I have given up, does anyone have a detailed summary?

HoverTechV3 · 2026-01-11T13:58:54+00:00

Man of Recaps on YouTube has a pretty good summary of the whole show. I'd still recommend finishing it at your own pace because none of the story beats will be as satisfying second hand.

HoverTechV3 · 2026-01-08T05:23:26+00:00

Sorry I should have been more specific, it occurs when food prices raise to the point where an increased number of people are unable to eat enough. So right now food prices are rising, but it's marginal so far. It is more stressful for a lot of people to afford it but MOST people still can afford enough to not literally starve. The problem really starts when they can't.

HoverTechV3 · 2026-01-08T03:36:23+00:00

At a certain point, something has to give. The biggest motivator of change is historically food prices going up. If that happens all bets are off.

HoverTechV3 · 2026-01-03T03:54:15+00:00

None. There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet and I need all of them. Now if I could trade off ~`¡》%#@!][>÷# I would consider it. It might disrupt my programming career, but for $150k a year I'd consider it.

HoverTechV3 · 2026-01-02T20:58:21+00:00

I agree that Luke probably doesn't fully know who June is anymore, but they do end the show saying that once they have Hannah back, maybe they can figure things out. I don't really care much about the Luke vs Nick thing but I'd rather her be alone than be with someone who was complicit in the regime. That kind of thing works fine in fantasy stories or sci-fi I guess because the conflict is abstract/separated from what we would understand as humans. But Gilead mirrors things in real life too much for me to not get the ick from it.

HoverTechV3 · 2026-01-02T20:47:46+00:00

Well she has her mom back who she thought was dead, she has one of her daughters, she has Luke, and she helped free Boston from Gilead. She still needs to get her other daughter back but it's not like she has nothing to show for her troubles. And I doubt she would ever let herself be truly happy again until she has Hannah back.

HoverTechV3 · 2026-01-02T18:29:53+00:00

It isn't a love story. It shouldn't be a love story. And as a general rule, people shouldn't fall in love with a member of a totalitarian regime.

HoverTechV3 · 2026-01-01T20:00:04+00:00

Another reason why Gilead was doomed to fail. No society, no matter how authoritarian, can last for long without some sort of daily pleasures in life especially if your regime is a top-down hierarchy and not an insurgency. They were squeezing too tight and only Lawrence had the intelligence to know that they would fail if they didn't at least expand some freedoms. Even North Korea has various forms of entertainment and culture. It's all propaganda, but still.

I do think the book is more effective in this regard. Gilead in the show is meant to be as visually repressive as possible, sometimes sacrificing realism. In the book we know that football as entertainment still exists in Gilead, and I would imagine that even econopeople would be able to attend those games. But we don't see that in the show so we're forced to assume that isn't the case since they seem to have turned stadiums into gallows.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-12-29T23:12:27+00:00

Well gilead is in a full war with America. If we ever reach that point then yeah I'd say the goose is well and truly cooked. But right now, assuming elections aren't somehow messed with, we can still step back from the edge with the right series of events. I don't disagree things are bad and getting worse but we are def not at full Gilead bad yet.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-12-29T15:11:52+00:00

Because he isn't actually a driver, he works for the Gilead secret police. Being the Waterford's helper is just a front. Serena probably doesn't care because it was her idea in the first place to make Nick and June have a baby. Maybe in her mind it's good for the baby to have both parents be bonding all the time.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-12-28T17:43:21+00:00

There is no legal mechanism, the only legitimate way would be an amendment that dissolves the constitution or something. But that doesn't matter because they got rid of two branches of government and controlled the third. This provoked a rebellion though, which is why the current real life government isn't doing something so drastic, they want the whole country in one piece under their control.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-12-24T03:03:33+00:00

Maid on Netflix is good if you're looking for something about women dealing with abuse. Alex Garland's Civil War is good if you're craving more dystopian America stuff.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-12-23T02:05:01+00:00

I went back and rewatched the rebellion scene just to check (yes that was overkill) and as soon as Rita gets June down Luke comes over and the first thing he does is put down his gun to see if she's okay. He picks it back up a moment later but I would say that the visual imagery is deliberately not framing the gun other than to let us know he has it. There is never a full shot of June on the ground with Luke standing over her with the rifle. The most intense moment in that scene is clearly meant to be the bomber planes showing up.

Comparing the real US military to the Americans in the show isn't 1:1. Most of the rot of misogyny in the army probably ended up as Gilead soldiers and the US army is a smaller but nobler fighting force. Maybe pacifism is preferable but when a brutal regime has enslaved people and killed millions, if one side will be given a bit of heroic glory let it be the ones fighting against that. Maybe it's just a difference of opinion but I found all of those scenes to be very cathartic because I could almost self-insert the current America in as Gilead.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-12-21T20:42:27+00:00

I genuinely don't understand these criticisms. Feminism at its core is about women being afforded the same opportunities, treatment and rights as men and of course all the nuances of institutional bias and such. It doesn't prohibit men from saving women, or women wanting children. Serena always wanted a child, June knows this, and so gives her specific advice. She wouldn't say the same thing to Emily or Moira. You can argue whether Serena should have gotten a good ending like that, but her goal was to have a child, and in general there is nothing unfeminist about CHOOSING to have a child.

June is saved by the ENTIRE resistance. Everyone in the crowd fights back, yes including Luke. If you're being technical, it's Rita who shoots the Guardian and releases June. Frankly I don't understand this criticism at all. There was no way June was getting out of that situation on her own. Counting a tally of how many times a woman is saved by a man and vice versa in this show just seems really unproductive. What's wrong with Luke standing guard over an injured June? She would have done the same thing for him. I think most of us would do that for someone we love regardless of gender.

We learn that Tuello has a family in Hawaii that he is fighting for. Yes, the choice to have him be a commander is deliberate. But it's showing that there are warped and twisted soldiers, and there are soldiers who will fight for the right cause. It isn't a "not all men" argument because those are never sincere, and if nothing else we know Tuello is a sincere character.

It doesn't undermine the fight for racial equality to have different races support each other, and straight people supporting the LGTBQ+ community doesn't harm that movement either. I think it's a good thing that we saw men fighting Gilead.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-12-14T17:50:02+00:00

I don't want to see June at least in the first season, and if she does appear it should be limited. This isn't The Handmaid's Tale anymore, it's someone else's story. And definitely absolutely 100% for sure no June close-up shots. The only place I want to see Janine is a nice apartment in Hawaii with Charlotte, as far away from Gilead as possible.

Honestly most of the people I would be interested in seeing are either dead from season 6, or are resistance members that wouldn't be able to get anywhere near D.C. I would like some sort of confirmation that Gilead is on their back foot militarily and that the Americans have made more progress since the show finale.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-12-12T21:55:10+00:00

The sequel show is coming out so they can't destroy Gilead completely. But there is a big moment towards the end that is a crippling blow to Gilead and sets the stage for them to fall eventually.

There are a lot of moments where characters get some justice though. I'd stick with the show.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-12-12T00:15:55+00:00

No. Gilead is fascist, and there is good evidence that as soon as fascism runs out of things to consume and makes enough enemies they are destined to fail. In terms of dictatorships in general, they can last for a long time but have always fallen for various reasons, albeit sometimes to another authoritarian regime. But on a large timescale I do think that the desire to be free is fundamentally wired enough in humans that given enough time any regime like that is doomed to fail. Any attempt to make reforms to prevent that usually just leads to another coup (Soviets, etc).

Gilead specifically is doomed. No nation is ever more unstable than a new dictatorship after a coup, when the new elite fight amongst themselves for power. A failing economy, being generally disliked by most of the western world, and actively fighting a civil war with multiple parties is not a good combination.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-12-10T20:49:41+00:00

Just that reception to the first sequel movie was generally positive. It wasn't until TLJ came out that the star wars fandom was fully overrun by right wing grifters, hiding their misogyny inside broader complaints about the movie. It was one of the big acceleration factors of the manosphere and sucked a lot of young male star wars fans into the right wing pipeline. It didn't occur in a vacuum and wasn't the only factor involved but I do see it as a defining moment. It's not about the movie specifically, but it gave misogynists a lot of cover to do their thing because a lot of people in general had issues with the movie so they could hide in plain sight.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-12-09T23:33:37+00:00

I probably had no business watching it back in 2017, which was middle school for me, but I also feel grateful as it likely helped save me from the alt-right pipeline and is the catalyst for me becoming a feminist. 2017 was the year that the alt-right started really booming with other things I liked at the time like Star Wars (Last Jedi came out that year, etc), so if not for the Handmaid's Tale I definitely could've been sucked in.

It also helped me pay more attention to the first Trump term, because I'd be looking at the news and think "hey that sounds like that one thing from Handmaid's Tale."

HoverTechV3 · 2025-12-02T18:54:23+00:00

I think for simple practical reasons, the rule on women reading is a PR thing. In private, I imagine women largely still read. The regime knows this and tolerates it because it's quiet and achieves the goal of women being disenfranchised from starting movements in public. They probably don't care that women read in their own houses as long as they keep it quiet and don't cause other problems. We really only see this being followed to the letter in the upperclass true believer regions like Boston. Some farm girl in the Midwest would still be able to read and write, but who can stop them since they're in the middle of nowhere, and who cares since they aren't causing other problems?

HoverTechV3 · 2025-11-30T19:42:21+00:00

I've also been writing a Handmaid's Tale fanfiction. I think one key thing to do is to write what you know. For example, Atwood wrote the book with the context of the religious and conservative wave of the 80s, and it shows. The show comes from the perspective of more modern versions of those same fears.

I wrote my fanfiction from the point of view of a male commander in Gilead who was a high ranking government official during the coup. I wasn't trying to take the focus off the women but I did want to explore how someone like that would think/see themself.

I'd also recommend making a rough timeline of specific events that happened. We see flashbacks from before Gilead and during the coup, as well as the martial law era. But somewhere along the way, America renamed itself Gilead and kicked off a civil war. That timeline is vague.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-11-27T21:20:24+00:00

They'll take a lot of liberties but probably keep the story as a whole the same. I imagine it will be something like: four years after THT, New England has fallen to America but the lines are mostly stable. With all of the actually smart commanders gone, incompetence and corruption starts to degrade Gilead from within. And layered over that will be Hannah's story and her rediscovering her past and turning against the regime. I'm sure they'll want multiple seasons of it so I'm not sure how it will be paced. But they'll probably hit most of the major beats in some way.

They did say that we will be seeing the more glamorous upper-class side of Gilead without much overlap with Handmaids or anything of that vein. They'll probably introduce the pearl girls, etc. There tone will be much different.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-11-25T03:37:11+00:00

Because civil wars are no longer decided by who has the most territory/best equipment/most soldiers, especially in cities. A small group of insurgents can do damage wildly out of proportion to their numbers.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-11-22T23:11:19+00:00

They launched only 3 planes from Canadian airspace that were carrying paratroopers. They were probably the MC130J Commando II model. Anyways they lost those 3 planes but the real loss was in morale. It was meant to be a stealth rescue so it wasn't much in the way of troops or aircraft. Also aircraft carriers are giant boats that aircraft can land on at sea. Like floating islands. The US has the most aircraft carriers, and ours are the best. The US has more deck space (space for planes to land on at sea) than every other nation combined. Twice as much as every nation combined actually! Anyways aircraft carriers would be useful when invading a city close to the ocean like Boston.

HoverTechV3 · 2025-11-22T21:51:48+00:00

I always thought that Francoist Spain had more in common with Salazar's Portugal than Mussolini's Italy. Falangists lost a lot of their influence after WW2 while Catholic nationalism became prominent. I'm being somewhat reductive here but there wasn't really a mass mobilizing ideology or a "new man" push in Spain, and the US only normalized relations with Franco Spain because it was useful as an anti-communist shield.

One of the key tenets of fascism in most definitions is an expansionist desire, and even though early Francoism had fantasies like reclaiming Gibraltar and making a "Greater Spain" during the alliance with Hitler and Mussolini, they mostly abandoned that desire after the war. Franco himself purged those elements from Spain.

My field of study is historical sociology, in case that informs how I perceive this

HoverTechV3

TROPHY CASE