u/PrincipledStarfish

"Do not return to the Temple. That time has passed."

I just had this thought. Everybody's trying to come up with all kinds of explanations for where the non Skywalker-related Jedi are in the sequel trilogy and whether or not they were killed in the knights of ren's attack on Luke's Academy and all of that, and I think the explanation has been staring us in the face the entire time: the other surviving Jedi just fundamentally disagree with the idea of trying to rebuild the formalized Jedi Order in the first place.

Ahsoka walked away from the Jedi Order, and has a very complicated relationship with whether or not to call herself a jedi. Ezra was trained entirely informally by someone who never completed their training, and unlike Luke he never had any kind of expectation that he had any kind of special destiny to fulfill. Cal was give in the opportunity to rebuild the order in Jedi: Fallen Order and was then given a vision of what would happen if he did, which was that the inquisitors would do Knightfall 2.0.

Then you have Rey's story, which is pretty much entirely about walking away from the legacy of the formalized Jedi Order. I'm willing to bet that she goes about things completely differently from how Luke does, doing the whole knight errant thing and trading apprentices along the way, the same as the other survivors do, and if any kind of institution or Temple arises from that, it does so organically, not because someone is trying to rebuild the pre-order 66 Jedi Order.

Because contrary to what Benioff and Weiss said, themes do matter and they're not just for 8th grade book reports.

Since there's been an influx of threads about "why didn't Gilead do xyz that would be more effective" or "could Gilead have done abc instead and been less rapey?" I'm going to answer all of those threads at once so they stop getting spammed:

No.

Everything Gilead did was on purpose because the fertility thing was a smokescreen to enable mediocre insecure betamale sexists to commit rape at scale. Everything is secondary to that. Everything else was an excuse. The cruelty and the rape and the control over everyone's sex lives is the point, because the commanders (yes, even Commander Mackenzie, even Nick, even Commander Josh Lyman) are creeps and losers and mediocrities who commit rape because they don't value women.

No, there is nothing that Gilead could to to make itself more tolerable other than not exist because it wasn't created to solve an actual problem, it was created so that small pathetic needledick like Fred can feel like big men. There is no such thing as a nicer Gilead just like there's no such thing as a nicer Nazi Germany. The rape is the point, just like the Holocaust was the entire point of Nazi Germany. You can't have a good Gileadist any more than you can have a good Nazi.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk, please get some media literacy I beg of you.

Based on the discussion about "oh my God, imagine having Paula as a therapist." I find that to be kind of boring and predictable, so I have a different question (cw: blood, murder, book spoilers)

What if she was actually a good therapist? Imagine what it would be like to be a straight ticket Democratic voter, feminist, ally, all of the labels you like, and your husband is "not very political." Except then it turns out he is. Armed men are forcing you at gunpoint to unlock the cabinet with your clients files and you comply because you don't want to be murdered. You find out your husband is actually a Christian Nazi and part of the coup. He expects you to be grateful for shielding you. You see one of your clients on the wall. You slip into the persona of a Gilead Wife because you don't want to die. You participate in the ceremony because you don't want to die. The parade of handmaids, because it can't possibly be him who's shooting blanks, and he insists they give him the girlfriend treatment and he takes them to Jezebels and pretties them up and leaves you behind. You only come back to yourself standing over him holding a pair of bloody knitting needles, covered in his blood as he wheezes in a sucking breath that sounds like a toilet plunger. You tell the handmaid to run and then tell everyone it was her because you don't want to die. Then Commander Mackenzie... poor sweet commander Mackenzie with the sick wife, like there's not a trade in toxins that mimic natural sickness that your husband threatened you with from time to time, and his poor benighted daughter of a terrorist who thinks the world of him because she doesn't know the truth.

Does Becka remind her of herself? Does she know what it's like to wash a man's blood off herself in the bathtub?

Another Garth post because he's turning into my Roman Empire. This is basically entirely speculation on my part, so take it with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, without further ado, my tinfoil about Garth

Studies have shown that one of the most potent factors in radicalizing someone is a sense of humiliation, the idea that their dignity and self-respect is being compromised, and they are being made to feel small and shamed. Take Nick, for example. Nick was a loser before Gilead, angry, unemployable, disposable. Commander Pryce took him under his wing and recruited him to the Sons of Jacob to the point where Nick was a lookout when the Sons took out Congress. What if Mayday, like Luthen Rael in Star Wars, is "condemned to use the tools of [their] enemies to defeat them?"

The elder Commander Chapin was supposedly a Billy Big Bollocks among the Commanders, which likely meant a big house, plenty of Marthas, status, a posse for Garth because his father was someone important. A little prince, basically the last person to question Gilead, especially if he is actually his parents biological child. The kid basically has a charmed life in Gilead and is on the fast track to Commanderhood, a wife, and status.

Then his father gets poisoned, probably when they poisoned the Commanders at Jezebels unless he had some sort of bad reaction to the sedative at Serena's wedding, and is now quadraplegic with apparent total aphasia at the very least. Look at the house they live in now. Shunnamite talked about how small it was, questioned whether they even had a Martha. They have a meager pension which makes them better off than 95% of Gilead but still a major step down from being a big name Commander's family.

Imagine that from Garth's perspective. The step down materially and, just as important, socially, because I'm betting Gilead trains Commanders' sons sort of like how the British elites did in the Victorian era, which means Garth suddenly learns that basically all of his friends were only friends with him because his father was Commander Chapin.

So you have a lonely, isolated teenage boy with no friends, a mother who is now taking care of a man who needs round the clock care and can't even toilet independently, and all of his father's supposed friends are nowhere to be seen...

Except for the person who becomes his handler. Who I'm sure made certain to visit periodically and take the lonely, angry lad under their wing. Who became basically Garth's only friend. Who would drip feed him questions about Gilead, about how it was run, drip feed him information about what things were like before, steer him towards the people whom he can blame for everything wrong with society. A lonely angry teenage boy whose only real social contact is someone with an agenda and who is trying to radicalize him is a dangerous thing.

Then they would start hinting that there was an outlet, something he could do. They would ask favors of him--small ones at first, deniable ones, just information they are curious about. They string him along with hints about being part of something bigger. They escalate. Eventually they reveal the fact that they're Mayday, and that they're planning to overthrow Gilead. By now Garth has concluded that Gilead is the source of all of the evils in the world, including the sense of injustice in his own life. Is he a feminist? Probably not. But Mayday gives him structure, purpose, meaning, identity, all things that were ripped away from him when his father was poisoned. Research shows that the core basis of radicalization is a quest for significance, the idea that he's still important and still matters. That's why he talks with such certainty and seems totally unconcerned by Daisy freaking out when she realizes how deep she's in.

Also I think Garth's handler is Aunt Lydia, but that's just a shot in the dark. I'm sure she can be perfectly lovely when she wants to be, and she could commiserate with Garth because her own position would have been uncertain in the immediate aftermath of THT Season 6

Agnes/Hannah applies this to the Pearl Girls, but who else do we know who converted from one ideology to another? Garth. Commander's son to Mayday spy. That's why I'm betting that Garth is being set up as sort of an anti-Nick, so that instead of being a dilettante's Mayday spy who only involves himself when June is concerned and when it doesn't threaten his position, instead most of the conflict with Garth ends up being because he is a true believer and will absolutely sacrifice love for the cause. The certainty he speaks with when he says "when Gilead is destroyed" and seems unconcerned with Daisy realizing how deep she's in. Garth is a zealot... Then Daisy asks him to go on a tampon run and you're reminded he should be pledging a frat or studying for midterms because he's like 19 or 20

When Daisy crossed the border, the one Pearl mentioned having "friends in the border guard," which to me implies that ordinarily there'd be more procedure to crossing from Canada into Gilead. Do the Commanders just let Aunt Lydia bring in women from abroad with no oversight whatsoever?