Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-33754845-20190919204913/@comment-43757330-20190928195054

So you don't think that her romantic relationship with Ozma, wherein they conceived four children, was genuine love? You don't think that her choosing to let Tyrion off the hook with a slap on the wrist was mercy? You don't think the her sparing Hazel after his failure, or sparing Cinder after her failure, was mercy?

I mean, yeah, she certainly has uses for these people, so killing them would be antithetical to her goals, but that doesn't mean she couldn't torture them a bit. The fact that she lets her subordinates off the hook so easily shows A) a lack of maliciousness, and B) that she, on some level, cares about them. And that's not to say she doesn't have the capacity for it; because she did just that to Lionheart, which shows that she very well could start killing lackeys if she felt like it.

And for the record, you're right about her being a sociopath. She's definitely that. Thing is, so are Cinder and Adam. So that doesn't really differentiate them. What does differentiate them is the fact that Cinder and Adam have not demonstrated even an emulation of mercy or love (unless you count Adam's abusive relationship with Blake as an emulation of love, which I personally don't).

That small fragment of kindness that Salem shows from time to time, even if it is used only for her gains (and let's face it, that's true of most people on the planet anyway), is what makes Salem ever so slightly less evil than them. Again, in my opinion.

I'm not defending Salem, I'm not arguing that she's a good person, I'm just giving a logical analysis of why one degenerate psychopath is slightly less evil than two other degenerate psychopaths.