#I had the midge doll as a kid and it was my favourite toy

[twinge-of-cosmicangst]

No spoilers I’m seeing Barbie on Sunday, but I’m beyond curious to find out whether Midge can actually just take her baby out of her stomach whenever she feels like it, and then pop it back in when she wants to have some fun.

[katakaluptastrophy]

This may be something you have already covered, or considered and discarded, but. Thoughts on Jod being trans?

Because it seemed slightly odd to me, that a AMAB kid going to his grandmother’s house would be allowed to play with his mum’s toys. Especially if they’re “traditionally girly” toys, as opposed to being told to run around or given a ball to do sports.

Whereas a little AFAB kid would gladly be given his mum’s dolls by a traditional grandma and told to play nicely and quietly. Not identifying with the Barbies so much as finding them so pretty (especially compared to the Ken dolls that look nothing like him, which he feeds to Ulysses the dog).

And then, two or three decades later and finding that he is now God. He has consumed the Earth and her siblings and made her anew.

How easy is it to change the bits about himself he never felt were right? To remake himself as God in the flesh? To look upon himself and say, it is good?

"When I was seven, you know, all Nana had to play with in her house was some of Mum's old toys. And my favouite out of all of them..." He gave a long, shuddering sigh. "My favourite was her old Hollywood Hair Barbie," he murmured. "I loved her little gold outfit and her long yellow hair. She was the best. She got to have all the adventures. There was also a Bride's Dream Midge, but Mum had cut Midge's hair into this weird mullet. It was Barbie for me." She looked at him. He looked at her. He added, "Not Hollywood Hair Ken. Mum had him too, but he was a creep. I gave him to Nana's dog to eat."

This is what we get when John is describing the "scraps of id" that lead him to make Alecto look like some kind of nightmarish Barbie. The 'id' is, psychoanalytically, the most instinctual, basic part of the self. If John is being truthful here, then he's expressing something very basic about himself and his motivations in making Alecto.

I'm not convinced that we can infer anything about his Nana's attitude towards what toys a child should be allowed to play with. John is probably born somewhere between the mid 90s to the mid 20s, so it's just as possible that John playing with his mum's old Barbies is evidence that his family was fairly progressive. Or too poor to afford new toys. Or just ambivalent about the toys he played with.

In terms of John and gender, or at least John and masculinity, this interview has an interesting insight into what Tamsyn might be doing with that:

the God of the Locked Tomb IS a man; he IS the Father and the Teacher; it’s an inherently masc role played by someone who has an uneasy relationship himself to playing a Biblical patriarch. John falls back on hierarchies and roles because they’re familiar even when he’s struggling not to. Even he identifies himself as the God who became man and the man who became God.

Though of course, to quote a different interview, this is a series where "readers will end up STICKY and GREASY with GENDER and BIBLE" and where Lyctorhood is "a huge genderfuck".

So I think there's certainly scope for trans readings of John, which shift the framework for the way that John is positioning himself in relation to his masc roleplaying of god. There's a number of elements that would have a very different resonance in such readings, not least putting Alecto into such a specific version of a woman's body, and the tension between his own exercise of bodily autonomy and his utter restriction and violation of others' bodily autonomy.

Personally, my take is that John is meant to be a type of cis man I'm sure many of us have met - one who is at pains to demonstrate his feminism, who perhaps finds the boundaries of masculinity confining to some extent, but who is ultimately unwilling to examine how deeply those boundaries are part of the way he views the world and interacts with others. And with John, this is writ large, quite literally: endowed with godlike power, he falls back on the patriarchal image of god. John may go out of his way to tell us that the maternity problem was important to him, that he played with Barbies, that he *cares*, but at the end of the day that introspection doesn't translate into his actions.

Regardless of how John came to his relationship with masculinity, he's stuck with - or perhaps in context we could say haunted by - a very particular conception of patriarchal masculinity.