#judging by rwby x jl 2 and beyond

[bestworstcase]

& in fact one of the things that makes salem compelling as a character is this juxtaposition between her personal cruelty and the rightness of her cause; it bears repeating that she chose to live in exile rather than fight back for thousands of years while ozma dedicated himself to the cause of destroying her, and that her war follows on the heels of ozma forging a global alliance and then, as ozpin, abruptly locking down the relics in apparent preparation to summon the brothers back to remnant. if salem’s true goal is to avert the final judgment—get rid of the gods—then it is clear from the historical timeline and the events immediately preceding her commitment to war that she really did not want to go to war.

but with the information she has and the experiences she’s had there really is no other way to achieve her goal – every other possibility requires her to take it on faith that ozma is willing the break from his task now, against all signs to the contrary. he is still openly promoting worship of the brothers and urging everyone to live as if the final judgment will come tomorrow while zealously guarding the relics needed to summon them – no reasonable person would conclude from ozpin’s public actions that he is, in any way, wavering from his task, and so it is wholly irrational to expect salem to just intuit that somehow. and if ozpin is, as he seems to be, more committed than ever and on the brink of summoning the brothers, war is in fact her only recourse.

what makes salem a villain in this story is the abusiveness toward her associates; her individual cruelty, far more than the war of last resort, because the cruelty has no justification. and i think rwby is interested in the tension here, between how long salem refused to fight back and how cruel she is on a personal level. the tenderness with which she speaks of humanity versus her violent resistance to letting herself care about any one specific person.

i think it’s easy to write the cruelty off as a simple matter of salem… not caring, not having any interest in caring – in extremes this is how we get the "spoiled bitch" reading – but the same could be said of ozma; he’s nicer about it but no less willing to use people as disposable tools. why does he lie? why does he manipulate? why does he get violent when his secrets are about to be exposed? you don’t treat people you care about that way.

so ozma has his reasons – the trauma and the cognitive dissonance and the self-hatred and learned helplessness that motivates his submission to the divine mandate, the palliative fairytales, the retreat into dissociation to cope with being forced to exist as a parasite, and so on – and so too does salem, it’s just that hers are made more opaque. what drives this woman who speaks so lovingly of human virtue to treat individual humans like garbage? some of it is sheer alienation – she hasn’t been allowed to participate in civilization in thousands of years, of course she is antisocial – and the trauma of ozma’s betrayal, the deeper trauma of collective punishment, the fear of being hurt again, the resignation to being seen as a monster no matter what she actually does…

which i expect will begin to rise to the surface over the last few volumes. but the point is i do think her villain -> hero arc will turn almost entirely on ending and atoning for the personal cruelty as opposed to the war, and in fact i imagine there may end up being a stretch of the story wherein salem has moved clearly into the ‘good’ camp (as in: made things right between herself and her remaining associates, cinder in particular, and her true end is known to the audience) and still actively in conflict with the vacuo coalition because Her Cause is just. and that’s the kind of complexity rwby is interested in.