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
