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dear-mrs-otome · 3 days

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Here is Jude's drunken story with ZERO GUARANTEES MADE - this will not be entirely accurate, both by design and by accident. Enjoy my shitbrained version of a summary 💕

Jude and Ellis are assigned a mission to investigate/deal with rumors that a certain bar is engaging in human trafficking - getting women drunk and then selling them. Kate, being our do-gooder, asks if she can help of course, and Jude suggests she can go undercover as an employee if she wants to help. Kate is like, I'm sorry whut?? But Jude just smirks and challenges her - she said she wanted to help, is she gonna back out of it?

Kate declares she'll do it and thus finds herself employed at the bar, albeit more than a little nervous about flying solo on this. A fancy-looking fellow walks in and looks around before taking a seat at the bar, and the manager calls to Kate.

She bustles over and the fancy man says it looks like she's working hard - how about he buys her a drink as a reward?

She's handed a glass and recalls how the MO here is to get girls drunk and then sell them, so she hesitates. Sleazy Fancy Man says if she can't drink it he'll ‘help’ her, and she's spluttering for him to please stop as he begins forcing the glass to her mouth. The moment it touches her lips though she hears -

“The hell ya doin’?”

Shocked, Kate watches as Jude suddenly appears, grabs the glass, and downs the whole thing himself. Equally as shocked is Fancy Man, who immediately tries to scramble away before promptly being sent sprawling, tripping over Jude's foot. A smirking Jude says he seems to be pretty scared - what's he trying to hide? Oh right, can't just come out and say you're trying to buy a girl can you?

Ellis takes down the manager as he's trying to haul ass out of the bar too, and with a sadistic grin Jude kicks the dude in the side of the face and gleefully suggests they spill their guts.

After they've confessed and the bar has been shut down, Jude has Ellis take the two men away. He and Kate are walking back home, but she notices he's been uncharacteristically quiet. Usually he'd have been busy bitching her out by now, but tonight it's just crickets. And the moment she opens her mouth to say something, reaching out to him, his whole body sorta lurches.

Kate’s all JUDE! and she steadies him, noticing his breath is hella hot on her cheek as she does. She's like, holy crap are you sick??!

Jude calls her an idiot for even suggesting that, but he's standing there in kind of a daze, face red as he tells her - “There was something in the drink.”

Kate commences freaking out harder, all OMG WHUT ARE YOU OKAYYYY and earns Jude griping at her to quit her noisy-ass shouting. She tells him they gotta get him to Roger ASAP, and giving him her shoulder she hauls ass back to the mansion and Roger's basement.

Surprised to see them, Roger asks if Jude got hurt but Kate hurriedly explains the situation and Roger gives him an exam. He says there's nothing major going on, just that the drink had something in it that amplifies alcohol - makes you drunker faster. Nothing to worry about.

Kate's hella relieved, and Roger summarily boots them outta his lab, saying he doesn't have time to babysit drunk people AKA Jude is her problem now.

Since her room is closest, Kate drags Jude there. She's about to go grab him some water when he calls out an ‘Oi’

- and when she turns to ask what's up she suddenly finds herself flat on her back on the bed, Jude straddling her. He's like…JFC woman you seriously have zero concept of danger don't you?

His large hand caresses her stomach and works her blouse up, and Kate gasps out - what are you doing??? As she's sorta flailing, Jude grabs her and easily pins both wrists above her head with his other hand.

“...Why were you gonna drink it?” He asks, deapan. Kate sputters that she WASN'T going to, which only makes Jude scowl. “You had your mouth on it.”

“Why did you drink it?” Kate fires back.

His answer is to put his free hand back on her stomach, and Kate can't help the involuntary little squirm she makes at the feel of his warm fingers. Jude smirks and calls her dirty for getting all excited, which Kate vehemently denies…all the whole totally aware of how her embarrassment shows in her eyes.

Jude gets his patented sadistic look on his face as he asks if dat pussy she wants to be well and truly pounded...and when he lowers his mouth to lick her stomach, she can't stifle her cry.

Then, serious expression back, Jude tells her this'll be a good learning opportunity for such a hella perv - just before he bites down on her stomach, hard.

The sudden sensation has her whole body seizing up, her sight wavering, unable to tell what is pain and what is pleasure. Both all jumbled up.

“You really…” Jude starts to say something, but before he can finish, his whole body gives out and he flops down atop her. Kate panics, then realizes as he winds up holding her that he's passed the fuck out, peaceful expression and all. The complete mood change from moments earlier has her totally drained, unable to do much more than watch him sleep. Wrapped in his arms and the scent of tobacco and sandalwood she closes her own eyes too.

The next morning she wakes up, all uncomfortable, and realizes she's got a Jude blanket - his arms still around her and remembers he passed out like that, holding her. As she starts struggling to get free of his embrace, Jude wakes up and asks wtf she's doing.

FULL ON AWKWARD she's got Jude eye contact up close and personal as she manages a ‘good morning’ which he promptly scoffs at. And she tries not to think too hard about how sad she feels when he lets go of her…but as she watches him pour a glass of water something comes back to her.

“Why did you drink that drink yesterday?” She presses again.

Jude’s all, ehhhhh? Before brushing it off as the fact that if he'd dumped it out there'd have been no evidence so he'd taken it himself instead as proof basically. And he offers to get her some of the stuff if she wants it so badly and pour it down her throat.

Kate (who by now we're all aware can totally see through him) thinks how she KNOWS he most likely just did it to protect her.

Jude puts his coat back on and scowls. “You brought me all the way back here, and had that quack take a look at me…so we'll call things even between us.”

He stalks out of the room with that, leaving behind a stunned Kate. Sitting up tho she winces, and looks down to find a raw bite mark on her stomach. She traces it with her fingers, heat running through her as she does, then smashes her face into the pillow in a state of WHAT THE FUCK, ME?? mortified. Convinced she's not gonna even begin to forget about last night until those marks fade away.

#ikemen villains #ikevil #ikevil jude #spoiler #spoilers #ikemen villains spoilers #ikevil spoilers #help i love them so much #that hint of bickering too #I AM FED

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fuckyeahisawthat · 19 hours

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Furiosa thoughts

About 48 hours after watching, I think my take on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is coalescing into: I enjoyed it as a Mad Max movie but found it disappointing as a Fury Road prequel.

Any Mad Max movie made after Fury Road was always going to suffer the fate of being compared to Fury Road, which is the best action movie ever made. So like, compared to any other action movie you can think of, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (we'll call it FMMS going forward) is very very good! It just isn't Fury Road.

The rest is under the cut for spoilers:

The action sequences were compelling. (I was aware I was hunched forward in my seat in tension/anticipation almost the entire time.) Some of them were even brilliant. That long sequence where the Octoboss and the Mortiflyers (yes those are their names) are attacking the War Rig with all kinds of airborne contraptions? Phenomenal. I was like yes okay now we are in a Mad Max movie! Other than that one sequence, though, in which we see Furiosa and Praetorian Jack begin to trust each other, I thought they rarely achieved the kind of wordless advancement of character relationships through action beats that is the lifeblood of Fury Road. So the action was good, but it was just normal-good, not Fury Road transcendent.

I did miss John Seale's cinematography. While I thought the action choreography was great, the shot selection was just not as dynamic and interesting as in Fury Road. I also really did not vibe with so much of the musical themes being recycled from Fury Road. The Fury Road score is SO memorable and the music is such an integral part of the momentum and feeling of every scene in the movie; I can play that score and see every beat of the action unfolding in my brain now. I wanted new score that felt like it was a part of this new action that we were seeing.

I loved all the new worldbuilding details and finally getting to see inside Gastown and the Bullet Farm. Those locations and their unique features were utilized really well for the action that took place in them. Loved the new details we got about the Citadel. The grappling hooks just dipping down to yoink people's vehicles during battle? Fantastic. The hidden Citadel ledge with the little pool of water?? That was such a fanfic-ready location. Pretty sure I already wrote at least one fic set there back in like 2016.

The Green Place! Very different from what I imagined but so much worldbuilding in just a few shots.

In general I thought the new cast rose to the challenge. Alyla Browne who played little kid Furiosa I thought was phenomenal actually. That's a tough role, both emotionally and physically, for a child actor and she slayed it. Casting Indigenous model and actress Charlee Fraser to play Furiosa's mother certainly made the Stolen Generation parallels more obvious. I'll have a lot more to say about Dementus down below, but Chris Hemsworth brought a great combo of bonkers and menacing.

I never doubted that Anya Taylor-Joy could bring the emotional intensity needed to the role--she can do crazy eyes like nobody's business, and with the growl she put in her voice she really did sound like Charlize Theron a bit. I found her physicality convincing for a young Furiosa. But she is not Charlize, through no fault of her own. Charlize is tall and she has broad shoulders and she just takes up so much space when moving and fighting as Furiosa and I think it was always going to be hard to replicate that. As long as they didn't try too hard to bridge the gap between the characters I was fine with it. But that one scene at the end where she's bringing the Wives to the Rig I was very viscerally like that is NOT our Furiosa. (I almost wish they would've used Charlize's stunt double for that scene the way they popped Jacob Tomuri into Max's place.) They could have simply left a time gap--based on the "15 years" she says to Dementus and the 7,000+ days we hear about in Fury Road there should be at least a 4-year gap between the film timelines, although in terms of bridging the look of the two actors it feels like it should be more like 10 years.

If FMMS had been a self-contained movie about a character named Furiosa in the Mad Max universe, I think I would have found it very satisfying. But as a prequel to Fury Road there were a bunch of ways I thought it was lacking on a story level.

I think it's pretty clear that this is not the backstory, or at least not the complete backstory, that Charlize Theron was imagining while playing Furiosa. Which...there's nothing objectively wrong with that; word of God and what actors think about their characters doesn't supersede what's on film for determining what is canon. However, Fury Road positions Joe as Furiosa's main antagonist, and while we don't get the full story behind the incandescent rage she directs at him, we know that rage is there and is a big part of her motivation. In interviews at the time, Charlize talked about the idea that Furiosa had been stolen to be a Wife but then was discovered to be infertile and discarded, how she survived by hiding in the Citadel and eventually rose to a position of power, how she saw her actions not as saving the Wives but as stealing them, and that her motivation at least starts out as more about hurting Joe than helping these women.

We get only the tiniest suggestion of Furiosa's backstory in Fury Road ("I was taken as a child, stolen") and the rest we piece together by implication. She is a healthy full-life woman working for a man who keeps healthy full-life women as sex slaves, hoping one of them will produce a viable male heir for him. She is effectively a general in his army, projecting his power on the wasteland, a position no other woman seems to occupy. She tells Max she is seeking "redemption." Redemption for what? She doesn't say. But "whatever she has done to win a position of power within this misogynist death cult" seems like a pretty obvious answer.

And that's interesting! That's an interesting backstory that engages with some of the core themes and moral questions of the Mad Max universe. These movies deal a lot with the tension between self-preservation and human connection. Do you screw someone else over to protect yourself? Even if it means putting them in the terrible position that you yourself have clawed your way out of? Even if it means enforcing your own oppressor's power over them? Or do you take the risk of helping people and caring enough to connect with them, even though this carries an emotional and physical risk?

FMMS doesn't really engage with Furiosa's relationship to Joe like, at all. It's not like Joe comes off looking like a good guy. He's just hardly in the movie. I don't know if this would have been different if Hugh Keays-Byrne were still alive. I don't know if there was pressure from the studio to cast an A-list male lead actor alongside Anya Taylor-Joy (who's a hot commodity now but wasn't what I would call an A-lister when she was originally cast). I don't know if, once Chris Hemsworth was cast, that affected how central his character's role became, since he is certainly the biggest name attached to the film. I would have actually been fine with Chris Hemsworth or another actor of his ilk playing a younger Joe, and us getting to see some of the charisma that attracted followers to him.

But the end result is that we have Dementus, who is a perfectly fine Mad Max villain, and quite entertaining at times! But not the most compelling antagonist you could give Furiosa.

The four Mad Max movies that feature Max go through an interesting evolution. In the first two movies, the villains are people "outside" society--criminals and roving gangs--and the people Max is defending are "civilization." So we have Mad Max where Max is a very fucked-up cop, and Road Warrior where Max is the prototypical western gunslinger, riding in to town to protect the settlement from an outside threat, but ultimately unable to accept any of the comforts of civilization for himself.

Then in Thunderdome and Fury Road, the dynamic switches. Now the antagonists are warlords and dictators. They are civilization. And the people Max ends up helping are trying to escape them.

To me, Dementus feels much more like the earlier kind of Mad Max villain. If there's another Mad Max movie I can most compare FMMS to, it's the first one. Dementus is Furiosa's Toecutter. (Kills her family, gives her her signature disabling injury, movie ends with her seeking revenge on him but it doesn't feel heroic or triumphant.) The whole end of FMMS when Furiosa is implacably hunting down Dementus? Extremely Mad Max 1.

But violent revenge holds a different symbolic place in Furiosa's story than it does in Max's. The end of Mad Max is a tragedy because Max tells us it is. He explicitly states, early in the movie, that he needs to stop being a cop or he'll become no different than the violent criminals he's pursuing. So he leaves his job and goes on an extended weird vacation with his wife and child, trying to get away from the violence of a collapsing society. But that violence finds him anyway, and by the end of the movie, Max has become the exact thing he said he didn't want to be. It's a tragedy not because the people Max kills in revenge for killing his family don't deserve it, but because seeking violent sadistic revenge is damaging to Max. That is not what he needs in order to heal from the loss of his wife and child. What he needs is to take the risk of human connection again. This is what he starts groping toward in the following two movies and fully realizes in Fury Road.

But Furiosa doesn't have the same arc. Her story in Fury Road is about how a few people struggling against their oppressor can be the catalyst that brings down a whole regime. Furiosa getting to rip Joe's face off is fucking satisfying, and it's supposed to be! So it's a bit weird, then, to spend an entire movie giving her a backstory that not only is not about Joe at all, but implies that seeking and getting revenge against Dementus for killing her mother and Jack is what made her into the person we see in Fury Road.

Aside from questions of revenge, what I thought Furiosa's goal was going to be is set up in the beginning of the movie. "No matter what happens, find your way home." Very clear objective there. And then we see her try to get home like, 1.5 times. I thought we were well set up to follow the tried and true film story format of "simple goal, big obstacles, high stakes." I wanted to see her trying over and over again to get home, and being thwarted in different ways every time. I wanted to see grief and guilt over her mother's death turn her mother's last command into a mission for which she would sacrifice anything (and anyone) else. I wanted to see her justify working for Joe and accumulating power in the violent world of the Citadel as what she has to do in order to get home. I wanted to see "Have you done this before?" "Many times." But we didn't really get that either.

Ultimately, I think the least frustrating way to think about the film--which the film itself encourages--is as one of many possible Wasteland legends about a character called Furiosa. Maybe it happened this way. Maybe it didn't. Maybe this is the Furiosa we see in Fury Road. Maybe it isn't. It all depends on how much you believe of the History Man's tales.

#mad max #furiosa #furiosa a mad max saga #mad max fury road #spoilers #furiosa spoilers #story structure

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