#the world he forged to placate his god and all the harm it’s caused—

[bestworstcase]

salem has not been “”good all along“” and that is in fact not what i’m arguing; my position is that salem was backed into a corner, forced into the role of the Sole Evil, and systematically punished each and every time she tried to escape that role until she gave up and went, fine, i’m your wicked old witch in the woods, but i’m not trapped here with you, you’re the one trapped with me.

literally the only thing ozma needed to do to avoid this was not accept the mandate given to him by a god who flat out told him modern humans are inferior, broken shadows of what humanity should be and deserved to die unless ozma redeemed them. instead he deceived her for years, manipulated her into serving that god for years, and then told her the truth and left her the literal instant she refused to do as she was told. at a time when the worst thing she’d ever done was be cynically pragmatic about supporting HIS stated ambition of uniting the world.

irrespective of exactly what she meant—and Again, It Does Not Make Sense To Me To Read Her Statement As Anything But “Let’s Replace The Gods, Like We Planned”—salem is not to blame for ozma’s decision to deceive her so thoroughly for so long and she is also not to blame for his absolute refusal to engage with any answer except enthusiastic conversion back into the fold of his genocidal god.

the narrative constructs salem’s villainy through dehumanization and fictionalized myths that are explicitly described as propaganda. qrow says she wants to change the world, ozpin says she intends to destroy it, jinn says she desires pure destruction and promptly reveals that she lived alone in a miserable little hovel with a well-maintained path leading straight to her doorstep. the evil witch commands dark powers in the wilderness, among beasts and monsters, say the people who hunted and enslaved the faunus and kept them in cages like animals. the entire point is that if you treat someone like a monster long enough, inevitably you create a monster. even if she’s the most resilient person in the world. even if it takes two hundred million years to break her down.

her songs—divide and sacrifice—are both seething with rage for ozma’s dedication to his mandate (“with your dark, sick, cruel design/convinced them their world could be saved” “all your faith in ancient ways/leaves you trapped inside a maze” “show them gods and deities/blind and keep the people on their knees/pierce the sky, escape your fate/the more you try the more you’ll just breed hate” etc). her loathing for him is underpinned by his loyalty to the gods she detests. she is also not furious with him for leaving her—she’s furious with him for LYING to her, evinced her vicious overreactions to being lied to in the present and the fact that she clearly sees dishonesty as one of ozma’s most essential traits (“the lies come out of you so easily… likeminded souls indeed” and the emphasis on deceit in both divide and sacrifice).

is she doing any of this out of virtuous noble good intentions? lolno, although the intensity of her vitriol on the point of ozma lying and manipulating people leads me to the conclusion that she probably does think of him as evil for the way he treats everyone, not just herself. is she deeply mired in her own trauma to the point of not caring about anyone else? yeah but after two hundred million years of being the gods’ scapegoat and personal chew toy frankly who wouldn’t be. does being fundamentally selfish in motivation make her any less right about the gods being tyrannical monsters who must be resisted? of course not.

does the depth of her trauma and the lengths she is willing to go out of desperation to not be the sole survivor of a global extinction again (or worse!) make her entirely beyond reach of change or reason? no, and we know that because salem has moderated herself at every step: amity and vale were both reclaimed from the grimm after the fall of beacon, haven was to be a surgical strike that would leave the rest of mistral untouched and while the academy is temporarily closed the kingdom itself is not meaningfully worse off than before, and mantle dealt with stragglers drawn in by the concentration of fear in the crater but notably was not wiped out by the salem’s fleet despite having all of maybe a dozen people defending it. she is self-evidently not interested in indiscriminate violence. likewise she responds to yang’s accusations by asking who she took away rather than by flying off the handle the way, say, adam or ironwood do when they’re confronted in similar ways. when she decides she misstepped with cinder she is able to calmly say “i’ve realized it’s all my fault” without flinching—for manipulative reasons, yes, but this also demonstrates that she is emotionally capable of taking responsibility for her choices and owning it when she’s been wrong. and when she truly loses her temper in 6.4, she makes a point of sending everyone out of the room and waiting until the door is shut before letting herself explode. it is obvious that she is capable of reason, capable of emotional restraint, and able to change if she is given the chance to.

for the sake of completeness i will note that it is mathematically impossible for salem to have slaughtered millions of people during the course of the show. the combined population of mantle and atlas cannot reasonably be more than about two hundred thousand at an absolute maximum based on the details of the successful evacuation, and that’s with making some very generous assumptions about evacuation time skipped and the evacuation being far more orderly and efficient than what is actually shown; vale is probably larger but also was explicitly not wiped off the map and, given that evacuations from beacon brought people to vale, it’s unlikely that casualties were so high as to amount to a majority of the people living there. the haven attack was virtually bloodless. the population of remnant itself is said to be in the millions—probably very low millions, unless we conclude that the VAST majority of remnant’s people do not live within the four kingdoms. if salem had slaughtered millions of people the story would be over because there would be nobody left. the death toll since she made her first strike in V2 is likely in the high single thousands, and that is quite awful enough that i don’t see any value in disregarding the text to exaggerate it by several orders of magnitude. salem has the blood of thousands on her hands and she is nakedly manipulative and cruel to her closest followers. it is unclear exactly how she spent her time prior, but given how devastatingly effective her campaign has been and the historical longevity of mistral, vale, and vacuo, and also the simple fact that nobody had a clue she existed, the only logical conclusion is that she has been mostly not doing much in the way of mass violence in the interim between now and the murder divorce—assassinations certainly, but nothing on the scale of what she’s doing now, probably because she’s been focused on other things like figuring out a strategy for dealing with the gods. ozma has himself convinced that she’s solely responsible for all the bad things ever, but that is obviously irrational and not how anything works.

rwby is also, narratively, keenly interested in examining why people do bad things and what it takes for them to change for the better, and not at all interested in doling out punishment or comeuppance. ilia baits blake into a trap to kidnap her in order to ship her back to adam and also participates in the attempted assassinations of blake’s parents, and blake forgives her without a second’s hesitation when ilia changes her mind. emerald played an instrumental role in the fall of beacon and the heroes, while not terribly pleased to have her with them at first, give her the opportunity to just walk away and readily accept her help when she decides to stay. the narrative stance here is that no matter what they’ve done in the past, everybody who truly wants to change and do better deserves to be given not just the chance to try but also the support they need to succeed.

salem is… not an exception to that narrative stance, and she is already being set up with things that suggest the potential to change: the beat of regretful weariness in 6.4 and effort to contain her temper in the same, her choice to calmly listen and respond to yang’s deliberately inflammatory accusation in 8.9, her ability to say with her whole chest that she wronged cinder. and the simple fact that the narrative has already BLATANTLY called attention to how nobody knows what she really wants. and ozpin flat out saying in fairytales of remnant that he uses stories about her as propaganda. and also this:

It is the storyteller who decides where a tale begins and when it ends, and if you look far enough ahead, even a story with a happy ending may reveal itself as a tragedy, and heroes may turn out to be villains.

Hopefully, the reverse is also true.

Honestly, I think it would be best if, rather than Salem being vindicated, the Brothers were to be dealt with while Salem is regenerating, and she came back to find that she's been denied her climatic final battle and there's nothing she can do about it.

Like, yes, the Brothers are awful and need to be stopped, but Salem is JUST as guilty of many of the same crimes with all the innocent people she's been willing to sacrifice out of spite.

So I think that a better conclusion to her story would be if, after everything's been resolved and Oz's soul has been freed from the cycle of reincarnation (allowing Oscar to be his own person in the process), someone were to just point out to Salem that she HAD her happy ending and threw it away for nothing.

well the thing though is that—aside from the fact that we’ve already seen how plainly indifferent salem is to that approximate line of reasoning—she… didn’t… do that. after millions of years of profound suffering salem had everything she could possibly want and more—and then her husband went “hey remember the god of light who cursed you with everlasting suffering and then tacitly participated in the slaughter of the entire human race? yeah he sent me back here to redeem humankind from what you, personally, did to piss him off and if we fail he’ll kill everyone again. that cool with you?” and salem went “UM. NO??” so ozma took the kids and left her. the fact that she caught him and they fought about it does not actually make it her fault that he did this to her, nor does lashing out violently in response to a grievous, overwhelming betrayal constitute “throwing her happy ending away for nothing.”

all she did was refuse to bow to a god whose cruel depravity she understands better than anyone else on the planet and who has been nursing a personal grudge against her for millions of years. frankly salem’s initial reaction when ozma told her the truth speaks volumes for how deeply she cared about him and how much she wanted to stay. insert the perennial “but she wanted genocide” quibble here, see previous posts for my argumentation on that; the key point for this discussion is to say that salem did in fact try to work it out by proposing an alternate course of action and ozma walked out on her without another word.

she is not the one who threw her “happy ending” away.

nor, more saliently, do i interpret salem’s motivation as predicated on desire for some abstract ideal of a fairytale ending. in fact i’m unconvinced that salem gives a damn about fairytales at all; her narratorial monologues come across as ambivalent on them at best (“mankind has grown quite fond of recounting the exploits of heroes and villains, forgetting so easily that we are remnants, byproducts of a forgotten past” <- not a positive statement from the woman who throws tables when she’s lied to) and her two songs are even more overt in (correctly) seeing ozma’s use of mythology as calculated deceit. when yang throws this talking point in her face, salem answers it with a shrug and inquires whom she is being blamed for taking away—that is not the behavior of someone who does the things she does because she feels owed a happy ending, especially not when you take into consideration that salem has been shown in other context to be a highly emotionally-driven person.

i suspect her indifference to yang’s accusatory scorn was a simple matter of none of it being remotely relevant to her actual past or present circumstances. the woman is being tortured by the creators of the entire cosmos over a petty grudge, and these kids think “didn’t get to live happily ever after with ozma” is what drives her? they think that’s even on her radar? that’s what the lamp showed them? it’s almost laughable.

also, honestly? if salem got taken out whilst confronting the gods and upon reconstituting learned that they were done and dealt with, i think she’d be stoked. you mean they’re GONE? it’s OVER? humanity overcame their tyrannical creators at last and this time her personal defeat DIDN’T result in another two hundred million years of agonizing isolation and helpless, furious grief? i think she’d be over the fucking moon.

[alexiethymia]

what is reflected

(A/N: Thought to try my hand at writing Noragami fic, mainly a character study of both Kazuma and Hiyori, slight Yatori and Kazubisha)

Kazuma contemplates his similarities with the half-ayakashi human girl.

He doesn’t know what to make of Iki Hiyori at first.

At first sight, she seems like nothing short of an ordinary middle-schoolgirl. Except for two things that make her anything but. One, she can see them. Two, she’s associated with Yato.

When he first had a proper conversation with her, he categorized her in the neat list of his mind as ‘not an enemy’ because of her connection with his benefactor. Usually he would have left it at that. Instead he tells her things, things that might help Yato because he knows Yato has been suffering blights through his shinki. Later on, he wonders why he did it. It’s not as if a single human girl can do anything to help a god.

He’s proven wrong during Yukine’s ablution.

As the new morning comes, Kazuma finds that his joints are screaming at him and that he’s more tired than he has been in over a decade. He can’t find it in himself to regret it, as he watches this slip of a girl clutch at a shinki (no, merely a boy taken too fast and too soon) and a god, centuries older, but who in that moment looks far too young for the blood on his hands. He wonders, amused, if they’re anchoring her or if she’s anchoring them.

Kazuma has always been a person of facts and logic, a scale of pros and cons, and at the core of his being tying all that he is together, what tips the balance is always what will be the best for Viina. Despite knowing in a distant part of his mind that being here is risky, it is for the exact same reason that he could not ignore the pleas of Iki Hiyori. He, of all people, understands devotion to a god, and the willingness to go through any lengths for them. They would make an interesting household, and with Iki-san and Yukine-kun as his twin pillars of support, Kazuma can now breathe a sigh of relief because it seems like his benefactor will be alright after all.  

It is through the whole mess with Kugaha, his exile and their capture that he somehow ends up being friends with Iki-san. He realizes that the two of them are quite similar, in both temperament, as well as their relationship with their respective gods. She, like him, is also far too perceptive, to his own discomfort, as he somehow ends up confessing the secret he’s held inside for years too numerous to count. Later, she then dismantles his carefully cultivated reality of happiness for Viina and the whole Ha clan. Through her simple and honest words, she makes Kazuma think, really think if he’s strayed from the right path in guiding Viina.

Finally, it dawns on him that what makes Iki-san remarkable has nothing to do with her link to their world, but everything to do with who she is.

In his wildest dreams, in whatever alternate universe, he could have never fathomed this outcome; Viina and Yato coming to a truce-an uneasy one, but a truce all the same-amidst the falling cherry blossoms. And all because a human girl and a newcomer hafuri dared the most powerful war god to make peace, all for the sake of the memory of a boy who loved flowers. That day is an unforgettable one for Kazuma. (It later becomes unforgettable for an entirely different reason. He’s not sure whose face is worse off-his or Iki-san’s).

Through her naiveté and idealism and just pure guts, Iki Hiyori has managed to displace their status quo which he had thought was already set in stone. Perhaps it’s her human nature at work. Gods and Shinki have long lost the ability of being affected by time, but as a Human, her candle burns bright and fast and perhaps it is because her seconds are fleeting that she embraces change. Kazuma wonders if he’s long forgotten the feeling.

Viina and Yato become tentative friends, but not much else changes in their relationship as they’re more liable to kill each other still, when they see each other. He feels a sort of kinship with Iki-san as he holds back Viina’s bloodlust while she tries to do the same on the other side of the ring. Through coaxing words and soft encouragements, she manages to calm Yato down. It reminds Kazuma of a wife supporting her husband. Or perhaps a mother placating a tantrum-throwing child. He still can’t decide which is more appropriate. He sometimes forgets that Iki-san is not Yato’s shinki, even as she is a part of his household. Yukine-kun has grown to become a fine guidepost, but he would be more likely to berate Yato than ‘spoil’ him. And as much as she has a positive effect on Yato, the same can be said for Yukine who thrives under her nurturing and Yato’s clumsy but fierce love.

“Sorry about making a mess again Kazuma-san.” She bows deeply in penitence. “I swear, sometimes, Yato’s just...” What exactly Yato is, Kazuma doesn’t find out, as she trails off in frustration, but the undercurrent of fondness belied in her words cannot be mistaken.

“I can sort of see what you mean when you said he was cool when you met him. I thought he was too at first.” Kazuma wonders at Yato’s would-be reaction to the twin spots of pink on Iki-san’s cheeks. “But now, he’s become so over-the-top. Sometimes I wonder what’s gotten into him.” She shakes her head and Kazuma hums noncommittally.

Surely, Iki-san is feigning obliviousness. She’s a smart and capable girl, while Yato is anything but subtle. He knows that inasmuch as no words have been shared between them, the same cannot be said for their feelings. He can recognize it in her with such painful accuracy that it hurts, precisely because they’re in the exact same situation. Perhaps she has not yet been made aware, or perhaps like him she is just lost. For all of Yato’s flamboyant gestures, how can she, a human, take it at face-value. He understands, as for all of Viina’s affections towards him, he still cannot answer that elusive question; can a god love as a human does? In the end, he and Iki-san are simply mere mortals caught in the orbits of celestial beings.

Yet, even as much as they are likely to be the most level-headed persons in the group and they have both taken it upon themselves to be in charge of Yukine-kun’s education, for all their similarities, there is one glaring difference between the both of them.

She is strong where he is weak.

He realizes it during the war with Heaven as her words yet astound him again. He has always put Viina at the top of everything. Everything he is and does and every meaning of his existence is for her. But at the crux of it, that single-minded devotion which was his truest belief as a hafuri, ended up hurting them both instead. He learns from Iki-san that to have faith in others, much more in oneself did not in any way lessen her belief in her god.

No, he and Iki-san are nothing alike at all.

If anything, it is she and Viina who are cut from the same cloth, with the same iron will forged through strength and tempered with kindness.

If so, that makes it so he has more in common with Yato than he hates to admit. The parallels are not lost on him. It is uncomfortable enough that apparently they commit similar actions such as hoarding doujinshi and photos of the objects of their affections, but to add insult to injury, he also sees himself in the way Yato clings to Iki-san’s words as if they were divine revelations and says her name as if it were a prayer. But he rationalizes; it should be alright for him. Viina is a god after all, it is only proper that she should be worshipped.

Yet even as he is put-together while Yato has only recently escaped the life of a vagrant, even as he hides through his restraint while Yato cloaks the truth in plain sight, for all their differences, perhaps in the end the both of them are just coping with impossible loves. The irony is not lost on him.

He does not dwell on this chain of thoughts for too long lest he blight Viina through even the slightest chance.  As he once again observes how Yato grasps Iki-san towards him, saying through his actions what he can never say in words (lest he becomes an obstacle to her happiness through even the slightest chance), he pities them.

Because this scene, like the cherry blossoms, is only fleeting. Iki-san, as befitting her nature, will eventually grow old and grey. Yato, even as a god, will never be able to grant his own selfish wish. Meanwhile, Kazuma will remain unchanging, always one step behind Viina. Even if everything remained the same for a hundred more years, he is comforted by the fact that he will always be near her, if not with her.

Kazuma as a hafuri, has always had the mindset of looking down on others. In a battle of borders and barriers, where to falter means to die, or worse, to cause harm to his god, he cannot afford to think any other way. And so, towards his benefactor and to his first believer, both of whom he has come to care for as cherished friends, he can only feel pity.

To feel otherwise would be to admit that he envies them instead.