Conclusion: Dinosaurs

It's endlessly funny to me, that so many people read Nona the Ninth - a book where a group of indigenous people from a small nation in the southern hemisphere spend years trying to build a communal plan, begging anyone to take collective action, reaching out again and again for as many people to get on board as possible, only to be stymied again and again by the individually and structurally powerful, who simply didn't care (and couldn't care due to the incentive structures imposed by power) and just wanted to preserve their own power/lives at the expense of everyone else, only for one of their number to be singled out and given immense universe-altering power by a magical entity, which of course led to disaster and the collapse of their original goals because, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely and will magnify even the most minor human foibles - and came away thinking ah yes, the point is that John as an individual is ontologically evil.

#i think people also forget john is arguably the most fucked up dude in human history and an unreliable narrator #he probably. can’t connect with who he used to be before necromancy #John The Guy and jod are different guys entirely #the regular scale of trauma does a lot to a normal human brain #john went through arguably the worst trauma a human person could possible experience #while being transformed into a godlike being #they’re not the same person #the same way mercymorn ‘we will not stand for reproductive abuse’ becomes ‘infants as fingers and gestures’ (via @monetarymollusk​)

i don't get how you can read the end of john's story and not see someone undergoing a complete mental shattering it's not an excuse it's an explanation of why he did what he did if you had ultimate god powers dropped upon you from a great height then saw everyone you cared about hunted down and murdered in front of your eyes whilst the very people who made living on earth miserable and squeezed every drop of profit from it before abandoning everyone to die escaped in front of your eyes are you saying you could've kept your head in that moment?  ( via @2impostors​ )

#john's backstory is SO important to me because it makes so much sense every step of the way#he lost the plot but like. every moment he went down that path.... i could see it.#that rage. that senseless thirst for meaningless revenge#and once he literally becomes god.. why hold himself to human standards of right and wrong? why care for single individuals at all?#and all of this tragedy is 100x better BECAUSE of the good intentions paving the way to hell#how do you look at john gaius 'no one knowingly left behind' 'begged for funds to reduce chance of damage'#'spents weeks trying to handle maternity issue bc people deserve a choice on whether to terminate their pregnancy'#beloved of alecto. she gave the world john because she loved the world!#how do you look at THAT guy and think he was irredemable from the start (via liesmyth)

The reason you can't be the next J R R Tolkien isn't because you don't have the talent, but because you're not the right kind of unwell. Tolkien wasn't bent for fantasy worldbuilding; he was bent for constructed languages, and got into fantasy worldbuilding in order to provide a material context in which to ground the notional evolution of the languages he invented. If you want to be the next Tolkien, you can't start with the worldbuilding; you've gotta find something extremely specific to fixate on, and develop it in such depth that inventing a world to contain it is genuinely the most logical next step.