#it's pretty sensitive theme for me... umm. I would do the same. deal?

[cemetegee]

John 00:00 (Or John has the Worst OCD Ever Known to men and yes I Apologize him for that)

I've just thought a lot about John, and our fandom interpretations, and... I just realized we get to see almost nothing of his emotions.

(Before you continue reading: this is probably gonna be a hell of a long post. But I really ask you to read it. I think it's absolutely impossible to understand John without the following knowledge. Please.)

The thing we see most of his emotions is his anger. Anger is, however, mostly a symptom of being hurt. (We are able to recept pain, therefore we avoid it.) From my experience, there are two types of people:

Those who direct the reaction to being hurt on themselves (being sad, self accusation)

Those who direct the reaction to being hurt on others (being angry with them)

Jod is clearly... well, both, in a way. But he clearly has a tendency to direct it towards others. I mean, what does he plan to do with his enemies?

There can be no forgiveness for them. He will haunt them until they're completely diminished. (Although it is interesting that he thinks that what he's done is unforgivable, and that he sacrifies his friends as some kind of self-punishment. Maybe we should keep that in mind.)

Side note: he also regains a certain amount of control over his enemies by that.

Jod's Primal Fear

But what have they done to him?

He says it himself: they have left him. John is terribly afraid of being left. That's why he needs to punish those who walked away. Because they've hurt him. And that's why he made half of his friends use the other half of his friends as their batteries:

God must be able to touch all of his creation. John must have a certain amount of control over his friends, so that they can't run away. Because he's terrible afraid that they could leave him. (Most likely because of the early death of his parents.)

But hands down, that's obviously not the only reason why he did that. Many people have a fear of loss without "killing" half of their friends. And at this point I'd like to introduce something many people don't really get until they themselves have it: OCD.

What is OCD?

Yeah, what is OCD? I'd say that's something Augustine can explain pretty well...

John was always so damned careful... No vulnerabilities, no lapses in all that time... It took 500 YEARS to trick him to even release genetic material in front of his friends... You know what that means?

John lives in constant fear. He permanently checks all opportunities how things could go "wrong" and tries to prevent them. And exactly that's what the core of OCD is: People with OCD live (more or less, it gets worse) in constant fear. Most people will always focus on rituals but nooooo, they are only ways to prevent (mostly objectively unrealistic, but that's in a way not so important, because the fear is real, and those who are affected will believe them in a certain way) things from happening. The main symptom of OCD is an overactive amygdala. ("The" part of your brain that processes and saves emotions, especially fear.)

John doesn't have (visible, maybe he has some in his mind - OCD thoughts - we don't know) rituals. But he doesn't have to. What I described earlier is the important part. One other important part (and defining criterium for psychic diseases) is... suffering.

And oh boy, does he suffer! THROWBACK to the part where he said he would let the RB's kill his friends to pay for his guilt? Oh boy, does he feel guilty! Oh boy, does he punish himself!

But let's talk about another fascinating aspect of OCD... John is a child of Generation Z, right? Thing is, even this generation doesn't really have an idea of OCD. The general idea is just... ah yes. rituals. washing hands. Like, it can be like that, but it doesn't have to. (There is not even enough relevant research. For example, there is no research if OCD can cause PTSD. OCD runs on the amygdala. PTSD = overwhelmed amygdala. The connection is not that hard.) You know what that means?

If John had OCD, he would probably not know it. (And his statements support that.)

And here another important thing about OCD: Untreated OCD continuinly gets worse. John is over 10.000 years old. Can you even imagine how BAD it must be AHAHAHA? No, really, I want to be serious with you for a moment: he must be so miserable, you can't even imagine. He is probably reduced to a bunch of fear and (self) hate.

(And he is - quite literally. The only thing that's keeping him alive is his hate against BoE. His biggest dream is to die and get to lie in the Tomb next to Alecto. That's why there's even a way in.)

John's Plans

One other thing that makes me think about John possibly having OCD are the *plans* he has. Many of them doesn't really to make sense to me (at least in a rational way that regards all details.) I mean, let's take a look at his plan for keeping his friends:

His plan for keeping his friends is letting the one half of them kill the other.

I am honest with you, I don't think that's a really good plan. You maybe *technically* stay in touch with your friends, but you doesn't really have use of it if, and half of them is dead. And all those things that make a friendship sweet and worth it (the voluntary love, your friends catching you if you can't do it yourself, the fact that you can talk with them about everything that concerns you) are missing. You don't have any purpose of those friends, they just *exist* and half of them is not really alive. I can personally only explain this to me with an aspect of OCD that I'd like to call: OCD tunnel vision.

If you have OCD and a certain fear gets to you (for example losing your friends) your vision will narrow on calming down this fear, and ignoring everything else around it. (People will actually leave their spouses because they fear they could cheat on them for no reason.) At the end you often will have done more damage than you would have done otherwise. (For example, half of your friends could be dead and the other half could hate you.) But! You have calmed down the fear. For a short time.

Doesn't fit John's "I'm afraid my friends could leave me, so I kill half of them, and the other half has to mourn to forever and will hate me" perfectly in that sheme? I think so.

PS: that may be not that controversial (and not neccessary for the rest of the argumentation), but... I'm not even so sure if his friends WOULD have left him if they had found out the truth. I mean, if the horrors of love are strong enough to do what JOHN did, they are surely strong enough to love a person who's done terrible things. And at the end, they don't try to kill him because of the terrible things he's done, but because he made them kill their cavaliers. John thinks what he's done is unforgivable, but actually we don't know. He somehow forgets that they love him as well. We don't really know if they ever could have forgiven him, because he never gave them the chance to do so.

John's Rituals

I said before that it's not possible to know if John has any rituals. But honestly, over making this post I realized, that he has indeed some very obvious rituals. But what is an OCD ritual?

As already said, OCD confronts you with some fear (what's btw hitting hard because OCD sometimes seems to know you better than you know yourself). To get rid of that fear you'll perform a certain action. (You'll mostly perform it very often since the fear will mostly come back. That's the ritual part about it.) That's why it's called obsessive-compulsive disorder: You have an obsession (the fear) and compulse (the action you do to get rid of that fear).

(Image source: M.Bitton – Wikimedia Commons user: M.Bitton)

But OCD actions doesn't have to be real actions in the real world. It can only just happen in your mind. That's called OCD thoughts. And it's what John has in my opinion.

Let's come back to the beginning. What is it, that Augustine says about him here?

What he says is that John:

Constantly checks his environment for signs of betrayal

Always takes care not to be vulnerable

Carefully (and constantly) concerns himself about not doing any lapses.

All those things can already count as rituals, since they intend to calm down a certain fear (fear of loss) (and he does them repeatedly.) They are the compulsion for an obsession and they are what John is (obviously) thinking about all day. Since 10.000 years.

I want to point out at this point that he thinks of this fear as a heavy burden. (What supports the suffering point.) When he talks to Harrow about what her parents have done he offers to free her from living in fear and the consequences of that:

(He breaks his promise. The point still stands :D)

Jod

But hands down, fear of loss, a need for control and heavy OCD don't make a commitant of war crimes. So what is it, that makes John do all those terrible things? He says it himself:

He can do it. He is a God.

And honestly, I don't think any of us would be better at his position. We all have our flaws. "It's not up to people to play God." The truth is, that being God would be completly overwhelming even for a perfectly healthy, stable person.

It surely, definitely is for someone who is not healthy, not stable and has OCD. I have never in my life seen so many people independently of each other describe a disease as "hell on earth." And to be honest, with the knowledge that he is most likely no evil mastermind with the plans for everything, but a very sick man I can't hate him anymore. (That's maybe because he's not real, but book character, but still :D) He is not the God who stands above things, he is suffering himself terribly. His final dream is to die.

That's btw one of the reason he "likes" Harrow so much: Harrow is canonically schizophrenic and schizophrenia is literally just autism and OCD combined. He sees himself in her. (Although I would say she's nothing like him.)

I have OCD for one quarter of my life now - I know how I evil it can be - and honestly, I don't know what I would have done in his position. I'm just genuinly glad I was allowed to be a very normal G when I started to lose contact to reality and experiencing psychological states of emergency. (Although I obviously hope I would be better.) I think it's much more easy to be "evil" if you have the power to be it. I've always said I'd be not a Jod apologist, but - well, I suppose I am.

PS: I ask, I beg you, if you find yourself in this post only the slightest bit and you have NO OCD diagnosis, please seek for help. It's really a thing that untreated OCD gets worse. It's maybe inconvinient to admit to someone that your brain tells you to kill your loved ones (or whatever else your OCD tells you), but it's definitely much more embarrassing to sit there two years later and have to admit that that's only the smallest of your problems.

Further Education (:P)

If you have no idea what OCD can look like I really recommend reading this reddit.

(And btw: I'm very sorry if you didn't feel like your OCD was portrayed right by this post. OCD can be as different as really any other disease. Here I just focused on the kind of OCD John has in my opinion.)