#PollMondays: Which of these sf/f characters would win in a free-for-all fight?
It’s time for another poll! This week, we’ve decided to make your life hell by forcing you to choose the character you think would most likely win in a fight. Imagine, if you will, that we stuck all of these folks in a cage match. Who would win? Why? Take the poll, and leave a comment!
Hardholders, Drivers and GunLuggers — Mad Max: Fury Road and the Apocalypse World RPG
The Apocalypse World RPG is a seminal game in recent, if not all of, roleplaying history. The game allows the GM and the players to create, and play in a world ravaged by an apocalypse whose nature is mysterious, somewhat lost to time, and has left a mess of a world for people to try and survive in. Written by D Vincent Baker, the game features relatively simple mechanics, niche protection by defining classes for player characters, and tons of tools for the GM to up the stakes, bring the pain, and make hard moves to get the players to make the ugly bargains and hard choices in a post-apocalyptic society.
Mad Max: Beyond Patriarchy — On Fury Road’s (2015) Visual Rhetoric and Apocalyptic Social Rebirth
If you haven’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road (2015; dir. George Miller) yet, I highly recommend it. Unexpectedly, it turned out to be a film I didn’t know I wanted. There are a lot of things worth discussing here, but in particular, I want to explore two elements of the film that I think make it a significant work of cinema. Visual Rhetoric and Mad Max (in Brief) In my review of The City of Lost Children (1995), I argued that Mad Max : Fury Road is primarily interested in storytelling as visual versus a story funneled to us through narrative proper. The point I want to make about the visual qualities of Mad Max — an idea that also applies to The City of Lost Children, albeit mobilized for different purposes — is that there is so little in this film that is told to us as a narrative (i.e., in exposition, dialogue, or in literal narration) that it compels us to focus not on the narrative (the plot), but on the conveyance of meaning within its visual landscape, both in the straight symbolic sense and in the characters-doing-things sense.
