Me in a nutshell

Things I noticed abt the character designs and loved (SPOILERS):

- the protagonists all have a main shape (triangle, circle, and square)

- Wick gets the triangle because he’s constantly treated as dangerous

- Neeta gets the circle because she’s kind and extremely selfless, shes also adaptable

- Emery gets the square/rectangle cause he is set in his ways and resists change

- Honeycutt also gets the triangle because like Wick, he is a dangerous entity, and I love how this imagery adds to the scene where Honeycutt tries to win Wick over to his side as they are both predators/parasites. Despite being very different people, they are biologically similar, Wick knows this and it hurts him deeply

Your characters are allowed to be bad people. Your story is allowed to have no moral lesson.yyour ending is allowed to be sad. The villain can win. The good person can do something unforgivable. The lovers can destroy each other. You are allowed to write the thing that no one asked for and everything that everyone told you doesn’t work and you are allowed to not explain yourself.

One- as OP said, your characters can be bad people, they can do bad things. There doesn't have to be a reason or a moral. You can make them bad if you want to. No other reason needed.

Two- it doesn't have to be good, it just needs to be written. On my last book i literally wrote the words "dumbest version" on the top of the page because I had seen some advice to do that. It changed everything. I stopped trying to make it perfect, I just tried to make it. Period. Full stop.

there's concern there. it's obvious. and it's SO common when it comes to bisexuality bc there's this huge and annoying misconception that bisexual people are unfaithful unloyal cheaters. and you can see it in her face as she processes the information that this is an immediate concern for her and for her son.

and now let's look at ilya's face

now he's concerned, because he knows he has to explain himself (which he does. he shouldn't have to but he does) and he's basically throwing out a hail mary to shane's parents that says hey, wait, no, i'm not gonna cheat on your son. i love your son. just because i'm bisexual doesn't mean i would hurt shane.

I did God's work.

About 10 years ago, I became obsessed with The Big Bang Theory. I was in college at the time, majoring in English and growing more and more fond of writing and screenwriting. I had to read and analyze some pretty heavy literature classics, so in my downtime, I preferred something lighter like sitcoms.

At the height of my Big Bang era, I was up all night reading scripts and trying to learn as much as I could about the writers, the fans, the ships ect. It was already well established at 8 seasons in 2015, so I had a lot to catch up on. I quickly saw a few very distinct ships, but I was never in a bad spot or felt attacked by anyone. Most of the time, respective ships (Shamy and Shenny, if you’re familiar) kept to their sides of the fandom, used their tags and didn’t bother each other.

I would read and write fan fiction, that’s how the writing spark got ignited, and I would watch every panel, every video where the cast and the crew were talking about an upcoming season. I loved Sheldon and Amy the most.

Then one time at a panel, the writers had teased that they would sometimes read Big Bang Theory fanfiction, out of curiosity.

At first it was kind of embarrassing. Professional writers reading fanfiction about the characters they invented, and reading some of the most insane smut between usually very prude characters on screen. I felt perceived, but they never said anything disrespectful or ridiculed us for wanting more intimacy between certain characters.

You know what they did with that? They incorporated fanfiction into their storyline and by doing so, they paid tribute to their devout fanbase.

They wrote an episode about Amy Farrah Fowler’s fanfiction of The Little House on the Prairie (season 8 episode 14). Amy was embarrassed and shy, her characters clearly sounding like a more sensual Sheldon and Amy, but then Penny and Bernadette encouraged her and they all ended up enthralled with her story. Even Leonard, with Penny reading it to him in bed on her iPad. I also read and write fanfiction on an iPad, so that was another sweet touch.

It felt like a nod to the active fans, those who cared so much about the characters they saw on screen that they would dedicate time and energy writing stories about them. Those who memorized not only the cast names but the crew’s too. Those who interacted with, promoted and supported their show for over a decade.

To me, that was one of the most beautiful ways to pay tribute to your fan base. I will never forget the kind words and subtle gestures the cast and crew of The Big Bang Theory has extended to their viewers over the years.

They know people come from all over the world to watch a live taping. I was fortunate enough to attend one in LA during the last season, and it was as magical as I had hoped it would be.

So maybe I was spoiled? Maybe I felt like this was the baseline for most TV shows: show appreciation for the fan base that remembers all the plots, story lines, character arcs and motives you wrote. Show respect to the real people dedicating themselves to not only watch but cherish the art you put out on screen. Show that no matter the glamour, the money and the premieres, you appreciate the audience that makes it all possible.

How did The Handmaid’s Tale respect their viewers?

They wrote and shot one of the most devastating love story between two beloved Atwood characters. They shot it, wrote it, promoted it in a way that made you think that the love between these two characters was so real, so strong, that it would transcend hardship and make it to the other side. And if it didn’t, it would at least end in dignity and beautifully, like it started.

They wrote a male character so complex, constantly toying the line between what he should do and what he can do, who never showed an unwavering support for the bad side, only to the woman he loves and their daughter.

They gave Elizabeth Moss her directorial debut in season 4 and she chose to shoot the bridge scene in 360, making it one of the most agonizing and earth shattering kiss I had ever seen on television.

They created a love triangle between June, Luke and Nick knowing damn well it would draw in attention and attract a type of viewers who would not grasp the intensity of the rest of the story. They made the actors pick sides, pick teams and made the viewers do the same.

Then they blamed us for it. They blamed us for falling in love with a tragic love story. They made fun of us, called us “The Nick fans” later on adapted to “Ofnicks” by some of the most hollow minded individuals on the internet.

They gaslit us, made us believe the signs were there all along, and that “95% of it happened off screen so it’s convenient to forget.” What the actual fuck?

Then they refused to take an accountability. They did not once address the uproar in the fandom, the disappointment of so many, the petitions and boycotts going around.

They’re ignoring everything, ignoring the very people who stuck around to watch their dragged on soap for 9 years. Those who excused the plot holes and the mistakes. Those who were forgiving and hopeful.

honest answer first: you're right that atwood's public commentary is overwhelmingly political. she frames the book as speculative fiction, as a warning, as a work where every atrocity had a historical precedent. she does not, in any interview i can find, market it as a romance. that's accurate and i want to be straightforward about it.

but the argument i'm making isn't about how atwood markets the book in interviews. it's about four things that are on record.

first, the academic consensus on this novel has, for decades, treated the love-as-resistance reading as central, not subtext. serious literary critics writing on this book have long argued that Offred's interior life, her desire, her affair with Nick, are the mechanism through which the regime is defied. this is not a fan invention. this is how the novel has been read in literature departments since 1985.

second, the textual evidence is overwhelming. atwood gives Offred pages of hungry, present-tense prose about Nick. she gives Luke past-tense grief. she ends the novel, in the historical notes, with a panel of scholars two centuries later concluding that Nick is the man who got Offred out, and one of them notes, almost dryly, that the human heart remains a factor. those are authorial choices. atwood put them there. the fact that she does not foreground them in interviews does not make them less real on the page.

third, The Testaments. atwood's own sequel. and what does Offred name the baby she had with Nick? Nichole. not after her mother. not after Moira. not a neutral name. Nichole. for Nick. and then atwood makes that child the figure who returns to Gilead and helps bring it down. the regime falls in the second book and it falls through Nichole. atwood structurally encoded Nick's significance into the architecture of the entire universe. she made his daughter the agent of Gilead's collapse and named her after him. you do not do that to a man you consider a side character or a cautionary tale. you do that to a man whose love produced the resistance's symbolic vessel.

fourth, and this is the part i think matters most: atwood's own brand of feminism, as she has defined it on record for decades, is in direct opposition to what the show did with June.

atwood has said, repeatedly, in interview after interview, that she is skeptical of the version of feminism that asks women to be angels, symbols, or moral exemplars. her 2017 NYT essay is explicit. she rejects the reading of the book as an ideological tract where women are angels or so victimized they are incapable of moral choice. she has said that her feminism is built on the proposition that women are full and flawed human beings, with all the variety of character and behavior that implies. she has been called a bad feminist by other feminists for this position. she has held it for years. she does not budge on it.

this is the feminism of interiority. of small wins. of moral complexity. of women who want things, who are wrong sometimes, who are complicated, who do not exist to be the symbolic vessels of a cause. and it is the exact opposite of what the show did with June in its final seasons.

the show turned June into a symbol. the warrior. the avatar of the resistance. the mother who must save all the children. the woman whose wanting is finally disciplined out of her in service of a mission. the woman whose love for Nick is reframed as immaturity, whose specific desire is recast as a phase she needed to grow out of, whose adulthood is supposedly proven by her willingness to give up the most particular and embodied love in her life for the abstraction of a movement.

that is not atwood's feminism. that is, in fact, the version of feminism atwood has spent forty years explicitly rejecting. the version where women are angels. the version where the morally serious woman is the one who has transcended her own desire. the version where motherhood and mission are the moral center and personal wanting is a weakness.

atwood's whole career stands against that. her interviews stand against that. her textual choices in this book and its sequel stand against that.

and i want to be careful about one thing here, because i think it's where the disagreement actually lives. there is a real difference between calling The Handmaid's Tale a romance novel and recognizing that it is a book with sexual awakening, love, freedom, choice, agency, and interiority baked into its structural core. those are two completely different claims.

i am not arguing the first. atwood would reject that framing and she would be right to. the book is not a romance. it is not built on the conventions of the genre. it does not promise the reader the happily-ever-after that romance as a form is structured around. atwood is not writing in that tradition and she has never claimed to be.

what i am arguing is the second. that this is a book whose central engine is a woman's interior life, her desire, her capacity to love and be loved, her right to choose a particular person to want, and the way all of that becomes the form of resistance the regime cannot legislate away. those themes are not subtext. they are the text. they are what the prose actually does on the page. they are what the historical notes confirm at the end. they are what the sequel structurally encodes through Nichole. and they are consistent with everything atwood has said, over decades, about what her feminism actually means.

so when i talk about Offred and Nick, i am not saying atwood wrote a love story in the genre sense. i am saying she wrote a book about a woman whose love for a particular man inside a totalitarian regime became the proof that the regime had failed. those are not the same claim.

the case is that her text treats Nick as central, her sequel confirms it by naming the regime's downfall after him, and her stated feminism is the philosophical opposite of the moralized empowerment fable the show ended on. the show put Nick on a plane and turned June into a symbol. atwood put his daughter at the heart of Gilead's collapse and has spent her career arguing that women are full human beings, not symbols.