#the way all the tension falls out of her body when she touches the beringel. that soft little smile. she caresses its face!

[bestworstcase]

I like your analysis on many things and I generally concurred on your points regarding Salem not seemingly doing anything but a thought did occur.

How does the idea Salem wasn't engaging in a secret war align with her killing Silver Eyed Warriors? No one else has anything to gain from their demises after all, so it wouldn't make sense for someone we've not met to be doing it.

the worldbuilding gremlins in my brain will not permit me to answer this without first noting that people are absolutely fantastic at rationalizing pointless violence and there’s a fine line between a savior and a scapegoat.

all it takes is one rumor that the warrior who turns grimm aside with a mere glance is really their master, sparing the faithful but unleashing the monsters on those who do not fall in line. or someone putting old myths about the maidens—witches whose power you can take by killing them—together with silver eyes. or one charismatic zealot blaming silver eyed warriors for the massacre of a village they couldn’t save. you know?

but, realistically, if silver-eyed folk are all descended from ozma, they’d have to be pretty rare to begin with—man doesn’t seem like he’s done a lot of settling down to have kids on the regular—and i don’t imagine there’s ever been enough of them for anyone but salem to be consistently picking them off.

although i will add that our data points here are: 1. maria, who was unambiguously targeted because of her eyes, 2. summer rose, who sought salem out on purpose, 3. hound guy, who salem fucked up good, and 4. maria’s father’s theory that the only reason silver eyes could possibly be so rare and obscure was if someone was hunting them down, which… isn’t logically sound actually, it requires the presupposition that silver eyes were common once and aren’t anymore, which probably isn’t the case bfjrhrk

and then like, look at the circumstances surrounding the three silver eyed people that we know FOR SURE that salem crossed paths with in some way: maria was a legend who styled herself as the grimm reaper. summer chose to go after salem, not the other way around. the hound… we have no idea where, when, or how salem found that guy, but we do know that he was the first, bc the hound was an experiment.

2 out of 3 are clearly atypical, and the 1 who isn’t was a SUPER high profile huntress, and combined with V9 establishing that summer’s “normal” was constant false alarms and ‘emergencies’ that turned out to be nothing? to me that raises the question of whether salem made a regular practice of culling silver-eyed warriors or if she went after maria bc maria’s fame brought her to salem’s attention?

BUT. THAT ASIDE,

i do think it’s pretty likely that salem regularly put bounties on the heads of SEWs of maria’s caliber, and may have exerted more effort than that (although if so, those efforts seem to have tapered off in the postwar era—it beggars belief that summer, ozpin’s protégée, would have slipped salem’s notice).

why? salem’s a grimm. grimm are very clearly shown to be… not mindless demonic monsters; they’re social creatures, they’re way smarter than huntsmen give ’em credit for, they have a drive to live just like any other living thing. and they’re all salem has. she’s been exiled from human and faunus civilization for thousands of years, but the grimm have never rejected her. it makes sense to me that she’d want to protect them?

and also, if she made the same connection maria did, and assumed silver eyes derived their power from the god of light… well. all the more reason to strike them down.

but, more to the point, salem taking maria out was entirely unrelated to whatever conflict she may or may not have been engaging in with ozpin at the time, because maria… didn’t know ozpin, wasn’t party to his conspiracy, had zero knowledge of salem’s existence. she was a lone, legendary hero doing her thing completely separate from what ozpin had going on. (which if anything supports the broader theory that salem was Focused On Other Things besides him; ‘other things’ need not necessarily be ‘good things’ hrgjshk)

there’s this pretty widespread fanon that ozma recruited silver-eyed warriors to his cause / that there is a power struggle of some kind over silver eyes akin to the one over the maidens, but i’m not… sure how well that holds up. certainly ozpin placed some importance on ruby’s eyes, but the impression i get is that ozma sees silver eyes as a proxy for his ‘smaller, more honest soul’—he’s not looking for the power so much as he’s looking for a particular purity of character. & obviously there’s silver-eyed folks out there who don’t answer to him or even know him.

so salem targeting silver eyes might sometimes overlap with taking out an agent of his, but equally it might just as often be motivated by—somewhat ironically—wanting to protect the lives of grimm.