r/AfterTheRevolution • u/BigSammyMagoto • Sep 10 '24
The Real Villain
So I just finished listening to the first book (like 5 minutes ago). The real villain in this whole thing is Jim, right? So what does that mean for Sasha in book 2? I was gripped by this book and could not stop listening. Robert's narration was fantastic!
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u/Pwwka Sep 10 '24
I felt that there really wasnt a villian, per se. They're just protagonists, and antagonists. Each person or side with their own beliefs and motives.
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u/kingxanadu Sep 10 '24
Did you forget about the Heavenly Kingdom and it's leaders?
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u/xSPYXEx Big Jim's Hangin Hog Sep 11 '24
The leadership, definitely, but the vast majority of the Heavenly Kingdom are just brainwashed and delusional, either groomed and trapped or given just enough power that they become addicted to the system.
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u/Pwwka Sep 10 '24
They are the heroes of their own story, bringing the "true light of god, and sin free world" to fruition, no matter the cost.
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u/BlomkalsGratin Sep 11 '24
Isn't that the case for everyone though? I'm not sure that means they don't qualify as villains just because they think they're righteous. It just makes them villains with motivations. As it should be.
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u/kingxanadu Sep 10 '24
True but for 2/3 of our protagonists they are definitely the villain or at least villainous, and they eventually become one for Sasha.
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u/Foolishlama Sep 11 '24
That’s the point. The organization as a whole is “The enemy” in a combat scenario. And the leadership in the Martyrs are maniacal monsters. But the whole point of showing us the lives of the teenagers within the kingdom is to humanize them. We can fight against an enemy without dehumanizing them, as Donald Ferris says to Manny.
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u/24782478 Sep 10 '24
So its just a Wire fan fic?
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u/SomeOtherWizard Sep 11 '24
I mean it's also a utopian fantasy and a cyberpunk rampage adventure and there's more gay sex than I remember in the Wire. But like....not no, though.
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u/Foolishlama Sep 10 '24
My perspective: this book isn’t about bad guys and good guys, heroes and villains. Just complex people with varied desires and motives. Roland is one of the most horrific characters ever, a guy who gets so high on killing that he tears people apart with his bare hands just for the chemical hit. But he’s also intensely relatable, especially for people with addictions.
Sasha was a willing soldier who was excited at the prospect of killing enemy troops in her first chapter. She got high on ketamine to watch the last battle and just felt jealous of Roland’s rampage cause it looked fun. But she’s a teenager, and she did some god while she was in the HK too.
Manny may be the main character with the smallest dark side, but it’s still there. He convinced his friends in Austin to work for him in a dangerous role and makes money off of their efforts, until Dallas got invaded. He manipulated his friend Roland into relapsing and encouraged his murder spree.
Jim is working against the HK’s advance, providing important resources and mercs to the effort of repelling their fascist empire. He is manipulative, shady, and has little care for human decency, but he is fighting for the morally correct side in the war. He also has understandable reasons for his belief system. Why is he any more villainous than Roland, or Pastor Mike, or Alexander?
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u/BigSammyMagoto Sep 10 '24
I think this is a great take. And really, I agree that it's not good vs evil or anything nearly as simple as that. I think its the means to which Jim pursues his ends that make me view him as the lowest of the low. The other characters, even Roland, seem more...human? Maybe that's the term I'm looking for. Jim is the embodiment of the establishment even though he is anti-establishment in his person. He is THE military industrial complex. I always felt uneasy when he was around and never trusted him or his motives (which had as much to do with Robert's narration as his writing). It's a person, who has decided their way is right, and will stop at nothing to achieve that goal, seemingly, without any redeeming qualities. Just because his ultimate goal is the moral high ground, it doesn't mean the route he takes to achieve it is just. I may not be articulating my thoughts clearly enough. I do really enjoy your perspective.
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u/Foolishlama Sep 11 '24 edited Sep 11 '24
I don’t disagree with you at all. I’ve listened through the book probably a dozen times, i keep coming back to it when i run out of current podcasts or get bored of my regular ones. And i really love Jim’s character. In real life i would probably be terrified of a man like that, but as Robert wrote him and read his parts i find him so engaging. “Fascinating.”
He sees zero moral value judgment on killing or brutality if it aligns with his goals. He truly has no morals, but he also doesn’t kill indiscriminately just for the fun of it. The more i go back to the book the more i realize he is telling the truth in his conversation with Sasha at the end— he believes in change above all else. He sees the long arc of history, and doesn’t bother himself with the individual lives in any conflict. Humanity is like grass to him; feel free to pluck out a few stray blades, if it’s in service of improving the lawn.
Most people would automatically rank the American Federation as a “better” nation than the Heavenly Kingdom, but he can clearly describe the AmFed as completely soulless, which in its own way is almost as oppressive as the HK. There’s a very understandable reason there are so many teen suicides there and so many kids are running away to join the HK: even though it’s a nightmare, it’s not soulless. Happy, emotionally/socially fulfilled adolescents don’t fall victim to nightmare propaganda.
Talking about killing the Cheney kids, he says “Not kids. Heirs, young enough to take full advantage of JuVen. The future undying lords of capital. They had to go.” Was he right? Would the continent have been worse off with those heirs present? Tough to say. The Bolsheviks decided the same thing Jim did when they murdered the Romanov kids, and i think that was a horrific crime and would never condone such actions and i would in fact fight and die to prevent kids, even heirs, from being murdered. And yet, Jim doesn’t see individual lives, he sees the long arc of history, and the intervention he chose to make was to prevent the heirs of capital from reaching maturity so that the seeds of a new world might blossom.
I wanna restate that i wouldn’t like Jim in real life. A revolutionary like him is no comrade of mine. But I’ve listened to the book so many times I’m desensitized to most of the horror, and i think he’s a good example of what a Greek god might actually think and say about the petty wars and conflicts humans engage in.
Thanks for posing the question and giving me the opportunity to write so much about one of my favorite books.
Edit: after rereading your comment, yes, i think Jim is meant to be felt as less human. He literally says he identifies as a Greek god, and Roland tells him he’s “forgotten what it’s like to be human.” That feeling that he’s different in that way, from humans, other post humans, even from Roland, is intentional i believe.
Edit 2: i went and found a line from Jim’s talk with Sasha that was nagging at my mind. When Jim is talking about the promises of change he heard in his youth from “progressive politicians and centerfold revolutionaries… every one of them either coopted by the system or killed by it,” his mask slips and he accidentally shows Sasha his “deep yawning pit of despair.” His belief in change above all else, even above the value of human life, comes from the way he experienced accelerating climate change, fascism, the dictatorship of capital, and failed progressive promises. Detonating the nuke in Dallas was him giving in to that despair and saying Fuck it. Nothing else had worked so far to bring about the revolution he thought necessary to improve the world. So he is human, he just perceives himself to be above human emotion. And i mean, that is part of what a sociopath is (which Roland calls him before the last battle).
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u/leaf3ygal Sep 12 '24
I have not been able to shake the Jim speech about change-worship. It feels like the opposite side of the coin of Octavia Butler's Earthseed in Parable of the Sower (which all fans of this book should really read).
All that you touch, you change / All that you change changes you / The only lasting truth is change / God is change
In the Parables universe this doctrine is a guidepost for a largely POC refugee community amidst the violent collapse of the USA, and has since inspired Adrianne Murray Brown's Emergent Strategy & similar ethics in radical politics: let go of expectations, hold change and facilitate change in your personal, communal, and political life.
But seeing this belief system push Jim to nuke a civilian population has deeply unsettled this ethic of mine. I'm reading Parable of the Talents right now so maybe I will post more about Jim/ Lauren Olamina in conversation when I'm done.
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u/Foolishlama Sep 12 '24
I am familiar with those books but have not read them and don’t know much about them. Thanks for the prompt, I’ll look for them soon! I listened to a couple interviews with Octavia Butler and thought she was brilliant.
Without knowing the Parables stories and the context around that ethic of change, here’s the main difference i see between positive and negative worship of change: despair, cynicism, hopelessness vs love, harmony, hopefulness.
I see unprocessed grief in Jim’s character which has festered and become despair and then cynicism. Grief over the world he used to know that died in his youth. We will all need to grieve our changing world within our lifetimes; what we do with that grief will have a big impact on how we act in the future.
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u/leaf3ygal Sep 13 '24
We love Abigail :)
I agree that outlook can have a big impact on how ethics turn into actions. But do we see Jim's grief in the book? It seems like he tried to change the old world as hard as possible. If anything he kind of acts as a part of the nomad 'war machine,' acting inside and outside the state as an agent of disruption. It seems to me like his main motivation in the story is to be close to power: to control Roland, to buy favors from Rolling Fuck, to get the body-mods in the first place. In the book he actually seems the most firm in his preference for the disrupted post-revolutionary status quo than the previous one, he says something like "kill the state, and a thousand flowers will bloom"
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u/Chrysocyon Sep 10 '24
My read is that Jim is both the hero and the villain. He killed the capitalist rulers of the old world but had to find new depths of depravity to do so. Was it worth it? Are more people free and better off? Does Jim really have values or is he as self serving as the people he killed? I dunno
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u/Ipunchdolphins Sep 10 '24
One thing I love about the book is how Jim and the HK kind of function as two similar but vastly different ideological evils. Like, Jim’s worldview is fairly well intentioned but when it leads you to <do things Jim has done and I don’t know the spoiler rules off the top of my head>… you’re not a hero here.
Be fascinating to see if that thread develops more in the sequel with Manny/Sasha.
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u/leoperd_2_ace Sep 10 '24
Oh yeah he is going to do some fucked up shit to Sasha in book 2 trying to turn her into the next Roland
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u/glycophosphate Sep 11 '24
I'm just waiting for the sequel because I can't wait to find out more about the King of Albuquerque and his penchant for boiling people.
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u/Tidd0321 Sep 11 '24
The point for me was that one group's heroic cause is another's evil plot, the innocent always pay and the evil always profit.
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u/SarahTwirls Sep 10 '24
I don’t see Jim as a villain at all.
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u/BigSammyMagoto Sep 10 '24
Maybe villain isn't the best word choice, but he's obviously at the root of the bomb in Dallas. He controls and manipulates Roland. He pushes Manny into convincing Roland to join the cause which he knows will push Roland over the edge triggering a "hard reset" for him. And obviously he can't wait to twist Sasha into whatever suits his needs the best. This obviously is my opinion and what I took away from it, but it's also why I phrased my opinion as a question in the post. I'm grateful to have a community to discuss this book with. Thank you for your opinion. What ARE your thoughts on Jim?
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u/theCaitiff Sep 10 '24
Not the person you replied to but....
I don't think Jim is the villain/antagonist either. My personal theory is that Roland, Jim, and Topaz were a throuple back in the old old days. There's hints of it there in Roland's broken up memories, a threesome with Jim, having sex with someone with damascus teeth, Topaz's comments about him not remembering them, Jim knowing all the right buttons to push...
It's obvious they worked together before/during the war, but my pet theory is them as a power throuple at the heart of the revolution. I'm less certain how/when the three of them met, post Roland's party in orbit or if they helped de-program him enough during his ground missions that he was able to regain control in orbit and start the purge. I don't think "Red John" as mentioned by Skullfucker Mike was ever a real person, just the three of them. Even chromed up murder beasts like Mike never got to meet Red John face to face, but Roland carried that nuke into Lakewood on "Red John's" orders and set it off. That's not something you trust to just anyone, it's the sort of task anyone as bound by their morals as Roland fights hard to be would want to do themselves if it had to be done at all.
I also view the three of them as poster children of post-anarchist punk burnouts. Let's say you're a true believer, you get involved in a few actions, fight the man, take your lumps, give a few in return... After a while, you either win or you burn out. You become the used up old shell of a man who once believed in something goddammit. And that burnout can take several forms, I think Topaz Roland and Jim are good examples.
After the war, Topaz knew they couldn't change the world or save everyone, they just couldnt. They scaled back hard, instead of being a mercenary fighting in wars and black ops across the planet, they said "these are my people, I don't care at all about the rest of the world but this group is mine and I'll take care of my people no matter what." They limited themselves to just one small area where they could see concrete results of their actions and picked only a few people to give a damn about. If you noticed, Topaz didn't much give a damn about Manny and the others, that was all Skullfucker Mike and his golden retreiver ass self. Topaz was there for Mike, for Roland, and was somewhat more open with other Rolling Fuckers, but not for Manny and not for the rest of the world.
Roland lost the war, not just ideologically, but personally. He lost family, he lost his moral certainty, he lost. His burnout was the self destructive nihilism of drugs and booze, uncaring about potentially killing himself or being the target of violence. For the non chromed normal person, he was the type to either crawl into a bottle and suicide by cop or just keep getting more extreme with the drugs until he finally overdosed.
Jim though, Jim is interesting. His burnout is the accelerationist sort. To quote another great american, "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood." Jim has given up on reform, he's given up on changing any of the existing structures, he's of the opinion that so long as ANY of the old world survives then people will cling to it and refuse to consider something new. So Jim wants to burn the world and make things as bad as possible. Not because he just loves misery, but because so long as these people think of themselves as "Americans" they can never begin to think of themselves as something else. If the AMFED still exists in even the smallest ways, the anarchist free city of Richmond can never be born. He'll set the whole world on fire and kill everyone old enough to remember the old days, just in the hope that something new and different will claw its way out of the ashes.
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u/BigSammyMagoto Sep 10 '24
Ok, first of all, I damn near pissed myself with "that was all Skullfucker Mike and his golden retriever ass." That's fucking funny, I don't care who you are.
Secondly, I really like this capsule of Jim. Thinking of it in a way that maybe i overlooked. After all, and I'm paraphrasing, but wasn't it Jim who said look at the corpses and see the seeds of the future?
I really like the idea of them being a Power Throuple. There's definitely a dynamic that exists beyond the level of comrades in arms. I never served in the military, so I can't speak to the intimacy of serving next to someone in a life or death situation, but it seems to still be more than that.
Great insight. Thanks for this!
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u/Unhappy_Trade7988 Sep 11 '24
I’ve listened to the audio book allot and sometimes Jim sounds like a dangerous cult leader who is using Roland’s memory issues to get him to do missions every few months.
Other times , when he talks about killing the lords of capital , he makes some sense. Pull out the roots.
Maybe that’s part of Jim’s programming?
Sasha will always be a follower. She swapped the heavenly Kingdom and its beliefs, for Jim and his beliefs. I wonder , if like in the heavenly Kingdom , would she have a moment of clarity in regards to Jim? Sasha could be the reader, we all say we’d never fall for a cult , never fall for a charismatic leader , but we probably would.
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u/MrArmageddon12 Sep 13 '24
Jim is a post human supremacist. He is on the other end of the spectrum from the religious fanatics in the story, but still just as dangerous if not more so. It just goes to show how extremism with just about any worldview or ideology is dangerous.
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u/Unhappy_Trade7988 11d ago edited 11d ago
In a way , they all are. But they each have moments where they make a moral choice.
Roland was the big boss , before he started resetting himself via RPG’s to the head. Or during the revolution , Jim made him think he was in charge of killing the powerful heads of power. If it wasn’t for the feed of the lives of the people he kills, he’d never have a reason to stop killing or feel guilt. Donald Farris knows more than he lets on, about Roland .
Sasha is a follower who uses whatever ideology interest her , to condone whatever group she follows. Part of it’s because she’s young and impressionable. Deep down she wants to be like Roland. I’m not sure if she’s the type of person you can trust with power.
Manny looks out for manny. From the outset , he seems like the less villainous. He probably is. But at the same time , he gets angry when he thought rolling fuck were blackmailing him to save his home , when all along he had planned to abandon his home, friends and family and move to Europe.
Jim is charismatic. I believe Jim has been using Roland as an unsuspecting mercenary for years. Makes him a fake offer to help him get his memories back. While knowing full well that during a mission , Roland’s mind and memory will eventually heal. Hence why Jim had surgery and training to hide reads and gestures to Roland. Jim will turn up again to offer Roland the same deal, in exchange for doing him a favour.
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u/D00mScribble Sep 10 '24
I just finished it too, and really loved it, especially with Robert’s talent as a narrator.
I’m not sure whether Jim is THE villain of the story, but I definitely foresee him becoming more horrifying the more we learn about him.
For Sasha, given her experience with religious extremists, I think he’s sort of an overcorrection.
With all she’s seen and done, she can’t go back home, but her entire belief system has been upended, and she has no idea how to survive in the chaotic world she’s entered. She wants someone to guide her, and Jim, for all his faults, knows how to thrive in chaos.
Also, old habits die hard, and he has that cult leader charisma to which Sasha is vulnerable. He offers her a kind of safety, but also the promise of adventure, both of which she’s wanted for a long time.
I have no predictions, but I’m curious how their relationship will develop once she gets a clearer picture of who he is.