Let's talk about Judge Sean Holden, only for the sake of his resurgence and popularity and how blood meridian is becoming retrospectively overrated.
Also going to be talking about traditional era ritualistic murders.
Also going to talk about folklore, in general, with Mac and Candyman as examples.
SUPER LONG POST! BUCKLE UP!
People are having such a hard time coping with the present they got to reach back to shit like blood meridian, which is a huge commentary in it of itself.
Judge Holden is actually something of a person or a folklore that exists in a few stories. I don't know about any of those other depictions, but I will say blood meridian wasn't good for him or anyone.
So, if the folklore thing is true that means that Holden's character was developed in a time where it was socially acceptable to demonize albino people. It doesn't take looking that far back to see the demonization of albino people in a lot of literature. It was a thing they did on the regular, that wouldn't be acceptable now. In a lot of cultures, albino babies were killed shortly after birth because they were believed to be demons. And then folklore stories spread of the atrocities that will happen if you don't kill albino people.
To start off, what meridian is written poorly. It's like it didn't know if it wanted to be a book or a screenplay to try to play up the writing for dramatic effect.
Judge Holden is described to be a hairless albino man with a childlike face and small hands but he's 7 ft tall. Huh...?
He got people killed but nobody killed him when he revealed that he lied to them. Huh...?
Children won't approach him, even when he's offering candy, but children are always trying to sell them shit. Huh...?
He's unlikable, physically intimidating, and has an aura oozing of evil but people listen to him, trust him, and even buy him drinks. Huh...?
There are a lot of other problems. It's very obvious that this character is evil just for the sake of being evil. But that's the anti-albinoism of the era that he was crafted in talking.
Some will argue that Judge Holden is not a real man, but a manifestation of humanity's evils. I don't think it's that deep. I think it's just a poorly written villain in a poorly written story.
My biggest point that he really is just a guy is that his whole thing isn't spent being evil. With the way these types of things usually go he has too much nuance to be a representation of one aspect of all of humanity.
I think what has people choked around this idea is that "he doesn't sleep and he says he will never die" and he's also in albino man with giantism and if you know what that is you know that Giants don't move around that well because this disability causes poor circulation through their body.
What makes people who want to believe that they're really smart believe that he is the ultimate evil is because he says anything that exists without his knowledge exists without his consent and he resents the freedom of birds and that he would have them all in zoos if you could. You know that's some shit any other person could say without being an evil entity, right? A person can just say those words. It's not that deep. It would probably make you think twice about hanging out with somebody who says stuff like that, but the words themselves aren't that deep. The simping for this kind of writing has to overlap with something for Elon Musk and Andrew Tate! It's tragic!
Whatever exists in folklore does inherently exist as something of an entity, I will agree. That means that it is always subject to interpretation or whatever the new person that wants to take that folklore wants to form it into. Judge Holden, just like Mac (more recent adaptations being Mac the knife and Mac tonight), can take literally any form. But due to anti-albinoism he stuck in this perpetually evil form.
Mac is a great example of what I'm talking about, so I'll keep going with him. His first adaptation in the was a pirate that, long story short, was a contradicting commentary on authoritarianism. That was 100 years ago. His most recent adaptation, in the 1980s, was a literal Moon God trying to seduce you into buying fast food using jazz music.
Judge Holden is as subjected to that as any other folklore. It's the internet that's being very back and forth about making his blood meridian version a jokingly righteous character, when really, you could just make him a righteous character because he belongs to the people and we can do whatever we want with them.
However, there is other speculation that Judge Holden is based off of someone that the author met while in Texas - in an exaggeration. When it comes to making characters, two things can be true. There's no limit to the inspiration someone can grasp for their characters, world, and developments. If Judge Holden is folklore, we can do whatever we want with him.
What's idiotic to me is people are on this side of the internet that is slowly encroaching in the other areas with this attitude of "blood meridian taught me the horrors of humanity". Gurl, shut up. Reality is scarier than fiction - I promise. There are no horrors coming from the most privileged socioeconomic ethnic group in the United States, a white male, can tell you. But definitely ones they can commit against you. Consequence free, at that. And even tell you that you should be thankful for it.
And I know this demographic isn't anything worth listening to because they keep comparing Judge Holden to Am and Q. Throughout Judge Holden's folklore (not just blood meridian), he has murdered and raped a few people in Mexico and the US southwest. Am and Q caused the suffering of the entire human race! I KNOW Y'ALL ARE BAD JUDGES OF CHARACTER, AND HAVE NO INTERPERSONAL INTELLIGENCE!
You can't even carry the excuse that you hold Am, Q, and Sean as interpreting them as entities because those other two aren't entities. One is a super computer that hates humanity just for being created and the other is a fucking alien - they aren't representations for metaphors like you can argue Sean is. You're really just trying to LARP "highly intellectual" but there is no "fake it till you make it" in this category.
On that note, I'll switch over to talking about Candyman. Candyman is specifically African American folklore where a vengeful Spirit of sorts transfers through descendants of African slaves that have been wronged and murdered in very specific ways by white supremacy, and it seems to happen at random in some parts of the folklore - while it can only be one black man at a time.
The most recent adaptation by Jordan Peele is glorious! The adaptation right before his, not so much because it was a tale of white saviorism. I think it was the two recent adaptations before Peele where Candyman was an entity for white people to defeat rather than being African American folklore.
I feel like Candyman is one of the reasons why people like to hold on to not letting folk wars be told any other kind of way, while Candyman is more of an example of how white supremacy ruins everything. When Jordan Peele got to Candyman, he was back and better than ever! It was about the horrors of white supremacy and generational trauma from chattel slavery and segregation - not "the white people must defeat the evil black person and save the black people from themselves."
But all of that ultimately proved the point that anyone can do what they want to do with folklore and if you don't like a section of the folklore that can be ignored and it doesn't affect anything because folklore doesn't have to be one ongoing storyline. As a matter of fact, if I remember correctly, Jordan Peele's adaptation skipped the previous movie.
I'm going to stop there before I start getting too much into Candyman because every time I think about Candyman I want to go further into it.
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Folklore can be whatever we want it to be, but if you think blood meridian is good writing you're making it very clear that you're a faux intellectual. You could just be yourself instead of trying to be something you're not, I don't know.
The white supremacy and capitalism that we deal with on a day-to-day basis is much scarier than anything blood meridian or this adaptation of Judge Sean Holden has to offer.
Judge Sean Holden was created in an era where anti-albinoism was still acceptable. We don't need giant albinos with creepy "childlike" faces representing humanities evils. Historically speaking, all humanoid depictions of evil target the marginalized groups of that culture and era - which should be considered a problem under modernity and post-modernity. If you know that none of the monsters look anything remotely like judge holden, you should be ready to let that go.
Final thoughts for this post:
Everybody has the right to their opinion, so treating Blood Meridian like a tour de force is a great way to let me know that you're not my type.
If you think Blood meridian is a five, like it spoke to you a little, but you have more heavy criticisms - we can vibe.
If you hated it, even better!
Okay, that's it for now.
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