#TL;DR salem’s magic is blasphemous apostate magic in this essay i will—

[bestworstcase]

doesn't salem still have ancient magic? the magic she used to torture oscar looked just like the old stuff she had when we first saw her in the lost fable.

strictly speaking:

no it looks very different now. but i’m dubious as to whether the V6 vs V8 magic fx is really meaningful because oz/oscar also have the new fx in V8 (albeit still green rather than salem’s multicolor). it strikes me as a stylistic rather than narrative change.

that said,

salem has magic.

that is not necessarily the same as salem still having the god-given magic ancient humans were blessed with; the pools of life and grimm were wellsprings of divine power and both of them changed her quite profoundly. the maidens are living proof that humans can wield magic without the divine gifts under certain anomalous circumstances.

(“anomalous” here meaning “not intended or foreseen by the brothers,” a category which certainly includes salem remaking herself in the pool of grimm.)

it’s also a fact that salem was empowered by her transformations in both pools; one made her immortal, the other made her grimm, she’s inarguably walking around with quite a lot of magic that ancient humans did not have. the sigil she uses to spawn her shadow hands is a grimm thing—the geist in V4 uses the same one to regenerate its own arm. in V8 she cracks solitas in half to draw up a river of grimm liquid overnight with zero apparent effort. during her assault on atlas she spawns wave after wave of grimm, hundreds at a time, seconds apart, for hours without slowing down. she designed a bespoke teleconferencing grimm that is also a security alarm system and which she can use in a pinch to create sendings of herself.

the lady usurped a god.

so the question is: does she still have the divine gifts that gave ancient humans their magic, or is all of the magic she wields now sourced from the pools?

magic is magic is magic—the practical difference between dust-magic and maiden-magic is scale and the line between aura, dust, semblance, and magic is often somewhat blurry (and of course cinder, salem’s protégée, uses her magic seamlessly as an extension of her semblance).

but not all magic is the same magic—the source is meaningful both functionally and narratively.

here i have to put on my contrarian cap and add that the widespread idea that salem holds modern humans in disdain and considers them to be not really human because they lack magic is, er, not particularly well supported by the text. and by that i mean salem explicitly regards modern humans as strong, brave, resourceful, passionate, and ingenious; derides ozpin’s self-defeating secrecy and refusal to trust (“your faith in mankind was not misplaced; when banded together, unified by a common enemy, they are a noticeable threat” <- she is mocking him for not doing that); and spends like four volumes all but begging cinder to stop obsessing over raw power. and she, explicitly, believes that humans are better off without the “old gods.”

this is a woman who fomented a rebellion against the brothers because she realized they were tyrannical monsters; the notion that she judges human worth solely on the basis of divine blessing is flatly absurd.

the point being that narratively, thematically, salem’s magic not being sourced from the brothers fits her character like a glove. that is what her rebellion was about.

and this is where i think the magic fx may actually be meaningful: at the beginning of TLF, when jinn sets the scene (“she lived in a time when kings and their kingdoms were plentiful, when men and women were capable of greatness, and magic was a gift from the gods that all could wield.”), we see salem do this:

six small lights, four large orbs. later in the episode, the black-violet and white-gold orbs reappear as representations of the brother gods; thus destruction/creation, which perhaps makes the green and orange orbs representations of knowledge and choice.

which is to say, i think those four larger orbs represent the divine gifts. that’s where her magic comes from.

then, near the end of the episode, the eldest daughter does this:

the six smaller lights are the same, but she doesn’t have the four larger orbs. jinn describes it as a miracle (<- implying ozlem had serious reason to think their children WOULDN’T inherit magic), salem is surprised but pleased, and ozma is horrified.

this section of TLF is, fundamentally, about the unreconcilable difference between salem’s view of the gods as monstrous tyrants and ozma’s unbroken faith in the god of light. look at the way his expression changes between “[we can] create the paradise” and “the old gods could not”:

the instant salem makes it clear that she’s envisioning a world without the brothers as “paradise,” he recoils. later his objection to their war of conquest is not “this is wrong,” but rather “this isn’t what he asked of me.” their disagreement isn’t moral; it’s religious.

so why—in the moment when ozma at last reveals his religious motivations to her—does ozma react like this to the sight of his daughter’s magic?

and why was it miraculous for a child of two magical parents, both of them hailing from a time when everyone could do magic, to be capable of magic herself?

the answer that makes the most sense to me, for both questions, is that the brothers stripped salem of their blessings—took her magic away—and then she effectively stole it back when she remade herself in the pool of grimm. salem’s magic would thus be more akin to modern human semblances than to ancient magic by virtue of not being a god-given gift; that’s a plausible reason for ozlem to believe their children wouldn’t or couldn’t inherit any magic, and naturally ozma would be disturbed by the revelation that what salem wants—a world where the brothers are not merely absent but actively unwanted and unneeded—is truly possible.

#TL;DR salem’s magic is blasphemous apostate magic in this essay i will—