Like I was saying in a post the other day, if John had been more of an asshole from the start, if he hadn't been trying so hard to do things in a fair and moral and just way whenever he thought they could afford to—when it wasn't an immediate matter of life-and-death, and even after multiple instances where it had been—if he'd been willing to throw zombies and skeletons at the problem and solve his problems with violence and murder sooner, we never would have made it to Barbenheimer.
But he didn't want violence and murder. He did want actual justice. He didn't even want the trillionaires to die until they were actively on their way out the door leaving everyone to die, and even then... With the parallels between John's story and Nona's, the way they had very much dragged him out from behind the table to shoot him and then he just doesn't mention them again and the narration sort of jumps, it is entirely possible not only that they shot him and he got back up, but that he got back up Having A Tantrum, Nona-style. Some really interesting points in that moment, too...
First, I became a demigod. I nearly fell out of my body. I put my hand around half the world’s throats. Some of them I managed to snap before they were melted away by nuclear fire. I did them clean. Everyone died, but I helped a hell of a lot of them go before they knew anything had happened. I drank them in, and it wasn’t enough. I needed those ships. I needed to extend my hand. I got it around the throat of the other half. I made them go away too. Then I had control of everything on the surface, but not the ships … birds flying above the fire … kids playing keep-away.
There's a fascinating juxtaposition in how John was the one who launched the nukes, but then he rushed to give half the world cleaner painless deaths before they knew to be afraid; it sort of aligns with his moment of hesitation when he catches the last ship, too, that one instant where he could feel them but then it was too late. (Something something parallels with John and Coronabeth where she doesn't know whether to be relieved or distraught that Ianthe isn't dead something something duality.)
"I made them go away" is such a pathetic attempt to frame it as any less horrific, and at the same time it speaks to a mentality of make it stop, the overwhelmed mentality that reaches to violence not for the sake of violence but for escape. "Kids playing keep-away" and just how often John and all his friends are so frequently compared to children. His blocky child's letters in the sand, his idea of Perfect being 7 years old again playing with his mum's old Barbie. Mercy and Augustine in the candlelight looking simultaneously appallingly old and no older than Ianthe, holding each other after the murder like children waking from a nightmare. The way Cytherea looked like she could have been seventeen or thirty-seven. Pyrrha's "It’s better to die. There’s a power to dying clean … dying free. It’s not love, what you’re about to do. It’s not beautiful and it’s not powerful. It’s a mistake. We didn’t even do it right … we were children—playing with the reflections of stars in a pool of water … thinking it was space." And of course, how Alecto sees everyone, too, even Crux, the poor baby of a mere hundred years...
Usually when people call him a man-child it's an insult but like. No, honestly. This is the autistic kid who latched on really hard to The Rules and always had a tendency to frame everything through the lens of Stories, who pushed himself through academic hell so fast and so hard to make a difference and had that work out overall despite so much working against him (and as an adult object personified so hard he thought of corpses as friends before magic ever existed but you know). He was told if you work hard enough and play fair, you can climb your way to the top, or at least high enough that people above you might listen, and then that just stopped working. And he kept going, what? No, that's not FAIR? That's not how it WORKS?
And right up until those last few minutes, that really was all he'd wanted. For them to stop, for them to play by the rules, for them to sit back down and take accountability and help fix their own mess, as was only fair. But it was never fair, and they were never playing by the same rules.
Honestly, at this point, considering how little he's done to Blood of Eden as they are and Prince Ianthe's order to cease activity and have others not accept anything from them but no demand to? kill them or even turn them in? I'm left to wonder if he even still wants to kill the trillionaires when he finds the rest (lost in time) or if he just wants to gather them and take them back and force them to fix shit jaowejaoaw. Like it wouldn't surprise me if he's like "no those fuckers had too many chances already", but it does feel like hunting them all down to take in alive would be significantly harder than launching some kind of attack he could be reasonably confident would kill them even without knowing exactly when or where they are. But yeah...
And then we turn around and these days he doesn't play by the same rules as everyone else, either, at least in any way that matters... but he takes his fair turns cooking like everyone else. He still trips over himself to apologize sometimes. Gradually compromises and accommodates, like giving Harrow first water instead of tea, and then crackers instead of biscuits. Still dives in to both physically and spiritually grab Harrow and pull her through the last stretch of the River during the trip to the Mithraem at genuine serious risk to himself. None of it is worth enough to matter next to all the horrors he's perpetuating and all the ways he puts himself above everyone else, but man it's almost worse that there's still that part of him that cares about trying.
