u/dragon-queen

I’m on my second run-through of the show, and I’m noticing a lot of things I didn’t notice the first watch.

Wharton seems very fixated on Serena before he really has any reason to be. He specifically asks Lawrence to find her and bring her to New Bethlehem. He seemingly arranges to “bump into” her on the street. He goes out of his way to learn what interests her so he can say all the right things and get her to drop her guard and be interested in marrying again. He asks her to marry very quickly - maybe a few weeks after running into her in New Bethlehem. He hides all the things he knows she wouldn’t like until after the wedding takes place.

Is it just a matter of that he had known her for years and thought she was beautiful? Or was there something else she represented to him? He does tell her that he saw her dancing with Fred in DC and that he felt bad for coveting another man’s wife.

I apologize if this has been posted about a lot already. I didn’t want to search because I was afraid of spoilers for the other books in the series.

I just finished Mr. Mercedes. I’ve read a lot of King, but missed this series. I enjoyed the book and will be reading the rest…but why did Stephen King have to focus so much on Jerome’s blackness? I don‘t really have an issue with the way Brady mentioned it all the time. Brady is crazy and a racist, and it makes sense for his character to be fixated on the fact that Jerome was black. But I don’t know why Hodges seemingly thought about it all the time. I don’t know why the first time Holly meets Jerome, she cracks up and says something like “You’re black. Of course it’s ok that you’re black.” I don’t know why Jerome had to leave Hodges notes in stereotypical black talk…seemingly to constantly make fun of his own blackness.

I know Stephen King is from Maine, which doesn‘t have a lot of black people in it. But he’s travelled a lot at this point, and seemingly met a lot of minorities. I also know he thinks of himself as a liberal and was probably well-meaning in this depiction of Jerome. But it’s odd.

Maybe this is anecdotal, but when my husband’s grandmother was 95 and met my Dad’s black girlfriend, she didn’t have any real reaction. She was just welcoming and treated her the same as everyone else. And she was a Republican (probably just because she was a Catholic and old though).

Anyway, I’m well aware that there are plenty of racists around, but this is a weird way for supposed non-racists to behave.

I am in South Florida. Three summers ago, I was fed up with being obese (yet again), and felt that it was making me unable to deal with summer heat. It was one of the reasons I started losing weight. Then in December of 2024, I started Tirzeptatide. I’m down about 90 pounds from my heaviest point, and I’m 132 pounds today.

Of course, Tirz has brought me many other benefits, but I’m still overwhelmed by this weather. I am only going outside at this point if I’m going to go in the pool, or just to quickly get in my car. I’m definitely glad to be smaller, but a Florida summer is still unmanageable to me.

Other’s experiences may be different though.

I am talking about when she delivers Serena’s baby in season 5. I know June had 2 children and watched a lot of births as a handmaid, but I’ve had a baby and watched a ton of Call the Midwife, and I wouldn’t know how to check someone’s cervix to see if they were ready to push. Did her Mom give her some training or something?

I think Joseph Fiennes is a decent looking man, and you could kind of see that in seasons 1-3 of THT, despite the fact that he’s doing truly awful things. But he looks really bad in season 4. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but he looks way older and more evil. Maybe the show creators asked him to lose weight or something? Or they did something to his facial hair?

Or maybe this is just my perception and no one else noticed this.

I know that in-universe it’s essentially just because the men want to take rights away from women. But we see other instances with people coming up with the foundations for Gilead and they usually used the Bible to back up all of their horrible ideas - like the Handmaid’s system and in The Testaments we see how Lydia came up with the idea for the aunts. I did a little research yesterday, and there’s nothing in the Bible that prohibits women from reading.

We see so many flashbacks and I think it would have been interesting to see a bunch of awful men in a smoke-filled room coming up with that idea, figuring out how it would all work and how they would punish the women that didn’t comply. And then it would have been interesting seeing how someone like Serena took that news.

Mark is presented to us as a very good man who is integral in the battle to retake the U.S. back from Gilead. He would almost be too perfect, if not for his feelings for Serena. Despite multiple people telling him who she was, and despite overwhelming evidence to that effect, he still goes out of his way to protect her and seems to even have romantic feelings towards her. He doesn’t want to believe she is one of the architects of Gilead, and so he doesn’t. Is this just to demonstrate that a pretty face and a surface level sweet demeanor can fool even a good and smart man like Mark?

We often see June taking a bath, but I don’t recall ever seeing a shower or hearing anyone mentioning going in the shower until they got to Canada. Do showers use too much water?

I was laid off in November of 2024. We had hit our FIRE number earlier that year. My husband is still working and makes enough to cover the bills with his salary. So we made the decision for me to take some time off and maybe try to just generate some side hustle income. That way we wouldn’t have to put our daughter in aftercare anymore, and I could bring her to extracurriculars after school and could focus on taking care of the house and getting in shape and other stuff for self-actualization.

Anyway, long story short - I found some side hustles that I enjoy, but at this point I’ve ramped it up to where I’m once again working 40 hours. I have a lot of flexibility and I don’t really have a boss, so that’s a huge step in the right direction. But I seem to have a hard time actually working less or not working at all. I know a lot of people in this group are really aiming for FI more than RE, but I never thought that would be me.

My siblings and I were raised Jewish, but none of us were very religious. I would consider myself agnostic, but culturally Jewish. My brother is now married with 4 children, and has converted to Catholicism. He has become pretty devout over the past few years. Do him and his children think I’m going to hell? And my daughter too? I have no desire to be proselytized to, but wouldn’t it seriously bother all of them if they thought we were going to hell?

I’m in the middle of a rewatch of the show. I was always sort of confused by how many Americans were left and how they had the planes and resources to wage an attack on Boston. I know that the last two states left were Alaska and Hawaii (both of which are not heavily populated) and that there was a fairly large amount of Americans in a base in Canada. Then I think there was the Republic of Texas, which was its own thing and not part of The U.S. or Gilead. Then there was unorganized fighting in Chicago.

But anyway, it seems like Gilead should have had a lot more people and a lot more resources. Where did the Americans get the planes and bombs to attack Gilead and take back Boston? Did they get assistance from the U.N. or something? Was Gilead easy to start dismantling because it had so much resistance inside - people who never wanted to be part of Gilead in the first place?

My daughter is turning 9 in August, and is constantly talking about how much shorter she is than the other kids in her class. She says she hates it. She’s not even that short - the doctor says she is in the 29th percentile and will probably be 5’4” as an adult. That’s actually my height, and I don’t recall ever feeling particularly short at her age.

She is always the youngest student or at least one of the youngest students, given when her birthday falls. So I guess that exacerbates the issue. I’ve told her that I never really felt like I struggled because of my height and her father (6’3”) tells her that there are a lot of negatives to being tall. It’s not really sinking in.

Is there anything else I can do for her, or is this just one of those things she needs to learn to accept?

Of course I would never in a million years want to live there, but the breads and other baked goods looked pretty good.

Was there anything else good about Gilead?

For example, if you retire in your 40s with $2 million in liquid assets, and start withdrawing $80k a year, and by year 5 you have a portfolio worth $3 million, are you past having to worry about SORR? In that scenario, even if your portfolio drops to $2 million you will be ok, right? And if you have a mix of bonds and stocks, it’s unlikely your portfolio would go down that much to begin with, absent some catastrophic market event. Assume I’m speaking in inflation adjusted terms.

This isn’t my exact scenario - mine is a lot messier than this. It would really take too explain it. But let’s just say we are 35% above our FIRE goal and not actually drawing down yet. Are we “safe” from SORR risk if we get to 50% above our FIRE goal? Alternately, would just accumulating 3-5 years worth of expenses in cash equivalents on top of our FIRE number be enough to insure against SORR?

ETA: I know I’m asking for a simple answer to a complex question. So there may be too many variables at play here to answer this effectively.

Why do the captions on Hulu refer to June as OfFred and OfJoseph? I’m talking about when they are just identifying who is speaking or making noises. Like I’m watching a scene where she is burying a body, and the captions say OfJoseph is panting. I know obviously that many people in Gilead refer to her that way, but I don’t think the viewers are supposed to think of her that way.

ETA: I’m referring to the characters in the show being certain. Not people in this sub.

I am just finishing up my rewatch of season 2. I understand that under the circumstances presented in the show, it’s definitely more likely that Nick is the father. These circumstances are:

• Fred never impregnated Serena (it was presumed she was infertile though)
• Fred didn’t impregnate the Handmaid prior to June
• Fred had been raping June for some time (6 months?) and she didn’t become pregnant until she slept with Nick

Still, we find out later that Fred is apparently not infertile. And it’s not like he was given a sperm analysis or anything. Serena, June and Nick are all certain from day 1 that it’s Nick’s baby. They never question it. How would they know?

The actor who plays Nick is part Asian and has incredibly thick eyebrows, but the baby doesn’t have those characteristics. I think we do get some type of DNA test later that proves it’s Nick’s baby - if my memory is correct. But I don’t know how they knew for certain before then.

I’m a 45-year-old woman who watched Mrs. Doubtfire many times as a kid. I know it’s trendy now to say that when we were younger, we sympathized with Daniel, but when we got older we realized Miranda was in the right.

Well I just rewatched the movie with my daughter, and I still think Miranda is horrible. Don’t get me wrong - I understand why she wouldn’t want to remain married to Daniel, and she’s well within her rights to ask for a divorce. But she thrusts the divorce on him with seemingly no warning, and then apparently kicks him out of the house penniless.

He should be more responsible and work towards more stable employment, but he deserved some assets and time to do that. Then when she brings him to court, the judge holds his lack of housing and regular employment against him, and only gives him custody one day a week, which she is apparently happy with. Then when he is seeing his kids, she comes by an hour early and honks the horn for them to come out, and then barges into his apartment when the kids don’t come out. She doesn’t apologize and instead just judges him for the state of his apartment - even though he just got it and he’s really trying to do everything he can to comply with the judge’s demands.

I don’t know - I was infuriated by this at age 12, and I still find it infuriating. I could go on and on, but I think her behavior is heinous. He may be a bad husband, but be didn't deserve that treatment regarding his kids.

ETA: Well it’s a day later and I’ve been thinking about this a little further. I haven’t really changed my opinion on Miranda, but I do think I may be more biased on this issue than I realized. My parents got divorced when I was 9, and we were a family with 2 girls and a boy as well. My mother was the disciplinarian and my father definitely wasn’t. My mother was the stable one who brought in a consistent income, but she was also abusive and I ultimately couldn’t live with her. She’s a narcissist and we are low contact now. My father is definitely flawed, but he’s the one who was there for me. He’s the one I could always rely on emotionally, if never financially. I can’t separate out that part of my history when watching this movie, and I’ll never be able to see it objectively.

I’ve been watching The Testaments and decided to go back and watch the last few episodes of the last season of Handmaid’s Tale. Then I went back and watched the first season.

In watching the last season of THT, I was fairly annoyed that we were seemingly expected to think that Serena and Aunt Lydia had found some type of redemption and deserved forgiveness. I knew they had done some truly deplorable, unforgivable things. Still, it had been years since I saw the earlier seasons and maybe my memories were dampened a bit.

But now that I’ve seen the first season again, I think they both should have been strung up. Them being given any type of redemption arc seems obscene to me. I feel almost resentful towards the showrunners that they would try to redeem these two characters on any level.

I imagine the answer is no, given how Gilead feels about that. And for the same reason I can’t imagine the women being given the pill or anything.

Yet, some fertile women like Moira and Janine are sent there, and my impression is that the only reason they were sent there instead of killed is that they were fertile. But there’s never any discussion about potential pregnancy resulting from the women there being repeatedly raped. And if they did get pregnant, how would that even work? Would the pregnancy still be supported because babies are so precious to Gilead? Would they do a DNA test to determine which commander was the father and give the baby to them?

I‘m probably getting too in the weeds on this...

Sorry if this topic has been discussed to death already. I spend a fair amount of time on FIRE and money management groups and subs, and they seem to very heavily male. I would guess 80% or so. Yet in my real life it seems that women are much more likely to be the budget managers/investors in a household. In my own life, my husband is involved with the finances, but not nearly as much as I am. We discuss things together, but he usually defers to me. We are in our 40s if that’s relevant.

Of course, my experience is anecdotal. Maybe what I see in the people around me is not representative of the larger world.