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Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:Are the Sons of Jacob based on something real? As far as I understand it, it's a monotheistic cult that is very loosely inspired by parts of the old testament. That's a weird choice by the author. Wouldn't something Christianity based make more sense in the context of the US(something similar to Mormonism or whatever the gently caress the Wesboro guys are)? I'm fairly sure it is Christianity-based, just a twisted Calvinist form of Christianity that metastasized from megachurch crap and right-wing politics and the various worldly concerns of that universe during the population crisis. It's not like in America there hasn't already been an entire movement of masculine fragility, misogyny, xenophobia, and anti-intellectualism that took Christianity as it's form without actually having much to do with any formal theological schisms in the traditional sense of questions about the nature of divinity or doctrine. It started in England but that poo poo was really popular over here, too, that's basically where the YMCA comes from. As a country, we're pretty good at that kind of thing. They're "real" in the sense that many Trump voters, the kind of dudes who are into Red Pill and call themselves "cultural Christians" and like Jordan Peterson, and literal neo-nazis all think of themselves as Christian. There's not anything we even see in the Sons of Jacob that's fundamentally incompatible with the Nicene Creed, which has been the nominal definition of Christianity for over a millenium. Most of people's ideas that Christianity is about good works, forgiveness, and the more palatable ethical teachings of Jesus are just flat out wrong; it can take that form, sure, but that's not fundamentally what it is or what it has to be about. The point is Christ's divinity, not his ethical teachings. Like, "a monotheistic cult that is very loosely inspired by parts of the Old Testament" is in fact a literal description of Christianity, except for that "the Old Testament" is reifying Christianity in the first place: it's not the old version of the Christian gospel (or Qu'ran, etc), it's a poorly edited fanfic version of the Torah. I mean, as for why the show and the books don't aggressively hammer home the point and all the connections to various ways Christianity has manifested throughout both recent and not-so-recent history is probably due to real "political correctness": the book has been challenged enough by right-wing Christians who find it an offensive depiction, even with the care that Atwood took to make it clearly something like Mormonism, muscular Christianity, the Great Awakening, etc etc and not even "mainstream" Evangelical movements. There's that weird sense of plausible deniability because if Atwood actually came out and said "in practice, Christianity has historically always been far more like the Sons of Jacob and the idea that Christianity from a global, historical perspective is fundamentally 'about' feel-good hippie poo poo is basically just PR and a great deal of that poo poo was developed in reaction to other religions and philosophies, not necessarily from within Christianity", it would have been dismissed out of hand as "too political" (at least in the US) and it wouldn't have been a best-seller. HELLO LADIES fucked around with this message at 20:46 on May 4, 2018 |
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May 4, 2018 20:20
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ATP5G1 posted:I don't think "Take Back The Night" existed when the book was published. I think she was just at a feminist rally. They've been going on since the 70s. They got officially branded and turned into ~a thing~ for the pre-Tumblr third wave in the 2000s, but they actually existed way before the book came out. The reason they're playing up June vs her mother as a generational divide between two feminists is because they straddle a literal generational divide between feminists. quote:Why is June written as an idiot? Why? Apart from the really boneheaded stuff (ike not hiding when her hosts were at church, I personally kind of like it. I don't know, I think it made the first season better that she had some moments of being fairly unlikable/lovely/naive. To me it feels like the point is that June's an ordinary person, has a normal set of flaws like everyone else, and still doesn't in any way deserve what happens to her, that the whole purity ethos around modern feminism is gross, and actually sort of a dark mirror of the evil of Gilead. That said, she's gotten waaay worse lately (the scene with the Qu'ran was super upsetting to me for some reason; like, it would be dickish as a normal guest, nevermind as the personal Anne Frank these people are risking their lives as well as that of their small child to protect. While it is grating, and kudos to Elizabeth Moss for that because it's hard to do as well as she does, so much of June's recent shittiness and idiocy ways that are so very pointedly "Tumblr/Jezebel 3rd wave ~intersectional~ Nice White Lady choice feminist", that it's hard to read it as just being in service to the plot. The training montage was pretty blatant, especially how she basically melted down when confronted with the messy reality, after making herself feel better by literally posting things on a wall - that made me cackle. It's like June basically making GBS threads on her mom for being right about literally everything and "we were both trying our best"; no, June, your mom was actually right about basically everything and you probably should have listened. It's like how Luke is kind of a jackass, and his overall "but I'm one of the good men right?  " bullshit might have been the deciding factor that doomed June and Hannah to be captured, and meanwhile he's objectively the best off of the three of them; he's gambling with lives that aren't his, because of a terminal failure to empathize and understand the risks. If you look at it through more than just the lens of the world of the show, it still works very well as a commentary on a certain kind of seemingly "woke" person. I think it's like everyone's point about the soundtrack choices like "Feeling Good" and all, which is a song by an iconic black feminist and also an iconic "pole dancing is empowerfulating!!!" girl power feminist anthem: yes, of course it's jarring, and Nick's criticism about her poo poo with Janine is correct. It's not that June should have stoned Janine, it's that the episode ending with her warm fuzzy feelings of empowerment and "they never should have given us uniforms if they didn't intend us to be an army!! " is nonsense, just like girl power choice feminism is nonsense. Being an army means you get loving shot at, June. You aren't on Tumblr anymore, and your feelings of empowerment don't actually matter if you don't have actual power. The intent is something like criticism, the execution is just not quite there.
HELLO LADIES fucked around with this message at 02:07 on May 5, 2018 |
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May 5, 2018 01:57
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BattyKiara posted:I don't buy that hole in the sheet thing. If such a thing existed in Gilead, surely the wives would insist that it was used on the handmaids during the ceremony. IIRC, that's an invention of the show, basically stolen from certain sects of Orthodox Jews, and in that sense I think it's a fuckup, but it's not entirely contradictory for how the ceremony is supposed to work. In the book, Atwood gets a bit more into the psychology of it, and IIRC the positioning is a little bit more like the handmaid is laying on top of the wife, and is really supposed to be much more of a direct surrogate. Like, the dude is supposed to be having a boner for his wife, and his Handmaid is supposed to be completely psychologically subsumed into her. The whole pretense is that the handmaid isn't even supposed to be "there" per se. It's been a while since I last read the book, but the whole point of it is that the wife and handmaid are really supposed to be "one flesh", possibly as a commentary on how hosed up the theology of Communion and the various philosophies of marriage, "headship", and all that crap are. Or, I guess I should say, the psychology behind the theology. I do think it's stupid that they put the sheet in, because it's actually from a very different theological and cultural stream and makes zero sense in hosed up neo-Calvinism when we look at the greater whole. I'm not trying to say it's psychologically healthy in Judaism, just that there's a very different culture around modesty, sacredness, and separation of the sexes than in Gilead, and it's of a piece with that but makes zero sense in Gilead, especially since they don't even have the excuse of it being cultural detritus and there being a large ethnic/tribal component to the religion that makes tradition incredibly paramount. Having that sheet in a culture where Eden can be alone with adult, unrelated men and just have her hair out in public is ridiculous, not even as an indicator of blatant hypocrisy and empty piety but because it just flat out makes no drat sense, and feels vaguely disrespectful of the real world cultures that have traditions like that, and I say that as someone who really hates that part of Orthodox culture. Like, the one criticism I have of Atwood's writing in general, and the show takes it to extremes, is that it's almost like the anti-thesis of Dworkin's "Right-Wing Women". There's zero nuance and zero attempt at real empathy for the women on the other side when it's not direct identification. It's all 100% just what a Nice Outraged Liberal "Spiritual But Not Religious" Culturally Christian White Lady finds shocking or puzzling or alien about those weird, backward right-wing religious people. Atwood at least is good at empathizing with how oppressive it feels, but in the show it's almost weirdly plastic. That attitude kind of infects the whole show, which I think is why so many of the "humanize Serena" moments fall flat and are creepy and yet you have vacuous idiots in Vanity Fair calling her "the most intriguing character of the show" and saying the scene of June's rape was "the most brutal of the series: they don't really know how to empathize and have an understanding of the motivations of the villains, while still actually understanding the horror of it all. The writers fail drastically at understanding this stuff in a systematic way, and can't really recreate anything like the internal worldview of these people, and the show is a lot poorer for it. They can only empathize with Serena by having sympathy with her, which feels gross to anyone remotely normal, and it also makes her totally ridiculous and over the top as a villain. She's only slightly less so than Fred, not so much because of the difference in performances (Fiennes is great too!), but because I think the writers have basically no window of cognitive empathy on Fred at all, whereas what they have on Serena is a funhouse mirror reflecting some parts of their own psychology. There was an interview with the writer for the last episode that made me spit bullets, and I feel like the sheet bullshit is a perfect illustration of the mindset behind it. HELLO LADIES fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Jun 25, 2018 |
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Jun 25, 2018 18:01
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Owlbear Camus posted:That's actually something a lot of Dominionists don't think about, the generic morass of America's Christian political block would really quickly have to stabalize into one specific sect at the expense of the others. If you aren't 100% certain your brand of Christianity is gonna come out on top, you're safer under secular governance. Yeah, hence why Mormons as a political block are actually weirdly reliable on "small government" and freedom of religion issues for socially conservative, otherwise loathesome Republican voters. The reason they don't abandon it all to hypocrisy like modern Fox News Republicans is because they have actually had to put a lot of thought into those scenarios, because of actually experiencing the negative consequences of being religious outsiders and not just buying into that "persecuted Christians"/"we're THE REAL Americans!"/"put GOD back in government!"/"War on Christmas" ego mythology. At this point, that's sort of the only way I'm able to suspend my disbelief that an American theocracy could possibly be Calvinist and communist and not evangelical and consumerist: the generic "we haven't thought about this too hard" prosperity gospel Fox News fundies don't actually have the necessary discipline and insulation from secular culture. They can get people to reliably pick Red over Blue, and that's about it, which isn't actually a matter of doctrine at all. They have higher divorce and abortion rates than godless heathens. A small, disciplined core of extreme religious weirdos makes more sense in terms of actually seizing power than something more popular that's also beholden to a lot of effectively moderate people, whether they profess how moderate and attached to the secular order they are or not. HELLO LADIES fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Jul 14, 2018 |
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Jul 14, 2018 17:04
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