Do you think Jod’s just got the gift for keeping it locked in or does lyctorising a planet just change how you perceive time? Because I know for a fact I would’ve had a breakdown before we hit 1000 years of immortally insisting I didn’t do nothin’ (kinda accidentally and kinda on purpose kill everybody during a panic attack and end the world).
The thing that gets me when I think about John is the fact that he’s not just a human who became immortal.
He’s not like the Lyctors, who sure, are superpowered and plagued with guilt and have spent 10,000 years bleeding into their dead friends. John murdered a planet and took some of her soul - but he also tore his own soul apart and put some of it into her. In a fundamental metaphysical way, John destroyed the person he was and became something much worse than just a Lyctor - John is a Resurrection Beast.
He works very hard to maintain a sense of him being just a guy, with bad puns and peanuts and teatimes. And I suspect to a great extent he does that for his own sanity, as much as it also allows him to manipulate people.
We get these horrifying little moments all through HTN where the facade slips and we see John as the really pretty horrifying eldritch thing that he is, with his ‘great immortal age’ and his 'chthonic eyes’, and that all too human anger magnified to an impossibly cosmic scale.
John is, all things considered, unreasonably normal. Terrifyingly, deliberately normal. A Lovecraftian horror who can offer you tea or tell jokes, who will make sure you’re drinking water at a boozy party, who’s spent 10,000 years visiting the sins of the fathers unto their descendants, who will make his friends swear their loyalty to him covered in blood and joke about how embarrassing it is.
As we wait for ATN, don’t let the memes and the cringe mid dismyriad crisis hookups fool you - we are not nearly frightened enough of John.
i wrote a big long essay talking about tlt and how it engages with describing the skintones of brown characters its under a read more bc it is so long.
ALT
