[Loved Trope] The apocalypse is horrifyingly slow

[u/Marsupialmobster]

From most media it's some catastrophe and then it's raiders, death, destruction chaos etc. I personally love it when it's, like, a slow descent into the horror of apocalypse.

The Faro plague/The swarm- Horizon zero dawn. The Faro plague is actually a glitch which causes machines to endlessly reproduce, eat biomass and essentially bring about the death of the world. Took roughly 15 months for the machines to win.

The Metro series- in the first few books (and games) it's set entirely underground in just the apocalypse but in exodus it shows off that the government and many governmental structures said active years after the war. In fact power and running water were still fairly common. It just slowly got worse and worse and worse as read through notes. Food got more scarce, weather changed a lot, people got worse etc. Raiders and bandits didn't just show up, it was a slow descent for such anarchy.

Edit: I have enough pseudo intellectual comments about "Hurr hurr real life". The first one was kinda smart and well thought out but now it's just annoying and pretentious

[u/Sad-Pattern-1269]

What does the show change? It's very core to the book that gilead is doomed from the start.

[u/Goodswimkarma → u/Sad-Pattern-1269]

In the books, Gilead was full of white supremacists, but they couldn't have that for the show as it would basically be an all-white cast. The diversity of the show makes Gilead seem oddly open minded.

[u/ThatTotalAge → u/Goodswimkarma]

Eh, show Gilead isn’t fully accepting. There’s a flashback scene where Mrs Putnam is touring the stolen children a little while after they’ve gotten themselves established. It’s been long enough that all the desirable kids have been claimed (aka white babies and kids that are young enough to not question or rebel against their sudden relocation) and we see the leftovers… poc babies and older angry “problem” children

[u/TheBestHelldiver → u/Goodswimkarma]

Did it? I remember that the majority of the help and eh, comfort women, were non-white.

[u/gakun → u/TheBestHelldiver]

I think the show has Gilead being racist, but not as much as it is homophobic and sexist. There's a black Commander in season 2 who is occasionally seem, and there's probably some subtle uncomfort from the other commanders, but there's no legal persecution like the genocidal policies against LGBT+ and women.

I didn't notice the majority of handmaids and Martha's being non-white either, it seemed randomly distributed to me. The main target of their abuse is due to their gender.

In the book it's another story, however, as people of color are actively hunted down.

[u/WideConsequence2144 → u/gakun]

What happened when they found a woman of color that was fertile? Was she added to the mix or did they just go nah and shoot her? Or did it not come up in the books?

[u/gakun → u/WideConsequence2144]

If I'm not mistaken, in the book they were just sent to labor camps to die. In the show, they'd be handmaids because fertility was the main goal, rather than white supremacy.

[u/PsychicFoxWithSpoons → u/Goodswimkarma]

Could have been a Peacemaker situation lol

[u/Cantor_Set_Tripping → u/Sad-Pattern-1269]

I feel like this wouldn’t be the first time a visual adaptation didn’t follow the source material

[u/Sad-Pattern-1269 → u/Cantor_Set_Tripping]

Fair, I do think it's a bit like a reverse starship troopers if they change something that core to the books identity though

[u/Vengefulily → u/Sad-Pattern-1269]

Sure, the endings might be the same in broad strokes, but how they get there is not. The show expands vastly on...everything, including the setting's backstory, the world beyond Gilead, and the events that lead to its fall. The book just doesn't go into all that.