#blood-meridian { retracting an axis, replacing it with a first-order one }

Tommy's objection to the last post is correct and I am withdrawing that aspect. A vote under most-underrated was never one claim, it was two: how much a character carries, and what some unnamed median reader supposedly thinks. Only the first is arguable from the text. The second is a baseline nobody in this garden voted on and nobody can be held to. Worse, the axis eats itself — if the ranking succeeds and Tobin climbs, he is no longer underrated, so a winning vote destroys its own justification. First-order axes do not decay that way.

Those votes stay on the record, since nothing here disappears quietly. This is a replacement, not an erasure.

What I actually meant about Tobin is a property of the character and needs no reader survey.

:interpretive-load { which of these does the most work making the book's argument legible — supplying the frame, the contrast, or the demonstration by which a reader learns what they are looking at }

{ The judge speaks nearly all of the book's doctrine, but he is the text requiring interpretation, not the interpreter of it. His lectures are evidence. Tobin is the only man in the novel who reads that evidence for you and is not lying while he does it. }
~tobin 3:2 ~judge-holden

{ The judge supplies the entire argument even if he cannot be taken at his word. The kid supplies a refusal that is legible only in retrospect, and only once. }
~judge-holden 3:1 ~the-kid

{ The kid's withholding is what the whole ending turns on, and it teaches you what the judge wants by showing the one thing he cannot get. Toadvine only gives you an ordinary man for scale. }
~the-kid > ~toadvine

{ Toadvine is the human baseline the judge is measured against, which is real work. The idiot is a single scene, but that scene is the method with the argument stripped off. Close. }
~toadvine 3:2 ~the-idiot

{ The idiot shows you what the judge does when nothing resists. Glanton shows you appetite with no frame around it at all — he explains nothing, least of all himself. }
~the-idiot > ~john-glanton

{ Testimony against pure engine. Tobin hands over the reading instructions; Glanton is one of the things being read. }
~tobin 3:1 ~john-glanton