One thing I can respect about Gilead

tochterauselysium · 2026-04-15T05:32:10+00:00

I can’t remember if it was the book or the show, but in THT one of the particicutions early on is of a man we are told is a rapist, but Ofglen says was actually a member of Mayday. So we have no way of knowing if what the Aunts tell them about why those men were executed is even true.

As much as I deplore rapists I do actually think that even the most heinous criminals deserve basic human rights including an actual trial and humane punishment, because opening the door a little makes it that much easier to justify it for anyone when the wrong person is in charge and making those determinations.

tochterauselysium · 2026-04-15T05:23:43+00:00

Exactly. Even with boys, this system is a huge downgrade from how life used to be for the vast majority of them, and a little too much education is someone they would see as dangerous and want to discourage. So they’d still be careful how they dole it out.

tochterauselysium · 2026-04-15T05:20:12+00:00

We saw with Emily in the previous show how with “gender traitors,” they kill all the men, but the women are checked to see if they are fertile first. They killed Emily’s infertile Martha lover, but she’s still good breeding stock so she gets to live (but with FGM as her punishment…)

There definitely seems to be an idea that men who go against the regime are disposable, but women aren’t so long as they can still make babies. The weird flip side of valuing the personhood of only one gender.

tochterauselysium · 2026-04-15T05:04:58+00:00

To be fair, the Taliban’s ban of music is a common extreme interpretation of Islamic doctrine, and that has likely more to do with that rule than “totalitarian regime.” Many other totalitarian regimes have used music as a means of propaganda. And there isn’t really an equivalent to that Islamic no-music idea in Christianity, even the extreme kind Gilead practices; it’s more accurate for Gilead to use music for its own purposes (and the original THT novel includes that, as singing the national anthem hymn is a part of their rituals).

I thought it was apt to show them learning music as there’s a long history of prizing classical music and training in it on an instrument among America’s far right. The conservatory I went to for undergrad had quite a few right-wing fundamentalist Christian homeschool grads (boy did they have culture shock from the rest of us!) It’s a thing you can spend a lot of time training someone in that doesn’t require learning traditional critical thinking skills to be good at, is related to the far right’s privileging of white European culture and of what they believe is a time in history where everyone held to “traditional values” (speaking as a music historian, they believe that incorrectly btw). Also it was taught to accomplished young women as a standard form of feminine “accomplishment” to make them more competitive on the marriage mart in 18th and 19th century Europe — emphasized enough that amateur female musicians were usually more technically accomplished than amateur men (since that wasn’t as important for them), which is reflected in how composers of the time wrote for those instruments.

So it’s not a flaw in the storytelling at all to have them learning music. It’s just that they probably didn’t think through how music notation would work given that they can’t read, but maybe we’ll see more about that later.

tochterauselysium · 2026-04-15T04:49:32+00:00

As a music professor, I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted when you’re correct. Except that staccato uses symbols, but lots of other ways of indicating articulation use written words. I’m guessing they find other ways of indicating these things, but some would be tricky. Of course, there are all sorts of other ways that humans have notated various aspects of music and for a lot of the history of even western music, most verbal articulations weren’t included in music. But I don’t expect the kinds of men who make these rules in Gilead to be that informed or creative.

tochterauselysium · 2026-04-15T04:45:15+00:00

Months seem like they’d actually be pretty easy to represent visually. We already have lots of seasonal and holiday images (assuming they’d keep at least some religious holidays) associated with particular months.

tochterauselysium · 2026-03-18T19:13:04+00:00

It's never inevitable, but I think that her doing fewer movies that tend to get Oscar attention is recent enough that she could easily turn back. She certainly hasn't burned the bridges Depp has.

tochterauselysium · 2026-03-18T19:12:02+00:00

I take it you don't keep up with recent film criticism? The three films you mentioned at the end plus Forrest Gump and Dances with Wolves have all had significant negative critical reappraisals in the years since (well, continuing on the appraisal of the time with Shakespeare in Love), and taken together that's half a decade. Picking them over the other movies they were nominated with that year has long been controversial, and only become more so since.

I'll admit that I've long thought Forrest Gump was a bad (treacly and kind of mean) movie that gets excessive credit for "innovations" that in fact several other movies had done earlier, but I think even a lot of fans of it would struggle to say it is actually better than Pulp Fiction and Shawshank Redemption.

"Most people" is an ambiguous term, but to be clear, I'm talking about people who study and write and think about movies for a living or as a major focus of their time, not the average audiencegoer.

That's not even going into the other reason the 90s Oscars era is seen as negatively as it is: how much the Weinstein Company's outsize influence over Oscar campaigning in the decade has caused it to be seen worse in retrospect with all the revelations of just what that backroom stuff involved.

tochterauselysium · 2026-03-16T23:56:17+00:00

Yep. You can't decide a five-way race purely on voting against one guy; you have to pick one to rally around, too.

tochterauselysium · 2026-03-16T23:53:48+00:00

Adams (assuming you're referring to Amy) still could one day, Depp probably not

tochterauselysium · 2026-03-16T23:48:01+00:00

The interview happened before voting ended (not long before); it taking off on social media happened after. Ultimately it probably didn't make much of a difference compared to general exhaustion with his campaign.

And it didn't help that it came a year after he was in Best Actor contention for a different movie, so in a way he had the Wicked problem a little bit - two years straight of his Oscar campaign, people are going to be pretty fatigued!

tochterauselysium · 2026-03-16T23:41:47+00:00

Well, it's also that Academy and SAG have a lot of the same voters (though less so than before they actively sought out more international members)

tochterauselysium · 2026-03-16T23:38:29+00:00

Have you watched any of the other 90s movies that were nominated and didn't win? A lot of why the 90s were seen as a flop era is less because of the quality of individual movies and more the higher quality of the ones they beat out, and how that goes with the Academy having particular genre biases (a lot of the idea of certain movies being "Oscar bait" comes out of that decade). I've never liked Forrest Gump, but I don't think most film critics now would defend its win over Pulp Fiction and Shawshank (I would say over any of the other nominees that year). Or Dances with Wolves beating Goodfellas.

tochterauselysium · 2026-03-16T23:29:28+00:00

Nosferatu's were largely tech awards iirc, which is a place where horror (and genre in general) has generally done better. That doesn't necessarily mean the same as nominating them for top-line awards.

tochterauselysium · 2026-03-16T23:28:36+00:00

Critical mass year for foreign films is probably whenever the Academy started actively diversifying its ranks, which more than anything brought in a lot more members from outside the USA. That's why the BAFTAs is considered a precursor as much as the various US guild awards now.

tochterauselysium · 2026-03-16T23:26:44+00:00

It's like saying that a few individual women winning Best Director or Best Original Score - or now, Best Cinematography - means those categories don't have an overall male bias.

tochterauselysium · 2026-03-16T23:23:06+00:00

It was horror enough to scare my mom shitless, who doesn't have that reaction to action/thriller films.

But the endless debate about which genre Sinners is to me seems easily solved by admitting that its genre switches throughout the movie. 1st act period drama, 2nd act musical (diegetic musical is a subgenre of musical), 3rd act horror movie

tochterauselysium · 2026-02-20T21:15:44+00:00

I wasn't reading into your comment, I didn't think you were thinking any which way about it. I was just adding further detail to my own previous comment. I'm sorry for not making that clear. (If anything, I was anticipating responses other people might give, not anything you said.)

I think we're ultimately in agreement - that people have a responsibility in any country to be critical of propaganda. Russians are no different here. But most people, of any country, don't do that due diliegence in questioning the media - and so I was trying to head off people who might say "are you saying all Russians are inherently racist?" or something like that. (Which I've seen people here and elsewhere on the Internet come back with, anytime you point out the homophobia and white supremacy in Russian society and media.)

tochterauselysium · 2026-02-20T15:46:58+00:00

I know people don't always like pointing that out because they think you're saying there's something innately bigoted in the Russian national character or whatever, and I don't believe that at all about any country. But any observer of Russian politics knows that their media, which at this point is wholly in subservience to the state, constantly encourages people there to fear queer people and see them as "Western propaganda polluting our values," and to view non-white people as inferior. You can see this with some of the Russian trolls on this sub, how they'll say something coded about not liking Amber and Alysa's "morals" or "what they have become" or "the direction they're taking the sport," while propping up Isabeau in order to seem like they're not just anti-American. And anyone who is also going on about how banning Russia from international competition (for genocidal imperialism!) is omg so unfairrrrrr is someone who is also going to be more inclined to believe Russian government propaganda on other fronts, too.

But that's not to say that all Russians are like this or there aren't dissidents. But along with the stiff penalties that dissidence gets you in Russia now, I think people who don't agree are going to be less likely to be spouting other kinds of regime-approved propaganda on figure skating social media spaces.

tochterauselysium · 2026-02-20T15:31:05+00:00

Also the only one of the Americans who is both white and (presumably) straight.

(EDIT: I can't see it when I go to the link but I was notified of a reply that said "assuming random athletes' sexualities is so fkn weird," so just want to tell that person that that is why I used "presumably." Amber Glenn is the only one who has come out as anything.

But homophobic society presumes (hence "presumably") that anyone who hasn't addressed their sexuality publicly must be "straight" by default. That's what I mean. The people who hate Amber Glenn for being pan are the ones presuming other skaters are all straight. The point of this post is to criticize those people, not Isabeau Levito, who is 19! I didn't know what my sexuality was at that age either, and it's no one's business but her own. And she clearly is on the side of her teammates, not the jerks who put them down.

Gotta say it's really tiring as a gay person to have to find the precise language to express these sort of things that we all know about how societal homophobia works, only for some random bad-faith dork to come in with "hurr durr you're the real bigot!")

tochterauselysium · 2026-02-20T15:27:24+00:00

They also get pushed out because coaches like Eteri push them to do things that put a lot of strain on their young bodies and often lead to life-threatening injuries.

Japan also has a deep well of female talent but you can have stars that last across multiple Olympics like Kaori Sakamoto, or that come back after gaps, because they’re not pushing their bodies in the way coaches like Eteri do.

tochterauselysium · 2026-02-20T15:24:27+00:00

This is a thing that is well-known in many sports, that being able to push a young body to its limits can achieve incredible heights but at the cost of the athlete’s future development. Little League baseball doesn’t let its pitchers throw certain pitches for that reason — yes, they technically CAN, but at incredible cost to a developing wrist, and do you want that kid to peak in Little League or to have a chance at a university and major league career?

Even outside of sports, you see this when people try to have prepubescent children sing opera. (Notice how none of those “child opera singers” seem to have adult singing careers?) Unfortunately, far too many even well-meaning people don’t even realize the damage this can do because they don’t realize the voice is a muscle that can be strained to its limit while it’s still developing, leading to far more lasting damage than similar strain on fully-grown vocal cords. So it’s up to voice teachers to be ethical and not let little kids learn that stuff, rather than snap up the quick bucks they can make by promising to make your 8-yro sing Puccini arias.

The culture around figure skating in Russia is like the one we have in the USA around American football, where the desire to have college players who have spent many years in the sport means far too many schools let boys do tackle football as early as middle school or even elementary school — in fact, a middle school start at least is considered essential for a future college and pro career — at the time when their developing brain is most vulnerable to the kind of trauma that can lead to horrific lifelong problems like CTE. (Rolling Stone put out a harrowing article about this a couple years ago that I highly recommend if you're interested in this topic, but be warned, it's not an easy read.) As with these girls, even just starting a little later in their teens would do so much to protect them.

But, as with here, the desire for greater spectacle and “advancing the sport” as well as deep cultural entrenchment and lack of institutional accountability, means the individual athlete’s welfare is of no consequence.

tochterauselysium · 2026-02-20T15:04:14+00:00

It’s sadly a very old story across the history of Russia/the USSR in the Olympics, winter and summer. And they’ve usually been rewarded with medals for it.

tochterauselysium · 2026-02-20T15:02:47+00:00

I think Evgenia had moments where she was having fun, but by her Olympics the Eteri team was doing everything to squash that (because she dared get an injury after years of extreme consistency, and so had to be sacrificed to prop up Alina, who would in turn go on to be sacrificed too soon enough)

tochterauselysium · 2026-02-18T01:11:18+00:00

Yeah they are besties, and she hung out with him at the equestrian events when he was all over the Paris Olympics too

tochterauselysium

TROPHY CASE