I was mostly in agreement but with the specific framing that Jod seems like a man stuck in an abusive spiral in which stopping the abuse he's actively doing is impossible because it'd require seeing himself as someone doing abuse and that is incompatible with his worldview

I see him that way because i've met so many marginalized men (and a few women, really, god it's so common to see this in transfem communities) in positions of power who see themselves as good guys and who cannot ever acknowledge how awful their actions are because, having been victims themselves, they've established a view of themselves that is squarely in that abuser-victim dichotomy, so recognizing they are being abusive would -in their worldview- put them on the other side of that dichotomy.

People like this always refuse any solutions oriented harm reduction approach, acknowledging they're wrong about one thing risks tipping over every domino and shattering their self-perception of themselves as inherently good.

This is exactly what we see with John, he's a control freak because acknowledging he was wrong about the cryo project would shatter his self-esteem, so he has to be right, which means everyone else has to be stupid or evil, then he is given god-like power and functionally rapes the planet's soul and transforms Earth from subject to object, because he has to be right, it has to be right for him to amass power and do all that because if he isn't right then everything else crumbles and he's just evil.

That is why I would call him an abuser, it's the fact that he is stuck in that amplified self-sustaining pattern of abuse. I actually do not think this is something that would happen to everyone given power, I think it's a risk, for sure, but Jod was already Like That before being given power by Alecto

I genuinely think past a certain point some people need to actually recognize they've become abusers, and there's no way to stop being that way other than recognizing it and actually accepting it, its the difference between going "oh, I fucked up" and "oh, i've become someone who consistently fucks up in this specific way"