There’s a stanza from Annabel Lee that’s been tickling my brainstem for a while, and it feels even more relevant now that we know how John and Alecto are bound together, and that their love was and still is mutual:
But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we— Of many far wiser than we— And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
That’s the heart of it, isn’t it? The source of all of John’s power, the reason he’s God, it’s because his soul is connected to his Annabel Lee’s. To end all of this, they’ll need to be dissevered.
I’d say that the angels have already tried and failed, and the demons look like they’re winding up to take a shot. Odds are that’ll go about as well for them as it did for Augustine and Mercy. But there’s someone the poem doesn’t ask. It doesn’t account for Annabel.
I think that may be why it matters so much that that Alecto still loves John, and where the true horror of love comes in. If Alecto’s soul is going to be seperated from John’s, Alecto has to want it. No one else can do it for her. Annabel Lee has to become the subject, and not the object.
Seriously tho I think I’m more invested in what happens to John than I am any other facet of the endgame. It will be the ultimate statement of the series’ themes on horror, love, and forgiveness.
Because John is loved. Pyrrha loved him enough to follow him into hell, and she’s never known how to stop. Gideon loves him—that’s her dad! She’s wanted to know him her entire life, and now she does, and he’s proud of her. Harrow doesn’t worship him anymore, but it’s implied in the way Nona ends that she does still love him. And even more crucially, she sees herself in his mistakes. Alecto’s last words before dying and first words upon coming back were that she still loves him, and being reminded that he loves her was the trigger that finally fully woke her.
So the questions I’m hoping Alecto the Ninth asks about John are: What do you do when someone you love is causing you harm? Is John right; is he unforgiveable? If no, how do you balance forgiveness and justice? If yes, how do you deal with loving someone you can’t forgive?
John’s belief that he’s unforgivable is the reason behind so many of his actions. He believes that he can’t be forgiven for fucking up, so the only way forward is to make his friends forget he fucked up. He believes that they would never forgive him so he lies and manipulates and kills. He’s a sunk cost fallacy, and it’s so important to me that the series proves him wrong.
Because the real tragedy of TLT is in many ways that characters are trapped by mechanisms they set in motions, forgetting that they could have simply walked out. “We had the choice to stop.” John doesn’t believe that. He is trapped in a prison of his own making and remains there because he never saw any alternative.
ALT
I need him (and the narrative!) to realise that actually, he could have stopped and he should have. He could have kept his friends. He could have earned forgiveness, and maybe he still can. But the tragedy is that he never even tried.
ALT