you’re in the story now

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fuckyeahisawthat:

Just thinking about all the layers of storytelling that go into Wasteland Weekend, and how hard it is to explain it to someone who’s outside that environment in a way that captures the magic and complexity of it.

Like, there’s canon: the world of Mad Max, Fallout and a couple other things that forms the basis for the aesthetic, some specific events like Thunderdome, and the general event worldbuilding.

There’s meta on that canon (where Clan of the Boltcutters got our name, for example), and where we extract a lot of the ideas from canon that are important to us.

Then there’s a layer that people tend to call lore: the story of your individual tribe at WW and your character within the event.

While there is some cosplaying at WW, most people are creating original characters for themselves within that world. So the whole event is sort of like a giant self-insert fic, or really many different ones going on simultaneously and drawing on different parts of the underlying canon. While there are some people who do go full on with playing a character, most of us are kind of just “me but in the Wasteland,” with varying amounts of Wasteland-appropriate backstory.

Different tribes’ lore varies a lot in amount of detail and how closely it attaches to canon. Clan of the Boltcutters is explicitly a post-Fury Road tribe of Vuvalini and others living in/around an integrated, post-revolution Citadel. We have a loosely-defined story about who we are, which gets embodied in our costumes, props, how we set up our camp and how we interact with other Wastelanders.

It’s a story that’s blurry around the edges and may vary slightly in the telling, coming in different versions (all of which are true) depending on who you ask, as things in the Wasteland are wont to do. But we’re basically continually writing a collective Fury Road extension fic that weaves our tribe into a hopeful version of a post-Fury Road Citadel–a version that occasionally borrows from, but is often quite distinct from, our own individual fic-verses on AO3 or wherever.

And then sometimes things that happen at WW get woven back into fics set in the world of the Citadel, like this one, and new friends we meet at WW get woven into our story as we go along, until the lines between all these layers get kind of blurry, and it all happens in a very organic and collaborative way that’s incredibly cool to witness but difficult to explain to anyone outside it. I remember someone in our tribe yelling to some of our new friends at one point, “You’re in the story now!” But we all are. We are the story and the story is us.

…And then there’s the layer where you’re collectively writing pun-filled explicit smut fic shipping other tribes’ gods. Because that was a thing that happened too.

And then there’s the things that happen at Wasteland that are stories all by themselves, if you think of them that way. We made a friend who cosplays as Angharad, and just the act of her walking into our camp and spending time with us made this into a story where Angharad lives – look, she’s right there in the post-REVolution Citadel!

We also have the Ace as a Wasteland friend, and he’s married to a Vuvalini – so obviously the Ace has survived the events of Fury Road and is now adorably coupley with his Vuvalini lady.

And every time we give packets of dried Citadel peaches and lizard jerky to warboys, every time we invite them and share our food and drink and shade with them, we are weaning them away from their toxic ideology just a little bit more, showing them that life can be different.

We are the story and so is everybody else and the story is all of us.

(…the two tribes whose gods we crack-smut-shipped are talking about a communal peace ritual next year that involves reading our.. uh… religious scripture… out loud.)