Mae (Planet of the Apes)

Mae is the deuteragonist of the 2024 20th Century Studios film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. She is a young girl living in a time where apes have become the dominant species and humans are a primitive species. Secretly a member of the few humans still able to speak and eager to return to humanity's place on Earth, Mae embarks on a dangerous adventure to succeed at all costs.
==Background==
More than three centuries after the retro-virus ALZ-113 created by humans to fight Alzheimer's disease but which ultimately made apes more intelligent and decimated humanity spread across the Earth, Mae was born into a human community still in possession of speech and intelligence, as well as knowledge of a distant era when humans were the dominant species. She was raised by her mother who taught her to remain silent to stay alive in this world dominated by apes who despise humanity. Ultimately, her mother died when Proximus Caesar's clan attacked their community, leaving Mae to fend for herself for a time.
===Personality===
Initially, Mae displayed a behavior similar to primitive humans, namely fearful, mute and wild, although showing a somewhat more developed intellectual and emotional capacity. She was frightened by the apes and fled from them as soon as possible but knew how to recognize who was visibly more hostile than others, like when she followed Raka and Noa from a distance to survive because she was able to see them differently. Once a certain bond was established, Mae was no longer afraid of the two primates and even walked alongside them.
Under her true personality as a non-primitive human, Mae appears fundamentally self-confident and knows how to assert herself, although she does not easily dare to raise her voice. Above all, she clings fiercely to the hope of returning the world to humans as it had once been, to the point of being ready to risk the devil to prevent the apes from becoming more powerful through knowledge or the possession of human weapons. Her determination, however, appears almost obsessive, like a person who cannot accept that going back is impossible. Through this same stubbornness, she feels a deep contempt for the demeaning of humanity, as when Trevathan firmly assured her that the world of old had disappeared forever, Mae finally reached her breaking point and savagely suffocated Trevathan to death.
If she is wary and fears apes, Mae is capable of having confidence in them if she has no choice or realizes that she has misjudged others, having practically revealed her secret of speech to Noa once she had understood that the eagle clan ape was truly her ally, just as she quickly considered Raka as her friend. Unfortunately, her open-mindedness remains eclipsed by her desire to restore the place of humans on Earth, to the point that Mae no longer really showed whether she had confidence in her rare ape friends and then was visibly indifferent to the consequences of her actions when she caused the bunker to flood with many apes trapped inside, including Noa and his clan. During their last meeting after the battle, Mae and Noa did not seem to be on good terms, with Noa now wary of human trickery while Mae dared to keep a gun in fear that Noa would be able to attack her for what she had done. In the end, Mae stood by her belief that her fellow humans deserved to reclaim what was once theirs but was nevertheless honest with Noa in answering that she did not know if humans and apes could coexist together. Both chose to let the other follow their path and life, leaving them on neutral terms.
===Physical appearance===
Mae is a young human in her early twenties sporting a mostly scruffy appearance, clothing in poor condition and goes barefoot due to time spent in the wild. She had a slender build due to repeated malnutrition but a non-negligible physical fitness due to surviving. Her eyes are blue, her hair is brown and long but disheveled, a small nose with big nostrils and a scar stitched up on her left arm.
Later after being taken to Proximus' fortress, she changes her tattered clothing with a long-sleeved blue shirt, beige ripped jeans and wears brown boots while having braided her hair. She also eventually wears a blue poncho after Noa and his Eagle Clan return to their home.
==Appearance==
===Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes===
In a ruined California town where three young apes from the Eagle Clan are searching for eagle eggs, Mae steals one of their blankets from one of their horses and tries to flee the pursuing trio until she abandons the blanket after entering an old train tunnel. Later in the evening, Mae infiltrates the Eagle Clan village to find food and finds herself cornered in the fish reserve when Noa, one of the apes from earlier, detects her presence. The second she is spotted, she runs away, shoving Noa, breaking his eagle egg in the process, then disappears into the woods. That same night, masked apes searching for Mae discover the village and burn it, taking the surviving members of the clan as prisoners.
Mae subsequently begins discreetly following a surviving Noa in search of his clan, narrowly avoiding being spotted by the ape on the first night of travel. The next day in the ruins of Los Angeles where Noa meets a learned orangutan named Raka, Mae hovers around Noa's horse before the latter chases her away when he sees her, calling her a parasite. The following night, Noa and Raka have dinner around a fire and Mae dares to approach while keeping her distance. The two apes, now knowing that she is following them, do not have the same opinion regarding her, Noa appearing indifferent while Raka offers food to the human. Seeing that she is freezing to death on top of being starved, Raka convinces Noa to take pity on the girl and reluctantly gives her his mother's blanket to warm up. While noting that she is smarter than other humans, Raka chooses to name her Nova, a name generally given to all humans. Despite the truce, Noa and Nova remain naturally suspicious of each other. Unable to sleep, Noa goes to explore the remains of an observatory and finds himself fascinated by the telescope capable of seeing the stars, just as a Nova who followed him is instinctively interested in the telescope before his eyes.
The next day, Noa speaks with Raka about Nova's previous ape-like behavior and ends up agrees that she come with them but on horseback so as not to slow them down. The trio later stops at a river where zebras come to drink and then primitive humans. By Nova's reaction, Raka encourages her to join her peers while Noa decides to continue his quest alone. Unfortunately, the masked apes burst in to capture the humans, just before spotting Nova and chasing her. She manages to dodge multiple capture attempts and then hides in the tall grass. The gorilla Commander Sylva and his minions comb the weeds looking for the girl, almost cornering her. As her chances of escape slowly decline, Nova sees Noa in the distance looking for her and as she has no other choice, she gets up and screams Noa's name to get his attention. She then rushes towards Noa, pursued by Sylva but Noa recovers her in time and escapes on horseback. The duo finds themselves confronted in their escape by a riding ape armed with an electric spear but the intervention of Raka saves them and allows the trio to get away.
In a safe place, the trio lets their horses go to falsify the tracks. Noa tells Raka that he heard Nova talking but the orangutan has trouble taking it seriously. However, Nova suddenly stops hiding her ability to speak, as well as revealing her real first name and knowing where Noa's tribe has been taken. Although she explains that the Eagle Clan was taken into a community of speaking humans, Noa no longer really trusts her as she hid her true nature from them but Raka is more understanding and maintains that they are still a band. That night, an almost asleep Mae spies on Noa having just repaired the electric baton he kept with him, not really leaving her reassured that he has such a weapon.
The next day, the trio crosses a wooden bridge over a river with a very strong current, only to be ambushed on both sides by Sylva, Lightning and two apes soldiers under the bridge. One of the soldiers tries to subdue Mae but she struggles hard enough that both of them fall over the bridge and she manages to hang on to a net. Raka tries to help her until the net partially tears, but she is saved when one of her bare feet gets caught in the net. Mae struggles to hold on much longer, forcing Raka to go into the water to bring her back to the pier bridge safely. Unfortunately, Raka is in turn dragged by the current with the net only holding on to a single rope. Under the eyes of a beaten Noa and a helpless Mae, Sylva cruelly cuts the rope, sending Raka to disappear beneath the raging waves.
Fists tied and dragged by rope, Mae and Noah are brought by Sylva to a kingdom of coastal apes where, once arriving in a beached freighter serving as a fortress, Mae is separated from Noa by Sylva dragging her to a cabin. There she then meets Trevathan, a cultured human in the service of the apes of which she does not take a liking due to her voluntary allegiance to the master of the ape kingdom, Proximus Caesar. Subsequently, the two humans observe the gathering of the apes where Proximus begins to praise the original Caesar whose teachings he has long distorted and corrupted then try to open the door of an old fortified bunker with explosives to seize all the contents left behind by humans. As the bunker does not open, Trevathan tells Mae that Proximus has been working on it for months, worsening Mae's fears because she knows that the former human government stored a lot of technology and weapons in this same bunker, the only possibility of Proximus taking possession of it is intolerable to her. Trevathan does not support her as he has accepted that the world forever belongs to the apes now and adamantly suggests that Mae abandon humanity's past.
Later, Mae and Trevathan are invited to the Proximus table for dinner, soon joined by Noa. Proximus proves interested in Mae's knowledge of the concept of evolution because he covets the immense human knowledge hidden in the bunker to bring dazzling evolution to the apes. When Mae tells him that he will never enter the bunker, Proximus reveals that he knows Mae's origins, just as his close guard had massacred her fellow humans without having confidence in their value, not constraining his plans since he knew Mae was going to "his" bunker, that he will obsess over opening no matter how many apes to sacrifice. With Mae he knows will refuse to help him, Proximus tries to rally Noa to his cause, warning him that Mae only wants the bunker's secrets to make humans stronger and more dangerous and that he only wants destroy human resources to prevent the apes from living again like the time when they were locked in cages.
The next night, Noa secretly meets with Mae to question her about her true motives now that he knows she was lying. Mae apologizes but explains that she was afraid because of what Proximus had done to her people and admits that she needed Noa. The Chimpanzee accuses her of only caring about her own interests, to which he could consent because he does not trust Proximus, in exchange for the truth from Mae. When questioned, Mae reveals that she covets some sort of special book in the bunker that she believes can restore speech to the rest of humanity. On the question that humans and apes lived side by side, Mae states that this was indeed the case but that humans dominated and the apes did not speak until a retro-virus created by humans duplicated apelike intelligence and nearly destroyed humanity. Once Mae confirms in the last two questions that she knows how to get into the bunker and that the water could destroy the contents, Noa decides to help her.
Recruiting Soona and Anaya, the two other apes that Mae almost crossed when she stole the blanket, the gang begins placing gunpowder in the tribe's dam on Mae's instructions. The young girl also notices that Nao has feelings for Soona but he does not admit it. They are suddenly discovered by a Trevathan furious at Mae's obsession with not accepting that the world before will never return. Mae tries to convince him to join them, only for Trevathan to turn his back on her, intending to warn Proximus. Refusing to let him do so, Mae fiercely lunges at Trevathan and ends up killing him by suffocation. After throwing Trevathan's body into the sea, the gang explores the foot of the cliffs behind the bunker then climbs the walls to climb up, Mae clinging to Noa's back. As soon as they reach the summit, they are given access via an old, ruined ventilation system.
Now in the bunker, the group advances equipped with torches into the human installation. Mae turns the power back on before asking the apes to wait for her while she goes her own way. Armed with a fire ax, she forces her way into a control room where she finds a supply of firearms as well as what she actually coveted from the start, a red satellite decryption key. With what she came for in her possession, Mae joins the trio and tells them they have to leave.
Arriving in in a hangar full of armored tanks with the armored door providing direct access to it, Mae proceeds to activate it from the inside. Unfortunately for them, Proximus and his army were waiting for them on the other side. While the self-proclaimed monarch is delighted to have gotten what he wanted, he scolds Noa for trusting a treacherous human like Mae and forces him to reveal the girl's plans by threatening Soona's life. Lightning about to slit Soona's throat on Proximus' orders, Mae shoots him with a pistol she had collected from the storage room, killing Proximus' minion and saving Soona. Faced with an impressed but not intimidated Proximus, Mae knows her back is against the wall as she fears that Proximus can do without her help to acquire the weapons and resources of the bunker. Blinded by fear and desperately refusing to let Proximus get his way, Mae tells Noa she's sorry before running to the detonator connected to the gunpowder and activating it, destroying the dam. She manages to get to safety as she watches the water rush into the bunker with the Proximus army and the Eagle Clan trapped inside, leaving her disturbed that she sacrificed her own friends to stop Proximus.
Some time later, Mae returns to the Eagle Clan village where the clan itself is found to have survived the flood, now led by a Noa having triumphed over Proximus. Without surprise, Noa is bitter against Mae because of her immoral actions, actions which also led him to see that Proximus was right about humans' destructive ambition to take back everything. Mae claims that everything once belonged to them and that the secrets of the bunker were made for humans and not apes, leaving Noa disgusted as he asks her if in this world she wants apes will have to live in cages again. Although Noa ultimately shows more concern about rebuilding and making his village safer, he quotes Raka as saying that he is sure the real Caesar would not have approved of Mae. Disillusioned and not knowing that Mae keeps the gun behind her back because she is afraid of what her former friend would be able to do to her now about the cost of hatred, Noa asks Mae if humans and apes are capable of sharing the same world. Unsure, she replies that she doesn't know. Despite the cold between them, Noa gives Mae Raka's necklace so that she never forgets what is important. The human and the chimpanzee subsequently separate peacefully, not without Noa remaining worried about the path Mae will choose.
On horseback, Mae goes to a dilapidated telecommunications center where other humans like her live and gives them the decryption key with which they reactivate old satellite antennas and successfully contact other humans around the world. Mae is last seen watching the antennas reactivate, happy to have finally succeeded in her mission.
==Gallery==
===Promotional===
File:Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes - Dolby poster.jpg
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Official Poster.jpg
File:Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes - Mae poster.jpg
===Screenshots===
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (13).jpg
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (14).jpg
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (15).jpg
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (16).jpg
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (17).jpg|Mae watches Noa walk away.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (18).jpg|"I have a name: Mae."
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (19).jpg
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (20).jpg
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (21).jpg
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (22).jpg
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (23).jpg|"It is not yours!"
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (24).jpg|"Oh, s**t."
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (25).jpg|Mae about to attack Trevathan.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (26).jpg
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (27).jpg|Mae gets the decryption key.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (28).jpg|Mae contemplates the consequence of her actions.
==Trivia==
*She is nicknamed "Nova", after a little human girl infected with the mutated strain of ALZ-113 that Caesar knew. The name was also used for a character in the original films and served as inspiration for the Rebootverse's Nova. However, orangutans call all female humans "Nova" while other apes refer to them as "Echoes".
*Mae's way of thinking about apes is not much different from the two previous antagonists J. Wesley McCullough and Dreyfus. Unlike them, Mae is not afraid of the apes to the point of wanting to exterminate them, but she nevertheless shows few scruples about sacrificing them. The main difference is that Mae hasn't succumbed to the xenophobic hatred for the apes, mainly because she has more fear than anger towards them.
*Freya Allan is the second British actress to be a major character in the franchise, preceded by Andy Serkis, who played Caesar in the first three films.
*She is the first character in the film to swear, subsequently leading Noa to say the same word after the two nearly fell off the cliff.
*The way Mae kills Trevathan is similar to how Caesar accidentally killed the traitorous gorilla Winter in War for the Planet of the Apes.
*Mae is descended from humans immune to the mutated and non-mutated effects of ALZ-113, also known as Simien Flu.
Category:Deuteragonists
Category:Females
Category:Anti-villains
Category:Orphans
Category:Adults
Category:Live-action characters
Category:Anti-heroes
Category:Heroines
Category:Planet of the Apes
Category:Acquired characters
Category:Thieves
Category:Horsemen
Category:Neutral characters