An interesting observation on The Coffin of Andy and Leyley:
Ashley is a Tar Soul and Andrew is a Grime Soul, right. And the demon tells you at one point, upon seeing a police officer's soul and wondering why it's not all evil too, that souls are defined primarily how the person sees themself, not how others see them. Thus, because the officer saw himself as a good person and believed his actions were justified, his soul is still pure.
And it's a pretty clear gesture toward the fact that Ashley, more than just being a bad person, fully believes herself to be a bad person. She is tar, her very essence is something dark and sticky that corrupts all it touches--and she fully accepts and agrees with that. For all of her bluster and ravado, her grandiose presentation of her self-esteem, she really has an incredibly low opinion of herself, at least in a moral sense. She's a lost cause; she believes that she's a lost cause. She acts like it doesn't bother her, because it's the only thing she thinks she can do anymore. She is trapped by the unhealthy coping mechanisms she developed to deal with an exceptionally unhealthy, abusive, and neglectful childhood.
And the demon likes that. The demon can take advantage of that, because that's the kind of person that will collect souls for it without blinking an eye. None of this namby-pamby ethical dilemma bullshit. It doesn't care. It wants souls. It needs a human that doesn't care, either.
But what are we meant to think of Andrew as grime, then? Grime is different from tar. Grime is the stuff that makes other things dirty, tarnishes what was once clean. I think Andrew, at his core, doesn't actually believe himself to be a bad person. He thinks of himself as a good person made bad by outside circumstances. By their parents, by their grandparents, by poverty, by isolation, by bullying, by the shit-fucked society we live in--and most of all, by Leyley. He has done awful, heinous things, and unlike Ashley, who simply brushes these things off, he will go to the ends of the earth to justify them. He's not a bad person. It's not actually his fault. It's never his fault, really. It's all the bullshit that made him this way.
These are both incredibly common worldviews for people caught up in cycles of generational abuse. "There's something fundamentally Wrong with me, so I will become the monster I was always meant to be" vs "none of it's my fault, my abuse made me this way, so all of my actions must be justified as a reaction to that abuse".
And they are both, of course, wrong.
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