Be still, my dog of war.

Max and Dog

Since I know there’s probably a fair amount of you out there who haven’t seen the first three Mad Max movies, I’m here to tell you a li’l secret about them:

All the people complaining about how Max “isn’t the main character” in Fury Road are big ol’ Fake Fanboys cause Max’s primary character trait in literally every movie is “I hate this, why is it happening, please leave me alone to brood in the desert in peace”. 

He’s much more the central focus of the plot in the first movie but in Road Warrior and Thunder Dome he basically just gets kidnapped or beat up by wankers in weird bondage outfits and spends the rest of the movie trying to leave as soon as possible while other people are like “please solve our absurd post-apocalyptic problems”.  There is not one single point where Max actively seeks out being a hero until it is forced upon him.  He ACTIVELY TELLS PEOPLE WHO ASK HIM FOR HELP to take a hike.

Mad Max himself would like nothing better than to never, ever, ever be the main character.

He would also like for people to stop stealing his fucking car.

Nobody wants to escape his own movies more than Max Rockatansky. 

He understands better than his own fanboys that his life sucks and you don’t want to be like him, to be Max is humiliating and painful. Every time he gets dragged into a conflict, he ends up worse than he started. Max seems to realize no good can come of this, and is weirdly genre-savvy because he’s always trying to make a getaway at the first signs of encroaching Plot. I find this darkly comical and endearing -- at no point does he snap off witty quips and save the day and get the girl. Ever. He’s perpetually a weird desert loser with terrible luck. It’s great.

What makes Max a badass is the ability to survive to the end of any movie he’s unfortunate enough to find himself in.

ballisticducks replied to your post: Lord Humungus is still my favourite.

What I like about Humungus is he behaves believably like a human as a wild apex predator. Like, wild animals try to avoid serious fights, they don’t have the luxury of hospitals that can stitch them up if anything goes wrong. It’s a waste of physical resource and if they get damaged they will be inefficient at survival and probably die, or at least get knocked off the top of the pecking order when a younger, healthier competitor shows up. It’s why animals have so many chest puffing warning signs before they attack, they don’t want to fight because they don’t want to risk being hurt, they just want whatever they’re squaring off against to feel convinced that if they did fight, it would lose. Humungus has his pack and he has his territory that he combs for resources. He comes across hostile competition, he wants to assert that the resources are his, he is the superior predator, he is prepared to defend what is his but he doesn’t want to fight. He is convinced that if it does come to that he will win, but as the big buck wastelander in that area he doesn’t have the disposable energy and resources to actually engage every single person who happens to be in the land he’s claiming as his territory. Of course, a civil show of force where Max and the gang at the compound roll over and cede their supplies wouldn’t make for much of a cool dude action movie so it escalates, but I like Humungus because he’s not like, an unreasonable tryant or anything, he’s just a very believable top dog in the wildlands.

On that note, Lord Humungus sans hockey mask for your viewing pleasure.