it’s so crushing to me that M–, in the middle of the nuclear escalation insanity, told john through the closed door of his bedroom that she knows this isn’t what he really wants, that they can still fix this together, that everything can still be all right if they just stop now. both she and A– believed in john’s goodness as a man, as a person, not even as a god or a leader, so much that they came up with the crazy ‘arming the bomb’ plan with him because they thought he would never actually do it. (they’ve got a recurring problem with judgement of character I suppose lol oopsie we enabled a genocidal monster sorry folks won’t happen ag– ah shit). C– tells him he doesn’t have to do this. the rest of his little found family, they all tell him this has gone too far, walk it back while we still can holy shit john!!! and he hides in his room because people are mad at him like a kid, but like a middle-aged kid with a doctorate who won’t take his finger off the one Biggest Reddest Button to end them all.
then, so many years later, cytherea says at the dawn of lyctorhood: we had the choice to stop.
and then. THEN augustine tells him, at the end of everything, “john, we still have the choice to stop, even now. you don’t have to do this anymore. even if there can be no forgiveness for what we’ve done, we can at the very least stop doing it.” without either of them knowing it he’s closing the loop of what M– said ten thousand years ago – they’re both begging him 'be the man I want you to be, not the man you apparently are’. and he still doesn’t listen.
what is this whole fucking mess if not a tragic ten thousand year demonstration of the unfortunate fact that no matter what you do, you can’t change someone through sheer force of loving them 😔
I just… godDAMN IT john if you had listened to the people who loved you ONCE! ONCE, at ANY of these points, instead of sunk cost fallacy-ing yourself into the fucking lightless depths of the mariana trench while getting high on your own supply and drowning the universe in blood, everything could have been so different. my head is in my hands my heart is in pieces on the ground my bones are trying to shake their way out of my body –