2022-11-06 17:17:32 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

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Re: your John post: I’m so fascinated by the moment when Cristabel kills herself in front of John to give him the final boost (psychological and practical) to figure out resurrection because when it WORKS and he figures it out, John’s immediate response is…to leave her lying dead on the floor because suddenly the urgency to save that one individual life evaporates in the face of everything he can now do.

There are later moments, like when the ship escapes, that are obviously pivotal in HIS mind, but it’s my sense that everything which happens after Cristabel’s (first) death is colored by that shift from “If I can just figure out how to bring ONE person back, I can bring EVERYONE back” to “Who cares if I can bring one person back? I can bring ANYONE I want back!”

And with THAT shift comes a shift in his own understanding of what morality looks like for someone with his power.

mayasaura:

> Sorry for the delay, I’ve been struggling with answering this one.

> I agree, Cristabel’s suicide is an extremely important pivotal moment for John, if not THE pivotal moment, but I’m not sure I agree about exactly what his pivot was.

> After Cristabel dies, when he’s holding her soul and through it sees Alecto, he doesn’t go straight to ‘I’m so powerful I can do anything now,’ and he doesn’t immediately set off the bombs or make himself god. He does a journey first through begging to become a vessel for that power, begging the soul of the Earth to tell him what to do. When he says that Alecto was incoherent and screaming, he follows up by saying “It wasn’t your fault.” He doesn’t blame her for it, but he resents that he wasn’t given guidance in that moment, that he was left with so much power and no idea what he was meant to do with it.

> Something I feel carries a lot of weight in that scene for how little John dwells on it is that John was also suicidal. When he set up the nuclear threat, I don’t think he expected to survive the fallout if he followed through. When Cris told him she knew how to help him and then came back with a gun, John’s assumption was that she was going to kill him. And he was going to let her.

> I find it difficult to analyze his immediate reaction to Cris’ death, choosing to focus on Alecto over Cristabel. For personal reasons, I’m incapable of judging someone for their immediate reaction to watching a loved one commit suicide. I just can’t. He had the power to bring her right back and he didn’t; it seems like there’s obviously something deeply wrong with that decision, but I can’t assume it was out of lack of care for Cristabel. Maybe it was representative of a shift in his priorities, it seems likely that you’re right and it was, but I can only credit that retroactively in how he processed having made the decision. Seeing something like that can just. Make you insane. Sometimes there is no 'why’ in what you do when you’re experiencing that kind of traumatic shock, and trying to find deeper meaning in it will only fuck you up beyond belief.

> I’m pretty certain John was in shock, from the way he recounts it. From the moment he starts telling how Cristabel came back with the gun, he’s described as sounding 'as though he were underwater with the rest of everything’. His memory surrounding the immediate aftermath is fuzzy, he can’t remember details about what he did, if he took anything with him. He remembers some trivial-seeming sensory and visual details clearly, like how there was less blood than he expected on his clothes. He doesn’t remember what he did, when he left the scene of her death to find the rest of his friends under assault or dead. He thinks he just watched, but he isn’t sure. It feels weird, like he dreamed it. He remembers Augustine saying something in their final moments huddled together behind the barricade, but not what he said. He recalls holding Augustine and Mercy’s hands as they begged for his life, as they died in front of him, but he’s not sure how he got there. He was, in short, incredibly fucked up and about to die.

> And that’s when he ended everything, and became god.

> I’ve been thinking about that moment preceding all of it—about Cristabel and John and how pivotal their relationship was—for a while since you first sent this, and I think on some level John does realize how important it is. John was only Catholic by the furthest stretch of the definition, we find that out fairly early in the Verses. He was baptized at a christian rock concert he’d attended for the underage drinking. There’s no evidence the man ever set foot in a church prior to his apotheosis, and he goes on to construct a giant Catholic-themed space empire. Why would he do that? Why is that the blueprint he chose for his new world?

> John wasn’t Catholic, but Cristabel was. She was a nun, she was the only person he allowed into the room with him during his breakdown, and he addresses her as 'Sister’. She killed herself in front of him. She’s the reason he learned how to perceive the soul, and she was the first soul he ever touched. Did he lean so heavily on the Catholic theme in honor of her, or to spite her, or both? Or did she push the theme herself? We know she invented the oath “One flesh, one end,” and we know she was the one behind forcing the invention of lyctorhood. In her first life, we know she was the one who most enthusiastically framed John as a religious figure, even before he formed the cult. How much influence did Cristabel have in the structure and formation of the Empire? How deep an impression did she leave on the culture, and on John?