my absolute favourite FAVOURITE thing about john/alecto is that they are both each other’s fucked up little science project that got Very out of hand.
they are both simultaneously victor and the creature to each other at all times. they love each other they ARE each other, they are divorced and married at the same time. they (literally) can’t live without each other and each will be the other’s end. they still love each other despite this.
The thing is, I’m not sure that Alecto, when she was wholly a planet, could comprehend that her actions were a horror on a human level.
Because The Locked Tomb is, amongst other things, horror. And what happens to John is in many respects a sort of Lovecraftian cosmic horror story: an entity that is so fundamentally different to humanity it does not share our moral framework and cannot possibly understand the implications on a human scale of what it is doing modifies his body without his consent, possibly literally alters his genes.
Some of John’s descriptions of his experience of his newfound powers suggest it’s a distressing experience: having drugs forcibly injected into your spine isn’t generally an image you reach for when describing pleasant or wanted experiences, however handy they may be for getting your message out.
And after he touches the soul of the earth and hears it screaming, his narration is incredibly disjointed - that’s just not something a human mind is meant to encounter.
At the end he’s sitting there, his friends dead, everything collapsing, and begging this entity to fulfil its purpose, to use him, to make all this suffering and chaos matter. And there’s no answer but screaming. Because she could not possibly comprehend what she had asked of him in that way.
And that’s all awful and horrifying and violating. John is changed, his fatal flaws awfully magnified until he dooms everyone. Was John entirely in his right mind when he nuked everyone, personally killed half of them before the nukes hit, strangled the earth, ate it, and forced it into some uncanny woman’s body? Probably not.
But unlike her, he was human: he existed in a human context and moral framework. He made escalating deliberately bad and terrible decisions, tried to deny responsibility for his actions because he knew they were wrong, and tried to blame other people for acting the way he did.
One of the first things Alecto - once she becomes Alecto, part of the Earth and part of John forcibly comingled in an unwanted and unfamiliar body - says to John is ‘I picked you to change, and this is how you repay me?’ But is that phrasing something that comes with her new context? After all, he tried to ask for answers and she wasn’t capable of giving them even when he hurt her before she became Alecto.
But I absolutely agree that John and Alecto are exhibit one for ‘the horrors of love’ in The Locked Tomb, in all its possible awful layers. And I’m so look forward to - and fearing - learning more about what that means…
@katakaluptastrophy the last tags exactly! I think a lot about the fact that Alecto, as the Earth, would have outlasted humanity. John talks about humanity “making the earth sick” but actually, it was human society that was on the brink of collapse. Even in the worst-case scenario, tens of thousands of other species would have survived. Earth as a biosphere would’ve gone on. Maybe a new species would’ve evolved to fill the spot humanity had left. We’re talking about geological timescales… what’s humanity compared to that? But still Alecto “chose” (instinctually, maybe?) to invest a human with her all that power, which came from her own soul, to save humanity.
There’s SO much to unpack about Alecto choosing John. What a proof fo love it was on her side. How horrifying it was on HIS side. “For she so loved the world, for John so loved the world” but both their conception of what the word ‘world’ means had humankind at the heart of it. They couldn’t communicate except maybe for the smallest, vaguest, most instinctual level until it was all over and Alecto had a human mouth to speak through, but by then it was too late… the horrors of love etc.
Oh…Alecto tried to make John a god like her, and it broke him. So he tried to make her human like him, and it destroyed her. Now they’re both human and god—and neither.
