#imo. they were always doomed from the moment alecto decided to bestow a whole bunch of powers on a random human

[liesmyth]

Thinking about the nature of John Gaius' powers: There's a duality to them. There's death energy but also life energy. He can stop hearts but also stop decay.

So, John's powers were, at the very least, on the way towards allowing him to recreate what his cryno project was attempting to do. The whole point of the project was to put people into a death-like state where food/water/waste/etc isn't a concern so that they could be packed into spaceships like sardines and moved to another planet.

John would need ships - and you don't get ships without some form of government, even if it was one John established himself - and the ability to revive people across distance (which John probably wasn't able to do early on), but I can see a plan John could have pursued if he'd prioritized saving people over retribution.

Alecto effectively gave him the power to do his cryno plan.

I LOVE that we still don’t know the full scope of his powers. Very cool, very scary. Whatever they are, they clearly go far beyond necromancy / thanergy, and probably did so from the start. However, I’m actually not that sure that Alecto bestowed those powers on John deliberately, and I tend to see it as a mixed blessing even in the best circumstances (and a horrible gamble in most of them).

IMO, the biggest sticking point is this: at one point, John was always going to get to the stage where the next step would be to “reach for the soul” and find Alecto; and I’m not sure he could have been able to handle that. In canon it happened in a moment of incredible stress, watching a close friend commit suicide in front of him, and he went absolutely insane.

From the way John’s POV describes it, though, I think it would have been overwhelming no matter what. Even if there had been no conflicts with the ships, no cow wall, even if he had agreed to go along with C— plan and try to freeze the ice caps instead of focusing on revenge... would he still have felt the screaming soul of the Earth, and melted the poles in a moment of overwhelmed terror, just to make it stop?

To me, John’s backstory is less about how his human failings brought about the apocalypse, and more about how a random well-meaning human can’t handle that amount of power and come out of it still recognisable. I think he was always going to destroy the world, one way or the other. John’s personal failings shape the way the Earth died, and the next ten thousand years of his life; but I don’t think it actually made much of a difference to Earth’s ultimate fate. He was always going to destroy it, one way or the other.

(On John’s specific powers: I’m also not sure if they were intentional on Alecto’s part, manifested that way because the Earth was dying [= thanegery] or because he was wrapped up in a project that involved dead bodies. But, even if he had been able to develop his powers to a point where he would go from controlling the dead to being able to put billions of living humans in suspended animation at no risk to their health... would that state have “kept” if the entire population had left Earth? He hadn’t eaten Alecto yet, and we know necromancy doesn’t work in space.)

Anyway. I think it would be possible that under the right specific super ideal circumstances, something good might have come of Alecto choosing a human to channel her powers; but it was a one in a billion chance. But I think it’s more in line with the themes of TLT — the Greek tragedy of it all! — that humans have very little agency when gods decide to interfere, and are just not meant to be receptacles of divine powers. If it hadn’t been John, it would have been someone else. If it hadn’t been the ships, it would’ve been something else. I think they were always doomed.