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bestworstcase · 4 months ago

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no yeah for sure. i know if it were my show i’d be eyeing the state of the fanon like oh boy. – which tbh v9 does feel to me like it came from a place of “christ okay we need to be more clear” – not that v9 is directly about salem, but she’s the storm on the horizon and they’ve gone back to stating the themes out loud in plain language again. jsfkfj

what i always circle back to when i consider this is that the first thing we hear as the story begins is salem extolling human wisdom, passion, ingenuity, resourcefulness… her tone shifts to ominous threat when she turns to address ozma, but the first impression we get of this character – in soliloquy! – is unadulterated praise for humankind intermixed with some sly digs at ozma’s propagandistic control over the narrative.

and i think that’s going to be a load-bearing pillar in the gradual recontextualization of the lost fable. similar to how the lost fable is preceded by a the volume in which raven keeps saying things like "the truth is hard to come by" and "you need to question everything" and "don’t blindly believe everything you’re told."

at the top of the show, we hear straight from salem’s internal monologue – her thoughts – exactly what she thinks of mankind and what are the qualities she values; and then we get three volumes of occasional abstruse hints suggesting that there’s a Great Evil somewhere out there, and we don’t hear that voice again until the end of v3 when she’s gloating over her horrifying victory. and then we meet her and it’s “don’t pick on cinder fall.” and then we have a few volumes building her up as this enigmatic Great Evil who intends to “change” the world in some nebulous way (or see humanity “crumble at her feet,” raven suggests) before the lost fable hits.

and then in the very next episode there’s the villain-shoots-the-messenger bait-and-switch wherein everyone is palpably expecting salem to disembowel someone because the haven operation went poorly, and instead she does an intimidating little song-and-dance punctuated by an unambiguous moment of sadness when her back is turned and the mask slips, followed by bolting on a stoic mask and going anyway moving on, and when she actually gets mad the first thing she does is kick everyone out of the room so no one is endangered while she tries to calm herself down and no one gets hurt when she fails.

and then in the next volume ironwood is like “without humanity, does she still feel fear? does she ever hesitate? 🤔” blissfully oblivious to the audience having seen salem have, like, a literal panic attack when she heard ozpin reincarnated faster than anticipated. lol. there’s been this perpetual push-pull between what salem herself says and does contrasted against what is said about her by other characters, and in the case of the lost fable this happens literally in back-to-back episodes.

the fandom is pretty dedicated to the calcified fanon built off the statements about her (and supplemented by wildly off base readings of things salem does/says, like the nonsense “salem calls it a semblance because she disdains it as a PATHETIC IMITATION OF REAL MAGIC” genre of takes where insane double standards are invented out of whole cloth) – but i think this is probably less true of general audiences / casual fans. for every stroke the story makes to create this impression of salem as a complete monster, there’s something salem herself does or says that doesn’t fit, and while general audiences are by definition casuals just enjoying the ride, the fact that we have this constant back-and-forth means that pulling back the curtain is less “shocking twist!” and more of a tipping point that should, ideally, bring all these discrete bits and pieces of things salem’s done or said suddenly rushing to the surface like “ooh! i get it!”

<- in some ways i think fandom can be a lot harder of a sell. dedicated fans get very attached to their theories and headcanons in a way that casual enjoyers really don’t. and while the fandom martyr complex with regard to the hatedom would have everybody believe that rwby is the Most Bullied Show In The World, Maligned By Everybody Except Us, The True Fans, rwby is extremely popular and the numbers do not lie. there is a very large general audience of casual enjoyers who are just vibing along having a good time. and those people will be completely fine.

i think most of the fandom that isn’t dedicated salem haters will also be fine – there has been a very noticeable increase in the amount of ‘hey salem had a point’ and ‘hey maybe salem isn’t a complete monster with zero sympathetic qualities’ since i entered the fandom after v8, and especially as the fandom has spent a year now digesting v9. which suggests to me that while the entrenched fanon has an annoying amount of inertia, most folks in the fandom are very persuadable, and as the narrative transitions to putting more and more weight on the ‘things salem says/does’ end of the scale, more and more fans are going to start going “wait… this sounds crazy but hear me out… what if… salem actually isn’t one hundred percent bad???”

(<- already seen a handful of theories in this general vein being floated. for the writers it really is just about continuing to build the momentum until the narrative reaches its tipping point)

for what it’s worth i knew nothing about salem going in other than 1. what she looked like and 2. “you would love her” and for the first five volumes i was very game to believe the “salem is some sort of incredibly ancient and cunning grimm who wants to burn the world down and idk build a dark empire from the ashes, bog standard evil witch behavior” and then i reached 6.2 and sighed internally like “not another fucking woman scorned” and then i watched 6.3 and immediately went “holy shit. so she was right and the resolution is we team up with her to take down the nakedly genocidal gods who’ve been torturing her for eons. got it.” and then by 6.4 i was mentally throwing a party.

which. granted, rwby happens to cater very closely to my exact personal tastes and i think this does predispose me to pick up what it’s putting down with regard to salem – but i do think it speaks to the narrative finesse that the lost fable is meticulously crafted to deliver an impression of salem being the ontological evil and yet is also the episode that makes anyone who’s really tuned in to the story’s themes and/or already inclined to say sure when asked to sympathize with salem have that realization that she was right. it’s holographic – what you see depends on which layer of the story you’re paying attention to – and rwby has consistently been pretty good at turning the audience around like “hey, remember that? look again, here’s something you missed before” in a way that feels exciting and satisfying. (& to general audiences in particular i think that’s probably a big part of the draw – people like stories that surprise them! and rwby delivers that really well.)

i’ve also been pondering a bit in light of the viz acquisition and the much bigger reach rwby now potentially has – if the RT shutdown drama and triumphant return to this larger and more stable platform leads to a large influx of new viewers, which is absolutely within the realm of possibility!, i think the overall slant of the fandom conversation about salem might change very fast – simply because slamming down v1-9 all in one go makes these patterns so much easier to see than getting one new episode per week with long breaks between each volume for as long as a decade depending on how long you’ve stuck with the show. i still vividly remember blazing through v1-8 and then glancing at the fandom and going “hey hi what the fuck are you talking about” every single time i saw a post about salem. gbrdshxjk it’s just a phenomenally different experience!

so who knows. i’m sure there will be some people squalling and moaning because there always are but imo rwby has been setting itself up beautifully to stick the landing since the very beginning. zooming in on that one line it does feel very “holy fuck how do you sell that she meant anything else but what it sounds like” but taken into perspective with everything else… i think it’s more like a fulcrum than a needle to thread. everything else balances on that one point and you just slowly put a little more weight and then a little bit more onto the right side.

if i had to compare it directly to some other narrative arc it’d be ruby’s big breakdown – she’s the shining optimistic character who inspires everyone else and never gives up hope! and we add a tiny bit of weight here, a sliver of weight there, she keeps the mask screwed in place unflaggingly for six volumes before we start to see glimmers of uncertainty leaking through – and then salem brings her to her knees and makes her eyes go haywire with one sentence, and it’s like okay ruby’s feeling the pressure, but look she’s bouncing back! she almost gets cinder! she comes up with a brilliant plan to get amity up! the cracks start to show again and she figures out how to save penny. sure things are bad and she’s feeling the strain, but she’s ruby, she’s gonna pick herself up like always – and then v9 hits like a freight train. there were plenty of folks prior to v9 saying “ruby is going to fucking shatter, this is it” but there were just as many fans during v9 going “holy fuck ruby isn’t okay!?” followed by looking back and going “oh. she’s not been okay for a long time” – same narrative technique.

Your post re: Salem's attitudes towards magic got me thinking about "Why spend our lives trying to redeem these humans, when we can replace them with what they could never be?" from Lost Fable again. I'm finding it a little difficult to blame people for believing she thinks the current crop of humans are just inferior when the only subject on offer in that sentence is "these humans." Of course when you stop to think for two seconds why Salem says or does anything she does it makes total sense that her hangup is with the gods, but that just makes me wonder even more why write the script like that? How unreliable is the direct dialogue in Jinn's vision supposed to be taken vs. her narration? (The simplest read of that episode seems to be of course the narration is biased per the question asked, but otherwise it's a frame narrative for the flashbacks which may or may not be more objective portrayals of events. The fact that the characters are also physically witnessing these scenes means they can't be 100% objective I think, but still leaves open the question of what's skewed and by how much.)

Unreliable or not, it's just a surprisingly absolute statement to put in her mouth considering how often we're invited to question her motivations everywhere else.

i do take the dialogue in the lost fable to be accurate to what the characters said, perhaps with some smudginess if what we’re seeing is ozpin’s memories exactly – in which case the dialogue in scenes he wasn’t present for is suspect because it’s what he imagines was said based on what salem told him, and the rest is probably closely accurate paraphrase because no one could be expected to remember the exact wording of conversations from several thousand years ago! but even then i would expect the parts he was there for to be reliable enough.

so much rides on the lost fable and specifically this one line that it would be beyond cheap for the resolution to be “she didn’t say that at all, actually.”

the first time i watched the lost fable, i did intuitively interpret that line as salem alluding to the gods – so i think there’s probably some degree of her statement reading as ambiguous or not ambiguous depending upon how one habitually uses the word “redeem.” specifically: how precise one is about the verb requiring an indirect object.

to ‘redeem’ something means to take some action to settle a debt, or redress a wrongdoing, which—inherently—implies the presence of a creditor or wronged party. in some contexts, the implied creditor is only an abstraction (think “the city’s robust public transportation is its only redeeming quality”—redemption is used here in a figurative sense to mean that the one making the statement dislikes everything but the city’s transit system); and in casual speech it’s fairly common to leave off the indirect object if it isn’t necessary to identify the wronged party (think the common phrasing of “so-and-so redeems themself”).

but while it isn’t incorrect to drop the indirect object, necessarily, there always is an indirect object; it isn’t possible to redeem a debt or a wrong that doesn’t exist, nor to have a debt without a creditor or a wrong without someone wronged. (as an aside, this is why redemption arc discourse tends to always be arguments about forgiveness—redemption does, inherently, definitionally, necessitate forgiveness—and this is also why i’m pedantic about differentiating ‘redemption arc’ vs ‘atonement arc’ vs ‘villain-to-hero arc’ and dislike the popular usage of redemption arc as an umbrella term.)

anyway, in simpler terms: when salem says “redeem these humans,” the apparent meaning of the next clause depends on whether or not one is predisposed to hear that phrase as a clipping and mentally append the implied indirect object, which makes her complete statement “why spend our lives trying to redeem these humans [from my sin in the eyes of the gods] when we could replace them with what they could never be?”

<- and then the question becomes, which “them” is she referring to? “these humans” or the gods who will judge whether redemption has been earned? her elision of the gods is entirely within the realm of common vernacular, and salem is a character who regularly circumlocutes (and earlier in the lost fable itself we have ozma’s quizzical “what are you saying?” signaling that salem’s speech is cryptic or confusing – because ozma doesn’t understand her; this is an intended trait versus the writers fumbling), and she says this in a moment of emotional distress (which she mostly bottles up, but while ozma is explaining all of this to her she’s leaning on the desk with her arms folded, listening intently – this is the same posture she has when she’s huddled in the shadows making herself miserable with conjurations of her children in 8.4).

so there’s quite a bit of weight here on the side of, “salem just discovered that her partner has been manipulating her into serving the gods she abhors throughout their entire relationship, she’s deeply shaken, she isn’t awesome at clearly articulating her thoughts in general; is it really surprising that she might misspeak to the tune of saying ‘them’ in reference to an (elided but necessarily implied) antecedent of ‘the gods’”

it (clearly) isn’t going to occur to most viewers as an obvious interpretation of the line, but i think it’s well within the bounds of what is reasonable for the narrative to later reveal that salem really meant this, particularly given how deliberate and how clear the storytelling themes are. definitely a risk, because some section of the audience is undoubtedly going to feel lied to and cry retcon, but rwby takes creative risks all the time.

and then there’s the ‘fairyales of remnant’ piece of it – the anthology is very much in dialogue with the lost fable across the board (on this see also ‘the two brothers’ presaging the thematic treatment of the brothers in v9, and ozpin’s paired commentaries on ‘the infinite man’ + ‘the girl in the tower’ being discussions of truth, propaganda, and forgiveness). so why does ‘the shallow sea’ begin like this:

Long ago, before the fish had scales, before the birds had feathers, and before the turtles had shells, when our god still walked and crawled and slithered the earth, there were only Humans and animals. (And Grimm. There have always been Grimm. There will always be Grimm. But those creatures don’t figure in this story, so just put them out of your mind, if you can.)

and end like this, after a story about the god of animals leading their chosen people to transform by submersion in magical waters, to the horror of those humans who refuse to change:

From that moment on, there have been animals, Humans, and Faunus. And the descendants of the Humans who turned away from our god’s great gift have always carried envy in their hearts. To this day, they resent us for reminding them of what they are not and what they never can be.

humans and animals (and grimm) -> animals and humans and faunus, and the last line – the mythic explanation for human hatred of faunus – is a nearly direct repetition of the last thing salem says in the lost fable?

now obviously not everyone can be expected to read ancillary material like the fairytale anthology, and that’s why the shell game with the implied indirect object matters; but it is interesting that ‘the shallow sea’ is stated to be a very old oral tradition (one which “contains deep truths,” no less) and that it repeats that line in a context that is quite plainly not about genocide – but rather cultural pride in the face of intense, often violent, persecution.

this story also 1. explicitly belongs to a closed tradition, and 2. is (obviously) one ozma knows despite there being no indication that he’s ever reincarnated as a faunus. which – together with the story’s age – adds up to at least the implication that it is possible he heard this story from salem, because the reasons she might be conversant in ancient faunus oral traditions are. well. obvious.

…and if that’s so, then ‘the shallow sea’ as written in the fairytale anthology completely recontextualizes salem’s last statement in the lost fable as salem quoting from a faunus creation myth both she and ozma knew in order to express her rejection of the brothers’ mandate, which would 1. neatly explain why ozma seems to have understood exactly what she meant even though none of the lost fable witnesses picked up on it, and 2. provide an elegant and very simple opportunity to ease the general audience into this revelation by having a character in vacuo retell this myth, using that same closing line. you don’t even need to mention salem directly – the turn of phrase is memorable enough that a lot of viewers will go “…why does that sound eerily familiar” and that plants a seed for later. (or if you’re going for more of a sudden record scratch moment, salem is the one declaiming.)

from a character standpoint, it also makes a lot of sense for salem to respond to ozma in this way – his liking for stories is, one presumes, not a new thing that developed after the ozlem kingdom’s collapsed, and he also clearly isn’t just cynically using fairytales to deceive and manipulate – else he wouldn’t have apologized to the kids by referencing ‘the girl who fell through the world’ and comparing himself to alyx. stories are just important to him and part of how he communicates.

so if salem heard everything his god told him and then said “no, none of that matters, why spend our lives trying to redeem these humans when we could [paraphrases the conclusion of a story where the hateful envious people who refuse to change are simply sent home and not allowed to live in the harsh but free new world with the people who chose to embrace change]” – she made an effort to say what she meant in his language, and what she meant was either 1. figuratively associating the brothers with the envious humans who were sent home and “these humans” with the faunus who were now free to determine their own fates, or 2. “okay yeah these humans aren’t great, have you considered more faunus as a solution” (<- this would be extremely funny if it turns out the shallow sea is a more literal story than i think it is, but i think it’s much less likely).

more broadly, to the question of why the line is written that way – i can only speculate based on what i would be thinking in the writer’s shoes, and the overall structure of the narrative around salem – but i imagine the absoluteness is sort of the point. it’s meant to be a really shocking and frightening thing to hear coming out of her mouth, while also being, if you pause to think very precisely about what she said, quite plausible as a verbal stumble – the alternative antecedent of “the gods” for “them” is implied and eliding the indirect object of “redeem” is common vernacular – and then there’s this other possibility hinted in an ancillary text that she might have actually been quoting a story as a verbal shorthand both she and ozma understood.

there’s a narrative expectation that the viewer will be right there with the kids making the same snap judgment about what salem meant – because i think the kids all absolutely did take this at face value as a statement of genocidal intent. the story itself is structured like a nesting doll such that each new revelation appears at a glance to be the whole story, but isn’t and in fact has large gaps and details that don’t add up which become glaringly obvious as soon as you reach the next layer and look back, but if you’re paying careful attention as you go it’s also quite possible to piece together the missing pieces.

delivering information this way trains the audience (…mostly) to expect that the information we’re given is incomplete and maybe not wholly accurate. the advantage here is that even if the vast majority of the audience is completely blindsided by a specific reveal, for most viewers that’s going to feel really exciting – this happened in v9 with the lore reveals about the brothers, massive overnight reversal in the mainstream fandom views of darkness with the general mood being that it was cool – as opposed to feeling tricked or lied to by a “retcon.”

and that builds up a certain kind of trust, that the story is a puzzle but it isn’t going to cheat. it’s also a bit of a challenge or an invitation for the audience to try to figure out what’s coming, like a mystery.

with salem, i’d bet that one line in the lost fable is supposed to seem weirder and weirder the more you think about it, because… why doesn’t it track with anything she says before that point in the lost fable? why does the story begin with salem waxing poetic about humanity’s virtues? why does the narrative make such a big deal out of nobody knowing what salem wants AFTER the main characters witnessed a seemingly open-and-shut declaration of her “true” intention?

at the same time, the amount of explanation required to argue for an alternate interpretation – even if it’s really not complex or a reach – compared to the ease of just taking the statement exactly at face value, in and of itself is both a misdirection (most of the audience will take the path of least resistance, and hopefully enjoy the journey the story takes them on while leading them to the eventual right answer) and sort of the thesis with respect to the storytelling themes. salem thinks coolsville sucks!

but i am also very willing to consider (because of my own intuitive reaction to the line) that the writers perhaps did not mean for it to seem quite as unambiguous as the general audience and most of the fandom ended up taking it, because if you’re spending a lot of time immersed in a specifically theological context regarding redemption (which the writers probably would’ve been, given the importance of the religious narrative in the lost fable and in relation to this line in particular) – and if you’re also in the habit of being very precise and careful about how you phrase things (which is true of how rwby is written in general) – and if you’re writing what might be the most critical episode in a complicated puzzle box story, whose fulcrum is a red herring that is also meant to provide a clue to anyone who thinks to look at it more closely and with an open mind — then yeah i can see a scenario where the writers may have felt that the specific wording of salem’s statement was more ambiguous than it actually is. in which case the echo in ‘the shallow sea’ might have been a bit of an effort to correct course by giving the subset of fans invested enough to read the fairytales (<- the cohort most likely to be keen to unravel the puzzle) an additional hint. who knows.

#constant writer brain 🤝#having done this exact sort of reveal before myself it really is a matter of accumulation more than anything else #like plinking little weights into a scale #trying to deliver a huge shocking reversal all at once is probably never going to work #but slicing it into tiny bits and doing it piecemeal until giving one last moderate push? easy. tricky to plan but #as a technique it’s pretty simple #if they go the ‘someone recounts the myth’ route i don’t actually think that will be THE reveal #but rather the hook to bring the lost fable to the audiences attention again #hey why does that turn of phrase sound familiar…? didn’t salem say something like that…?#maybe get people to rewatch the lost fable. which will hit different after what we learned in v9 about the brothers #do that in combination with developing the paradigm shift between salem + cinder #and revealing whatever exactly is going on with summer #in tandem with the v10 plot of the kids dealing with the crown and having to resolve that without vacuo exploding in civil war #all of this in combination primes the audience for the big reveal #sidebar i’m really unconvinced that *ozma* misunderstood her #which is a subject for another post but #i think it would be sort of interesting if part of this reveal came From Ozma #like i doubt he’s been set on stopping salem all this time over . a simple misunderstanding.#versus her being an apostate who flatly rejected any option other than ‘fuck them. we dont need them’#and then he hid in oscar’s subconscious for months while the kids’ drew their own conclusions. but he climbs back up feeling –#if until the end is any indication – a minuscule glimmer of distant hope that salem is still. within reach #and then made this promise to be more honest. does that include being more honest about salem?#(esp with the camera work in v8 so heavily suggesting that oz is deliberately/knowing lying to hazel about salem’s goal.#those tattletale dutch angles…)

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