@tempoaryblogformightyjensblog there is a species that is technically immortal yes! but i don’t really see any cues from that in salem’s design nor is it ever referenced in the show so the theme feels pretty muddled. and even then jellyfish don’t seem to have any outside significance thematically so it’s pretty much a moot point for her as a character- we already know she’s immortal, her being a jellyfish doesn’t tell us anything new about that.
i'm genuinely curious as to why you don't like salem's original design,,, it's one of my personal favorites in the show. i'm also not really sure why you think she needs to look younger to have a narrative about eternal life, can you elaborate on that??
putting this under a cut because it once again got insanely long. i am so sorry. there is just sooo much i had to say
the thing about salem is that her design of her younger self in volume 6 SLAPS. it really gets across that sense of spoiled, naive elegance- down to the way they animated her moving, she looks like she's dressing up as a mature, experienced adult. but she isn't one! and i think you still get this same sense in some of her behavior even now that she's much older. she's not interested in teamwork despite her claiming so, she wants yesmen who will see her as all-knowing and never question her. by all means, she and ozma are now the closest thing remnant has to real, living gods, and i think while both of them have grown arrogant because of this, salem has bought into it much more, entirely unwilling to put herself on the same level as the people she associates with for even a second.
a good character design will reflect these core traits and ideals of a character, and salem's flashback design does this. her current design (both v7-present and the one before) tells me nothing about her except that She Is Evil. both of salem's more modern designs feel like a first pass at creating a better one.
first off, i do actually like the bones on her arms. i love the idea of incorporating features of the grimm into her design, but the fact that this is the ONLY place this is done makes it feel clunky, over-complicated, and unnecessary. the amount of detail on her upper half in general makes her feel top heavy and graceless, because it isn't matched in the rest of her outfit. a lot of her design points look like they're meant to flow down in an interesting, sort of liquid way, and having something as an interruption to that would be good! - but again, the bones don't do that for me. had they given her an additional mimicry of grimm-like ribs on the dress, i think it would have added some further stability and cohesion without continuing to overcomplicate her top half.
the silhouette her dress gives her is very fun to me, very elegant evil queen, but the top half is again too complicated and they must have been unconfident in that silhouette, because she is, for some reason, wearing that cape.
even from a side angle, this cape looks super weird and clashes with the long train of her dress. if this cape was also long enough to flow, it would be a lot less of a problem to me, but because it doesn't it ends up looking like a cape they added just because Evil People Love Capes! if they were worried about her ability to contrast with her surroundings, they should have invested more time into making her surroundings contrast her. i mean, oscar in this same scene is wearing red himself, but since his outfit is primarily green, he appears as the primary focus of the entire image. and he is- but so is salem, and she feels like an afterthought. your eyes are drawn to him, away from her. (also the entire set of the whale is awful, don't get me started on this damn whale LMAO)
back to her long train, though, I love it. the way it hides her legs to give her movement an unnatural glide, the way it gives her the appearance of melting into the ground- hello, WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST! it's EXCELLENT.
but it's rarely onscreen. it's once again distracted from by her cluttered top half, back to that- what the hell is with this whole thing?
the slightly open neck? it being held together by this weird ugly clasp because if every girl in this show doesn't have a boob window the whole staff will die, i guess? these random sleeve hole that exist to show off her weird spider veins? i get that it's cartoon fashion and not meant to be realistic, but it's so ugly. the boob window on her first dress actually did something for the design- it matches and lines up with the rounded diamond shape on her forehead. but this one feels both gratuitous and useless.
this is more of a problem with rwby's general design and is not in the least exclusive to salem, but i feel the need to point out that her eyes being such a dark red against black scleras makes it very difficult to read her expression if the shot isn't right in her face, her eyes aren't angled a specific way, and the lighting is bright enough that there's heavy contrast on her features.
vs
I could definitely go on forever about every tiny detail i hate about this design, but i want to end this here:
why, and how, is salem meant to look like a jellyfish?
it's pretty clear, to me, that her and the seer grimm are meant to have similar design cues- even moreso for her v7 design. the hairstyle being one large bun with the pieces that jut out and match the bones on the seer. her pieces of hair that flow downwards and the red lines on her v7 dress are clearly meant to be jellyfish tentacles, it's a cool idea- but why? why is salem represented by jellyfish? what does this tell us, in-series, about her? i don't think i can recall a single mention of jellyfish in the entire series. are we meant to go research jellyfish facts on our own and draw a conclusion for ourselves? jellyfish don't really have easily recognizable narrative meanings in media. it's not really symbolism if it doesn't exist anywhere else in the show.
salem looks more like a spider than a jellyfish. the legs, the thorax, her narrative role. she manipulates people into trusting her, and then ensnares and destroys them. it's a much stronger theme, if a little overdone.
to close i'll answer the last question you had about making her look younger because tbh i completely forgot that was part of this- salem was given eternal life at a very young age. i think because of this, it makes no sense for her design to age her, and it does rub me the wrong way a little bit that the only older women who are allowed to actually LOOK older than 20 are maria, a character who keeps me up at night because she is so useless, that old lady in the mech who hated maria whose name i literally don't know, who, again, WHY IS SHE HERE? and salem, the MAIN SERIES ANTAGONIST, granted eternal life when she still looked like this.
it plays better with her theme of being a spoiled, closed-off young girl acting like a mature woman despite not being one for her to look younger, and it's already been touched on that salem's eternal life causes her suffering and there's a possibility her real motive for getting the relics is to finally be allowed to die. having something in there about her never being allowed to age despite having been a mother, her entire family growing while she stays eternally young, beautiful, and utterly trapped, could do her character a lot of good.
ngl i hate salems design. i think it sucks. and i think her being a jellyfish makes no sense. i redesigned her as a secretary bird instead. way too many notes under the cut.
first off i made her look generally younger bc i think there's a missed opportunity for a stronger narrative on how eternal "youth"/life causes her immense suffering. there's this thing about her assembling the relics because she wants to die that gets touched on once but i think it needs more there. i would like a scene where salem laments to herself her inability to age.
i will be real with you, my original idea was just that i was spitballing birds the main cast would be, but i grew very attached to the idea of salem as a secretary bird. big, elegant birds of prey who crush snakes under their talons, their color scheme- it just felt very fitting, and like the exact kind of visual cues i would rather see in her than this confusing ugly jellyfish with spider veins thing they gave her.
i wanted her hair to more closely resemble her human design- but i really liked the idea of those weird spider-y hairpieces she has, and i think the feathers here give her a sense of confidence and self-assurance- but they also make her look a little standoffish. they're emotive. i tried to keep every other element pointing downward both for cohesion and to give her that sense of sleek, collected grace she puts out- that bit at the bottom of her dress is supposed to be representative of her weird grimm-making slime- which i like to think she'd sort of just slide around with for an even more off-putting inhuman vibe.
in my mind she would have to artificially expand the wings in order to use them, which could also be her answer to how birds like to fluff up their feathers to seem larger and more threatening.
lore-wise, i think her being a bird could also be used to explain why it's seen as ~such a curse~ that the branwen twins can turn into birds; all of the old world's "magic" has been converted to fairytale and/or mainstream superstition, but people did used to know about salem, so it could have remained in one way or another in the public mind that birds are universally bad omens and messengers of evil- think of it how people in the modern day think rats are all disease riddled, mouth-foaming and malicious animals, even though they are literally just rodents who happened to get the blame for disease outbreak pinned on them.
the branwen clan choosing to associate itself with birds, but under a name that literally means "blessed raven" could be a very interesting look into their lore in a world where birds are considered evil animals. (plus, a whole extra layer to raven and qrow's general deal- qrow is cursed by name, semblance, and his ability to become a crow, but raven by branwen clan standards is universally blessed. could be something neat there.)
are ... are there animals in rwby ? other than zwei ?? the grimm look like animals but are monsters . have we ever seen a normal animal that wasn’t zwei .
they have fish . and we see a dog . and MAYBE birds assuming every bird we’ve seen hasn’t been qrow or raven . but are there like ... zoos ? are most things just near extinct ?? do they have animal preservation programs ? do the grimm attack animals or is it just humans ??? are there cats in rwby and if not how did anyone know blake was a cat faunus . has any of the main cast SEEN a cat
There are animals! That’s why people can identify faunus as “scorpion faunus” or “monkey faunus”, etc. We see stuffed animals, characters named after animals (Fox, Raven, Fennec, etc.) and the books mention all sorts of animals existing in Remnant (specifically Fairytales of Remnant, and Before the Dawn, which mentions some of the animals native to Vacuo).
good to know ! i haven't read fairytales or before the dawn so i can't speak for those but i just think it's kinda funny that zwei is the only normal living animal we see in the main series . i'm just really curious if not seeing a lot of actual living animals is a commonplace thing in remnant or if we just haven't seen them because it hasn't been relevant yet . i do plan to read the novels at some point so i'm excited to see what they have to say on this : ]
are ... are there animals in rwby ? other than zwei ?? the grimm look like animals but are monsters . have we ever seen a normal animal that wasn’t zwei .
they have fish . and we see a dog . and MAYBE birds assuming every bird we’ve seen hasn’t been qrow or raven . but are there like ... zoos ? are most things just near extinct ?? do they have animal preservation programs ? do the grimm attack animals or is it just humans ??? are there cats in rwby and if not how did anyone know blake was a cat faunus . has any of the main cast SEEN a cat
are ... are there animals in rwby ? other than zwei ?? the grimm look like animals but are monsters . have we ever seen a normal animal that wasn’t zwei .
perhaps it's my own love of visual storytelling that is making me think this deep into it but expanding on my idea of ruby with the qrow fringe , i think having him cut it like that for her is cute but her cutting it like that herself / asking for someone to cut it like that could also be a good narrative point about her idolizing and therefore mimicking him once she runs away . i think ruby sees qrow not as the "loose cannon" kind of character he's meant to be to us the viewer , but rather as a source of stability and a trustworthy adult presence with a lot of other similarities to her - it's established that after summer's death , taiyang "shut down" and qrow came in to pick up the pieces and help tai raise ruby and yang and i think that where yang feels conflicted about raven , ruby has no real room for conflict in how she sees her family because that challenges her idea of the adults in her life as cool , dependable heroes who save the day , and it feels like the natural conclusion during an arc where she's trying to fit herself into a leadership role with no guidance whatsoever that she'd mimick the only person who she had never personally witnessed shut down or fail to the degree the rest of strq did .
thus : ruby cuts her hair to be like qrow's during v4-v6 as a reflection of her idolizing him and using him as a template for what being a good leader looks like , and then gets her new haircut in v7 that looks a lot more like hers to establish she's building a stronger sense of personal identity and has come to understand that qrow is just as flawed as her .
i love ruby's v7 hair style but i keep thinking about what itd look like if they'd changed it (more) for v4-v6 . options include "her teammates go at it with safety scissors," "qrow does it for her but he's only ever cut his own hair so she ends up with the same weird bird fringe at the back," and "they go get it professionally done and someone finally gives her a hair tie." needless to say the second option was my favorite
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