#interpreting otherwise normal human emotions through lifetimes like that and all the shit they’ve lived thru: TASTY | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

itsclydebitches · 4 years ago

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[1/5] Am I the only one who doesn’t see Salem as guilty for the atrocities she’s committed? Jinn straight up said that her dip in the Grimm pools tainted her with dark magic that compels her to act on an instinct shared with the Grimm’s progenitor, the Younger Brother. If she’s being roofied with deific dark magic that fundamentally overrides her free will and fills her with a magical instinct to cause destruction, then doesn’t that absolve her of blame?

BUCKLE UP this ended up being a whole ass essay as I happily ignore my actual work

So this is admittedly a very complicated situation and I want to preface my response by saying that I agree with a great deal of this. I’m no longer able to find it because my metas/ask responses exist in a disorganized hellhole, but I said much of the same in Volume 6. Namely that the Gods are indeed the primary parties responsible for this entire mess, Salem was done dirty by them, she was (to an extent) justified in her goals, and she didn’t know that jumping into a grimm pool would turn her into a grimm queen rather than just killing her. Salem is, in many respects, a victim.

But being a victim doesn’t mean you can’t also be a perpetrator. This is the basis for most complex villains in media: we understand how they got to where they are, we feel for them, we may even think they’re correct about things like the injustice around them (insert Magneto here), but their actions are nevertheless too immoral to be supported. We get that a shit life largely outside of his control and the manipulation of Palpatine turned Anakin into Darth Vader. Doesn’t mean Darth Vader is off the hook for his crimes. We know that Jack Torrance was driven insane by supernatural forces when all he wanted was to watch over a hotel with his family. Doesn’t mean we shrug off him trying to kill his wife and child. We know that Voldemort was a product of a messed-up love potion that may have made it impossible for him to love “normally.” Doesn’t mean he’s excused for being a wizard Hitler. The humanity of villains is what draws us to them, but being a victim in the past doesn’t perpetually excuse/justify everything you do in the future. This is why all of these villains die in the end. That’s pretty much the only “good” solution we’ve found to such a complex situation. We don’t want the villain to be unforgivable because we got to see the tragedy of their downfall. At the same time, we can’t excuse the horrors they’ve committed and just welcome them back into the fold. So they die, giving the heroes the chance to mourn them without guilt and the audience the chance to enjoy that redeeming act (if the villain performs one).

That’s part of the balance that Salem is immersed in, but of course that’s not acknowledging the actual argument here: how can we blame villains for their actions when they had no control over them? Not a wishy-washy, highly subjective concept of “control” – Example: Does someone like Kylo Ren “really” have a shot at being a good person when they’ve got Palpatine in their ear? (The answer is yes. Yes he does.) – but a much more simple and objective situation: there’s magic at work that 99% of people straight up cannot fight against it. Like the RWBY equivalent of the Imperius Curse.

However, RWBY’s first mistake here is that, unlike the Imperius Curse, there is no firmly established lore surrounding the grimm pool. In Harry Potter we know that most people can’t fight off the Imperius Curse. That’s established numerous times throughout the series and that knowledge impacts the storyworld: there are laws in place that say if you can prove you were under Imperius, you’re not considered guilty of the crime. RWBY has none of that. We can assume that the grimm pool took complete control of the good Salem and is forcing her to do things against her actual will… but that’s never established. It’s an assumption. An interpretive reading. We don’t know that the magic doesn’t erase her free will, but at the same time we don’t know it does either. All we do know is that the pool created a “desire for pure destruction” in Salem. However, desires aren’t the same thing as a loss of control. Even if we pump up the concept of a “desire” into a “need” instead, that’s still not the same thing as, say, a chip put into your head that literally forces you to obey a 66 Order you’d otherwise never even contemplate (Star Wars). Or a demon taking control of your body and using it as a puppet (Supernatural). Needs are strong… but they can be overcome. Even the most intense of needs that keep us alive. We could (again) interpret that the magic created a need for destruction so powerful it’s akin to a drive like hunger, that Salem has to give into it in order to survive/stay sane, but that still isn’t a blanket justification for how she goes about achieving that. The villain in a zombie apocalypse film might go, “I had to eat! There was no other way! It was me or them… and I chose me.” We understand the drive, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay that they slaughtered an entire settlement in order to steal their food. In the same way, Salem doesn’t get to excuse a thousand years of abuse, attempted enslavement, and large-scale murder in the name of “I have this desire/need now.” Not unless the show establishes that the magic is 100% controlling her with the “good” Salem just along for the ride. Which it hasn’t.

In addition to this, I think there are three other aspects to Salem’s situation that make her different from the examples listed above (Bucky and LotR).

1. Planting the Seed

Unlike these other two fandoms where the characters began as Certified Heroes™, Salem’s situation is (again) a bit more complicated. She was absolutely an abuse victim. She was absolutely one of the good guys alongside Ozma. She absolutely got screwed over by the Gods in a horrifying way… but at this point Salem’s actions become less straightforward. For me, I think her emotional response is completely justified. If I had a God who wouldn’t bring back my tragically dead lover for BS “It’s about balance” reasons when he’s the ones who creates and enforces these rules about balance, I’d want to get a second opinion from God #2. If those Gods proceeded to emotionally and physically torture me for daring to question them all while lording themselves over humanity as an “experiment,” I’d want to take them down too. The problem here is not Salem’s goals, but rather the way she goes about them. Namely, manipulation. She very deliberately does not tell the God of Darkness about her meeting with Light. Much more damning (because let’s be real, this is a story chock-full of people telling lies of omission and keeping secrets), she rallies the people not out of a noble cause – Hey, why are we letting these two beings treat us like lab rats? – but rather through a much more deliberate lie: you too can get immortality if you just come help me kill them.

I bring this up because it shows us that Salem had “bad” qualities long before the magic started its work on her. She was a flawed human whose flaws were emphasized more than the average hero corrupted by evil. She’s not a war hero fighting Nazis, or an average hobbit agreeing to an incredible self-sacrifice. She’s someone who (arguably selfishly) couldn’t let Ozma go and then did everything she could to get him back, with “everything” including manipulation and endangering others – to the point where everyone died. (As a side note, Salem basically did what others accuse Ozpin of. She brought people who never wanted to fight (civilians) into an actually impossible war (let’s kill two gods) under a falsehood (you’ll achieve immortality).) Are many of these mistakes human? Yes. Is it entirely Salem’s fault? No. She is not responsible for the Gods being the most dickish beings in the galaxy who chose to wipe out an entire species because they didn’t like them banding together. But Salem did have a hand in all this. She helped orchestrate the tragic conclusion. She’s not “pure” in the way that Bucky or Frodo was, which tells me that the magic perhaps isn’t full on corrupting her, but is building on something that we saw was already there.

To use your drinking analogy, drinking doesn’t actually make anyone do anything. It just lowers inhibitions to do things we already wanted to do. Which means we’re still very much responsible for making awful choices while under the influence of alcohol. That’s one interpretation of the magic here. That desire/need lowers Salem’s inhibitions and encourages a person who is already poised to be a villain finally become one. I’ve been drunk and I’ve never once considered getting behind the wheel because I know precisely how dangerous that is—and Salem’s choices are far, far more harmful. To me, saying Salem is excused from her choices (in the context of what RWBY has given us so far) is like someone saying, “How can you blame them for shooting up an entire store and taking multiple lives? They were drunk!” I can still very much blame them for choosing that act, even if their thinking was impaired, even if someone else initially poured the alcohol down their throat without their consent. You’re absolutely right that there’s no easy way to map Evil Dark Magic onto real-world morality, but Salem’s actions are extreme enough that what comparisons we can make don’t look good.

2. Demonstrating Free Will

I think a stronger argument regarding the magic not full-on corrupting her is that we see Salem enacting free will throughout the course of her new lifetime. Meaning, the magic didn’t just turn her 100% evil and that’s that, she’s a mindless, destructive machine now. Rather, we’ve seen Salem engaging in a large variety of “good” and “bad” things. If the magic truly created a desire that she absolutely can’t fight against, then presumably she would have just killed/enslaved the world from the get-go. But she doesn’t. Salem hangs out in a cabin until Ozma finds her. Does she then go on her evil rampage? Again, no. She and Ozma set out to do “good” throughout the kingdom, saving the people from grimm and the like. Their choice to enact this good via godhood is, uh, not great (lol) but it’s still a far better use of her powers than what we see Salem doing later. This comparative trend continues on. She’s apparently stable enough to have four kids and lead a semi-normal life for a time. She only murders Ozpin when it’s clear that he won’t join her in this new “replace humanity” plan. Does she attack the first time he says no? No, rather she waits until he tries to sneak the kids away, which means Salem waited for absolute proof of his “betrayal” before acting. She then focuses on Ozpin for a thousand years, leaving Remnant to mostly do its own thing. Then she decides (for reasons not made clear by the canon) to attack the world now, launching a far more devastating attack than we’ve ever seen. And “ever” is at least a thousand years.

All of this shows us that Salem has her own version of free will going on. She is making active choices and changing her behavior to suit a changing situation. That means she is responsible for choosing those truly heinous options: killing her children where before she raised them, killing Ozpin where before they argued, attacking the world where before she protected it. Salem has been bad since she came out of the pool, but she has a very wide range of badness that speaks to an ability to decide for herself just how bad she’ll be at any given time. The fact that Salem then gets really bad – genocidal dictator bad – makes her responsible for that change. To return to the previous comparison, a need to eat might drive someone to commit a technically “bad” thing like, say, stealing bread (Hey, Jean Valjean), but we see how that’s still a good person fulfilling that need in the least harmful way they possibly can. Salem could have fulfilled her own need in ways other than all the horror she’s pulled.

3. Accepting Responsibility

Finally, to take up the LotR example, even knowing that the Ring influences people with Evil Magic doesn’t mean that everyone caught up in that web is excused of their related crimes. We pity Gollum, but he’s still someone to be wary of, someone we treat as the potential threat he is, and someone who is labeled as a villain for his actions. Sam is not wrong to be furious with the things Gollum has done. They’re not erased in the name of, “But none of that was really his fault. Only the Ring’s. Be mad/wary of the Ring and the Ring only.” Boromir is very susceptible to the Ring’s magic, but that also doesn’t let him off the hook for his choices. He’s berated for suggesting they use the Ring themselves. Aragorn firmly insists he return the Ring to Frodo, making it clear that there will be consequences (a fight) if Boromir doesn’t resist better. In the end, both of these characters – Gollum and Boromir – die as a way of “repenting” for those sins (at least, that’s one possible interpretation of the text). Even Bilbo, so obsessed with the ring that he terrifies Frodo by making that demonic grab for it, immediately apologizes for that action. He (and the story) understands that “Something else was acting upon me” doesn’t mean that the correct response to that is, “Well why should I apologize/face consequences for those actions then? It wasn’t my fault.” It partly was their fault though. There’s a strength of will here that dictates whether you’re going to go “bad” and even if we acknowledge that at some point everyone will inevitably fail, that doesn’t mean they don’t face the repercussions of that failure. Or that they’re not responsible for fighting as hard as they can for as long as they can.

Which is the reason why Frodo is praised rather than damned. We understand the impact the Ring has on people and we watched him heroically struggle against it up until the very last second. (The same can be said of Boromir and Bilbo). Those two things work in tandem to show us how heroic Frodo is in the face of unimaginable odds. As said, RWBY has done nothing to establish the parameters of the grimm pool’s influence – can Salem resist it? How much? For how long? – but we also never see her struggling to do good even while the magic pulls her in a different direction. The context was never a pre-grimm pool Salem accepting the magic out of noble self-sacrifice, as Frodo did. There’s no scene where Salem begs Ozpin to help her stay on the right path and accepts his assistance like Frodo relied on Sam. And the worry is that if Salem is “cured” then the story won’t force her to face any punishment that equals the extent of her failure to resist the magic’s influence. Yeah, Frodo failed too, but his failure was at the very last moment, after struggling so hard, and it was a failure that was able to be very quickly fixed by Sam. Salem’s failure has been going on for centuries, we’ve never seen her struggle to overcome it, and we can’t fix the sheer amount of horror she’s introduced to the world. Immediately forgiving Frodo is a fair act within the context of his story. Immediately forgiving Salem would not be.

Overall I’d say that the Gods are absolutely responsible for this shit-show and need to be held accountable, but I don’t think that lets Salem off the hook for her own hand in all this. Even if someone chucks me into a situation I initially had no control over, I’m still responsible for the actions I take from then on out. Even if something is acting on me that makes being a good person that much harder, I still have a responsibility to fight against that with everything I have. So up until RWBY definitively says, “The magic is something that no human could have ever overcome or even slowed down and everything Salem did was a direct product of that magic,” she’s guilty. She’s not the only one who is guilty (looking at you, Light and Darkness) but she’s a very big part of it. Which brings me back to the ending point of the previous post: I don’t think RT has the ability to write a satisfying ending for such a complex situation. Not unless they just go the route of Salem being cured, choosing a redemption act, then dying for it. RT simplifies things too much and a story where Salem is excused of any and all responsibility in the name of “She started out as a victim” and “Magic was influencing her” isn’t going to go over well given the breadth and extent of her crimes. Not to mention, as laid out above, the implication that she was capable of lessening those crimes whenever she pleased.

#rwby #mymetas #Salem #Anonymous

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