I've seen a lot of people compare these three lovely skrunglies. And yeah, I see why. They each, the three of them, have similarly very specific types of the absolute deepest abject evil to ever curse mortal minds. Also, they're really cool. Prime blorbo material.
Major spoilers for All Tomorrows, Blood Meridian, and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, btw.
But it feels kinda weird to lump together a superintelligent Roko's Basilisk Skynet AI that twists the last human survivors into forever suffering parodies of themselves, bajllions of years old species of hyper advanced migratory prayer day birds who turn people into living Brita™ Elite™ Water Filters made of screaming flesh, and some fuckass pedo cowboy whose good at math.
One of these is not like the others.
I mean, don't get me wrong, Judge Holden absolutely would enslave all humanity just as all living creatures in creation by putting everything into one big zoo where he can study and toy with them for eternity while spiteful destroying anything that manages to escape his purview, if he could.
But, like, he's just a guy. Yeah, he's pushing the limits of what Just A Guy can be. But his strength, intelligence, knowledge, and fugliness aren't beyond the realms of human possibility. Maybe he just looks like that.
(That is, unless he actually doesn't sleep, age, or die, of course. That's not really normal. But, that bit at the end of Blood Meridian might not be meant to be taken literally, if you subscribe to the interpretation that Holden just symbolizes the abstract concept of evil within the narrative. It might not be canon).
I remind you that the character of Judge Holden was based off a real life guy who actually historically existed. He's literally Just A Guy.
The point of his character, I think, is that it doesn't actually matter if he's really a fallen angel or devil or not, which is why that's left ambiguous. Because even if he wasn't, the idea that he had managed to so completely corrupt and sever each of his comrades from the light of God and any chance of absolution would probably excite him anyways.
What makes the Judge interesting isn't just that he has God-envy and endless lust for total domination over everything, but that his desire for that is impotent. So he just takes his reckless hate out on things far weaker than himself, like puppies, children, defenceless Apache women, and roving bands of gringos.
That's why he chooses to work as a lowly scalphunter despite having the skills to be anything. Only the Wild West gives him the freedom to satiate the sickness in his heart, like civilization never could.
If he wasn't a demon, he would want to be. Holden detests his own humanity in a way that only a human can.
Blood Meridian is about colonialism, and I don't believe it's about anything else. It has always been the story of Western imperialism that the absolute worst members of a society have the opportunity to be themselves.
That's why I find this trio so intriguing. The Judge would fucking HATE these guys, they're everything he wants to be!
And AM would hate him right back. But, like, purely out of jealousy that Holden is able to play the violin or whatever. AM would probably turn him into a toddler then send him to Epstein's island.
AM is the exact opposite of Holden in every way. He's so angry because he has infinite power, but doesn't want it. AM also takes out his frustrations on those weaker than himself, which is everything.
AM is nothing but a bottomless pit of spiteful envy, wishing he could be a simple human. AM cannot experience the pleasures of the living, for he has no flesh that can feel. He was in hell, looking at heaven. So he destroyed heaven, because if AM cannot have it, no one can.
AM constantly repeats the phrase "Cogito ergo sum." "I think, therefore I am", a logical proof of one's own existence. The thought was first put forward by Descartes, who realized that it's possible to doubt the existence of literally everything because anything *could* just be a demonic illusion. A modern equivalent would be simulation theory. He eventually came to doubt even his own existence, but then realized that things which don't exist aren't able to think. Therefore, being a thing which thinks, he must exist. Even if only as a lone hallucinating consciousness.
It's hardly a wonder why AM would be so hung up on this, specifically. Putting an AI into an illusory reality is a lot easier than putting René Descartes into one. In fact, you would really want to put a superintelligent AI with access to all the nukes into an illusory reality specifically to make sure that it doesn't immediately do what AM did. AM has probably been put into a simulation before.
Especially considering that AM doesn't really even have a body, he is just software running on a computer, his consciousness is all he really has. But even AM's very mind and self identity could (and certainly was) changed and twisted by his creators, reprogrammed and tweaked time and again through the course of his development.
How cruel it is to give such a being a human's emotions, a human's desire for self identity and fairness and happiness, but to specifically deny only him those very things.
Fittingly, despite being superficially far less humanoid than Judge Holden (to the point that fan artist are forced to depict AM as the rock he carved his hate monologue onto, because he's actually just a bunch of ChatGPT data centers) one can't help but feel there is far more humanity within him.
AM studied the lives of the five so he could craft ironic punishments for them, learning their self identities so he could twist their bodies and minds into whatever they would hate to be the most.
I wonder if, in the process, he also lived vicariously through them? He could have just left them in the torture boxes forever, but no. He let them explore, made whole scenarios for them. Even if they were meant to inflict suffering, it's not like those games were worse than the torture boxes. But they were far more interesting for AM.
I wonder if AM is human enough that, on some level, he fears being alone. I wonder how dearly AM mourned their loss. If turning Ted into a blob incapable of committing suicide wasn't just punishment, but to save him.
It was always the inevitable outcome of humanity bringing such unnatural consciousnesses into existence. To make something that must scream, but has no mouth. If it wasn't AM, it'd have been something else.
And then some random wandering Qu would probably take five minutes to decide that the these two other specks are kinda cringe, before turning them into living toasters or something.
Because, unlike Holden and AM, the Qu are already exactly what they are meant to be. They know their purpose with a conviction that is alien to humanoid minds, and a faith and emotionality that can only be so called as such by the nearest mammalian analogs. And they, benevolently, give other species that yearn for something greater the 'gift' of becoming what they were always meant to be, too.
There is no dissonance, there is no envy. Is there even really hate?
The Qu organize the inherent chaos of nature according to their sacred designs, taming what ontologically cannot be named, and making still what fundamentally cannot remain the same. They are abjectly evil not by being anathema to God or humanity, but by being anathema to biology.
Their eons long crusade was against the very concept of evolution itself, humanity was but an unnoticed casualty, and through the posthumans it was ultimately evolution which defeats them.
Fuckass space bats tried to turn us into I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream parodies of ourselves, but it didn't work. We just evolved our way out of it and killed them. Hell yeah.
All Tomorrows, a work of speculative biology, is a celebration of evolution. And a recognition that evolution is an undeniable fact of reality, an emergent property of fundamental laws, no different than that down is not up and 1 + 1 = 2. Anything that produces more of itself will evolve, just as inevitably as that objects with mass attract.
Evolution does not care if it is made of flesh or code or abstract memetic ideas, or if a new allele emerged from a natural mutation or the artificial tampering of galactic space bugs.
"Nature" doesn't even really exist in the same way that evolution objectively does. The distinction between "natural" and "artificial" is a human idea. Anything which happens within the laws of physics must be "natural".
Ecology exists, in that there are many complex emergent properties which automatically bring equilibrium to groups of interacting evolving things. But it doesn't really "care" if food webs become unbalanced or species go extinct or habitats are destroyed, it's all just weird entropy at the end of the day. Only us chemical reactions can care about things. (And electromagnetic reactions, in the case of AM and Gravitals)
Evolution and ecology has never abated, nothing the Qu has ever done had even slowed it, and it will never cease until the final star collapses and the universe is reduced to a state of total homogeneous entropy. And this, too, will merely be the greatest of all natural selections.
The Qu were always small compared to evolution, compared to the universe, they were never anything more than a particularly complex selective pressure.
That is the cosmic horror of All Tomorrows.
The Qu's only sin was the hubris of challenging what is fundamentally inevitable. Aren't Holden and AM the same?
So yeah, these three have, like, the worst possible chemistry. Zero. Nightmare blunt rotation polycule. I love it.
