bracer and a half dozen belts, including the crest that cuts low across her hip and over her thigh. Her white undershirt is stained with mud and dust, her arm is like nothing from almost any universe, her mouth is set in a sharp frown, and her face is done up with a fresh and vivid shock of engine grease-Imperator black.

Honestly, she looks more like water taken on than she does the newest Warden. She’ll be lucky if none of the twitchier residents try to take a shot at her.