vin *•.⏳

Sometimes I catch myself feeling more sympathy for the kid than I ought too, then I remind myself of the dozens (if not hundreds) of native americans he helped slaughter - and whilst the kid is a fictional character, the systemic genocide of those native americans most certainly is not. The kid is a tragic character, sure, but tragic ≠ blameless. Even when he madly confesses to 'the acts of blood in which he had participated' in Chapter 22 and attempts redemption twelve years later via the 'dried shell' of the native american eldress, offering to 'convey her to a safe place, some party of her countrypeople who would welcome her', it’s too little too late. The damage is done. And though I find the kid endlessly fascinating as a character, as well as the rest of the cast in Blood Meridian, they are all instruments of American Imperialism. Is the kid the worst of them? Probably not. The judge takes the cake there, so much so he kills the kid for the crime of *squints* not wholly committing himself to the 'work' of war. Sure, whatever, but the kid still killed natives - whether he felt bad about it or not is irrelevant and entirely arbitrary to the judge's own whacko hypermasculine dogma. Blood Meridian is based on real and (considering we haven't even reached the two century mark since its events) recent history - Chamberlain's memoir, though undoubtedly apocryphal in places, is a real account of the Glanton gang's exploits. Don't get me wrong, I'm guilty of having my own fun with the novel and its contents, just look at my posts, but I try to be mindful of how my stuff can be interpreted and whether or not I'm contributing to the blorbo-fication of scalphunters. It's a hard balance, and I think in a perfect world there would be no 'fandom' for such a loaded piece of media, but there is, and I'm in it.

https://www.cormacmccarthy.com/wp-content/uploads/blood-meridian.pdf

i think what fucks me up the most about the last two chapters of blood meridian is how much focus they put on the kid. being a kid.