WiseAbsol

I still think about this moment all the time.

I feel like this is an almost universal experience for people of our generation. We always knew more or less that the super-rich were corrupt assholes ruthlessly exploiting the rest of us for their own gains. But still, on some level, we held out to the belief that when things were really dire, when we really had to work together or risk catastrophe, even those rich assholes would begrudgingly do their part. We knew the game was rigged, but we though there were some rules keeping the powerful in check. And then we had that moment of finding out that no, there really were no rules if you had enough money, that you could really just fuck over all of society and get off scot free. For some of us that moment was the 2008 financial crisis. For others it was later, but I feel like we all had that sinking realization at one point, that feeling of sheer powerlessness in the face of the most brazen injustice.

And for John that moment must have hit so much worse, as he was screwed over personally as well as politically. That was his project, he was supposed to save humanity - except they wouldn't even let him. They took away his life's work and the future of humanity in one fell swoop. Imagine the entire world crashing down on you like that. Would you ever be able to recover? I don't think I would.

After that moment, I don't think there's anything John could have done that could have made me lose all sympathy for him. He did so much wrong but man they really had to break him to get him to that point.

AND AGAIN!!!

Even after all he's been through, even after he saw the trillionaires steal his life's work laughing all the way to the bank, he STILL clings to the idea of some ultimate justice. He's still assuming they're playing by the same rules as everyone else. He still can't accept that the whole system he's been carefully working his way through to make a difference in the world was always designed to serve these people.

And again...

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...

I didn’t care what they thought, I wanted the attention. I wanted to break my NDAs. I wanted to let them know about the cryo plans and how we got shut down.

agott would actually like to deal with these coco feelings in less than 2 decades, preferably

And for whenever someone mistakenly tells you that humans can only hurt nature -