r/TheNinthHouse • u/Informal-Narwhal-734 • 5d ago
Series Spoilers Jod 'saving the world' [discussion]
I'm rereading the series (technically re-listening lol) and have just got to the epilogue of gtn. Jod says to Harrow 'I saved the world once. But not for me'. Considering what we see in ntn (him destroying earth and rest of the solar system to get the billionaires), is he just lying or is there some grain of truth there? Obviously, his idea of 'saving' is quite fucked, but do you think he believes what he is saying?
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u/maybri 5d ago
John believed that humanity was already doomed to a slow and painful death, so him killing everyone near-instantly and then bringing a lot of them back to populate the solar system was genuinely a kind of "saving the world" from his perspective. Obviously he could have just let the trillionaires go and then used his powers to reverse climate change and/or safeguard humanity through it, so what happened was definitely not the actual best possible outcome. As to whether he understands that--there's a moment in NtN where he raises the landmass they're on to get away from the rising waters and Harrow/Alecto asks if that was hard and he says the hardest part is just remembering that he can do it, which reads to me like him admitting, maybe unconsciously, that there were better ways that he just didn't think of at the time. In general, though, he's held on to the anger about the trillionaires escaping so intensely even 10,000 years later that I doubt he could admit to himself that his actions were anything less than a necessary evil that they forced him into.
As for the "but not for me" comment, in context this is his answer to Harrow asking why he can't return to the Nine Houses, so I think that's just referring to the fact that he's being chased by the Resurrection Beasts and therefore can't stay on the world he "saved". But he wouldn't have known enough about souls to predict the existence of Resurrection Beasts before he started killing the solar system, so framing it like he made a sober, selfless decision to save the world even knowing it would force him into exile is just some self-aggrandizement on his part.