History Fridge / TheHandmaidsTale

** Children born of the Handmaids will be curious of their birth stories probably. If June's baby grows up with the Waterfords, what the hell is ''that'' story gonna be like? "Oh, we both just ''violently raped the Handmaid'' to get you to come out early. Praise be."

** Alternatively, imagine if you were a US citizen who lives abroad and divorced their spouse but your children are living in the US with said ex-spouse who either remarried or is raising them as a single parent. If they were unfortunate enough to live in an area which Gilead already conquered then your children most likely got taken away while your ex-spouse was punished for their divorce by either execution, sent to the colonies, or getting turned into a Handmaid if they were a woman with viable ovaries. There is a good chance that you in the other country would never see your own kids again because Gilead sure as hell ain't letting them go anywhere and barred any possible communications that you used to have to them.

* You might be wondering why the Commander whips Serena, but not Offred for their "illegal" activities. The FridgeHorror here is that if Offred wasn't pregnant at the time, she would have been whipped and dismissed from the household, and probably her hand amputated. It really shows how desperate and megalomanically selfish the Waterfords appear that they would shirk their beliefs for their own child, but condemn actions to save the Putnam's baby girl.

* Offred's doctor offers to try to impregnate her himself, so she won't get in trouble for repeated failures with the likely sterile Commander. That night the Commander suffers from TheLoinsSleepTonight, meaning if she'd accepted the deal and did get pregnant from it, she would have been immediately discovered to have had sex outside the arrangement and punished even worse, especially as she's already considered an "adulterer."

* The Vietnamese translation deliberately used loanwords from Chinese to translate the terms (Handmaid, Unwomen, etc.). This gives the series an archaic feeling, symbolizing Gilead's intention to return to "traditional" values, with the added weight of historical restrains placed on women in a Confucian system in Vietnam and China's feudal pasts. The book cover also reflected this by using a font that is closely associated with Chinese novels published in Vietnam, accompanied by the image of a woman whose face is hidden by a white cowl, revealing pale skin and red lips, the ideal of aristocratic ancient beauty.

* Research has proven that babies often need skin to skin contact with their mothers or caregivers in order to survive. The Putnams never saw Charlotte as anything more than a status symbol and certainly never gave her hugs or cuddles even when she was fully clothed, let alone skin to skin, so it's not that surprising when she starts to wane. By contrast, when Janine undresses and cradles her daughter close, Charlotte starts to improve.

* In the series, there is no longer a white supremacy. While Gilead residents of all classes are racially diverse- it is still not a multicultural society, since all cultural differences (such as religion and attire) have been wiped out. It is likely that this has been done to protest extremists of both wings regarding race: both the ultra-conservative super-strict churches where the only diversity allowed is race; as well as ultra-liberals who think that as long as something is not racist, it is not evil and thus should be tolerated. Not the first time the Handmaid's Tale protests extremist views of both wings (such as regarding porn)- so it makes perfect sense.

* Stripping June of her name becomes all that much more insulting when you learn that she even chose to keep her last name when she got married. Watching her repeatedly tell the nurse that her name is Osborne, not Bankole, is especially unbearable when you know what's coming.

* With Offred out of the way, whatever her fate, there's no reason to hold Hannah's safety over her head and therefore no reason to keep Hannah alive or safe, except the lack of children.

** There's also the Fridge Brilliance that this isn't a functional society but a Nazi-esque reactionary one, that we eventually learn blows up within a generation. It still doesn't mean there's not a massive amount of pain, horror, and anger before it collapses. Fascist, but Inefficient indeed.

* At first all that talk about "Colonies" so severely contaminated or irradiated that you die with a short time of being shipped to the clean-up gulags seemed rather weird, considering that just 5 years before, life in the U.S. appeared to have looked almost exactly the same as it does in the real world. And there's no talk about Gilead having provoked a nuclear / chemical war with the rest of the world, or anything like that. (On the contrary, they seem desperate to maintain good relations to other countries and even Canada is apparently not worried about getting invaded next.) But in a full-blown civil war in the U.S. it's quite likely that at least some of the country's about 100 nuclear plants would go into meltdown,[[note]] Not so much the reactors themselves, which can be shut down quite quickly, but the pools where the spent fuel rods have to be kept under water for 5 years to cool down. Those pools need continually running pumps so the water doesn't boil off and the stored mass of still-hot fuel rods melts and goes critical, which is what happened in Fukushima after the pumps were damaged by the tsunami. Nuclear plants in the U.S. normally only have enough diesel on site to keep the pumps running for a couple of days in case the electrical grid has a blackout. The electrical infrastructure of the U.S. is already in pretty bad shape – now imagine what happens if the people maintaining stuff get driven away by fighting militias, or if some theocratic luddite terrorists clueless about how things actually work try to sabotage a nuclear plant or detonate an EMP bomb close enough to wipe out their computers…[[/(note]] so of course large areas of the country would be as uninhabitable as Fukushima and Chernobyl. And yes, attempts to clean up the actual reactor site would kill people very quickly. In Fukushima, not even robots hold out for long in the intense radiation, which is why they still haven't located the melted core half a decade after the disaster, and are only very, very slowly managing to get out the old fuel rods from the pools that haven't blown up yet.[[note]]But most likely will, during the next earthquake, which is why time is of the essence and people ''are'' trying to clean up the site as fast as possible.[[/note]]

* If the ban on women reading was extended to include even Literature/TheBible, it would make sense for Gilead to do so in order to keep women ignorant of Scripture verses so they could defend themselves against the state-enforced religious misogyny against women, feeding them only what the state religion wants them to know about God's will for their lives. In the series, Aunt Lydia wasn't too pleased to know that Offred also knew Scripture and quoted it back to her without [[QuoteMine Quote Mining]] it like Lydia did.

* In the series, there is no longer a white supremacy. While Gilead residents of all classes are racially diverse- it is still not a multicultural society, since all cultural differences (such as religion and attire) have been wiped out. It is likely that this has been done to protest extremists of both wings regarding race: both the ultra-conservative super-strict churches where the only diversity allowed is race; as well as ultra-liberals who think that as long as something is not racist, it is not evil and thus should be tolerated. Not the first time the Handmaid's Tale protests extremist views of both wings (such as regarding porn)- so it makes perfect sense.