Problematic because: "Her backstory is genuinely miserable - widowed, poor, untrained, stuck working at Crotus Prenn Asylum because she has no other option, then left there for decades watching and experiencing awful things until she breaks. The issue is what that breaking turns into. She starts thinking of murder as “purification,” and one September morning over fifty patients and four staff are found dead while Sally sits there rocking in the corner. These are asylum patients, so she isn’t killing powerful people who hurt her, she’s killing vulnerable people under her care because she’s convinced herself it’s mercy or cleansing. The Tome material ties her collapse to the Broken Woman’s eugenic “remove the weak” worldview, which Sally resists at first but eventually absorbs. So there’s sympathy there, because Sally is also a victim of grief, poverty, institutional horror, and whatever the Entity later does to her, but the end result is still a nurse murdering patients and then continuing that in the Fog."
Propaganda: 1. "Sally is one of the better DbD killers for me because her story is sad without making her innocent. She didn’t start as a monster, she was a desperate widow who took the only work she could get, then spent years in a place that should have been caring for people and clearly wasn’t. She thinks she’s helping, she thinks she’s ending suffering. She doesn’t need to hate her victims to kill them, she can pity them and still be dangerous."
2. "Her lore is genuinely grim, and I think she’s one of those killers where the sympathy makes her worse rather than softer. With Trapper, you can go, okay, brainwashed mine heir. With Wraith, you can go, okay, exploited worker who snapped. Sally is different because her whole thing is care gone completely wrong. She was supposed to be a nurse. Even if Crotus Prenn was awful, even if the staff and systems around her were awful, the people she killed were still patients. They were already powerless. And that’s why she works as a killer. She isn’t just scary because she teleports through walls and screeches at you, she’s scary because she has that warped “this is for your own good” thing. The way she closes survivors’ eyes in her mori has always stuck with me for that reason."
Problematic because: "In a world of powerful and hungry gods, she worships an illegal river-god and for decades did human sacrifices to him. Was even known as the “attack dog of the faith” for her willingness to use violence to defend her people’s secrecy. Also lured people into being sacrificed A Lot."
Propaganda: "She is the character EVER. Worships a god she resents, who she at first clings to because what does she have left and is angry at for the way he took her family as they sacrificed themselves to him. Breaks from her religion and struggles to be free of her god despite his obsession with her. Is actually the favorite of two different gods and this is not a good thing. So so so tired and keeps powering on anyway because what else is she going to do? She’s not going to just die. Tries to do her best, protect the living and bury the dead, while grappling with her regrets and how tempting it is to solve problems with violence even though she really does not want to anymore. She’s impatient, she’s tired, she’s proud, she’s snarky, she carjacks a woman and kidnaps her and eventually becomes her friend and ally in her goal to make a world without sacrifices. It’s not like Carpenter believes it’ll WORK but she appreciates the attempt. And she just goes on living. She’s even aromantic."