i keep seeing people say that john thought alecto was so beautiful when he made her but i’m pretty sure he literally said something along the lines of “ya it was all really overwhelming and everyone was dying and i just made the first thing i thought of and it was honestly a little fucked idk”
What I can’t get over is how much John loved his friends.
It’s so clear in the way he talks about them as he tells Alecto/Harrow about his story of what happened. What keeps hitting me hard is that he seems so taken aback by how much they loved him. By the fact that they stayed with him, the fact that none of them left him. Even as he’s telling this story back he seems so awed by the fact that they stayed with him through it all.
He calls them his loved ones and yeah, they were. And that love is still there, in whatever way that love can exist after a myriad of being God. It’s fucked up and warped and twisted just by the nature of who he is and who he’s become and what he’s done, but it’s still there, wrapped up in the whole mess of him and warped, probably beyond repair.
The Locked Tomb is so heavily tied up in love. In different kinds of love. There are so many different manifestations of love in these books, and so many different ways we the readers are shown love and shown what it does to people and how different people express it and live with it.
And not to sound like someone who is all ‘y’all just don’t GET my fave’ but I think something that isn’t talked about enough is the way that love is what drove John to what he became and what he did. Obviously I’m not saying there weren’t other factors at work, he’s a tasty guy full of a million character traits that I want to study like a bug, but I think that love is so key to understanding his character. Love is what drove him and love is what ultimately undid him and undid the world. I love this passage so much:
The whole thing is just so good, and then the ending of “For John had loved the world” sucker punches me all the way to Wednesday and back. He loved the world. He loved the world to the point of destruction. All of his hopelessness and rage and despair that ultimately drove him towards the moment he became God came about because of that love. I think that love as a destructive force is such a tasty thing to think about. It’s so good. Love as something that can drive someone to terrible things, love as something that can break you because it’s just so much. He loved the world so much. And again though, I want to reiterate that he loved his friends and that that also played such a key role in things. It’s no coincidence that the moment he finally snapped came about as he watched his friends die around him. I’m not saying that it was just ‘oh he got sad and had a whoopsie’ because no that’s boring and also wrong. I am not uwu-ing this man, he’s an absolutely terrifying character and I am fascinated by him and what he does and how he justifies it to himself and all the awful shit he pulls. There was so much at play, so much that had been pushing him to the edge etc. so many delicious Greek tragedy level ingredients being thrown into the John Gaius descent into darkness pot.
But I still think it’s so key that what finally brought all of this to a head, with his anger and despair driving him to the point of threatening nuclear war as the trillionaires left the world to die and the mobs knocking down his gates, was his friends. It all came together in such a tragic way and god, the whole John 1:20 interlude chapter is so damn good, the way it escalates, the way all of this madness and panic and absolute frantic terror and loss of control all comes together (I teared up reading it, and said “damn Tamsyn” out loud, for the record). The way John recounts how his love ones died in this sort of blank, blurry way. The very clear fact that his mind is barely grasping it as he tries to remember how to tell the story, that it was all so chaotic, that he watched them die, the way he can’t keep it all straight. His account of it is very disjointed and almost dreamlike, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. As is the fact that he could feel each person die (“like popping bubble wrap”) and felt it as his friends died around him (and actually saw some of them shot right in front of him and god the way he recounts those ones has such a specifically heart breaking tone to it idk how Ms. Muir gets that across so well). It HURTS. And honestly, I think his friends were his humanity by the end. Or they were what was keeping him tethered to it. Whichever way you prefer to see it. They were what could have held him there, if it hadn’t all gone to shit, if it had gone a different way, if they’d lived and if they’d managed to rein him in and walk him down from his despair. But they died, and he loved them, and the world was screaming, and he loved the world. And he stopped the heart of his last living friend to set off a nuke.
And then as he put it, he let go.
It’s so good, I am writing this at past 5am in the morning so this is not me at my most coherent as I try to get these thoughts to sound good in not my head but STILL
Anyway it’s all about love and John’s story is so heavily laden with the idea of love as a destructive force and I am LOSING my MIND
Also he made flowers grow for Nigella and Cassiopeia’s wedding but they were weird and some had teeth but Nigella and Cassiopeia thought it was hilarious and John was Cassiopeia’s best man and he cried through the entire service and he ate food then even though he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten food and look, look this is what I’m talking about when I say his friends were his humanity/were what was keeping him tethered to his humanity, I am crying in the club
Ok time to make my hopefully coherent adjacent post about the whole ‘John made Alecto look like Barbie’ thing. Also this goes out to @opticor and @2impostors for the interest in my semi-coherent thoughts on this topic.
I’ve seen people reading it as like ‘wow John took the soul of the earth and made her look like Barbie what a typical dude thing to do’ and personally I don’t at all vibe with that reading of it so now I am turning some rambly tags I made into a proper post.
I’m going to start by posting a crappily highlighted passage, as is my wont:
I think one aspect of this that people misconstrue is “I wanted to make you the most beautiful body I could think of.” I think a lot of people are taking this as beautiful=sexy=John is super gross and wanted to make the earth a sexy hot Barbie body.
However, I very much read this as John, who loved the earth so much, wanting to make a beautiful vessel for the earth’s soul. I don’t think ‘sexy’ is the right way to interpret this one. There’s a big ol’ gulf between that ‘beautiful’ and the way people seem to be reading it as ‘sexy.’ Now is there a lot to unpack and think about in all of this? Yes. Is it ‘John is gross and made Alecto sexy because he’s gross and gave her the classic sexy lady body of Barbie?’ No.
And also very key here is “Most of what had made me John had gone somewhere else. There were a few little thoughts left…a handful of things that made me me…”
I think it’s really worth keeping in mind here that in this moment John was barely holding onto anything of himself and thus turned to one of the few things he had left to grab at, aka a childhood memory of playing at his grandma’s house. And more specifically of playing with his mom’s old Barbie:
He was eating the soul of the earth and barely holding onto his own identity and personhood and turned to one of the few scraps of himself that remained. His memory of playing with his mom’s old Barbie as a kid was one of the few things he had left in that moment, and that was what his fragmented mind reached out to and grabbed onto as something beautiful. The way he talks about the Hollywood Hair Barbie is also very deeply not in the realm of like, ‘wow Barbie is so sexy and I wanted to make the earth sexy’ sdfghjk. He talks about her “little gold outfit and her long yellow hair.” He thinks she was “the best,” and “got to have all the adventures.” Sorry but this really doesn’t read as ‘ah yes Barbie, the sexiest of women. A doll I lusted over’ asdfghj.
In a moment of almost completely losing his personhood and identity, John reached out to that memory and that very childlike love for something he’d found beautiful, and that was what his mind held onto.
John is also very notably defensive about the fact that this was what he chose for Alecto. He seems to view this as something embarrassing. He’s not bragging about making a sexy body, he’s sort of self-consciously trying to explain why his torn to shreds mind grabbed at that form.
When he made Alecto he wasn’t thinking in any coherent fashion. His broken mind was grabbing at his most basic, simple memories to find something beautiful. He wanted to give her a vessel that could have pretty yellow hair and have all the adventures.
Also ngl I really don’t see ‘I loved playing with my mom’s old Barbie and having her go on adventures and I loved her pretty hair and her golden outfit’ as a typical dude thing.
Like there is certainly a lot to think about vis a vis John’s view of himself as creator, and in how he also compares her to a Christmas tree fairy, a Renaissance angel, Adam and Eve, and Galatea. He evokes all of these when describing her, not just Barbie (and he also calls her “Frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair.”) I think there is a TON to think over and discuss with all of that. (The relevant passage for those comparisons is on pg. 409 of NtN for the record). But yeah, there is a lot to analyze in the things he evokes in describing his act of creation (for one I find it interesting that not all of them are ‘female,’ so to speak). There’s a lot to think about in terms of how he gave parts of himself to make her ( “I ripped half of my ribs from my body and made you from dirt, my blood, my vomit, my bone.” (pg. 408), and in him choosing to frame himself as creator, and as creator in a distinctly biblical way (the ribs being an obvious call to this). The reference to Galatea is also its own interesting thing. But anyway, John made her body from himself and oh boy is there a lot there but okay this paragraph is threatening to become too long, so I need to leave this topic for now and come back to it later in its own post sdfghj.
ANYWAY, all of this is to say that I really think interpreting John’s creation of Alecto’s physical form as a ‘typical dude thing, he wanted to make her sexy and picked Barbie, the most basic ideal of womanhood’ is a reading that really misses the mark.
Annnnd that’s all from me tonight, time to go to bed.
I really did not get the memo on “NtN made us all hate John/hate John even more” because I’m over here like wow he’s my babygirl he’s my favorite I love him more than ever
Reblogging my own post because I think this tag is EXTREMELY tasty
sorry to lockedtombpost but i think a lot of people online are missing the point of john gaius. everyone walked into nona like ‘i hate the guy irredeemably’ and walked out like ‘i hate the guy irredeemably’ and that does a disservice to his character and to his arc and to the end of the world. john’s apocalypse was not an orchestrated, preplanned, malicious endeavour: it was a series of downward trips and falls that just kept happening until finally he went tumbling all the way down the stairs and hit the ground with a nuclear blast.
john is a commentary on incremental evil– we all like to think we could never end the world, but we could certainly all raise a stink to our bosses if they tried to cancel our global salvation project. And when they didn’t listen, we could all turn to our friends and their friends in our desperation, and try and try and try to struggle against the immovable object of capitalist greed. And when that failed, of course we would get desperate– when we realized we’d made this terrifying breakthrough, developed this incredible power, of course we’d look for some way we could use it to change things. when the world tried to stop us, of course we’d cut ourselves off from them, do whatever we had to to buy more time to try and change things, fix things. and from that point of desperation and immediate personal threat, the cows don’t look like such a horrific act after all. and from there, is it really such a leap to be willing to leverage that amount of fear and power to try and save the world? and from there, isn’t taking a bomb as a bargaining piece– never intending to use it– laughing about it, almost– isn’t that the next reasonable step, if we’re talking about leverage?
john wanted to save the world. and that isn’t relevant because it redeems him in any way– it’s relevant because all of us want to save the world. all of us. it is easy to look at him starting a nuclear war and declaring himself the King Undying and go ‘lmao what the fuck I would never do that’, but the whole point of him is the steps in between, the fact that he didn’t jump straight from well-meaning scientist to planet-killer. coming out of nona with no empathy for john is dangerously conceited. would you simply do better, if you woke up able to raise the dead with the end of the world looming? why? at what point would you stop? at what step in his descent would you have declared ‘no further?’ are you immune to the sunk-cost fallacy? would you see a way out from that cave of meat and bone?
john ended the world and remade it in his image at the end of a very long walk. all of us would have begun that walk by his side. the question nona poses is– would you stop where he hadn’t?
tamsyn really did something with the dynamic of jod and the lyctors she was like i’m gonna take just some guy and his friends and make him god and them immortal but ten thousand years later they still kinda treat him like hes god but also like a guy they’ve been stuck being friends with for Ten Thousand Years but you can never tell which one it is because they’re all ten thousand years old and have moved far past normal human expression and communication structures and they’re all also kinda psychosexually obsessed with each other and have and Do fuck .. mercy alters her own dna at will to turn her hair pink for funsies . god makes a none pizza with left beef joke . g1deon is actively attempting murder for most of the book . god has a threesome on the dinner table
ALT
