pov: you wake up from the worst fucking nap in your entire life and find out you gotta get your shitty little husband who’s been slutting around the whole universe while you were out and just being a huge embarrassment in general.
I know I’ve already made a post about my interpretation of John, but I feel like I need to come up with a shorter way to summarize it because I keep seeing other takes on him that consistently miss one important dimension or another. It’s not that John was evil and manipulative from the beginning and everything he said was a lie, AND it’s not that he started off perfectly innocent and is a completely tragic victim of circumstance. It’s that he was just some guy, with normal human flaws. I have known so many John Gaius’s, so many people who are funny and driven and compassionate but also annoyingly willing to weasel out of any culpability they might feel or have put on them whenever they make a mistake. I’ve known so many people whose company I enjoy and whose opinion I value who I know will always put their own comfort and well-being over mine. They’re just human foibles, no better or worse than the kind of flaws that everyone carries. What makes John Gaius into a genocidal cult leader is not being an inherently bad person, it’s being handed nearly unlimited power and placed in a pressure cooker of stress and rage and desperation and then - and this is key - when everything has settled and he has a moment to reckon with what he’s done and the mistakes he’s made, choosing to double down rather than do the hard thing and try to make amends.
Until further notice, that is my definitive take on Jod.
it makes so much sense in hindsight that Nona had her third tantrum after being shackled down by the wrists and ankles. almost like someone did this to her before and she’s really mad about it
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.”
so funny to me how augustine and mercymorn were like “don’t worry guys. we have a plan to distract god. just wait for the signal, you’ll know it when you see it.” and the signal was to just start having a threesome with god on the dinner table right in front of harrow and ianthe
the best part of nona the ninth is how every time corona enters a room we have to take five minutes for everyone to have their dan nicky your bobbies moment
also i think you missed the point if you had a major problem with what john did to the cows at all btw. i can’t help but liken it to how vegans shit their pants over sustainable inuit seal hunting but have no problem with exploitative quinoa farming practices, or how people get upset and uncomfortable with the idea of having to slaughter or even pluck a chicken but will happily eat that chicken once it’s unrecognizable.
all of this is in the book. it’s not even coded. john says those cows were destined for the abattoir, and he killed them faster and more painlessly than they would have died there, and he knows it wasn’t the angelic thing to do, but it was them or him and his friends.
these forms of hypocrisy are part of a very colonial, european view of animals, and the way in-universe officials and oligarchs constantly shut down conversations about the fate of all of humanity bybringing up a couple hundred cows killed by an indigenous man– it felt almost too heavy-handed.
there is a socialized gut feeling of revulsion at the thought of a cave of meat, and the whole point of the cows is that humans will allow that socialized reflex to override actual logic. and that seems to be exactly what it did for a lot of readers.
Ok as wretched and detestable as Crux is, this little glimpse of his familiarity with Harrow’s psychosis does make me cry a little bit
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im putting this in the evidence bucket for “harrow has not only been haunted by alecto since she was a child, but also at times fully posessed by an amnesiac alecto since she was a child”
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