The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

In The Handmaid's Tale, the United States' government has been overthrown by a totalitarian theocracy. This would be enough to make the current society a religious fundamentalist Nazi-like state, but there is also the added bonus that procreation and births have greatly diminished (either for environmental or social reason that are not fully explained). It has that Children of Men storyline going on. Now, you combine a patriarchal, male-driven, extremely religious, chauvinist society with declining birth rates and you end up with the story of Rachel and Leah from the Bible Remixed. That story tells of an infertile Rachel who used handmaids as proxies to have children for her:

And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die.

And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel; and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath witheld from thee the fruit of the womb?

And she said, Behold my maid Billah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.
- Genesis 30:1-3

How messed up is that passage? Anyway, in the world of Gilead, handmaids such as the narrator are the first generation of women to be used as concubines for the wealthy elite class in order to bear them children.

The novel, as narrated by Offred (not her real name, just a moniker meaning she belongs to Fred, the head of the elite family that she serves), immediately plunges us into this strange new world where women are not allowed to read, they wear huge costumes to cover their entire body including most of their face, they must be chaperoned at all times, and public hangings are the daily ritual. Right away I'm thinking "yeah, right," eye-roll. I think the story begins to gain an eerie believability when Offred describes her life prior to the coup. She was married. She had a child. She had a job, a mother, she went to college. She describes herself as "I am thirty-three years old. I have brown hair. I stand five [feet] seven [inches] without shoes" (I immediately cast Natalie Portman in the role, though she is considerably shorter I think). That juxtaposition, the description that things were perfectly normal "before" until everything started to degrade and eventually became a bizarre reality, is what most captivated me about the story.

The Handmaid's Tale is thought provoking because, as strange and unlikely as the Gilead society may seem to us today, these things have already happened. Subjugation of the few by the many, total government control and societal shutdown, unchecked repression, trading freedom for security and progress. And that's just the larger themes. The book also explores sexual violence, social conservatism, religious fanaticism, censorship. Hell, these things are still happening. Atwood pushes these themes to the extreme, into territory that we can only hope is really just the stuff of fiction. She has said: "this is a book about what happens when certain casually held attitudes about women are taken to their logical conclusion." As a skeptic, I want to shrug off this comment as a lot of hot air. But as a woman, I already deal with enough male-centered, misogynistic views, and a noticeable dose of fear. I think a lot of other women do too, and the themes in the book are not completely off the wall.

Two themes from the book profoundly shook me and, to be perfectly frank, downright scared me. The first is when Offred begins to doubt whether her husband Luke harbors the same anti-feminist beliefs as the rest of society:

"He doesn't mind this, I thought. He doesn't mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other's anymore. Instead, I am his. Unworthy, unjust, untrue. But that is what happened. So Luke: what I want to ask you know, what I need to know is, Was I right? Because we never talked about it. By the time I could have done that, I was afraid to. I couldn't afford to lose you."

It is a very sad and lonely moment where she wonders if she might lose all support. Wondering if someone you trust without question could betray you has to be the loneliest and most soul-crushing realization.

The other moments that were very discomforting were when Offred is trying to find the motivation, not just to keep living, but to accept that this is her new life and that the old one isn't coming back. Makes me wonder where my motivation would come from if my life were turned upside down. It is the backbone to any apocalypse/survivor/dystopian story and it always makes me wonder how I would survive, if at all. And those types of questions are definitely not just relegated to fiction.

The narrative uses stream of consciousness heavily and is almost too poetic most of the time to ring true, but in the book's epilogue we learn why Offred's narrative is like this. For such a short book, it takes on some hefty themes, presents very complex characters, and tells a unique story.

Another good pick out of my deck of cards. Thanks for the loaner, Subie!

I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance.

If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

It isn't a story I'm telling.

It's also a story I'm telling, in my head, as I go along.

Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else.

Even where there is no one.

Loremaster Sinnh

Loremaster was an achievement that I resisted for a long time. It just sounded like the most time-consuming achievement that would end up requiring a lot of grinding and running back and forth. What do you expect from an achievement that asks you to complete 2,705 quests? That's a pretty big number! So I always looked in awe at people sporting their Loremaster titles but I also felt bad for the poor bastards that must have spent hours and hours every day grinding out all the last quests. As you can probably guess, I ended up being no better...

Gold Tag

I was actually relatively well on my way towards the Loremaster title before I actively started working for it. I had gone through all the Northrend quests (875 of them) and picked up the Northrend Loremaster achievement as a way to earn gold for my epic flying training. With that, I was already well past the 50% mark, more or less (obviously, a lot of quests, probably 35% or so, were completed during the leveling up process).

Now I just needed to make up my mind. That extra nudge came when Blizzard released a new patch that would let you query their server in order to find out which quests you had and had not completed. Previously, there was no way to keep track, unless you had a fine memory :( and/or spent some time tracking and filtering quests on wowhead.com. But now Blizzard had released the key. Pretty soon, add-on developers integrated the server query into their programs and created a compact little tool for telling you what quests you were missing and where to find them. Suddenly going back to the level 20 through level 60 zones where I had quested nearly two years ago didn't sound so daunting. At least I knew where to go and who to see when I got there. And so I did. Others may bemoan that the achievement got easier with quest tracking and to those I say: the best part is that my title and tabard look just like yours :)

Every time I wear the tabard, my reaction is something like "oh, it's hideous...I LOVE it!"

Once I decided to get started, I heeded Rock's advice, who slapped me upside the head (metaphorically speaking) because I was going to do Outland Loremaster before doing Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms Loremaster, and that was just crazy balls because the upcoming expansion will make the current Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms Loremasters go the way of the dodo, thus it would make sense to focus on the ones that might be going away. So thank you, Rock.

THEN I settled on starting with Eastern Kingdoms, as rumor has it that it's the easier of the two old world Loremaster achievements to do. And it's true! There are a ton of quests there, much more than you'll need for the EK achievement (I didn't even step foot in the Badlands and I still got the achievement). Most of that time was spent weeping in corners in the Blackrock Spire dungeons because I was horribly lost, and coming quite close to tearing hairs out when some random quest giver sent me to those dungeons for the umpteenth time.

By the time I got EK Loremaster, I could navigate Blackrock Spire with my eyes closed. It’s all about the little victories.

It is still on my bucket list that I have to do the Fallen Hero of the Horde quest line that starts somewhere outside Stonard. I even got the achievement without doing any of that, but I hear it is quite epic. Some of the highlights I did do for EK included: the Tirion quest line in Eastern Plaguelands to save his son; the ghost Pamela quest line to bring peace to a little girl's soul and restore her dad through a pretty badass battle; the quest line to obtain the key to Scholomance, including unlocking the ghost town of Caer Darrow; and the Blackrock Spire quests that reward you with wolf pup and spider pets.

Then I moved on to Kalimdor. People weren't kidding that Kalimdor would be a pain to complete. It is quite a battle to seek out the last 30 or so quests you need to finish. It's even more maddening to spend a couple hours on a single quest only to turn it in and find out it didn't count towards the achievement (there was much swearing involved). But Kalimdor does have some of my all-time favorite zones: Winterspring, Un'Goro Crater, Azshara, and the Shimmering Flats in Thousand Needles.

I love that the majority of the Un'Goro quests are a love letter to Nintendo: there's the quest to kill the gorillas that drop empty barrels, the quest to help “Linken” remember his identity by bringing him his Sword of Mastery, and the quest to help Larion or Muigin who reward you with a zapper to kill carnivorous plants. I also found a very out of the way quest in Azshara to help Kim’jael retrieve, among other things, his stuffed chicken and his wizzlegoober :) Wailing Caverns has a neat storyline and the quest to recover Cuergo's Gold is pretty amusing. However, hunting down five different animals in the Barrens to get items that begin quests does stick out as the most time consuming pain-in-the-rear portion of the entire Loremaster experience.

The quest line starts when you discover a sunken raft with a compass, a map, and a key.

But, with the old world zones out of the way, the rest of the trek was relatively painless. All that was left was three zones in Outland. I say that like it was just a trifle, but Netherstorm had 120 quests to complete, Shadowmoon Valley had 90, and Blade’s Edge Mountain had 86. So there was still some work to be done, but at least Outland marks the start of Blizzard's revamped quest mechanics, where quests didn't take you halfway across the world to continue or complete. Most quests are contained inside the zone and progressing through the quests is just a much better experience overall. I especially loved Shadowmoon Valley, which has the extremely long and lore-filled The Cipher of Damnation quest line. I also liked the Blade’s Edge quests to help the ogres and eventually become their queen, and the quests from the troll that got buried up to his neck and is out for revenge.

You can barely see me but there I am, right in the middle.

Finishing Loremaster in Outland really made me sad that I didn't experience end-game content during the Burning Crusade expansion as I have during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I haven't even stepped foot inside most of the Outland dungeons, even on my alts. That's definitely something I plan to do on my death knight or my alliance shaman.

And pretty soon that was it. Loremaster, done. Add one more poor slob to the pile. To be fair, it really didn't end up being as time consuming as I thought it would be. I even got several other achievements along the way, like The Keymaster, and I maxed out my reputations with the other Horde factions and got The Ambassador. I even got The Seeker achievement (Complete 3,000 quests), which I actually completed before I got Loremaster. That seems backwards to me, but I guess I ended up doing WAY more quests than I needed to. The craziest part is that there are still a ton of quests I didn't do, so I wonder how many there actually are in the game. According to my character's statistics on the WoW Armory, I've completed 3,170 quests. Lord! 0_0 And I wonder why I don't really remember them all.

Another fun quest in Netherstorm to save Bessy the Cow...who doesn't love cows?