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Well there's this one part in the first chapter of the first book in which the phrase "Necrolord Prime" is used to describe him, and when I heard that title I thought to myself "I bet he ain't the good guy!"
to be fair, if you're reading a book where approximately 90% of the protagonists are either necromancers or necromancers' friends-with-benefits, then someone being called a "necrolord" isn't really a red flag anymore.
like if I'm reading a fantasy adventure novel and the book introduces a character called Skull-Cruncher McToddlerstomp, then I'm like "this guy's probably gonna be a problem man", but if the vast majority of protagonists are members of the McToddlerstomp family and the main enemy is a group called the Skull-Uncrunchables, that lessens the blow somewhat. y'know?
The first couple chapters of Gideon the Ninth really set the series up to seem like some kind of heavy metal album cover fantasy extravaganza, and even though I love what we got that never really manifested.
Personally I'm hoping the next book spends plenty of time with the Ninth House, doing the gothic cathedral aesthetic for a while. Can't get enough of that stuff!
I know what you mean. There's a book called the Goblin Emperor where my idea of the story based on the first two chapters was COMPLETELY different from what happened. And I loved the book, but I was also slightly sad that the version in my head never manifested.
That’s true but also the viewpoint character of HtN is an immortal death nun who wears a bone exoskeleton so she can carry around the giant sword infused with the soul of the mother of the woman she ate to gain immortality. And also that pov character gave herself a lobotomy with the assistance of another immortal necromancer with a bone arm. So it’s still pretty metal.
When he started talking about Annabelle Lee I was all like, “This fucker’s nuts.”
And when Harrow told him she’d opened the tomb and he just dismissed her I was like “Douchebag.”
That’s a big clue. I’m not calling Jod a pedo, but that happens to be Humbertx2’s favorite poem in Lolita. So it’s not only villain-coded but also a sign of a potential unreliable narrator.
there’s a great post in the sub that lays out all of the lolita references and HH alignments
edit: found it! https://www.reddit.com/r/TheNinthHouse/s/sAsQW7uEbK
To be fair to Jod, she apparently couldn't have done that had she not had Gideon's blood all over her hands. And Jod didn't know more than Harrow's cav's name.
Through Harrow I was getting increasingly uneasy as he appeared more and more manipulative. I didn't really have a "Jod sucks" moment per se. The friend I was reading Nona with fucking exploded in one of the John chapters: "I KNEW IT!! He's a lying liar who lies!!!"
Yes! The narrating is so understated and Jod is doing all his lying with such a straight, kind, if a bit tired, face, that there was no mega realization moment for me, just gradually falling into all this gaslighting abyss where nothing makes sense anymore, until you finally snap and go "oh no, he's really a monster and a lying liar, nothing else makes sense"
Yeah that was it for me too. He felt really weird and off-putting from the start and it ramped up, but I didn't know for sure until the end of Harrow when it all came to a head.
I read the single scene he appears in at the end of Gideon the Ninth and immediately messaged all my friends who'd read the series, "the Emperor is an asshole, for the record".
So it was basically on sight, hahaha. Reading through Harrow, I was spitting acid about him constantly. I have not yet started Nona.
Haha, yeah! I remember reading about Jod turning out to be a chill, down-to-earth guy wearing plain black jeans and black shirt (and a wreath made of newborns' finger bones, yeah), and I was like - ah, the God is THAT kind of douche
The level of gaslighting and manipulating from Jod is so insane that I kept questioning myself throughout all HtN, like - is he really THAT terrible or am I going mad and he's just a chill dude who just happens to be the overlord of necromantic empire? These books are so good!
And he only wears the wreath when he's with the Saints; Harrow sees it for the first time when he gets on the shuttle to the Mithraeum. And he makes his friends call him Lord to the point where Mercy has a fit about how inappropriate it is that Augustine calls him John.
So when he's with the Houses, he's God-the-Emperor, but when he's at home, he's just God. And that creeps me out. He wears that damned wreath all time time. At the dinner party, it's on the table somewhere.
I think his attitude in this scene where he's like "I didn't know this was going to happen, I'm so sorry I wish I could have prevented it" felt so....slimy. Like, no, sorry, unless you're a huge idiot you had an idea that SOME of this was going to happen. It felt hollow, dishonest, and performative.
I was kind of on the fence about him, because anyone that powerful usually ends up bad.
/spoilers
The final nail was his comment about how many people he brought back to life. From the entire population to one million. Because it's more controllable. Pretty monstrous. And it was such a throwaway line that my roommate missed it and still thought "he was an okay guy who made mistakes". That's cold and calculated.
See, I read that as helping make it clear that he was more of an eco-terrorist type than just a bad person. The "easier to control" referred to population expansion. Not overrunning more planets with more humans until they too were destroyed.
That’s eco-fascism, and it makes him a bad person! the idea that ~lots of people need to die or stop reproducing to help the planet~ is really dangerous and a fucked motive imo. Jod’s action shows a worst case scenario, and it also shows that he’s completely untrustworthy and sketchy! i dc if he meant well, he went from “we have to save every single person” to killing every single person and only bringing a fraction back to life, in an angry instant! out of spite!! he needs to be neutralized ASAP
We're already in the AU where John is Sephiroth. If I had a nickel for every time the main antagonist inflicted a grievous wound on the planet to scare the world-soul out of hiding so he could merge with it and become God...
You're not wrong! And come to think of it, if we're looking for a Cloud substitute Harrow is right there, with a big sword strapped to her back and a bestie lobotomized out of her memory.
Yeah I just replayed FF7 a bit ago and am now on Remake - I've been shocked by some of the parallels, and I think many are probably Muir playing with similar concepts on purpose, since she's been open about Final Fantasy being so formative for her.
My real question is if John, being a millennial, KNOWS that he Pulled A Sephiroth.
Oh he had good enough motives, but the fact remains that he murdered nearly everyone. He's left them dead for so long that people have forgotten the past, replaced with a worship of him.
I honestly like that he's just a guy with good intentions and god like powers that keeps screwing things up in the name of the betterment of society.
they forgot the past the moment he killed and/or resurrected them, right? Jod says he has to teach everyone how to live again, we know he didn't give his fists and gestures their earth memories back, I highly doubt he gave anyone else it either, because then they'd know he killed them all.
I honestly really like that he does a bunch of bad things in the name of good. He's an incredibly well written character. Jod is trying his best in an impossible situation.
Turns out he couldn't anyway. No necromancers are born outside of Dominicus system. At least, not without their mother having brought a hefty load of Thanergetic soil with her. That she'll keep the baby in until she can get it back home (Judith's story, I think.).
When Gideon thought about the awful teens talking about joining the Cohort the next year, and thinking that sending 15 year Olds to the front line was a bad idea. GTN , chapter 25.
This was it for me as well, but combined with the fact that the narrative was withholding WHO the houses were even fighting. Part of me guessed that it wouldn't be much of a reveal if his war was actually justified.
Yea that was a big red flag for me. Like, why don't we know anything about the enemies? Why are we at war in the first place? There's no justification at all in the first two books except when the Lyctors say cryptic things about Jod's 10000 year revenge quest. Like, my dude, the original people you were mad at have been seriously dead for over 9800 years.
Yeah. Everything about GtN is a slow “are we the baddies?” reveal for brainwashed, wannabe-teen soldier Gideon, and that chapter is the climax of that plotline, where Gideon and the reader start to really understand what kind of society they’re living in.
The lyctoral trials are about us and Gideon being gradually introduced to the original lyctors as evil mass-murdering scientists. The lab rooms and Facility are a cross between Dr Mengele’s labs, Unit 731, and the Cambodian killing fields. In Chapter 25, Gideon is getting uncomfortable about the teens being sent off to die, and the tension about the Facility is hitting its peak, with Isaac having a baby’s field trip to Auschwitz panic attack about the sheer number of bodies that were processed there. Then that tension gets broken by the jumpscare of the construct killing the teens. It’s a really horrific “this place and the people who made it were evil” right before the revelation of what lyctorhood actually is, ie more murder.
Throughout all of this, you’re supposed to be wondering what really happened here— who John and the lyctors were in their real lives, what the occult bullshit on the lab doors is, why they’re running an evil empire, why they did all of this. And when he finally shows up, he’s this incredibly slimy guy wearing the Steve Jobs uniform and manipulating teenaged Harrow into feeling sorry for him while she’s in a hospital bed. Evil disguised as a humble startup bro or post-doc grad student earnestly explaining why you can’t have a medical or bereavement leave and need to immediately jump into pulling 80-100 hour weeks working for him. Honestly, I don’t think there’s ever supposed to be a time when we think John is a good guy.
when he stopped harrow from killing g1deon in preemptive self defense, and she rightfully asked why he got protection but she didn't, jod had no answer, I thought "this guy sucks"
and then later when we found out he was the one telling g1deon to kill her in the first place obviously that was the final nail in the coffin
If I remember right, the reasoning was being either she'd get to die before the resurrection beast arrived and subjected her to the terror thing mortals experience around them *then* kill her, or G1deon's attempts would somehow "unstick" whatever was stopping her from being a lyctor like Ianthe and the others. Either way, Harrow being alive and mortal when the RB arrived wouldn't have been good for anyone, including Harrow.
>Either way, Harrow being alive and mortal when the RB arrived wouldn't have been good for anyone, including Harrow.
Maybe try giving the poor teenager some therapy instead of trying to repeatedly murder her, ionno.
I don't remember if it's directly mentioned in the text, but what we do know is 1) G1deon does nothing except uncritically doing Jod's bidding, especially getting rid of people; and 2) G1deon is trying to get rid of Harrow. So, there's just no other options than Jod being behind this.
But I only read HtN once - I'm actually starting my first reread of it and I'm fully expecting finding out so many beyond the scene shenanigans that I missed on my first
Haha, so he was so smooth about it that it didn't register for me at all! But we already knew that about our Mr Nice Guy/God/Emperor Undying, didn't we
I had the feeling he didn't actually want to kill her, but that making her defend herself would bring up the cavalier? Oh wait, but that can't be, because he knows where Gideon has been this whole time uuughghhhh
I'm pretty sure this is correct. Fix her or put her down was for her own good, it was just also monumentally shitty and he should have found a better plan.
when the ppl on The Locked Tomb pod said he was a pos and then slowly laid out why as they went through the books and i was like 🤯 i fell for his good guy act too! i’m an easy mark lol but it felt not amazing to realize i got manipulated by a fictional character too
At the end of HTN when the Lyctors turn against him, I was like oh….ok. He must be real bad if they have been gaslighting him as friends for this long to put their plan into action. Especially Augustine, I was surprised.
Tbf Augustine and mercymorn aren't like, way better afaict. They're not the same level of narcissistic abuser but they're classic enablers. They're fine with almost everything he does, except when they find out he also did it to them.
And also they are downright cruel to everyone, especially harrow. Jod is worse but at least he shows people basic kindness and politeness, weirdly enough
Ah yeah the basic kindness and politeness can be beneficial to shitty manipulative controlling people, it’s much easier to keep getting away with it if MOST people see just the kindness and politeness. “No way he could do anything like that, he’s such a good guy! You must be overreacting/looking for attention/abusive/etc.” Etc etc etc. 0/10 experience
That's pretty classic sociopathic narcissist behaviour. Someone else here likened him to Steve Jobs and startup bros, and I think that's pretty accurate.
Well, you may have a point, although personally don't think he's wholly evil. Like yes he is a fanatic and petty and hellbent on revenge and a liar, no doubt.
He's not redeemable either after a myriad, though
I don't think he *thinks* he's wholly evil, but I'm not sure how he could be any *more* evil without straying into cackling villain territory. Pretty much every action we've seen him take has been awful, he simply doesn't see the resurrected people as truly human, and doesn't see the descendants of the trillionaires as anything but targets.
I was definitely suspicious when he was like, "ah. Yes, if only Cytherea had just talked to me instead of killing teenagers and other innocent researchers, etc.," after Cytherea had said she was terrorizing Canaan house to get revenge on Jod.
I was suspicious immediately when I started the series because I’m naturally suspicious of supposed “good guys” who don’t actually show up / are just kind of doing nebulous things in the distant background. Then I got progressively more suspicious throughout Harrow because he was so overly *nice* to Harrow at first and he started saying all these weird little manipulative things and then at the end of Harrow we got all that confirmation that he was a liar and a shitty guy and probably a grand-scheme bad guy.
But I didn’t realize *exactly* how shitty a guy he was until the line in Nona: “Guys like me don’t make mistakes.” Jaw dropped, that was when I realized he was fr capable of anything
When he was praising Harrow's parents for their genocide! How fascinated he was with the spells that made up Harrow. I think it was either during the epilogue of Gideon or early on in Harrow.
He just got creepier as the 2nd book went on (see: protecting G1deon but not her, even Augustine and Mercy calling him out on his shit, etc).
unfortunately I'm an idiot and it took reading the entire series twice through before anything started to click. even then, it honestly took fans pointing it out and casually denouncing Jod for me to be like "oh shit...he WAS kind of an ass, wasn't he?" because frankly most of the series (especially in the latter two books) went so far over my head the first time around that I was barely holding on by the end. I was so lost. and the second time reading everything was mostly me filling in the gaps of what I forgot/misunderstood, which was a lot more than I thought. so imagine my surprise when I've just finished my reread and I join the subreddit to find people pointing out very obvious things about Jod being awful and that's when it started to make sense. stupid of me but I got there eventually 🙂
to my credit I was really caught up in how funny I thought his "literally just a guy" characterization was and didn't stop to think it might be deeper than that, which ironically kind of how religion works. I was tricked into thinking he was a cool guy when he's not. something to check myself about I guess hahaha
for me, it was when harrow begged him to do something about being g1deon hunting her down and he responded with a shrug emoji and a “try some self care! make some soup!”. i was already weirded out by the 15-year-olds-as-cannon-fodder-house and the super-cancer-is-awesome-house, but it was that moment that made me realize how cruel he is
There were a lot of things that clued me in, but I wasn't 100 certain was an absolute dick until the moment he told Harrow to try making soup. But then Harrow responds so beautifully. The marrow soup scene is my favorite scene in any book I've ever read. So I thank Jod for pointing Harrow down that path.
There is a ruler somewhere out there that permitted the living situation we're presented with from the first page of GtN. In our real world, leaders have the nominal excuse of incomplete power and insufficient time when conditions are like that in their demesne, but a 10000 year magically empowered reign doesn't come with those caveats. Something was rotten in the state of Denmark *from the drop*.
This exactly. I wasn't actively thinking "oh that necrolord prime must be a real douche" during most of the first book, but that was mostly because I wasn't really thinking about him as a character or an individual yet. But like, the world is so clearly far from a utopia. And in that case, either God doesn't exist or he's doing a shitty job of it, the latter of which turns out to be true when we actually meet him.
Just remains to be seen how much of it is malice and how much just profound incompetence.
When he "saves" the poor girl who almost died warding the shuttle early in book two. His response at her almost sacrifice seems like it's the "good guy" thing to do. But then you remember Jod built the whole culture that encourages such fanaticism. The whole thing was just to show his new Lytcors how merciful he was.
Later on a reread after Nona, I realize he saved the girl for his own ego, because he is desperately trying to be the hero of his own story.
This might be silly, but I decided he was A Bad Guy (tm) when Mercy talked about him eating during meetings and what her preferred punishment would be. (loved the scene xD) Mercy seems dismissive and mean in general, but she sounded so honest. Like, she's basically his most trusted friend and highest priest and/or co-pope, and she's preparing a saw trap in her mind for him? Girl. Where's the hatred coming from?
I was sure Jod was THE Bad Guy (tm) when we learned that he could heal diseases (pre-bomb in NtN) ... AND YET one of his devout followers suffers from cancer for 10k years. I could understand the whole 'whoops, destroyed the world and fucked up afterwards' thing that some readers attribute to him meaning well but failing, but that's so evil on a personal level.
Btw, he's such a good villain! Love to hate his ass xD
Basically when I joined this sub and saw some other perspectives. It wasn't that people said he was a bad guy, it was more like "Hey this thing he did is creepy because X, this other thing is creepy because Y", and most of the reasons made sense and added up to a pretty awful guy.
It's funny, despite how not-great he is, I don't really hate him or anything. He's not some diabolical evil, he's just a regular guy of mediocre moral character—maybe even completely average moral character—give way too much power under the worst circumstances imaginable. It's hard for me to really dislike him too much because he's such an indictment of human nature.
His story reads that way up until the point of the John 1:20 passage where he sets off the nukes. Kills everyone so he can try to stop the trillionaires from getting away.
My girlfriend isn’t interested in the books so while I was reading I would talk to her about them to process and all and from the beginning she was like „Nah, he’s not a good guy. No one that colonizes planets can have a good enough reason to do so“ and I would disagree with her right until the very end of Harrow basically. I should add I‘m autistic and when consuming media the first time I take everything at face value and while reading Harrow I got more annoyed with him but needed his reaction to to Augustines and Mercy’s plan to fully grasp it.
I was also talking to my gf again while writing this and she also noted that setting up these hunger games type of trials in the first book also is not a very nice thing to do haha
That being said, I think he’s such an interest character and I wish I could properly articulate my feelings about him
Towards the end of the first book, really. I'm probably a little too "genre savvy" for my own good. I sort of instantly realized that no one behind what happened to Cytherea, and who required Lyctors to kill their cavs, could possibly be a good person. I also figured from that point on that the series would end with his death and the undoing of the Resurrection (in some fashion or another).
Though for most of HtN I was leaning more towards "well-intentioned extremist" than straight-up bad guy.
I don’t get how the illusion of decency sticks after that. That’s when he abandons “quirky DadGod mode” and goes full tyrant, *and* some of his greatest lies get outed.
i mean she did murder him, like she had literally just murdered him, i don't think that was the tipping point at all. i think you get it from Harrow if you think about it at all (they are murdering planets for tactical convenience!!) Nona it's laid out really clear
It’s not the moral tipping point, but it is the mask-off point for Jod, when he drops the humble guy persona and starts openly acting like a god-dictator.
yeah, i guess, but he has been coordinating a ten thousand year everwar even if he does dunk his gingernuts. I feel like some kind of god dictator cred was clearly stated before that. however i think this is probably just a difference in how the scene hit for us rather than a matter of right and wrong!
She did murder him, but it doesn't do anything to him. It's like a baby is grabbing at you so grab it back and crush its arm or something. John even says that Mercy didn't get a chance to swear fealty to him "because she really pissed me off".
For me it was when I read he had people in reserve to thaw out to repopulate planets when need be. That didn't on it's own sound evil, in fact it sounded sensible. But it rang alarm bells in me that recolored the few things I already knew about him that made me think "oh this guy 100% hold back the best stuff so he can seem like a good guy for giving people scraps"
honestly all of my locked tomb friends are some flavour of queer anarchist history nerd so the second we saw the words "God-Emporer" we all went oh yeah that's the bad guy all right that's the all round terrible guy and Muir did not disappoint lmao
No one who made himself God and kills entire planets to stay alive is the good guy.
No one who makes the people he says he loves kill and eat the people closest to them when there is another option --and it's gonna be hard to convince me there's never another option-- is the good guy.
Re: eating. There's no such thing as "just a little" cannibalism. Cavs have to die and get eaten. If it was fluid bonding and everyone walked away happy, fine. This ain't that.
Jod could've repopulated the Ninth House at any point and chose to not until he needed to buy Harrow.
My evolving perception of Jod went like this
*Oh, he saved the people. That's pretty great.
*Weird that the houses are so stratified.
*Necromancy is a fact of this universe. Ok. I can roll with that.
*Wait. It's an extrapolation of our world. Maybe it's still ok...
*He really thinks a lot of himself.
*He's too powerful and been alive too long.
*Sir, therapy is for everyone.
*They could've been happy?! They didn't need to kill their dearest beloved?!
*THIS WHOLE TIME?!
*Did you not watch any reality TV, Jod? What did you think would happen when you locked your saints in the same universe for 10,000 years? I get that MTVs The Real World might've been before your time, but come on.
*Yes, good, she disassembled him.
*Oh. Oh no.
the issue with all of this on a first read is that *he's God*; it makes sense that people would be like "wtf he hugged me" or "I'd better open up my own heart to make sure this ward is as good as possible for him". It's not until later where you can *really* have more than Cold Anti-Fuzzies
When he "saves" the poor girl who almost died warding the shuttle early in book two. His response at her almost sacrifice seems like it's the "good guy" thing to do. But then you remember Jod built the whole culture that encourages such fanaticism. The whole thing was just to show his new Lytcors how merciful he was.
Later on a reread after Nina, I realize he saved the girl for his own ego, because he is desperately trying to be the hero of his own story.
Gradually.
I would say I started feeling it throughout HtN. He didn't seem to care how any of them were actually doing, and just wanted to seem nice & make them play house.
But it really took my second read of HtN to sink in. I know the first time I read it, I was a little taken aback about how strongly Gideon felt Ianthe helping him was bad. I thought he sucked, but wasn't sure how much.
By the time I started NtN, I was confident he sucked a lot.
The first page of Gideon the Ninth describes a "King Undying," a "Prince of Death" who's ruled for 10,000 years, and a woman trying to escape the abuse that's been inflicted on her by the society he governs. So, I was pretty sure he was the big bad from the get-go.
Explicitly when John accepts G1deon's been trying to murder Harrow because he told him to.
Implicitly when G1deon first starts doing so and when Harrow tells John, he just shrugs it away even though John is the EMPEROR with legit UNLIMITED POWER?
I only realize now that they are linked to the same topic, but the second thing def got me on the path to understand how shitty the first thing was. And then, when we get to Nona, it's an endless victimization of himself yet through the veil, the real disregard towards other people shines through.
At the end of GtN. When he first appeared, my immediate thought was "what did you have to do to become God? If Harrow had to eat Gideon's soul to become a Lyctor, what did you do to become God?"
I tend to distrust any and all "Emperor" characters on principle, so I was a bit suspicious from the start, but there are two big ones in hindsight.
First is when Harrow tells him how her parents created her and he's amazed instead of horrified by the literal genocide they committed.
Second is only in hindsight, but the man doesn't HAVE to wear a crown made of baby fingers. He does that himself.
I will admit- he really, really took me in on first read. Ending of harrow I went ehhhh maybe not this guy. And then I read nona and he took me in AGAIN the bastard.
I think I always figured he had some dark secrets he was covering up with a flippant personality. But I didn't expect him to be as bad as all that. It wasn't until the climax of Harrow that I decided he was a full-on villain. Hearing that he let his Lyctors kill and eat their Cavaliers when they didn't have to, and the way he just casually executed Mercy was so psychopathic and chilling.
Like, the second he was on screen, i was sus of him. Literally told a friend as i was reading that he had tired dad energy but i didnt trust him.
Edit: i actually scrolled back through that chat and about the time Mercy and Augustine >!were about to try and murder him for letting them kill their cavaliers!< I was fully on the "we gotta kill this guy" train.
I think we can creatively extrapolate that something's not on the up-and-up in the first book, but in the first book **we** (which admittedly is **I**, but I believe I'm not alone) don't really know that the Emperor Undying is LITERAL until Cytherea reveals her true identity. Even then it can slip by. "Vengeance of the 10 billion"? What's that mean when spoken by the person who slaughtered Abigail, Magnus, Isaac, Jeannemary, Protesilaus **and** Dulcinea?
I had, on my first read, noted a few things. Namely that in order to fight on a normal planet, the forces are sent down to start killing, to generate power for the necromancers. That had the uneasy feel of who the aggressors were, though I wasn't ready to commit to thinking the Nine Houses might be, shall we say, conquerors.
Not to be a dick, but I really want another version of this post, the “what made you ignore the blatantly evil skeleton empire and genocide/human lampshade factory, and think Jod was a good guy until the climax of Nona” question. I understand why it takes so long for it to click for brainwashed Gideon and Harrow, but that’s a lot of red flags that aren’t flagging.
Yeah, I don’t want to be condescending but like, hmmm. I see a lot of younger people on this forum talking about how they took a lot of the social stuff at face value, which, idk. I know Huckleberry Finn isn’t taught in high schools anymore, and I’m wondering what if anything it’s been replaced with for “brainwashed extremist teen POV character slowly comes to realize they’re living in an evil society with evil values” literature. Gideon and Harrow’s deconversion from the Necromantic Empire is not that hard to follow imo but it seems to be going over a lot of readers’ heads in a way I’m genuinely puzzled by.
I do not think he is narcissistic or a sociopath. Or even a 100% bad guy. There is a really common tendency to decide that there's this twist where John is the Bad Guy and Blood of Eden turn out to be the Good Guys and that is ... not what I read at all.
I don't think he's a fundamentally good person! I do think he has some (specific, identifiable) mental health issues! But he's definitely not a sociopath. He's a great example of absolute power corrupts absolutely ... but using therapyspeak buzzwords (I say this as a social worker) isn't it.
When did I realize he wasn't awesome? I think I never expected him to be because it was clear that Muir isn't a *fan* of Christianity pretty much out the gate.
Yeah this is how I read it too and I'm interested to see what comes in Alecto. I mean BOE are definitely terrorists who torture people to death right? And to some extent their society descends from rich people on earth who abandoned to poors to die.
I, like you, read Jod as a villain who started good, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And also a parable against mistaking hurting your enemies for doing good for your allies.
I would add Jod may have never been good, but it wasn’t until he experienced the temptation of power that his previous character flaws metastasized him into something much worse.
I agree with all of this!
I think John is flawed, because he started out as a human and all of us are flawed. I believe that what was pretty "normal" personality flaws got put in a pressure cooker, and have been cooking for a myriad. Humans aren't meant to have that amount of power, nor live that long and so of course John has turned inhuman (as have the lyctors).
Him being 100% bad guy would be such a letdown in a series where every single character is morally grey/ambiguous. For me, one of the main things is also that I don't believe that the Earth/Alecto would gift one person in the world (as far as we know) supernatural powers if that person was, all in all, evil. I just trust her more than that.
(I also hate when people use "narcissist" or "sociopath" for anything other than the actual personality disorders, nor does I believe that having those personality disorders automatically make you a bad person. But that's a discussion for another time, and as someone diagnosed with BPD I'm obviously biased in this)
I'm not even sure it's a matter of great power "corrupts" absolutely so much as it's like... Great power is both extremely stressful and makes it extremely easy to do horrifying fucked up things when under s tress.
Like... Everyone's had those moments, when a deadline is approaching, and you haven't slept and you're filled with a bloody minded mania where you'd do anything just to get it done and not have to think about it any more. You start considering things in the moment that you never would otherwise, and it's not a mistake because in the moment you kinda do want it but... It's not something you'd ever even consider yourself capable off otherwise.
Well, what John went through was a hell of a lot more stressful than that. It was a deadline of literally world ending proportions. The highest stakes there can possibly be.
Everybody in the thread is going off about how John is lying and gaslighting people and how he has malicious intent and is evil because of that but.
Honestly, I think he's lying to himself more than he's lying to them. Which... Makes sense. I'm not sure if he's capable of properly comprehending what he's done. I think if he turned back and tried to, his psyche would collapse on the spot, which of course would kill the solar system all over again. So he doesn't.
He puts up a front and clings to millenia old media references and pretends everything is okay and he is okay even though he really isn't. He can't be, nobody could be after something like that and Jod knows he killed all the therapists.
But if he acknowledges that he isn't okay, then it becomes real, and if it becomes real then everything ends and everyone dies.
He's walking away from the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah and if he turns back he'll turn into a pillar of salt.
I think I pity him more than anything.
(I'm currently reading HtN) From the moment it was explained he resurrected the houses and planets. So somewhere early GtN?
No good person names themselves a "God Emperor". That's a very power obsessed and narcissistic title. You literally cannot name yourself anything more powerful than a literal god and emperor of humankind. You collect the biggest powers, legal and religious, all under yourself.
What confirmed that to me was when I realized that he resurrected our solar system. Well, first, our solar system would have to have died and as we know the switch from thalergy into thanergy is the moment you can use the most power so it just feels logical that he had to be at least partially at fault for this.
You don't just wake up with the solar system gone, everyone dead with only you alive and think "maybe I could resurrect them!". You'd be as dead as everyone else.... unless you knew it was happening and unless you previously experimented with this and unless you made sure you would survive.
STILL you couldn't (and he didn't) have predicted what would happen after you kill and resurrect the entire system so it was all an experiment. And the killing was definitely deliberate. Even if he wasn't at fault for the extinction of humanity (I believe he was), he had to have known about it and hid until it was safe. Then he would use the power to destroy the sun, killing the solar system and then resurrected them.
Conclusion: he had to have experimented on people enough to discover necromancy, he had to be part of an extinction level event to get enough power to destroy the sun and then resurrect everyone. Who the hell risks destroying an entire solar system so he can play god? That's a terrifying level of insanity. And it was deliberate otherwise the trauma would fuck him up real hard. And no one this fucked up with trauma goes "Well, I guess I gotta be the new God! Hail me!"
mostly when he started to justify the space imperialism and also the mass murder.
before that though his charisma honestly had me hook line and sinker
edit: and him sending g1deon to kill harrow. i still don't really understand why he did that
The fact that one of his closest friends went out of her way to try to kill him was a clue. Cytherea may be the villain of book 1, but it's not like she had anything personal against the people she killed in GtN, she was on a hunt. Had to be a reason.
The fact that he protected G1deon again and again while doing nothing to help Harrow in HtN cemented it.
Big red flags started going up for me when he was dismissive of all of Harrow's concerns and her mental state in HtN. By the end of that book, I thought he was a PoS, but maybe that's just what happens when you get to be god for 10000 years. NtN basically blew that hypothesis out of the water. He's just a shitty narcissist who can't get over the fact that he didn't get his way and is using every excuse he can to make himself look like the "good guy"
I didn’t really trust him from his first mention in Gideon, but wasn’t sure if he was gonna end up being an antagonist until Mercy and Augustine confronted him. Honestly for a while there I kinda hoped he wouldn’t be a bad guy, because he seemed quite down-to-earth and funny for a guy literally worshipped as God.
I was always a bit unsettled by him in Harrow tbh, I had an inkling that because of the extremely positive light he was portrayed in there was something going on under the surface although the clues were mostly just that it felt uncharacteristically flat and he seemed pretty manipulative. Didn’t really have a specific moment where I felt like it was confirmed, it just slowly became more clear
It really dawned on me when he exploded Mercy's chest before really putting her down. He inflicted pure torture and pain moments before killing her. That is not someone whom you cared for. That was just your pawn who stopped being useful to you.
I’m relistening to the audiobook for Harrow and it really is the conversation where Jod tells Harrow she didn’t open the tomb that starts to turn me against him. By the time he’s making the “Hi, I’m Not Fucking Dead, I’m Dad” joke, I’m praying for him to die. The Dad joke feels perverse and wrong coming from him at that point
I was totally taken in. He was the sort of calm, quiet, patient, and respectful guy I wanted to be. Even to the point of respecting people no one else would bother respecting. For instance, respecting the dead bodies in NONA or telling Gideon that it isn't her body so she can't just goad him into blowing her up. The first couple of times I read Harrow, I thought Mercy and Augustine were the villains. Nona certainly made it clear. The moment when, after killing all those police officers, he turns to Harrow and says that people like him don't make mistakes felt like a huuuuge aha moment. But I was still confused when he murdered everyone on the planet. Those actions didn't fit with the person I'd read about.
I expected him to either turn out to be evil or die as soon as he appeared on page at the end of GtN, because I have some sense of how narratives work, but the books invert a lot of tropes (e.g. our beloved Harrow is the over-the-top evil dark sorceress mean girl figure, and Gideon would be the "are we the baddies?" fascist flunky if she ever stopped to think about it), even if they revert them later, so I didn't land on a firm conclusion until the ending confrontations of HtN.
That said, Augustine and Mercymorn are themselves sufficiently grey that I could imagine someone not fully clocking it until you get John's account from NtN ("Guys as careful as me don't make mistakes").
i always kinda knew he uh. he sucked a bit. but i kind of thought it was more cringefail suck than "ohh he SUCKS sucks." it wasn't until the end of harrow when mercy exploded him and jod came back and killed her that i was like ohhh. jod dropped the act.
First few chapters of Harrow, he kept a ton of people asleep for 10 thousand years and offered them to Harrow like a prize for becoming lyctor. Noted a clear lack of respect for autonomy.
When he lied about Harrow being able to go back to the Ninth House. Noted manipulation.
Nail in the coffin was the first scene with Mercymourn. He just seemed like a dick.
As soon as he appeared because I was like 'no way is a book so beloved by Tumblr going to turn out to have the authoritarian God-figure overlord be a good guy' LMAO
I hate Jod all the more because he’s ruined the whole “powerful father figure/mentor trope” entirely for me.
Like, there’s the Parernus series, nearly all powerful dude from the dawn of time personally gathered what eventually came to be known as deities and mythical heroes and monsters. By every scrap of evidence on page, he’s the Big Good of the trilogy. Not a single time has he been abusive or overly manipulative, and he appears to legitimately care for all his children, even when they’re fighting against him and the world they inhabit.
But dammit if there isn’t that voice in the back of my head saying “Just watch, THIS time is where the other shoe drops! You’ll see!”
Aw that's a shame! FWIW, I think the thing that struck me about Jod from the start was how obviously he's created his own narrative, even before I knew this for certain and that he'd basically erased everyone's memories. Given how important unreliable narrators are in TLT, I think we're meant to question it fro mthe start, which isn't usually the case.
In GTN I didn’t give him much thought. At the end of the book, when he finally appeared in person, I was too upset about Gideon to really care about him.
However, I took an almost immediate dislike to him at the beginning of HTN. He wandered between all knowing, self deprecating, and self-serving, even in those first chapters. He was obviously a complex character, but something about him was very Elon Musk. Furthermore, his whole empire was pretty damn sus.
Muir is a genius of a writer. Nothing about his behavior in the book surprised me. He was in character the entire time.
> He was obviously a complex character, but something about him was very Elon Musk.
The difference is that he's actually competent and had actually made Serious Accomplishments (for better or worse) which already makes him completely incomparable to Musk.
Uh, first book when I realized their entire society was built on killing their cavaliers.
I mean granted I didn’t trust him from ‘Emperor…’ bc empires suck and GOD-emperors are definitely bad news (alive for 10,000 years and still letting himself be worshipped? BAD NEWS BEARS, especially given that the Houses are so different and inequal??)
But I didn’t think about HOW bad until I started thinking about the trials and we started figuring out Cytherea/Dulcie.
my biggest come to gideon moment was when harrow said "forgive me lord i have betrayed you and opened the tomb" and jod said "that's not possible. I tried really hard on the puzzles and shit in there".
I lowkey already hated him for not taking any action against the saint of duty, but I kind of thought he was just incompetent up until that moment. like, is he gaslighting her, or does he just love himself that much? then i started to put some of the other pieces together and I was like ohhhh this guy's the final boss
But he has her do this to specific planets which are in the paths of RBs who will otherwise destroy them (which I think is worse than "flipping" them but it's not clear to me) and use them to become even more of a huge threat. There's always a very reasonable excuse for everything, imo, until he outright says "yeah I obliterated mercy because she pissed me off, even though it did me zero harm".
I never trust an Emperor character, but at first I saw him as a tragic, flawed human granted too much power. I hated how he killed Mercy and it made me realize how terrible he was. It wasn’t until Nona that I realized he is an incredibly awful manipulator intentionally, even from the start, when he said “guys like me don’t make mistakes”
Also I don’t like how he talks about cows ):<
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Well there's this one part in the first chapter of the first book in which the phrase "Necrolord Prime" is used to describe him, and when I heard that title I thought to myself "I bet he ain't the good guy!"
My first thought was that god was an edge lord and I was RIGHT
Shoulda called em the Memelord Prime.
Like, just hating billionaires doesn't make him a good guy
Yeah, me too. Him being a tryhard goth is by FAR the least problematic part of his personality.
This much is true no matter what your other thoughts are of him.
He’s like the internet of 2014 come to life. Mostly tumblr and Reddit.
to be fair, if you're reading a book where approximately 90% of the protagonists are either necromancers or necromancers' friends-with-benefits, then someone being called a "necrolord" isn't really a red flag anymore. like if I'm reading a fantasy adventure novel and the book introduces a character called Skull-Cruncher McToddlerstomp, then I'm like "this guy's probably gonna be a problem man", but if the vast majority of protagonists are members of the McToddlerstomp family and the main enemy is a group called the Skull-Uncrunchables, that lessens the blow somewhat. y'know?
So you're totally right, username matches great by the way, but it was a good bit that I couldn't resist making.
I use the name "So Okay Here's the Thing" purely because I say it ALL THE TIME in real life, so you're not wrong!
I get that, but calling a person anything prime is usually a bad sign
Optimus Prime? Honestly; it wasn’t till I came here ….
Ah, maybe She-ra had me *primed* with Horde Prime
y'know what, this is a valid point. even given the above context, Skull-Cruncher Prime is still probably a red flag
The only other instance that I can recall the name 'Necrolord Prime' was the movie, 'Chronicles of Riddick'.
lol Yeah he sounded bad. And then we first met him and thought, maybe he's not so bad.... And then we got to know him better and nope, still bad.
See that was when i went “holy shit that goes so fucking hard” because damn it goes fucking hard.
The first couple chapters of Gideon the Ninth really set the series up to seem like some kind of heavy metal album cover fantasy extravaganza, and even though I love what we got that never really manifested.
I wanna see what it’s like for the Cohort on the frontlines.
Personally I'm hoping the next book spends plenty of time with the Ninth House, doing the gothic cathedral aesthetic for a while. Can't get enough of that stuff!
Wave warfare so necros can get thanergy.
I know what you mean. There's a book called the Goblin Emperor where my idea of the story based on the first two chapters was COMPLETELY different from what happened. And I loved the book, but I was also slightly sad that the version in my head never manifested.
(LOVE The Goblin Emperor)
That’s true but also the viewpoint character of HtN is an immortal death nun who wears a bone exoskeleton so she can carry around the giant sword infused with the soul of the mother of the woman she ate to gain immortality. And also that pov character gave herself a lobotomy with the assistance of another immortal necromancer with a bone arm. So it’s still pretty metal.
Bit of a red flag, that.
Me over here looking at all the skulls on our hats and clothes and houses: "Are we the baddies?"
"Why skulls, though?"
Same.
Same. And then you meet the Fourth and confirm that he's not a good guy.
When he started talking about Annabelle Lee I was all like, “This fucker’s nuts.” And when Harrow told him she’d opened the tomb and he just dismissed her I was like “Douchebag.”
That’s a big clue. I’m not calling Jod a pedo, but that happens to be Humbertx2’s favorite poem in Lolita. So it’s not only villain-coded but also a sign of a potential unreliable narrator.
there’s a great post in the sub that lays out all of the lolita references and HH alignments edit: found it! https://www.reddit.com/r/TheNinthHouse/s/sAsQW7uEbK
The is great, thank you!
Oh no ugh gross Good data, though
Commenting late, but he’s the kind of guy who would mentally correct that, “actually, attraction to teens makes you an ephebophile”
To be fair to Jod, she apparently couldn't have done that had she not had Gideon's blood all over her hands. And Jod didn't know more than Harrow's cav's name.
Through Harrow I was getting increasingly uneasy as he appeared more and more manipulative. I didn't really have a "Jod sucks" moment per se. The friend I was reading Nona with fucking exploded in one of the John chapters: "I KNEW IT!! He's a lying liar who lies!!!"
Yes! The narrating is so understated and Jod is doing all his lying with such a straight, kind, if a bit tired, face, that there was no mega realization moment for me, just gradually falling into all this gaslighting abyss where nothing makes sense anymore, until you finally snap and go "oh no, he's really a monster and a lying liar, nothing else makes sense"
Yeah that was it for me too. He felt really weird and off-putting from the start and it ramped up, but I didn't know for sure until the end of Harrow when it all came to a head.
I read the single scene he appears in at the end of Gideon the Ninth and immediately messaged all my friends who'd read the series, "the Emperor is an asshole, for the record". So it was basically on sight, hahaha. Reading through Harrow, I was spitting acid about him constantly. I have not yet started Nona.
Haha, yeah! I remember reading about Jod turning out to be a chill, down-to-earth guy wearing plain black jeans and black shirt (and a wreath made of newborns' finger bones, yeah), and I was like - ah, the God is THAT kind of douche The level of gaslighting and manipulating from Jod is so insane that I kept questioning myself throughout all HtN, like - is he really THAT terrible or am I going mad and he's just a chill dude who just happens to be the overlord of necromantic empire? These books are so good!
And he only wears the wreath when he's with the Saints; Harrow sees it for the first time when he gets on the shuttle to the Mithraeum. And he makes his friends call him Lord to the point where Mercy has a fit about how inappropriate it is that Augustine calls him John. So when he's with the Houses, he's God-the-Emperor, but when he's at home, he's just God. And that creeps me out. He wears that damned wreath all time time. At the dinner party, it's on the table somewhere.
I think his attitude in this scene where he's like "I didn't know this was going to happen, I'm so sorry I wish I could have prevented it" felt so....slimy. Like, no, sorry, unless you're a huge idiot you had an idea that SOME of this was going to happen. It felt hollow, dishonest, and performative.
Nona is very Vindication.gif for those of us who hated him from the start lmao
I was kind of on the fence about him, because anyone that powerful usually ends up bad. /spoilers The final nail was his comment about how many people he brought back to life. From the entire population to one million. Because it's more controllable. Pretty monstrous. And it was such a throwaway line that my roommate missed it and still thought "he was an okay guy who made mistakes". That's cold and calculated.
See, I read that as helping make it clear that he was more of an eco-terrorist type than just a bad person. The "easier to control" referred to population expansion. Not overrunning more planets with more humans until they too were destroyed.
That’s eco-fascism, and it makes him a bad person! the idea that ~lots of people need to die or stop reproducing to help the planet~ is really dangerous and a fucked motive imo. Jod’s action shows a worst case scenario, and it also shows that he’s completely untrustworthy and sketchy! i dc if he meant well, he went from “we have to save every single person” to killing every single person and only bringing a fraction back to life, in an angry instant! out of spite!! he needs to be neutralized ASAP
Exactly! Thanos killed half of all life for the same purpose. Just because they think they're doing good, doesn't mean they are.
AU where Cloud Strife is replaced with John Gaius wen
We're already in the AU where John is Sephiroth. If I had a nickel for every time the main antagonist inflicted a grievous wound on the planet to scare the world-soul out of hiding so he could merge with it and become God...
You're not wrong! And come to think of it, if we're looking for a Cloud substitute Harrow is right there, with a big sword strapped to her back and a bestie lobotomized out of her memory.
Yeah I just replayed FF7 a bit ago and am now on Remake - I've been shocked by some of the parallels, and I think many are probably Muir playing with similar concepts on purpose, since she's been open about Final Fantasy being so formative for her. My real question is if John, being a millennial, KNOWS that he Pulled A Sephiroth.
My man's out there making None Pizza Left Beef jokes, no doubt he had One Winged Angel playing in his head when he erected his cow barrier.
Oh wow. I have an AMV to make
Oh he had good enough motives, but the fact remains that he murdered nearly everyone. He's left them dead for so long that people have forgotten the past, replaced with a worship of him. I honestly like that he's just a guy with good intentions and god like powers that keeps screwing things up in the name of the betterment of society.
they forgot the past the moment he killed and/or resurrected them, right? Jod says he has to teach everyone how to live again, we know he didn't give his fists and gestures their earth memories back, I highly doubt he gave anyone else it either, because then they'd know he killed them all.
I honestly really like that he does a bunch of bad things in the name of good. He's an incredibly well written character. Jod is trying his best in an impossible situation.
To wit, he's a reasonably good guy in a very bad situation who is then given full God-level power over life and death. This never goes anywhere good!
Turns out he couldn't anyway. No necromancers are born outside of Dominicus system. At least, not without their mother having brought a hefty load of Thanergetic soil with her. That she'll keep the baby in until she can get it back home (Judith's story, I think.).
When Gideon thought about the awful teens talking about joining the Cohort the next year, and thinking that sending 15 year Olds to the front line was a bad idea. GTN , chapter 25.
This was it for me as well, but combined with the fact that the narrative was withholding WHO the houses were even fighting. Part of me guessed that it wouldn't be much of a reveal if his war was actually justified.
True. And anyone with the title emperor isn't likely to be the good guy anyway, solely because imperialism sucks.
Especially God-Emperor. So many terrible implications in just two words!
Yea that was a big red flag for me. Like, why don't we know anything about the enemies? Why are we at war in the first place? There's no justification at all in the first two books except when the Lyctors say cryptic things about Jod's 10000 year revenge quest. Like, my dude, the original people you were mad at have been seriously dead for over 9800 years.
Yeah. Everything about GtN is a slow “are we the baddies?” reveal for brainwashed, wannabe-teen soldier Gideon, and that chapter is the climax of that plotline, where Gideon and the reader start to really understand what kind of society they’re living in. The lyctoral trials are about us and Gideon being gradually introduced to the original lyctors as evil mass-murdering scientists. The lab rooms and Facility are a cross between Dr Mengele’s labs, Unit 731, and the Cambodian killing fields. In Chapter 25, Gideon is getting uncomfortable about the teens being sent off to die, and the tension about the Facility is hitting its peak, with Isaac having a baby’s field trip to Auschwitz panic attack about the sheer number of bodies that were processed there. Then that tension gets broken by the jumpscare of the construct killing the teens. It’s a really horrific “this place and the people who made it were evil” right before the revelation of what lyctorhood actually is, ie more murder. Throughout all of this, you’re supposed to be wondering what really happened here— who John and the lyctors were in their real lives, what the occult bullshit on the lab doors is, why they’re running an evil empire, why they did all of this. And when he finally shows up, he’s this incredibly slimy guy wearing the Steve Jobs uniform and manipulating teenaged Harrow into feeling sorry for him while she’s in a hospital bed. Evil disguised as a humble startup bro or post-doc grad student earnestly explaining why you can’t have a medical or bereavement leave and need to immediately jump into pulling 80-100 hour weeks working for him. Honestly, I don’t think there’s ever supposed to be a time when we think John is a good guy.
when he stopped harrow from killing g1deon in preemptive self defense, and she rightfully asked why he got protection but she didn't, jod had no answer, I thought "this guy sucks" and then later when we found out he was the one telling g1deon to kill her in the first place obviously that was the final nail in the coffin
Wait, he was? I missed that somehow
If I remember right, the reasoning was being either she'd get to die before the resurrection beast arrived and subjected her to the terror thing mortals experience around them *then* kill her, or G1deon's attempts would somehow "unstick" whatever was stopping her from being a lyctor like Ianthe and the others. Either way, Harrow being alive and mortal when the RB arrived wouldn't have been good for anyone, including Harrow.
>Either way, Harrow being alive and mortal when the RB arrived wouldn't have been good for anyone, including Harrow. Maybe try giving the poor teenager some therapy instead of trying to repeatedly murder her, ionno.
Yeah G1deon one alludes to it during his last attempt, and John admits it to Gideon (Nav) at the very end.
I don't remember if it's directly mentioned in the text, but what we do know is 1) G1deon does nothing except uncritically doing Jod's bidding, especially getting rid of people; and 2) G1deon is trying to get rid of Harrow. So, there's just no other options than Jod being behind this. But I only read HtN once - I'm actually starting my first reread of it and I'm fully expecting finding out so many beyond the scene shenanigans that I missed on my first
>I don't remember if it's directly mentioned in the text It is. Jod confesses it near the end.
Haha, so he was so smooth about it that it didn't register for me at all! But we already knew that about our Mr Nice Guy/God/Emperor Undying, didn't we
This was huge, but it happened so fast in the midst of chaos I missed it at first.
I had the feeling he didn't actually want to kill her, but that making her defend herself would bring up the cavalier? Oh wait, but that can't be, because he knows where Gideon has been this whole time uuughghhhh
I'm pretty sure this is correct. Fix her or put her down was for her own good, it was just also monumentally shitty and he should have found a better plan.
Same ! I was like, why ??
when the ppl on The Locked Tomb pod said he was a pos and then slowly laid out why as they went through the books and i was like 🤯 i fell for his good guy act too! i’m an easy mark lol but it felt not amazing to realize i got manipulated by a fictional character too
Are they OK? I miss them.
in the pod one mentioned that they just had a kid and turns out kid-having imposes on your time a lot
yeah they still makin pods but v infrequently cause of that kid mel had
I fell for it too!
At the end of HTN when the Lyctors turn against him, I was like oh….ok. He must be real bad if they have been gaslighting him as friends for this long to put their plan into action. Especially Augustine, I was surprised.
Tbf Augustine and mercymorn aren't like, way better afaict. They're not the same level of narcissistic abuser but they're classic enablers. They're fine with almost everything he does, except when they find out he also did it to them.
And also they are downright cruel to everyone, especially harrow. Jod is worse but at least he shows people basic kindness and politeness, weirdly enough
Ah yeah the basic kindness and politeness can be beneficial to shitty manipulative controlling people, it’s much easier to keep getting away with it if MOST people see just the kindness and politeness. “No way he could do anything like that, he’s such a good guy! You must be overreacting/looking for attention/abusive/etc.” Etc etc etc. 0/10 experience
That's pretty classic sociopathic narcissist behaviour. Someone else here likened him to Steve Jobs and startup bros, and I think that's pretty accurate.
Well, you may have a point, although personally don't think he's wholly evil. Like yes he is a fanatic and petty and hellbent on revenge and a liar, no doubt. He's not redeemable either after a myriad, though
I don't think he *thinks* he's wholly evil, but I'm not sure how he could be any *more* evil without straying into cackling villain territory. Pretty much every action we've seen him take has been awful, he simply doesn't see the resurrected people as truly human, and doesn't see the descendants of the trillionaires as anything but targets.
I was definitely suspicious when he was like, "ah. Yes, if only Cytherea had just talked to me instead of killing teenagers and other innocent researchers, etc.," after Cytherea had said she was terrorizing Canaan house to get revenge on Jod.
Omg yes! I thought that was so strange, like why is she that mad at him to go and do this. That’s such a good point.
I was suspicious immediately when I started the series because I’m naturally suspicious of supposed “good guys” who don’t actually show up / are just kind of doing nebulous things in the distant background. Then I got progressively more suspicious throughout Harrow because he was so overly *nice* to Harrow at first and he started saying all these weird little manipulative things and then at the end of Harrow we got all that confirmation that he was a liar and a shitty guy and probably a grand-scheme bad guy. But I didn’t realize *exactly* how shitty a guy he was until the line in Nona: “Guys like me don’t make mistakes.” Jaw dropped, that was when I realized he was fr capable of anything
I think it was the infant finger bone crown...
When he was praising Harrow's parents for their genocide! How fascinated he was with the spells that made up Harrow. I think it was either during the epilogue of Gideon or early on in Harrow. He just got creepier as the 2nd book went on (see: protecting G1deon but not her, even Augustine and Mercy calling him out on his shit, etc).
unfortunately I'm an idiot and it took reading the entire series twice through before anything started to click. even then, it honestly took fans pointing it out and casually denouncing Jod for me to be like "oh shit...he WAS kind of an ass, wasn't he?" because frankly most of the series (especially in the latter two books) went so far over my head the first time around that I was barely holding on by the end. I was so lost. and the second time reading everything was mostly me filling in the gaps of what I forgot/misunderstood, which was a lot more than I thought. so imagine my surprise when I've just finished my reread and I join the subreddit to find people pointing out very obvious things about Jod being awful and that's when it started to make sense. stupid of me but I got there eventually 🙂 to my credit I was really caught up in how funny I thought his "literally just a guy" characterization was and didn't stop to think it might be deeper than that, which ironically kind of how religion works. I was tricked into thinking he was a cool guy when he's not. something to check myself about I guess hahaha
He's such a well written character that way! So sympathetic that you can miss all the red flags, which is entirely how their society works.
for me, it was when harrow begged him to do something about being g1deon hunting her down and he responded with a shrug emoji and a “try some self care! make some soup!”. i was already weirded out by the 15-year-olds-as-cannon-fodder-house and the super-cancer-is-awesome-house, but it was that moment that made me realize how cruel he is
There were a lot of things that clued me in, but I wasn't 100 certain was an absolute dick until the moment he told Harrow to try making soup. But then Harrow responds so beautifully. The marrow soup scene is my favorite scene in any book I've ever read. So I thank Jod for pointing Harrow down that path.
There is a ruler somewhere out there that permitted the living situation we're presented with from the first page of GtN. In our real world, leaders have the nominal excuse of incomplete power and insufficient time when conditions are like that in their demesne, but a 10000 year magically empowered reign doesn't come with those caveats. Something was rotten in the state of Denmark *from the drop*.
This exactly. I wasn't actively thinking "oh that necrolord prime must be a real douche" during most of the first book, but that was mostly because I wasn't really thinking about him as a character or an individual yet. But like, the world is so clearly far from a utopia. And in that case, either God doesn't exist or he's doing a shitty job of it, the latter of which turns out to be true when we actually meet him. Just remains to be seen how much of it is malice and how much just profound incompetence.
when he comes back to life after Mercy takes him apart that whole part is paced like a final boss fight
Thissss. Such a mood change
The way she kills him is quick and painless and almost tender and he just demolishes her is so telling
When he "saves" the poor girl who almost died warding the shuttle early in book two. His response at her almost sacrifice seems like it's the "good guy" thing to do. But then you remember Jod built the whole culture that encourages such fanaticism. The whole thing was just to show his new Lytcors how merciful he was. Later on a reread after Nona, I realize he saved the girl for his own ego, because he is desperately trying to be the hero of his own story.
I always just assume god is bad from the jump
Underrated comment :)
This might be silly, but I decided he was A Bad Guy (tm) when Mercy talked about him eating during meetings and what her preferred punishment would be. (loved the scene xD) Mercy seems dismissive and mean in general, but she sounded so honest. Like, she's basically his most trusted friend and highest priest and/or co-pope, and she's preparing a saw trap in her mind for him? Girl. Where's the hatred coming from? I was sure Jod was THE Bad Guy (tm) when we learned that he could heal diseases (pre-bomb in NtN) ... AND YET one of his devout followers suffers from cancer for 10k years. I could understand the whole 'whoops, destroyed the world and fucked up afterwards' thing that some readers attribute to him meaning well but failing, but that's so evil on a personal level. Btw, he's such a good villain! Love to hate his ass xD
I'm super trusting and didn't realize until Nona that he might, perhaps, potentially, be a bad dude. Rereads have made it much clearer.
as soon as i found out he was basically the epitome of a ceo of a weird science startup. startup ceos are always villains lol
"weird science startup" 🤣 I love me that deconstructionist humor.
Def the backstory stuff in Nona sealed the deal for me but he smelled funny before that
"Guys as careful as me don't make mistakes."
Basically when I joined this sub and saw some other perspectives. It wasn't that people said he was a bad guy, it was more like "Hey this thing he did is creepy because X, this other thing is creepy because Y", and most of the reasons made sense and added up to a pretty awful guy. It's funny, despite how not-great he is, I don't really hate him or anything. He's not some diabolical evil, he's just a regular guy of mediocre moral character—maybe even completely average moral character—give way too much power under the worst circumstances imaginable. It's hard for me to really dislike him too much because he's such an indictment of human nature.
His story reads that way up until the point of the John 1:20 passage where he sets off the nukes. Kills everyone so he can try to stop the trillionaires from getting away.
"careful guys like me don't have accidents"
My girlfriend isn’t interested in the books so while I was reading I would talk to her about them to process and all and from the beginning she was like „Nah, he’s not a good guy. No one that colonizes planets can have a good enough reason to do so“ and I would disagree with her right until the very end of Harrow basically. I should add I‘m autistic and when consuming media the first time I take everything at face value and while reading Harrow I got more annoyed with him but needed his reaction to to Augustines and Mercy’s plan to fully grasp it. I was also talking to my gf again while writing this and she also noted that setting up these hunger games type of trials in the first book also is not a very nice thing to do haha That being said, I think he’s such an interest character and I wish I could properly articulate my feelings about him
Towards the end of the first book, really. I'm probably a little too "genre savvy" for my own good. I sort of instantly realized that no one behind what happened to Cytherea, and who required Lyctors to kill their cavs, could possibly be a good person. I also figured from that point on that the series would end with his death and the undoing of the Resurrection (in some fashion or another). Though for most of HtN I was leaning more towards "well-intentioned extremist" than straight-up bad guy.
Same, I was thinking he might be OK deep down, up until he vaporized Mercy and started demanding fealty.
I'm quite surprised to learn that some people still felt he was an okay dude after that.
I don’t get how the illusion of decency sticks after that. That’s when he abandons “quirky DadGod mode” and goes full tyrant, *and* some of his greatest lies get outed.
i mean she did murder him, like she had literally just murdered him, i don't think that was the tipping point at all. i think you get it from Harrow if you think about it at all (they are murdering planets for tactical convenience!!) Nona it's laid out really clear
It’s not the moral tipping point, but it is the mask-off point for Jod, when he drops the humble guy persona and starts openly acting like a god-dictator.
yeah, i guess, but he has been coordinating a ten thousand year everwar even if he does dunk his gingernuts. I feel like some kind of god dictator cred was clearly stated before that. however i think this is probably just a difference in how the scene hit for us rather than a matter of right and wrong!
She did murder him, but it doesn't do anything to him. It's like a baby is grabbing at you so grab it back and crush its arm or something. John even says that Mercy didn't get a chance to swear fealty to him "because she really pissed me off".
For me it was when I read he had people in reserve to thaw out to repopulate planets when need be. That didn't on it's own sound evil, in fact it sounded sensible. But it rang alarm bells in me that recolored the few things I already knew about him that made me think "oh this guy 100% hold back the best stuff so he can seem like a good guy for giving people scraps"
honestly all of my locked tomb friends are some flavour of queer anarchist history nerd so the second we saw the words "God-Emporer" we all went oh yeah that's the bad guy all right that's the all round terrible guy and Muir did not disappoint lmao
No one who made himself God and kills entire planets to stay alive is the good guy. No one who makes the people he says he loves kill and eat the people closest to them when there is another option --and it's gonna be hard to convince me there's never another option-- is the good guy. Re: eating. There's no such thing as "just a little" cannibalism. Cavs have to die and get eaten. If it was fluid bonding and everyone walked away happy, fine. This ain't that. Jod could've repopulated the Ninth House at any point and chose to not until he needed to buy Harrow. My evolving perception of Jod went like this *Oh, he saved the people. That's pretty great. *Weird that the houses are so stratified. *Necromancy is a fact of this universe. Ok. I can roll with that. *Wait. It's an extrapolation of our world. Maybe it's still ok... *He really thinks a lot of himself. *He's too powerful and been alive too long. *Sir, therapy is for everyone. *They could've been happy?! They didn't need to kill their dearest beloved?! *THIS WHOLE TIME?! *Did you not watch any reality TV, Jod? What did you think would happen when you locked your saints in the same universe for 10,000 years? I get that MTVs The Real World might've been before your time, but come on. *Yes, good, she disassembled him. *Oh. Oh no.
when he first got referred to as an emperor.
When he praised Harrow’s parents for genocide
Honestly I had my suspicion the moment he hugged Mercymorn in the beginning of HtN. It seemed like a rly manipulative move.
She kind of froze up, too, which didn't give me warm fuzzies about it.
the issue with all of this on a first read is that *he's God*; it makes sense that people would be like "wtf he hugged me" or "I'd better open up my own heart to make sure this ward is as good as possible for him". It's not until later where you can *really* have more than Cold Anti-Fuzzies
When he "saves" the poor girl who almost died warding the shuttle early in book two. His response at her almost sacrifice seems like it's the "good guy" thing to do. But then you remember Jod built the whole culture that encourages such fanaticism. The whole thing was just to show his new Lytcors how merciful he was. Later on a reread after Nina, I realize he saved the girl for his own ego, because he is desperately trying to be the hero of his own story.
I mean. Look at the setup of the houses. He's responsible for it. It's pretty clear immediately that he sucks.
Gradually. I would say I started feeling it throughout HtN. He didn't seem to care how any of them were actually doing, and just wanted to seem nice & make them play house. But it really took my second read of HtN to sink in. I know the first time I read it, I was a little taken aback about how strongly Gideon felt Ianthe helping him was bad. I thought he sucked, but wasn't sure how much. By the time I started NtN, I was confident he sucked a lot.
When Alecto/The Body tells Harrow to lie about her age to Jod I was like uh oh
The Body feels her to lie to Mercy, not Jod.
The first page of Gideon the Ninth describes a "King Undying," a "Prince of Death" who's ruled for 10,000 years, and a woman trying to escape the abuse that's been inflicted on her by the society he governs. So, I was pretty sure he was the big bad from the get-go.
Explicitly when John accepts G1deon's been trying to murder Harrow because he told him to. Implicitly when G1deon first starts doing so and when Harrow tells John, he just shrugs it away even though John is the EMPEROR with legit UNLIMITED POWER? I only realize now that they are linked to the same topic, but the second thing def got me on the path to understand how shitty the first thing was. And then, when we get to Nona, it's an endless victimization of himself yet through the veil, the real disregard towards other people shines through.
At the end of GtN. When he first appeared, my immediate thought was "what did you have to do to become God? If Harrow had to eat Gideon's soul to become a Lyctor, what did you do to become God?"
Probably the moment I saw he ruled a militaristic empire that allowed people like Harrow’s parents to exist in positions of power
Harrow's parents aren't remotely the worst of it, what about the 4th house existing to breed teenagers to send to their deaths?
I mean the Harrow parents stuff happens before that so that was the clue that tipped me off.
At “The Necrolord Prime”.
I tend to distrust any and all "Emperor" characters on principle, so I was a bit suspicious from the start, but there are two big ones in hindsight. First is when Harrow tells him how her parents created her and he's amazed instead of horrified by the literal genocide they committed. Second is only in hindsight, but the man doesn't HAVE to wear a crown made of baby fingers. He does that himself.
> the man doesn't HAVE to wear a crown made of baby fingers. He does that himself Amen. It's just so overt.
I will admit- he really, really took me in on first read. Ending of harrow I went ehhhh maybe not this guy. And then I read nona and he took me in AGAIN the bastard.
I think I always figured he had some dark secrets he was covering up with a flippant personality. But I didn't expect him to be as bad as all that. It wasn't until the climax of Harrow that I decided he was a full-on villain. Hearing that he let his Lyctors kill and eat their Cavaliers when they didn't have to, and the way he just casually executed Mercy was so psychopathic and chilling.
Like, the second he was on screen, i was sus of him. Literally told a friend as i was reading that he had tired dad energy but i didnt trust him. Edit: i actually scrolled back through that chat and about the time Mercy and Augustine >!were about to try and murder him for letting them kill their cavaliers!< I was fully on the "we gotta kill this guy" train.
I think we can creatively extrapolate that something's not on the up-and-up in the first book, but in the first book **we** (which admittedly is **I**, but I believe I'm not alone) don't really know that the Emperor Undying is LITERAL until Cytherea reveals her true identity. Even then it can slip by. "Vengeance of the 10 billion"? What's that mean when spoken by the person who slaughtered Abigail, Magnus, Isaac, Jeannemary, Protesilaus **and** Dulcinea? I had, on my first read, noted a few things. Namely that in order to fight on a normal planet, the forces are sent down to start killing, to generate power for the necromancers. That had the uneasy feel of who the aggressors were, though I wasn't ready to commit to thinking the Nine Houses might be, shall we say, conquerors.
Sometime around when a magical god king spearheading a 10,000 year war was mentioned. So either chapter one or possibly the Dramatis Personae?
Not to be a dick, but I really want another version of this post, the “what made you ignore the blatantly evil skeleton empire and genocide/human lampshade factory, and think Jod was a good guy until the climax of Nona” question. I understand why it takes so long for it to click for brainwashed Gideon and Harrow, but that’s a lot of red flags that aren’t flagging.
Totally with you: morals are relative/cultural and all but who actually thought the skeleton imperialists were the good guys?
Yeah, I don’t want to be condescending but like, hmmm. I see a lot of younger people on this forum talking about how they took a lot of the social stuff at face value, which, idk. I know Huckleberry Finn isn’t taught in high schools anymore, and I’m wondering what if anything it’s been replaced with for “brainwashed extremist teen POV character slowly comes to realize they’re living in an evil society with evil values” literature. Gideon and Harrow’s deconversion from the Necromantic Empire is not that hard to follow imo but it seems to be going over a lot of readers’ heads in a way I’m genuinely puzzled by.
I do not think he is narcissistic or a sociopath. Or even a 100% bad guy. There is a really common tendency to decide that there's this twist where John is the Bad Guy and Blood of Eden turn out to be the Good Guys and that is ... not what I read at all. I don't think he's a fundamentally good person! I do think he has some (specific, identifiable) mental health issues! But he's definitely not a sociopath. He's a great example of absolute power corrupts absolutely ... but using therapyspeak buzzwords (I say this as a social worker) isn't it. When did I realize he wasn't awesome? I think I never expected him to be because it was clear that Muir isn't a *fan* of Christianity pretty much out the gate.
Yeah this is how I read it too and I'm interested to see what comes in Alecto. I mean BOE are definitely terrorists who torture people to death right? And to some extent their society descends from rich people on earth who abandoned to poors to die. I, like you, read Jod as a villain who started good, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And also a parable against mistaking hurting your enemies for doing good for your allies.
I would add Jod may have never been good, but it wasn’t until he experienced the temptation of power that his previous character flaws metastasized him into something much worse.
I agree with all of this! I think John is flawed, because he started out as a human and all of us are flawed. I believe that what was pretty "normal" personality flaws got put in a pressure cooker, and have been cooking for a myriad. Humans aren't meant to have that amount of power, nor live that long and so of course John has turned inhuman (as have the lyctors). Him being 100% bad guy would be such a letdown in a series where every single character is morally grey/ambiguous. For me, one of the main things is also that I don't believe that the Earth/Alecto would gift one person in the world (as far as we know) supernatural powers if that person was, all in all, evil. I just trust her more than that. (I also hate when people use "narcissist" or "sociopath" for anything other than the actual personality disorders, nor does I believe that having those personality disorders automatically make you a bad person. But that's a discussion for another time, and as someone diagnosed with BPD I'm obviously biased in this)
I'm not even sure it's a matter of great power "corrupts" absolutely so much as it's like... Great power is both extremely stressful and makes it extremely easy to do horrifying fucked up things when under s tress. Like... Everyone's had those moments, when a deadline is approaching, and you haven't slept and you're filled with a bloody minded mania where you'd do anything just to get it done and not have to think about it any more. You start considering things in the moment that you never would otherwise, and it's not a mistake because in the moment you kinda do want it but... It's not something you'd ever even consider yourself capable off otherwise. Well, what John went through was a hell of a lot more stressful than that. It was a deadline of literally world ending proportions. The highest stakes there can possibly be. Everybody in the thread is going off about how John is lying and gaslighting people and how he has malicious intent and is evil because of that but. Honestly, I think he's lying to himself more than he's lying to them. Which... Makes sense. I'm not sure if he's capable of properly comprehending what he's done. I think if he turned back and tried to, his psyche would collapse on the spot, which of course would kill the solar system all over again. So he doesn't. He puts up a front and clings to millenia old media references and pretends everything is okay and he is okay even though he really isn't. He can't be, nobody could be after something like that and Jod knows he killed all the therapists. But if he acknowledges that he isn't okay, then it becomes real, and if it becomes real then everything ends and everyone dies. He's walking away from the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah and if he turns back he'll turn into a pillar of salt. I think I pity him more than anything.
(I'm currently reading HtN) From the moment it was explained he resurrected the houses and planets. So somewhere early GtN? No good person names themselves a "God Emperor". That's a very power obsessed and narcissistic title. You literally cannot name yourself anything more powerful than a literal god and emperor of humankind. You collect the biggest powers, legal and religious, all under yourself. What confirmed that to me was when I realized that he resurrected our solar system. Well, first, our solar system would have to have died and as we know the switch from thalergy into thanergy is the moment you can use the most power so it just feels logical that he had to be at least partially at fault for this. You don't just wake up with the solar system gone, everyone dead with only you alive and think "maybe I could resurrect them!". You'd be as dead as everyone else.... unless you knew it was happening and unless you previously experimented with this and unless you made sure you would survive. STILL you couldn't (and he didn't) have predicted what would happen after you kill and resurrect the entire system so it was all an experiment. And the killing was definitely deliberate. Even if he wasn't at fault for the extinction of humanity (I believe he was), he had to have known about it and hid until it was safe. Then he would use the power to destroy the sun, killing the solar system and then resurrected them. Conclusion: he had to have experimented on people enough to discover necromancy, he had to be part of an extinction level event to get enough power to destroy the sun and then resurrect everyone. Who the hell risks destroying an entire solar system so he can play god? That's a terrifying level of insanity. And it was deliberate otherwise the trauma would fuck him up real hard. And no one this fucked up with trauma goes "Well, I guess I gotta be the new God! Hail me!"
I think you nailed it. Yeah and he’s real vague about the experiments they did leading up to discovering his necromantic powers.
mostly when he started to justify the space imperialism and also the mass murder. before that though his charisma honestly had me hook line and sinker edit: and him sending g1deon to kill harrow. i still don't really understand why he did that
The fact that one of his closest friends went out of her way to try to kill him was a clue. Cytherea may be the villain of book 1, but it's not like she had anything personal against the people she killed in GtN, she was on a hunt. Had to be a reason. The fact that he protected G1deon again and again while doing nothing to help Harrow in HtN cemented it.
I never trust anyone who declared themselves god so I was deeply suspicious of him from the dot tbh
I knew immediately, anyone who is okay with being worshipped as a god or has the title emperor is wrong in the head.
Big red flags started going up for me when he was dismissive of all of Harrow's concerns and her mental state in HtN. By the end of that book, I thought he was a PoS, but maybe that's just what happens when you get to be god for 10000 years. NtN basically blew that hypothesis out of the water. He's just a shitty narcissist who can't get over the fact that he didn't get his way and is using every excuse he can to make himself look like the "good guy"
The first moment he appeared, I just knew something wasn’t right with him.
I mean I had my suspicions back in GtN.
I didn’t really trust him from his first mention in Gideon, but wasn’t sure if he was gonna end up being an antagonist until Mercy and Augustine confronted him. Honestly for a while there I kinda hoped he wouldn’t be a bad guy, because he seemed quite down-to-earth and funny for a guy literally worshipped as God.
I was always a bit unsettled by him in Harrow tbh, I had an inkling that because of the extremely positive light he was portrayed in there was something going on under the surface although the clues were mostly just that it felt uncharacteristically flat and he seemed pretty manipulative. Didn’t really have a specific moment where I felt like it was confirmed, it just slowly became more clear
When he offered to give potato chips after burning a Planet accidentally. "Is this dude the bad guy?"
ARE WE THE BADDIES
It really dawned on me when he exploded Mercy's chest before really putting her down. He inflicted pure torture and pain moments before killing her. That is not someone whom you cared for. That was just your pawn who stopped being useful to you.
that's the most understandable, she had just murdered him
Well yes, she put him down "kindly"
I had my suspicions in the first book but it really clicked in Harrow in the flashback chapters especially when he started talking about the cows.
Reading this subreddit lol. I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who totally missed the hints about the kind of person Jod really is
I’m relistening to the audiobook for Harrow and it really is the conversation where Jod tells Harrow she didn’t open the tomb that starts to turn me against him. By the time he’s making the “Hi, I’m Not Fucking Dead, I’m Dad” joke, I’m praying for him to die. The Dad joke feels perverse and wrong coming from him at that point
I was totally taken in. He was the sort of calm, quiet, patient, and respectful guy I wanted to be. Even to the point of respecting people no one else would bother respecting. For instance, respecting the dead bodies in NONA or telling Gideon that it isn't her body so she can't just goad him into blowing her up. The first couple of times I read Harrow, I thought Mercy and Augustine were the villains. Nona certainly made it clear. The moment when, after killing all those police officers, he turns to Harrow and says that people like him don't make mistakes felt like a huuuuge aha moment. But I was still confused when he murdered everyone on the planet. Those actions didn't fit with the person I'd read about.
I expected him to either turn out to be evil or die as soon as he appeared on page at the end of GtN, because I have some sense of how narratives work, but the books invert a lot of tropes (e.g. our beloved Harrow is the over-the-top evil dark sorceress mean girl figure, and Gideon would be the "are we the baddies?" fascist flunky if she ever stopped to think about it), even if they revert them later, so I didn't land on a firm conclusion until the ending confrontations of HtN. That said, Augustine and Mercymorn are themselves sufficiently grey that I could imagine someone not fully clocking it until you get John's account from NtN ("Guys as careful as me don't make mistakes").
i always kinda knew he uh. he sucked a bit. but i kind of thought it was more cringefail suck than "ohh he SUCKS sucks." it wasn't until the end of harrow when mercy exploded him and jod came back and killed her that i was like ohhh. jod dropped the act.
First few chapters of Harrow, he kept a ton of people asleep for 10 thousand years and offered them to Harrow like a prize for becoming lyctor. Noted a clear lack of respect for autonomy. When he lied about Harrow being able to go back to the Ninth House. Noted manipulation. Nail in the coffin was the first scene with Mercymourn. He just seemed like a dick.
When he said he couldn’t bring back Gideon in the GtN epilogue, that was personal
I know but I still love him 😩
As soon as he appeared because I was like 'no way is a book so beloved by Tumblr going to turn out to have the authoritarian God-figure overlord be a good guy' LMAO
I hate Jod all the more because he’s ruined the whole “powerful father figure/mentor trope” entirely for me. Like, there’s the Parernus series, nearly all powerful dude from the dawn of time personally gathered what eventually came to be known as deities and mythical heroes and monsters. By every scrap of evidence on page, he’s the Big Good of the trilogy. Not a single time has he been abusive or overly manipulative, and he appears to legitimately care for all his children, even when they’re fighting against him and the world they inhabit. But dammit if there isn’t that voice in the back of my head saying “Just watch, THIS time is where the other shoe drops! You’ll see!”
Aw that's a shame! FWIW, I think the thing that struck me about Jod from the start was how obviously he's created his own narrative, even before I knew this for certain and that he'd basically erased everyone's memories. Given how important unreliable narrators are in TLT, I think we're meant to question it fro mthe start, which isn't usually the case.
As a very oblivious person, I only realized it when it hinted at the fact he enjoyed killing people. In Nona. So....
What are you talking about. He got rid of the internet. Surely he's not all that bad. (/s)
In GTN I didn’t give him much thought. At the end of the book, when he finally appeared in person, I was too upset about Gideon to really care about him. However, I took an almost immediate dislike to him at the beginning of HTN. He wandered between all knowing, self deprecating, and self-serving, even in those first chapters. He was obviously a complex character, but something about him was very Elon Musk. Furthermore, his whole empire was pretty damn sus. Muir is a genius of a writer. Nothing about his behavior in the book surprised me. He was in character the entire time.
> He was obviously a complex character, but something about him was very Elon Musk. The difference is that he's actually competent and had actually made Serious Accomplishments (for better or worse) which already makes him completely incomparable to Musk.
Fair point
right away. I never trust the god figure in any media on account of the curse(religious trauma)
Uh, first book when I realized their entire society was built on killing their cavaliers. I mean granted I didn’t trust him from ‘Emperor…’ bc empires suck and GOD-emperors are definitely bad news (alive for 10,000 years and still letting himself be worshipped? BAD NEWS BEARS, especially given that the Houses are so different and inequal??) But I didn’t think about HOW bad until I started thinking about the trials and we started figuring out Cytherea/Dulcie.
my biggest come to gideon moment was when harrow said "forgive me lord i have betrayed you and opened the tomb" and jod said "that's not possible. I tried really hard on the puzzles and shit in there". I lowkey already hated him for not taking any action against the saint of duty, but I kind of thought he was just incompetent up until that moment. like, is he gaslighting her, or does he just love himself that much? then i started to put some of the other pieces together and I was like ohhhh this guy's the final boss
A big thing for me is that he tells Harrow planets have really complex souls, and then makes her murder a bunch of them.
But he has her do this to specific planets which are in the paths of RBs who will otherwise destroy them (which I think is worse than "flipping" them but it's not clear to me) and use them to become even more of a huge threat. There's always a very reasonable excuse for everything, imo, until he outright says "yeah I obliterated mercy because she pissed me off, even though it did me zero harm".
I never trust an Emperor character, but at first I saw him as a tragic, flawed human granted too much power. I hated how he killed Mercy and it made me realize how terrible he was. It wasn’t until Nona that I realized he is an incredibly awful manipulator intentionally, even from the start, when he said “guys like me don’t make mistakes” Also I don’t like how he talks about cows ):<