roachpatrol:lurkinghistoric:mswyrr:ecouter-bien:flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:mswyrr:Couple things1) My

roachpatrol:lurkinghistoric:mswyrr:ecouter-bien:flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:mswyrr:Couple things1) My position is that if something is not in the text of the theatrical cut of the movie itself it is not official canon and I can incorporate it or not as I wish and so can we all. I refuse to be bound to whatever extraneous ideas passed through the heads of people involved in creating the movie which they happen to mention or even put into a comic or something - it’s secondary canon. If they didn’t put it in the movie, there’s a reason for that (it didn’t quite fit, it wasn’t worth the precious time, etc)2) The fandom idea people are so wild about where the Vuvalini left their sons behind etc etc is not in the movie. It’s a random thing some person involved mentioned in passing without explaining at all. Clearly if it passed through their minds it was decided against including and not fully developed in any meaningful way. The degree to which people have turned a passing comment into some kind of systematic androcide of the innocent is really heartbreaking and mind-boggling to me. That is not in the movie.3) You know what is in the movie? This (points upward) right here. Look at the Vuvalini’s face when she’s helping Capable as Rictus attacks. Now, compare with the grief on her face as Nux dies. She fucking cares about that reformed ex-War Boy. Whatever imaginary horrors you wish to put into the Vuvalini backstory, y’all gotta respect that face. And not simply merrily depict them all as a bunch of heartless misandrist demons for… whatever possible reason that might appeal to anyone. I cannot personally imagine. As far as I can tell: simple refusal to extend women understanding even a 10th as much as male characters are extended understanding or the benefit of the doubt. Also the fact that we’re trained to judge whether a woman is a perfect angel, and if she is not, condemn her a filthy demon. But whatever. I’ve seen it. I’m tired of it. So here we are. I’m not against exploring moral ambiguities or issues or potential wrongdoings in the past of any or all of the Vuvalini. Letting women be complicated, flawed, and even do wrong is important to me. But I am not here for them being uniformly vilified and, FFS, actually compared with Immortan Joe. That’s not exploring complexity, that’s inventing any flimsy pretext to throw them on the trash heap. There is no evidence for that, just the most over the top, ridiculous, non-canonical reading of them that turns them into an implausible and disgusting monolith.Yesss. I’ve said this once and I’ll say it a thousand times more: all of the women in this film cared about saving the men despite all that occurred and that is SO important.Yes, this whole Vuvalini as inherently misandrist thing is silly, mainly because it doesn’t seem to make any practical sense (safety in numbers) and it reduces them to reasoning along the lines of “girls = good, boys = bad”, like let’s give them more credit than that.I reblogged a quote yesterday about how, statistically, women are more likely to be harmed by men than be eaten by a shark or hit by a bus, and for me it explains the Vuvalini’s mistrust of men. Their mistrust of men is not inherent, it comes from a place of experience. And if you invert that, it means that if a man proves himself reliable, they will trust him.In that same quote it talks about how, despite the reality of the danger, women who express fear of men are pathologized. In our society, a woman can say she’s afraid of sharks and everyone gets it. If she says she’s afraid of men she gets backlash. So I think part of what is happening here is that we’re socialized to ignore the validity of the Vuvalini’s fear of men.Even though in their world their fear is basically as justified as it possibly can get. I’d snap every strange man I saw coming for me if I lived in their situation and had the sniping skills too. Further on the question of what happened to the men of their group or w/e - there’s a lot of angles to explore imo. Since I don’t think you have to leash yourself to any random thing people involved in the movie say, it’s actually wide open to interpretation. A few things that shape my own interp.1) It’s not just that there’s only women left, it’s that there’s only the older/oldest generation and one of their daughters (Valkyrie) left. And we don’t know how long after the War Boys kidnapped Furiosa and her mother the Green Place became spoiled - the women we know could have been in their 40s/50s and Valkyrie in her 20s when it happened. We don’t know.2) Clearly there was a lot of death and devastation. Clearly the people of the Many Mothers was a much larger group back before what was basically a mini-apocalypse fell upon them. Clearly many women and girls were lost as well as men and boys.Instead of focusing on “but what about teh menz!” I think an interpretation of their backstory should address why so many people died and why these people survived. 3) Is it possible that the women we know as the Vuvalini were part of those tasked with scouting/protecting the group primarily and that perhaps the people who died were focused on agriculture and other skills that made them less able/willing to flee when the land became poisoned? Did many more flee and simply have died over the years, these women we meet having faced tragedy after tragedy and the slow death of their people? Maybe that is why they are so glad to have young people, potentially daughters and sons, again to care for and build a world with?Instead of turning them into simple harridan son-haters, I want people to look deeper at them and exercise some sympathy. Imagine these women as part of the scouting/warrior group - (a) some of their people refusing to leave with them, believing they can make it work, that it isn’t as bad as it looks and then (b) years, maybe a full decade or more, of trying in futile effort to protect those that came with them, to keep them alive. But they die. They lose people over and over and over again. Becoming more insular, more hardened as raids and attacks and hunger and disease and thirst and deprivation slice away, piece by piece, everyone and everything they love. There’s so many possibilities. So much further to look than simply seeking a group of women and saying “clearly they’re son abandoning demon spawn” in denial of all evidence or context or empathy.4) One of the only first-hand accounts of the experience of living through the Black Plague was written by the writer Boccaccio. If you want a nuanced vision of what people behave like when their world ends–which is what happened to the people of the Many Mothers–I recommend reading it. The stuff about who flees and who stays and the emotional disturbances/social breakdown that happens during a catastrophe is very useful.If I wanted to explore ugliness on the part of the women we’d meet, I’d think about how social ties break down and conflict erupts and people are unable to judge their situation accurately and what that might lead to, rather than, again, depicting them as 1 dimensional, soulless man-hating villains.5) The idea that a matriarchal society has to be anti-man is anthropologically and historically untrue. Indigenous groups with matriarchal behaviors and practices (matrilineal descent, husbands leaving their families and living with the families of their wives, women in control of the agricultural resources and having strong influence in decision making over issues like war, women in control of family groups/living arrangements) that I am aware of in the US lived in arrangements that did not require or expect them to murder or abandon or devalue their sons. It’s kind of offensive to depict a woman-centered society as being like the worst kind of patriarchy. We don’t fully know what kind of social arrangements the people of the Green Place had, except that there was a strong respect for and power for women.That does not spell misandry inevitably, any which way you slice it. Yes to all this. I was lurking on tumblr when the Vuvulini/Crow People detail emerged, and I remember being shocked by how eagerly that angle was picked up. This particular snippet was first revealed in this post, which is basically a list of discarded ideas. Immortan Joe is blue! There’s a lottery with a potato! The crow people are the Vuvalini’s abandoned sons! And yet the immediate reaction, from a lot of people, was to jump from “discarded idea” over “possible headcanon” or even canon and straight to “Essential Defining Fact About the Vuvalini”.  Since then, I’ve seen more detailed accounts of that talk. Production designer Colin Gibson clearly does see the Crow People as abandoned Vuvalini sons, but I’ve yet to see anyone else on the production team agree with him - most of them didn’t even recognise that detail when they were asked about it. (George Miller and storyboard artist Mark Sexton among them. I don’t know if anyone has asked Nico Lathouris, but in the art book he describes the Vuvalini as “the people who are most capable of bringing any kind of sanity to the world”, so I’m guessing he’s not on Team Vuvalini-are-son-abandoners either.) Which suggests to me that it was an idea that came up in discussion but was discarded very quickly, or perhaps simply that it was Colin Gibson’s own headcanon. None of that means that fans shouldn’t headcanon it, if they want to. It certainly doesn’t mean there are no negative sides to Vuvalini culture, or that those shouldn’t be explored. But I’m still surprised by how this idea - which never appears on screen, which was first mentioned alongside Immortan Joe being blue - took off in fandom. Most of all by the determination to treat it as the central fact about the Vuvalini. I remember some poor soul requested a Nux-brought-up-by-Vuvalini AU on the kink meme, and another anon came riding in to insist that it was “confirmed” by that behind-the-scenes talk that the Vuvalini were son-abandoning monsters, and that this must be borne in mind at all times. For a fanfic AU request! So yeah, female characters being judged on a quite different scale to that used for male characters. In fandom as elsewhere.i’m pretty sure the reason misogynists are always assuming that matriarchs kill off or drive out or enslave their sons, is because they can’t comprehend a situation in which men would voluntarily allow women in charge. which, given the whole plot of fury road, is pretty fucking funny.Particularly galling when the anthropological evidence shows that “matriarchal” societies are consistently more democratic and inclusive than patriarchal ones. Of course, plenty of anthropologists use this to argue they don’t actually exist: if men aren’t being oppressed like patriarchies oppress women, then it can’t, in their view, be a “true” matriarchy, and the leadership role of women is just some unique and interesting quirk, not a central aspect of their social system *eyeroll* -- source link
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