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whalesteak posted:I could imagine they'd be able to get some mileage out of setting the birth of Gilead in flyover country, where the coasts don't realize until too late how pervasive and how serious the new fundamentalism has become. Yeah, the biggest problem that I have with the premise is that it is set in New England of all places. In real life, groups like ISIS and the Taliban tend to form in sparsely populated areas where national governments are weaker, and they also tend to form during times of chaos where to many local people they can actually seem to be an improvement over the alternatives at first. See, for example, Wikipedia's description of the Taliban's rise to power: Wikipedia posted:In 1991, the Taliban (a movement originating from Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-run religious schools for Afghan refugees in Pakistan) also developed in Afghanistan as a politico-religious force. The most often-repeated story and the Taliban's own story of how Mullah Omar first mobilized his followers is that in the spring of 1994, neighbors in Singesar told him that the local governor had abducted two teenage girls, shaved their heads, and taken them to a camp where they were raped. 30 Taliban (with only 16 rifles) freed the girls, and hanged the governor from the barrel of a tank. Later that year, two militia commanders killed civilians while fighting for the right to sodomize a young boy. The Taliban freed him. If the story had been set in Mormon country, the Midwest, or the Bible Belt and the backstory involved the infertility plague and other disasters leading to a widespread collapse of civil order, and a Branch Davidians-esque group that had prepared for such a collapse taking advantage of the power vacuum to conquer a sizeable chunk of territory then, yes, I could buy that as a setup for a story about life under an American Taliban. But some religious militia massacres Congress, declares that it is in charge now, issues crazypants orders to do things like ban women from working, and state and local governments in some of the most liberal parts of the country just nod and go along with it? Come on.
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May 1, 2017 03:56
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precision posted:It was strongly implied that Mexico was far worse off radiation and environment wise, and therefore really desperate (not one baby in SIX YEARS). Meanwhile Gilead are having enough babies to casually trot out the 20 they've had just in the past year alone. Compound that with the fact that we can assume every place in the world with morality and working internet will have nothing to do with Gilead and I think it's obvious we're supposed to assume Mexico is turbofucked and Gilead is merely hosed once a month. I think the implication is that the developing world got hit much worse by whatever is causing the infertility epidemic, and while other places like Canada and Europe may be better off than Gilead, the latter is the only (former) developed country willing to consider trading its fertile women. Though the more this show emphasizes the infertility crisis aspect of the setting, the more jarring I find it that the flashbacks show a pre-Gilead world that's pretty much indistinguishable from our own apart from the hospital scenes in episode 2. It seems like a big failure of imagination to present something like this as causing no major social changes except the one specific change of inspiring a bunch of religious nutcases to overthrow the US government. INH5 fucked around with this message at 04:46 on May 18, 2017 |
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May 18, 2017 04:42
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