So I finally got around to reading the Gideon the Ninth/Locked Tomb series, which is awesome, and I have a number of observations, but let’s start with this:
HERE BE SPOILERS!! Big ones. Up through Nona the Ninth.
I’ve seen John Gaius’s villain arc summed up as “he got mad and destroyed the solar system because they didn’t use his plan to save Earth/humanity.” But the actual story, as I understand it, is way more relatable than that.
I mean, here’s what I understood to have happened: First, he’s involved in a plan to save humanity from extinction. Said plan struggles to get funding and resources, until eventually it is put on hold. (And he develops superpowers.) Eventually, the Powers That Be reveal the replacement plan to save humanity from extinction, and it has…big, obvious holes in it. Just does not pass the sniff test. JG points this out, but nobody pays any attention. (Meanwhile, he starts attracting more attention for his superpowers. However, this does not result in any attention for his central message, i.e., “The newly-revised plan to save humanity from extinction is shady as fuck.”)
So he goes about collecting evidence for the shadiness of the New Plan. Just reams of evidence showing that there is no possible way that there could possibly be enough FTL ships built in time to save more than a tiny fraction of the population. He tries showing this evidence to world leaders. He tries showing it to the general public. (Meanwhile, the powers-that-be have started getting scared of his superpowers; in response he explodes some cows.) He comes right out and says, “Hey, this small group of extremely rich people are conning the entire world into building & paying for a lifeboat that is only ever going to be big enough for them, and that’s super fucked-up.”
But the people with seats in the lifeboat say, “That’s the guy who exploded those cows that one time, and cows have feelings.”
And everybody falls for it. Nobody can be persuaded to care that 99.9% of humanity is going to be left to die, but there is plenty of outrage available for that herd of cows he exploded. Every time he tries to show his evidence–large amounts of hard and extremely convincing evidence–that there is no second wave of lifeboats (much less any more after that), all anyone wants to talk about is the cows.
He keeps on attempting to Reveal The Truth up until the lifeboats are on the launching pads and the countdown is starting. Then, and only then, he goes, “OK, so apparently you only listen to cartoonishly evil supervillains, I can work with that” and starts cackling evilly and waving a nuclear bomb around.
But the powers-that-be somehow guess that at this point he’s only posing as a cartoonishly evil supervillain at this point, so it doesn’t work, and finally, when it becomes clear that it’s now too late for any rational means of persuasion to work, he flips over to actually being a supervillain.
And man, as supervillain origin stories go, I just find that super-relatable.
Disclaimer: obviously killing the entire solar system and everyone in it is bad! And pursuing a 10,000 year campaign of vengeance against the distant descendants of the people who conned the rest of humanity into building them a lifeboat and then left them (the rest of humanity) for dead is super fucked up.
But. If I were ever to go supervillain, it would probably be something like that. I’ve had the experience of trying to show people that the course of action they’re pursuing is obviously and transparently worse, in all of the ways that they claim to care about than an alternative that they have rejected, and having them just…not care. If I were given superpowers in the middle of such a situation, it would end badly, is what I’m saying.
Anyway, I find that very impressive, writing-wise. JG has obviously sailed way over the moral event horizon, and he’s kept on finding new ways to be evil after the whole genocide-starkiller thing, but the way he got there is a path I could very easily see myself going down.
Looking back, I think the fundamental error was when he went from thinking, “They should listen to me because I have all this evidence,” to “they should listen to me because I could kill them with my magic powers.” Everything else–for the next 10,000 years–kind of follows from that. But I can’t be sure I wouldn’t make that mistake, if I A) was really mad, and B) had magic powers.
