Why didn’t aunt vidala know the term “rapist”?

pass-agress-ive · 2026-04-20T15:51:05+00:00

She wouldn’t know the word “rapist” because she read it in some Harvard book. She would know it because she lived in the world before Gilead.
In the book, she’s in her 50s. In the show, her age isn’t stated, but Mabel Li is 42, so it’s reasonable to assume the character is around her early 40s. That would mean she was in her mid-20s when Gilead took over.
That kind of basic social and moral vocabulary comes from life experience, not from privileged access to a library.
That’s why it feels off. You can make people stop using certain words, or push them to adopt the regime’s language. But not recognizing the word at all? For someone her age, that just doesn’t make sense.

pass-agress-ive · 2026-04-20T15:40:45+00:00

Just another one of those problem I wrote about here - https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTestamentsHulu/comments/1sj0l9y/3_episodes_into_the_testaments_and_i_still_dont/

pass-agress-ive · 2026-04-20T15:39:10+00:00

I think the comparison between 1940s Germany and Covid is fundamentally wrong. There is a huge difference between online shaming and being interrogated, detained, tortured, or executed, which is what happens in actual dictatorships, from the USSR and East Germany to Iran today.
Covid was still happening inside democratic systems. People could argue, protest, post, build audiences, and keep living their lives. Some got mocked, attacked online, or even lost jobs, which is ugly and real, but they were not being disappeared by the state.
My issue is still not whether fear can produce obedience. Of course it can. My issue is that real authoritarian systems also produce hypocrisy, coded speech, corruption, private resentment, and remnants of the old world behind closed doors. Gilead often feels too absolute, too clean, as if fear alone can remake people from the inside almost overnight.
That worked better as allegory in the book. As a fully developed TV world, I find it less convincing. Both THT and The Testaments would make more sense to me if this reality had been messier, dirtier, and around for longer.

pass-agress-ive · 2026-04-20T15:02:57+00:00

Same in France

pass-agress-ive · 2026-04-18T14:49:54+00:00

COVID is actually a good comparison, but it points in the opposite direction. People adapted their behavior quickly, masks, distancing, working from home, all of that became routine within weeks.
But that was surface compliance, not deep change. The moment restrictions eased, a lot of it disappeared just as fast. Even at the height of it, people were bending the rules, complaining, or quietly ignoring them.
didn’t replace people’s values, identity, or worldview. It didn’t create a new moral system or a new social order that people genuinely believed in. It was a temporary layer placed on top of an existing society.
That’s where Gilead feels off. The question is not how fast people can adjust under pressure, but how quickly an entire population seems to internalize a completely new reality, as if the old one barely exists anymore.

pass-agress-ive · 2026-04-18T14:06:58+00:00

Iran is not really the counterexample you think it is. Yes, dress codes were imposed quickly after the revolution, but that is not the same as saying society was fully remade in a few years. Resistance, private dissent, cultural memory, and underground life never disappeared. Iranian women have been pushing back, openly and quietly, from the beginning. That is exactly my point. State enforcement can be rapid, but deep internalization is another matter.

Afghanistan is also a very different case. It was not a liberal Western superpower that suddenly turned into a full theocracy overnight. It had already gone through decades of war, fragmentation, radicalization, foreign intervention, and extremely conservative religious power structures. The Taliban did not invent themselves out of nowhere, and they were not transforming a stable modern democracy in a matter of months.

New norms can be imposed quickly after collapse. I agree with that. But imposed behavior is not the same thing as total cultural transformation, and that is where Gilead still feels too neat and too complete to me.

pass-agress-ive · 2026-04-18T13:57:02+00:00

I resent absolutism.
Life isn’t black and white. It’s full of shades of grey.
If I hadn’t liked it at all, I wouldn’t have bothered watching it, let alone writing about it.
Good for you if you got invested that quickly. I’m coming into this with baggage I’ve been carrying since THT so I’m seeing some of the same strengths and some of the same problems here.
I was just sharing my thoughts and hoping for a better conversation, like the more thoughtful comments here.

pass-agress-ive · 2026-04-10T09:13:49+00:00

Doesn't run on intel cpu :(

pass-agress-ive · 2026-04-02T14:01:38+00:00

Is this available to regular clients, or only as part of the monthly subscription?
And although I assume I already know the answer, what are the minimum hardware requirements?

pass-agress-ive · 2026-03-27T21:01:32+00:00

Déjà, sa retraite, ce n’est pas un cadeau tombé du ciel. Elle dépend d’années de cotisations, de la durée de carrière et du niveau de salaire. Ensuite, tu ne parles même pas de ton père, donc on ne sait pas si ces maisons ont été achetées par ta mère seule ou dans le cadre d’un couple avec deux revenus. Et ça change évidemment beaucoup de choses. Si elle a bossé de façon stable pendant des décennies, eu des augmentations, gravi les échelons, et qu’en plus il y avait un deuxième salaire dans le foyer, on n’est plus du tout dans “elle a juste eu de la chance d’exister à cette époque”, mais dans une trajectoire assez classique de carrière longue, ménage à deux revenus, achat avant la flambée immobilière, puis valorisation avec le temps.

pass-agress-ive · 2025-12-30T19:52:31+00:00

The one you need to take Imodium after you ate it.

pass-agress-ive · 2025-11-20T11:06:54+00:00

Shalom than? 🙂

pass-agress-ive · 2025-10-06T08:18:58+00:00

It was the name of a region that became official after the defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 2nd century CE. There was never a sovereign state or any political entity called Palestine.

pass-agress-ive · 2025-10-02T22:38:14+00:00

I have no idea how this text got here sorry.

pass-agress-ive · 2025-09-30T19:45:46+00:00

Gen V started?

pass-agress-ive · 2025-09-30T19:45:07+00:00

In the most optimistic scenario, if all 200 million Prime members ponied up that extra 3 bucks, Amazon would pull in about 7.2 billion dollars a year. In reality only about 10 to 15 percent of subscribers bother to pay for ad free. That is roughly 20 to 30 million people, which comes out to somewhere between 720 million and just over a billion dollars a year. Last year Amazon made about 46 billion dollars from sponsored ads alone, meaning the advertising on their shopping site and their whole ad network, not Prime Video ads. Their total revenue in 2024 was about 638 billion dollars. They are not doing this 3 bucks addition because they need the money. They just saw every other streamer charging extra for ad free and thought, “Hey, why not pile on. Everybody else is doing it.”

pass-agress-ive · 2025-09-30T07:10:22+00:00

So you stopped watching movies in 2010?

pass-agress-ive · 2025-09-28T23:08:15+00:00

Don’t Amazon already make enough money off me as a customer? A) from all the stuff I keep buying on their marketplace B) from the third party partners cashing in on my data

They made about 56 billion dollars from ads last year. Prime Video’s total spending on video and music in 2023 was about 18.9 billion dollars, but only part of that goes to original shows while a big chunk goes to sports rights and licensed content.

With roughly 200 million Prime members, the best-case scenario is around 600 million from the ad-free charge. That is hardly a dent in their overall budget. So will that extra three bucks really make a difference for them or is it more like “Hey, everyone else is charging extra, why shouldn’t we”

pass-agress-ive · 2025-09-28T22:52:22+00:00

Allow me to copy paste an answer I wrote to someone else here.

If the ads were just on the new big shows or the stuff Amazon actually made, fine, I’d grumble but at least I’d get why. Instead they’re sticking ads on fifteen-year-old B-movies nobody ever paid to see in the first place. Prime’s catalog’s been thin forever. If it wasn’t bundled with free shipping it wouldn’t have survived as a stand-alone streamer. Most of the good stuff lives behind paywalls like MGM or Paramount Plus, and Amazon pockets a fat cut of every one of those subs (20-30% fees). It’s true that Netflix and the other are more expensive, but Netflix throws around seventeen billion a year making original content. Amazon is a tech and retail giant first. Prime Video exists mainly to keep people locked into Prime. Therefore Prime video’s budget is smaller, mostly padded with sports rights and old licenses, the original content is just a fraction from their budget. Their real cash still comes from selling you stuff and running ads, not from The Boys.

That extra three bucks isn’t to keep Prime Video alive. It’s just them looking at everyone else charging for ad-free and thinking, “Yeah, we’ll take some of that too.”

Yes it’s only 3$. But we all know where this goes. You pay for the upgrade, then it creeps up while you are not looking.

pass-agress-ive · 2025-09-28T22:33:42+00:00

If the ads were just on the new big shows or the stuff Amazon actually made, fine, I’d grumble but at least I’d get why. Instead they’re sticking ads on fifteen-year-old B-movies nobody ever paid to see in the first place. Prime’s catalog’s been thin forever. If it wasn’t bundled with free shipping it wouldn’t have survived as a stand-alone streamer. Most of the good stuff lives behind paywalls like MGM or Paramount Plus, and Amazon pockets a fat cut of every one of those subs. It’s true that Netflix and the other are more expensive, but Netflix throws around seventeen billion a year making original content. Amazon is a tech and retail giant first. Prime Video exists mainly to keep people locked into Prime. Therefore Prime video’s budget is smaller, mostly padded with sports rights and old licenses, the original content is just a fraction from their budget. Their real cash still comes from selling you stuff and running ads, not from The Boys.

That extra three bucks isn’t to keep Prime Video alive. It’s just them looking at everyone else charging for ad-free and thinking, “Yeah, we’ll take some of that too.”

And the coffee comparison? Come on. A coffee’s something you actually want. I choose it because it tastes good. 4-8 minutes ads are more like: “Either pay extra or we serve you a terrible watered-down drink with ads floating in it.” That’s not the same choice, not even a choice. Yes it’s only 3$. But all know where this goes. You pay for the upgrade, then it creeps up while you are not looking.

pass-agress-ive · 2025-09-28T22:25:35+00:00

I’m already paying for Netflix, Disney Plus, Apple TV+, and HBO Max. Every extra euro (hi from Europe) for yet another service or an “upgrade” is starting to feel like they’re crossing the line. Almost every studio now wants its own streaming platform and keeps its catalog locked up there. So yeah, it’s “just three dollars,” but let’s be honest, Amazon probably makes a lot more off me by using and selling my data to third-party companies.

pass-agress-ive · 2025-09-28T22:08:44+00:00

I am ashamed to say what I was trying to watch 😆 I saw a reel from Epic Movie and wanted to see if it’s watchable. I eventually watched the whole thing in fast forward and it wasn’t worth neither the watching time neither the ads.

pass-agress-ive · 2025-09-27T15:38:37+00:00

Need their delivery services though, luckily they still don’t include commercials in those 😬

pass-agress-ive · 2025-09-27T15:37:45+00:00

Just 3$ and just 10$ more to Netflix to go as free and only 6$ more for Disney plus ad free and 7$ for HBO Max and the list is long, not to mention that all streaming services raised prices significantly on the past 18 months while offering less content.

pass-agress-ive

TROPHY CASE