2022-09-26 5:52:28 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

alectothe9th:

> gynecologistmsfrizzle:

> > 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?

> +1 to this. Definitely the most disturbing part of John is when he says something super accurate and distressingly insightful. The one that stuck with me was “It turns out no one wants papers, no one wants principle. They want magic. They want to be saved.”