Entertainment

Twitter Is Super Pissed About This Awful 'The Handmaid's Tale' Parody Tweet

by Lilli Petersen
Hulu

Margaret Atwood's acclaimed dystopian novel-turned-Hulu-hit, The Handmaid's Tale, is a terrifying warning tale about the dangers of religious and political authoritarianism and the slippery slope towards the subjugation of women. You know what it needed? An emoji!

That's what the team behind The Emoji Movie, which comes out Friday, apparently thought. On July 21 the movie's official account tweeted out this winner:

Twitter

Why yes, that is a smiling, made-up lady-face emoji peeking cheekily out from under a Handmaid's robe and cap.

You know, the outfit that is intended to literally make a woman unseen and unheard in The Handmaid's Tale. A society in which women have no rights and are literally given to men to be used as breeding machines (and, by the way, are forbidden from wearing makeup).

In case you didn't catch the reference, they even handily captioned it for you, as “The Emoji's Tale.”

Guys. Guys.

Did it not occur to you that perhaps a story about an oppressive totalitarian society which literally reduces women to the value of their reproductive abilities is maybe not the best idea for a cute emoji?

It clearly occurred to them at some point on Monday. By the evening of July 24, the tweet had been deleted.

Twitter saw it, though. Oh, Twitter saw it. And it was not happy.

Some people offered suggestions about what The Emoji Movie could parody next!

To be clear, these are jokes. Please do not parody these. Any of them. Please just don't.

And at least one person was looking for a silver lining.

There are so many other things that could get the emoji treatment and work wonderfully.

This emoji version of Frozen is awesome, and I'm not even going to get into the delightful ridiculousness of the R-rated eggplant emoji movie we're supposedly getting next year (let's just say I'm here for it).

So, let's leave Offred out of this, OK?