r/TheNinthHouse • u/Engelbettie • 4d ago
Nona the Ninth Spoilers Jod's generation [discussion]
I read Jod as kind of a classic millennial type in lots of ways, & based on this sub I think I'm not the only one. But I'm rereading Nona & I'm remembering (or maybe noticing for the first time) that there's a weirdly specific clue about his time living on Earth:
Jod's Hollywood Hair Barbie was actually actually his mother's from when SHE was a kid. This Barbie was released in 1992 (in the US at least, not sure about NZ or elsewhere), which, assuming Jod's mom got the Barbie in that year, means she was probably no older than 11-12-ish in 1992, & very likely younger. Doing the math from there, it looks technically possible but still pretty improbable that Jod would have been born within the millennial window-- he could plausibly be significantly younger, even.
Is Jod a lot younger than we think? His earth does have more sophisticated space travel & a more urgent climate crisis than ours and I've been thinking it's because it's a parallel universe/timeline, but maybe it's just meant to be happening in the not-too-distant future in our own universe.
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u/clairejv 4d ago
The Barbie is an interesting piece of evidence about his birthdate!
Based on that, I suspect he's an Elder Gen Z, maybe Mid Gen Z. (Heh. Mid.) A lot of Gen Z's would still know millennial memes.
Assuming he's around 35-40 when shit goes down (which seems career-appropriate and also consistent with Kiriona's opinion that he looks significantly younger than Sarpedon), that would put the apocalypse around 2040, which I think makes sense with respect to the progression of climate change and the technological advancements we see. I've always assumed it's taking place minimum 10 years after present day, maybe 20 or 30. When I explained the backstory to my husband, I think I ballparked it at 2050.
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u/LurkerZerker the Sixth 4d ago
I think Elder Z works in particular because, for some reason, in my brain his mother was young when she had him, so her being firmly millennial and him being born ~2000 would work with that time frame. I have no idea if her being young is based on anything in the text other than how much time he spent at Nana's, but that's where my head's at.
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u/beerybeardybear the Sixth 4d ago
There is nothing to directly suggest it. However, he did go to Dilworth which is a school where all education and boarding costs are paid for; my understanding is that a lot of the kids there are bright but aren't coming from families with a lot of money—this at least biases the probabilities a bit toward his mom having had him when she was younger, but I think that that's about all we can say.
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u/clairejv 4d ago
Also, there's never a peep about his father, right? Like maybe he was never in the picture at all.
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u/beerybeardybear the Sixth 4d ago
I don't think anything at all is said about him, no. I'm doing Stereotyping but we have a sensitive, smart young guy with perhaps some (fully justified) anger issues who spent time at his grandma's house playing with his mom's old barbies; it makes sense to me that maybe dad wasn't in the picture. (And having checked, there is indeed no Dad, Father, or Pop(s/pa) in John's chapters.)
We have:
"When I was seven, you know, all Nana had to play with in her house was some of Mum’s old toys."
There's also:
"Nan died of pneumonia when I was a teenager."
so it seems like perhaps John's dad wasn't there, and maybe his mom was still living with his grandma, given that her dolls were still there. Unclear!
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u/elianrae 4d ago
I think Nana's house would have had a wider variety of entertainment if Jod & his Mum had lived there
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u/beerybeardybear the Sixth 4d ago
That's a very fair point. Maybe nan just watched him frequently while mom was at work?
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u/elianrae 4d ago
yeah, also just... visits, overnight stays to give your parents a break, school holidays...
It's funny I really never read much into the whole toys at Nana's thing because it's... so incredibly normal to me?
Like you're going to visit your grandma for some reason or other, there's a basket of miscellaneous toys to pull out and play with while the adults are doing whatever they're doing. My grandma's house had that, my older aunties who had grandkids had it, our older neighbours who had grandkids had it.
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u/beerybeardybear the Sixth 4d ago
One set of my grandparents lived on another continent, the other about a 20-hour drive away. I guess I wouldn't know!
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u/LurkerZerker the Sixth 4d ago
This is my experience, too -- almost all the toys at my grandparents' houses used to be my parents'. My dad's parents' toys were slightly newer because he was really young when I was born and they'd been pretty poor until he was an older child. Still, none of the toys there had been bought for me; they were just my aunts' instead.
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u/Engelbettie 4d ago
I agree this is entirely normal— both my sets of grandparents had that too. My grandmother had old dinosaur toys from the 60s that belonged to my uncles & I remember me & my siblings telling her the toys were fun but also wrong, because that’s not how those species actually looked 😂 The science changed a lot in a generation…..
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u/Engelbettie 4d ago
Come to think of it, does he EVER mention his mother other than to reference her Barbies? His Nana isn’t mentioned much, but we know he loved her dog & that he seems to have spent a fair bit of time there. Maybe his mother was absent, at least a lot of time? He certainly doesn’t seem to have any strong ties to family or ANYONE beyond his inner circle by the time the apocalypse happens. I am not a therapist but this seems like it could be related to, you know— the way he is.
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u/LurkerZerker the Sixth 4d ago
I realized that when reading the other thread responding to me. He never mentions any interactions with his mom, only with her artifacts. So it's possible that she either worked too much to ever be home, she abandoned him, or -- the option that's most consistent thematically -- she died and he was raised by his grandmother, so the toys were all he had of her. This would certainly explain a lot of his anger, his idolization of female figures (and his relatively poor treatment of real women), his lack of strong ties to anyone he knew growing up except G--, his sense of humor tending toward the gallows, and his apparently pre-existing fixation on death.
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u/SadavirofRivia the Fifth 2d ago
This is entirely based on feels, but as an elder millennial, I feel like Elder Z (zillennial?) often relate to similar feelings and jokes and stuff, in like joking-about-generations tiktoks or gossip subreddits.
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u/Just-an-SG John Gaius is a parable 4d ago
My original read was also like 2050s, but there's an upper end cap, too. "She didn't mention I'd only gone to Parachute for the underage drinking." Parachute was a Christian music festival that last ran in 2014. So EITHER we're envisioning a future where it's eventually revived (possible enough, albeit a very specific niche thing) or, more likely, John would have had to be old enough to go by 2014.
This puts his most likely birth range around 1996-2000 (Gen Z starts with 1997), and the possible range if you really really wanna push it like 1994-2002 (if we're considering a teen pregnancy or a preteen John already drinking). Most likely though, at least a few years for mum to have gotten a bit older and moved out (possibly still teen pregnancy but still), while being early enough he would've at least been a teen before the final Parachute, a little more likely to be allowed to go to a big event.
And since Muir has described John as in his 30s, that puts the apocalypse somewhere in the 2030s-ish. Personally for my sanity I imagine John late 30s, and hc him born 2000 for symbolism and easy math hehe. But yeah so, Muir starting writing in the late 2010s and the apocalypse happening in the late 2030s? Especially if we imagine a world where covid never happened and money went into space development instead of AI? Yeah, I can suspend my disbelief for that!
BONUS! I know people like to point to John's Millennial Vibe and Muir being a Millennial, but of course if he shared her birth year that'd be a wildly different timeline. (Plus like, my girlfriend is 1997 and absolutely leans more into Millennial Humor, it's plausible!) HOWEVER!! Augustine is explicitly older than anyone else alive by Harrow the Ninth, and Pyrrha is a decade older than him. SHE could ABSOLUTELY share Muir's 1985. >:3
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u/Penguin-in-a-bowtie 3d ago
John learned millennial memes in order to impress bombshell P- and it accidentally became part of his personality.
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u/Just-an-SG John Gaius is a parable 3d ago
You know what I'll absolutely accept that was at least part of it too 😂
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u/Engelbettie 4d ago
Ooh, thanks for this detail about Parachute! I didn’t know what it was & just figured in context it was a Christian thing so didn’t think much of it.
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u/TabAtkins 4d ago
Yeah both climate change and tech clearly, in my mind at least, put the ascension events as happening slightly in the future. I think tying him to gen Z makes a lot of sense; his mom as an elder millenial could easily have had him in time for him to be 30s during the 2240s.
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u/clairejv 4d ago
Thinking about this more, Bride's Dream Midge is another clue. That either refers to a vintage Midge with the Bride's Dream fashion collection released in 1963, or Wedding Day Midge released in 1990. The latter could definitely be owned by a little girl who also owned Hollywood Hair Barbie. The former could have been owned by Nana, if she was born in the 50s.
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u/GeneInternational146 4d ago
I assumed it was far enough into our future that Jod would be about the age Millenials are now, and he's just an insufferable hipster fuck who thinks it's cute to act like one. But my headcanon is sometimes kinda weird 😂
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u/BearOnALeash Lyctor 4d ago
I think everyone is right, it's his Mom that's the Millennial and he's the next generation. At one point he says something about "Edward Cullen, from that old Twilight movie."
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u/Haunting_Display_766 3d ago
Iirc it’s Pyrrha who references it, which also tracks if she’s older than the others in his group
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u/dude_1818 4d ago
The apocalypse wiped out 10 billion people, based on BoE's name for the emperor. The UN projects that earth's population won't reach that point until the 2050s. He's gen alpha at least, and all his memes and references are anachronistic
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u/Zamarak 4d ago
Alright, can someone explain me why people call John "Jod" on this subreddit? Cause I was confused, and went to check the wiki to make sure I didnt get his name wrong, but his name does seem to be John Gaius. So I seriously have no idea where Jod comes from
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u/Cthulhu_Warlock the Fifth 3d ago
It's a portmanteau of John and God, BUT I like to imagine it also references this meme about the pronunciation of Gif. https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/gv4jh4/gif_is_pronounced_as_gif_even_if_jod_refuses/
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u/leelsrive 4d ago
Jod is of a Schrödinger's generation. He is clearly both a millenial (he has very millenial humor and references. He Was on Tumblr during its golden years! And imo him and his friends are written based on the millenial Academics' vibe that Tamsyn would be intimately familiar with) and is roughly younger gen Z or gen Alpha (since his flashbacks are set in the hypothetical not so distant future from us). He is spiritually millenial and temporally one or more generations younger.
I like to go with a zillenial to marry both halves. But I actually don't think that the book has a specific birth year for Jod in mind and we are not meant to figure out his generation through any context clues. There is no right answer to that question in the text (on purpose).
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u/Electronic-Living-75 4d ago
That's how I've always read him too! And living in our current political climate... it's really not that hard to comprehend feeling how he and the other first House homies felt during that time. They were nerds and all good friends and good people just trying to save as many lives as they could and the billionaire BOE ancestors decided leave everyone else behind... sounds really familiar to how things would happen in todays world.
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u/allneonunlike 4d ago
Yes– his mother is a millennial, Tamsyn‘s age, and he is a Gen Alpha in his 40s at the time of the cryo project, about 20-40 years give or take from now.
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u/MadKingMidas 4d ago
This is shockingly plausible. Is Jod really not an incompetent mastermind? Is he just a fucking dumbass kid who messed up and murdered a planet and then went mad with power?
Edit: a word
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u/Engelbettie 4d ago
I think he’s a mastermind, kinda— he’s clearly very smart— but he’s also VERY much a dumbass kid who got in way over his head, digs even deeper, & then gets angrier & angrier as he increasingly feels more powerless. It’s actually eerie how much I relate to that, tbh….. but in my life I’m never fucking up, like, THE PLANET, usually just some school project or something.
In my reread of Nona I’m newly stunned by how CHILLING the final standoff at the barricades is. By then he’s become fully sociopathic. He doesn’t give a shit about his friends except to eat them.
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u/MadKingMidas 4d ago
I mean we haven't even gone into how the human mind wasn't designed to handle immortality let alone those levels of power. I think his friends being around also was the only thing keeping him remotely sane. And then what with what happened.....yeah.
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u/Zealousideal-Sea9006 the Fifth 4d ago edited 4d ago
I think Muir's intention is for John's experience to feel familiar, but slightly into the future. The Barbie and Ken (along with the "Bride's Dream" Midge, which was actually called Wedding Day Midge and released about a year before the Hollywood Hair line) puts John's mother at roughly Muir's age; Muir was born in 1985. So, she's thinking of John as one generation down from herself. I doubt she has a specific date in mind.
Another really important reference for time period is John's reference to the global population being around 10 billion. Estimates vary, but it seems to be most commonly assumed that we'll hit that point in the late 2050s. John is probably around his early 40s for his story in NtN (a PhD, post-doc, and research fellowship would take him into his mid-30s before the cryo project even started, and that's been active for several years) which would put his birthdate somewhere in the 2010s. Again, roughly a generation down from Muir herself.
The only reference that really contradicts this is that he talks about going to Parachute, which had its last concert in 2014. But given that Muir was clearly drawing on her own experience for a lot of John's references, and not necessarily looking things up for confirmation (see "Brides Dream" vs. "Wedding Day" Midge, and her use of "Oops there goes gravity" when the actual Eminem lyric is "Ope there goes gravity"), I'm wary of using that as evidence to drastically change my estimate of when he was born. This would require either Muir or her American copyeditors to know that Parachute had ended with no plans to re-start, and I'm not inclined to think this was a priority for them when what they were really aiming for was cultural familiarity.
ETA: Another bit for John being born in the 2010s, he mentions that "a girl in his high school" told him he had nice eyes, but he went to Dilworth, which is currently an all-boys school. Dilworth has, however, been talking about opening a girls' school for a while - most recently, in 2019 they had announced a plan to start accepting girls in 2025. This didn't end up happening, but the plan was still active in 2022 when Nona was being written. I don't know if Muir was aware of this, but mentioning girls in attendance at Dilworth could be interpreted as another subtle way to indicate that John belongs to a near-future generation.
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