Possibly the start of something, definitely not what I set out to write. Zero spoilers for Infinity War – I could have written this after seeing Black Panther.
Once Bucky’s able to walk around without needing a nap, they move him out of Central Wakanda to a rural part of the Merchant Tribe’s lands. For his recovery and safety, they tell him. If there are going to be spies in Wakanda, they will be in the capital. And the pastoral life will help him heal, although he is not so sure about that. Before he was a weapon he was a fireman’s kid from the part of Brooklyn that didn’t have much nature still left standing. He doesn’t know anything about livestock apart from what was on view at the butcher’s, but now he’s bunking down in a place where the animals outnumber the people. Which is apparently the point of the exercise – to separate him from all that has come before so that he can figure out who he will be now.
He’s pretty sure he’s not gonna be a farmer, but for the time being he is.
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.)
I honestly always find the term ‘spinster’ as referring to an elderly, never-married woman as funny because you know what?
Wool was a huge industry in Europe in the middle ages. It was hugely in demand, particularly broadcloth, and was a valuable trade good. A great deal of wool was owned by monasteries and landed gentry who owned the land.
And, well, the only way to spin wool into yarn to make broadcloth was by hand.
This was viewed as a feminine occupation, and below the dignity of the monks and male gentry that largely ran the trade.
So what did they do?
They hired women to spin it. And, turns out, this was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered ‘respectable’ outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn quite a tidy salary for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required.
So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn’t get this, because All Women Want Is Husbands, Right?
So when people say ‘spinster’ as in ‘spinster aunt’, they are TRYING to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter.
But what I HEAR are the smiles and laughter of a million women as they earned their own money in their own homes and controlled their own fortunes and lived life on their own terms, and damn what society expected of them.
What if birthmarks are the places that actually killed us in our past life? Like there’s this girl from school whose birthmark is a line on her neck. What if her throat was cut? I know this guy who has his birthmark on his whole left cheek. What if he was shot? My little sisters birthmark is a line straight down her stomach. What if she died on the operating table?
– Fantasy noir: Pour another one, Joe. My dragon left me for some clean-shaven cape-wearing foreign hero with an accent so thick you can hear the fake passport in his voice.
– Existential noir: these are mean streets to have an empty life in, kid. Thinkers nurse a hangover from their disgust of life for fifty years then roll over and die. This is how we run things in our city. Play it again, will you.
– Southern Gothic Noir: look at yourself, boy. They’ve got names for people who carry the Bible like that. They’ve got names for everything around here. And if you don’t get it the first time the walls will whisper it back to you.
– Noir Mythology: She was a priestess at some local temple. One of those temple only people who pray for a pint of bourbon and a life insurance go to. And she had a face that meant trouble, make no mistake. But not after Zeus turned her into a cow. Not after Zeus turned her into a cow.
– Noir meta-Shakespeare: Characters like us, Horatio. We weren’t born to grow old and mean. We faff around, we mix a stiff one, and then we die. But when we die, we die hard and we make sure we bring the whole damn city down with us.
– Noir Milton: Heaven looked high class from fifty feet away but from five feet away it looked like the kind of place meant to be seen from fifty feet away. Stay there long enough you get a double pint of Hell’s Bells. Real hell is my business now. Real hell is how I make my nickel.
– Noir William Blake: She was the sort of tiger a bishop would paint crosses on his front door against. You can’t tell anything from tigers like that. She could have had the sheriff in the back room. She could have been making millions. But you could tell she burned bright in all the right places. Oh, dhe burned bright all right.
– Noir Dylan Thomas: Alright, old man. Amateur hour is over. You go down kicking and screaming or you don’t go down at all, you get my meaning?
– Noir Keats: Outside, the Autumn smelled of politics: it asked only for the highest types of men and had nothing to offer them but bleating lambs and the song of crickets. The sort of autumn that shares his smokes and his wife with the maturing sun. “I don’t like Spring,” the kid said. “That’s all right, sonny boy. I ain’t selling it.”
– Noir Edgar Allan Poe: You could tell from the way he sauntered in the bird meant business. He had the kind of beak that could drive a nail through your forehead. Didn’t string more than two words together but he knew all the right ones all the same. He knew which ones stung. “I don’t want no birds in my room,” I said, loud enough for hell to hear. But birds like that don’t just scram. Birds like that stick to you like a bad divorce from a Hollywood diva.
I will apologize in advance for this comment, because I LOVE THIS POST and I do not wish to profane it, but when I read the Dylan Thomas noir, my brain first read “you go down dicking and screaming,” and I really think that, considering Thomas’s life, it still feels perfectly appropriate.
Steel Phoenix Studios 