so…John’s planning on pulling the plug on the world, right? Like that’s what he’s doing here?

I’ve just been turning these bits of ntn over and over in my head and tbh I can’t stop thinking about the description of 10,000 years of civilization as a first draft. John’s first resurrection didn’t quite end up how he wanted – closest friends all dead, turned traitor, or both, fighting a war on multiple fronts, his only allies the corpse of his accidental bastard daughter and a twenty-something princess with cannibalistic tendencies whom he canonized as part of a failed attempt to revitalize his polycule– but hey, it doesn’t matter, because he can just start over. All of NTN he’s in this depression spiral; he’s falling apart, he’s having orgy parties with his senior staff, he’s got at least part of his subconscious camped out in the comatose mind of a half-dead nineteen year old he tried to have murdered, treating it like a confessional booth; because right there, in the background of his mind through all of this, is the off switch. He can have his breakdown, and then just…let Alecto out. Erase it all, start fresh, and this time he’s got one attempt under his belt, he’s got notes for what to do differently, and so let it all fall to shit! Nobody else is gonna remember any of this anyway. Two worlds, now, that only John will remember. Maybe three, later; maybe four, what’s to stop him from redoing it over and over til it’s just right? 

The issue with that, of course, is there’s really no way to treat the world like this and still care about it in the way other people do. You’d lose your ability to be affected by life’s events after a couple reboots and then what’s there to get emotionally invested in? When you’ve turned a person off and back on two, three, four times and you know you’ll probably do it again the next time something happens you don’t quite vibe with, how can you possibly look at them as a real person? Are they a real person, if they only know what you want them to know and do what you want them to do? And once you reach that point, once people aren’t people but project components for you to edit, what are you even bothering with all this for?? John started down this path because he so loved the world; what happens when he reduces the world to something he can no longer afford to love? Might as well pull that plug for good, yeah? 

Anyway. I’m fascinated by the way John’s shitty mental state is dooming the world and it’s everyone else’s bad luck. The rest of the cast is out there fighting for their lives and he’s like *sigh* let’s try that again. take two, everyone!