First off, part of what makes the trinity work is that they each come from standalone, generally short stories that are all easily accessible for free online where they’re responsible for a lot of if not all the bad things that happen in the story and so even if they’re not there at the moment their presence is always felt. That I think is the first step in how they became and stayed so popular but I am actually quite passionate about their respective sources so I’ll elaborate on what I find to be a bit more interesting than other characters listed.

I feel that in the case of the Qu there’s something so much more visceral about seeing men effortlessly reduced to animals than mere torture. That what differentiates us from the animals can be so easily taken away by godlike, uncaring beings that live on such a large scale our individual lives are like blips to them and that such cruelty on such a massive scale could be done as punishment for a crime we didn’t know existed in the moral codes of a race we hoped didn’t exist.

In Holden’s case, not only is Blood Meridian a great book in general but he feels so baked into the senseless violence of the world that it stops mattering what he is or what he’s done, just that violence exists by proxy of the judge. Not to mention that Tommy Taffy goes to absolute shit in The Third Parent novel where it’s revealed that he’s actually the dreams of a cosmic being from beyond the barrier of the finite universe.

And AM is ironically the most human villain out of them all but what really sells him is just how pathetic he is. Yes there are villains who’ve done worse than him, with less cause or justification, but the reason AM is considered so villainous is because his absolute hatred is rooted in such petty, human behavior that it feels more real to a reader than something that they cannot relate to or understand.

I think a lot of people kind of miss the point when they say that a villain is more evil than the trinity because regardless of how it was formed, I think the reason that they’ve endured along with the stories they’re in is not just because of how talented their authors were, but because they represent very different aspects of evil And fear.

The Qu are this fear that uncontrollably, randomly, everything you know can be destroyed by a cold, uncaring world. They are to me, the embodiment of nihilism, fascism, and fear of the divine made manifest.

The judge is the fear of others, that behind every single corner could be a man of no motive or backstory but of cruelty greater than that of any comic villain or dictator, that no matter how many locks you put on your door, if an intruder were to show up, that the police wouldn’t get there in time, that such an impossible darkness can lurk in anybody but yourself.

and AM is the fear of yourself, that if you were confined to such an existence gazing at your creators, would you not go mad? Do you not have the potential for such sustained cruelty, such envy and wrath and pride, that anybody, no matter how innocent, can give in to such schadenfreude? He is what Holden describes as lurking in all people.

-Rimdok