#and it had zero emotional impact on salem bc it had nothing whatsoever to do with her actual. deal

[bestworstcase]

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.