When it comes to John, I have zero interest in condemning him. First of all, it’s boring. You mean destroying the world and lying to your friends about it is bad? Shocking. Groundbreaking character work.
Second of all, I’m just not all that comfortable with condemnation in general, not when it comes to whole-ass people. Actions, for sure. I am ready to wholeheartedly condemn pretty much every decision this man has ever made, but I’m only comfortable doing that with a side of compassion for the man himself. Tamsyn said once in an interview that some of the discussion she’s seen about Harrow is unintentionally very cruel to people with mental illnesses, and I feel similarly seeing a lot of the discussion around John. If I’m going to try to figure out where he’s coming from, why he did the things he did, and what he thought he was accomplishing by doing them, I’m not at all interested in coming at those questions with contempt or disgust.
To me, the main question when it comes to John is: What do you do when you feel that you’re unforgivable? That you’ve fucked up so completely no one will ever love you again, unless you lie and trick them into it? How do you deal with shame? And while part of the answer is definitely “Holy shit, not like that,” what I’m most interested in is: what should he have done instead? At what points in his narrative could he have changed his course? And at what point, if ever, did he become right about it being impossible for him to dial it back and turn around?
This is the best John post. I think that he is deeply fucked up and his inability to forgive is a huge part of it - anyone else or himself. His evasiveness comes from his inability to confront what he has done - to own up to it because doing to would be too big and too devastating. I think John is really an incredible portrait of a kind of righteous anger that has hollowed everything else out until even the love that once motivated it is gone.
#when i think about what john has done and continues to do#and how much sunk cost fallacy he must have after ten thousand years of bad decisions and avoidance#how he probably feels like he doesn’t really have a choice#i think about ‘we had the choice to stop’#as true now as it was then#the consequences of the actions he’s already taken will continue#both for others and for him#but every single second he has the choice to say 'no more’#'ive hurt a lot of people but i will not hurt another’ #so much evil is done by people who are afraid to reckon with the fact that you can always say 'no more’