Daily Mad Max meta
So I was trying to think through how the Citadel could rewire its military strategy and its mythos as a force to be reckoned with after Immortan Joe's death, of course, because what else would I think about, and I was turning over the fact that it's both a very vulnerable and a very desirable military target.
And then I was thinking, well, in the movie there are at least two instances where characters use being vulnerable and desirable to draw potentially dangerous enemy forces in over their heads - when Valkyrie seriously puts herself in a cage on top of a tower, naked and alone, in an attempt to bait passersby into, I suppose, getting mugged by the surviving Vuvalini, and when Cheedo baits Rictus into an exposed position during the final confrontation by acting scared and helpless.
So wow, that would be a thing you could weaponize, wouldn't it, and it would also make a decent (gendered) myth: a kind of myth of the Siren city, off on the horizon, full of water and food and gasoline and run by women and it should be easy to invade, but that vulnerability is a fucking lie. You think you're big and tough and you try a frontal attack but your supply lines are cut off, you're harried from every direction by people who fade back into the desert when you try to turn to face them, your vehicles bog down in weird sand traps. Forces that try to invade the Citadel just never come back and no one who survives can put together a coherent story about what happened, because it was all really confusing. They're probably witches. Do not engage.
(I am imagining many strategy confrontations between Furiosa and (per
thatyourefuse) Cheedo the Deceitful, who is really, really good at disorienting small armies. Furiosa is like "we could just. shoot them all. though." and Cheedo - once she's grown into her new title - goes, oh, no, we want about a fourth of them to limp back home babbling about crows and how they never saw it coming. We don't have the people or weapons or infrastructure to be unassailable, but we can be incredibly difficult, that's a different strategy entirely)
Anyway, I don't know how well it would hold together as a strategy, but it seems, at least, in character for the culture they're going to have. And I like the idea that your first mistake was thinking that you could invade them, and everything after that was a worse mistake.)