It’s endlessly funny to me, that so many people read Nona the Ninth - a book where a group of indigenous people from a small nation in the southern hemisphere spend years trying to build a communal plan, begging anyone to take collective action, reaching out again and again for as many people to get on board as possible, only to be stymied again and again by the individually and structurally powerful, who simply didn’t care (and couldn’t care due to the incentive structures imposed by power) and just wanted to preserve their own power/lives at the expense of everyone else, only for one of their number to be singled out and given immense universe-altering power by a magical entity, which of course led to disaster and the collapse of their original goals because, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely and will magnify even the most minor human foibles - and came away thinking ah yes, the point is that John as an individual is ontologically evil.
#i think people also forget john is arguably the most fucked up dude in human history and an unreliable narrator #he probably. can’t connect with who he used to be before necromancy #John The Guy and jod are different guys entirely #the regular scale of trauma does a lot to a normal human brain #john went through arguably the worst trauma a human person could possible experience #while being transformed into a godlike being #they’re not the same person #the same way mercymorn ‘we will not stand for reproductive abuse’ becomes ‘infants as fingers and gestures’ (via @monetarymollusk)