The entire “Salvos” series looks like a collection of post-modernist literary tropes, in a sense that everything is inverted. The protagonist is a Demon, the main antagonists resemble God and Church. Male characters look like they can’t tie their shoelaces without a “strong independent woman” showing them the way. The Hero is a confused, cowardly stereotype of a gen-z American college student whose girlfriend died in an accident doing something heroic and then he got depressed and wasted his life away, after which he got whisked into the Nexeus to fill the role of a Hero. People who are heroically trying to do “the right thing” invariably cause a mess and get themselves in a situation they shouldn’t have been in. It all looks like some kind of a literary form the author seems to be compelled to use, probably because he thinks his audience won’t buy it if it isn’t “edgy” enough, but the problem is, this form is so overused, it doesn’t feel edgy. It feels like a collection of foolish prejudice shared by children who haven’t read a single book that isn’t manga or something of that sort. For instance, the trope about the Christians and the Church as the nefarious bad guys pretending to be good originates from the propaganda that was spread by the Tokugawa shogunate since 1614, in a great persecution of the Catholic Church in Japan. Essentially, it’s propaganda that was spread by the actual villains, and it became part of the popular culture in Japan, and as such became a trope in anime and manga.

Also, the trope of casting the protagonists and strong characters as female is probably seen as sexy in the beta-male circles where they just want their mommy to take care of things because the world is hard and they are sad and depressed and their testosterone levels are insufficient for detection on the blood tests. So, the typical male and female roles are reversed, and to Melas’ credit, he makes characters work as people, except in case of Lofus the Broken Berserker, which is an extreme caricature of a boisterous hyper-masculine character that was cast as female, and it doesn’t work at all. However, other female characters work and feel like actual normal people, and there are no “Mary Sue” female characters who are magically great at everything because girl power. The female characters need to work for everything just like everybody else, and since magic is a major structural element of the world, sexual dimorphism doesn’t make the whole thing ridiculous the way it would here.

The reason why the whole thing works so well is that the initial setup creates a certain set of expectations, by setting the stage with the ridiculous set of supposedly subversive tropes, which makes you think you’re in for typical post-modernist deconstructionist nonsense, and then the author manages to completely subvert those expectations by creating a meritocratic world where neo-marxist tropes about species and groups within the world being neatly divided into oppressors and the oppressed fly straight into a brick wall. In fact, the typical collectivist ideas about saving the world and treating people as members of groups and categories rather than the individuals that they are, are put straight into the mouths of the greatest villains. Regnorex presents himself as offering salvation to Demonkind, leaving a trail of dead bodies and ashes behind him; he just gets all his followers killed, along with everybody else. Belzu, who killed millions and razed entire countries in the Human Lands also presents himself as a saviour of Demonkind from Regnorex and his rule. He also just gets everybody killed and manifests terrible evils in the world. The Spirit Lord has a grand plan of salvation, spanning millennia, and he seems to be the arch-villain of the series, bad enough that the Arcraem sent its Ordained Judge, the Archangel, to kill him. The Kobold sects who just fanatically kill everyone all think they are saving the world by doing it, and they think in strict categories. Even outside the series but still within the “Deltaverse”, Galgom the Tyrant of Utana presents himself as a saviour of that world, and Idu, the arch-villain of the Multiverse who destroyed countless worlds presents himself as the saviour of the Multiverse. It appears that every single psychotic mass-murderer sees himself as implementing a grand plan of salvation, while seeing people merely as members of categories, and never as individuals.

On the other hand, Salvos sees only individuals, to a fault; she literally has a problem understanding the abstract categories and their importance. She will save the world by accident, by simply wanting to save the dozen people she loves and the environment they need in order to exist. She has none of the neo-marxist traits of seeing the world through simplified groups of oppressors and the oppressed. In fact, the Humans are, as a group, absolutely the most hostile towards her of all she met in the entire world, and yet most of her beloved companions are Humans. They all start by wanting to kill her, then changing their minds, and eventually growing to love her. There is a wide pattern of the redemptive power of love and a good personal example that overcomes ingrained prejudice – for instance, the Vampires are indoctrinated into hating Demons for untold centuries, and yet, Salvos created such a strong personal example of goodness and kindness towards them, that for instance Saffron becomes her close friend and companion, and Hadrian has a crisis of worldview resulting in accepting Salvos, while Mons uses her connections and wealth to publish a truthful biography of Salvos while she’s absent. In essence, the characters from deeply prejudiced and judgmental groups are showed as actual people who can change their minds and be convinced by reason and evidence, rather than remaining mere vehicles for a trope about bigoted Nazis.

Even the members of the Temples and the Council of Cremont, which is built up as an antagonist in the series, serving the interests of the Spirit Lord and subverting the Arcraem, which uses nefarious means such as summoning Willy to pretend to be a deity in the temples where his job was to shine brightly and look ethereal, so that the people would pray to him as a God, although he as a material being couldn’t hear their prayers and wasn’t what they think he was, until he was so bored he almost went mad; even the Summoners and the Priests of those Temples are portrayed as good people who genuinely believe they are doing the right thing, except for a few at the top of the hierarchy who seem to be outright evil and utterly corrupt. Edithe, for instance, is shown to have been completely brainwashed by the Church where she grew up as a child, and defaults to their formulaic thinking, but she is gradually forced to question and revise those beliefs as actual life happens. For instance, she starts by being a formulaic brainwashed character who attacks Salvos and accuses her of all kinds of nonsense, and eventually grows to understand that Salvos is nothing like her expectations of what a Demon is supposed to be. She also initially annoys Willy with her formulaic approach to him as a Grand Spirit, reminding him of all those people in the Temples who saw him as a mere prop for their choreography. Slowly, as she lets go of that nonsense, he warms to her and they form a working partnership based on mutual respect. He knows she had to stop being a Summoner because she broke her vows, just like he did, but only later does he learn what she actually did – she broke her vow in order to save her Spirit and sacrifice her own life, and was only saved because Salvos arrived in the nick of time. When they met Druma in the Spirit Plane, Willy was shocked to learn that he sees Edithe with such respect that he willingly disobeys the Spirit Lord in order to help her. So, basically, people who are a part of the Temple brainwashing scheme instigated by the Spirit Lord aren’t portrayed as generic elements of some abusive class of villains; there is great complexity, with good people being part of evil schemes, and people adhering to beliefs often quite formally, where their personal choices go against them, and they don’t even bother to make everything consistent and logical, which makes the whole thing seem very realistic. The over-arching pattern that the evil people always rationalize their evil with some great good they are supposedly doing and which never actually happens, while the good people save the world mostly by accident, doing one good deed and making one good decision at a time, is obvious and unavoidable. Also, Salvos beats the prejudice against Demons that troubles her greatly not by whining about it in some theatre of victimhood, but by slowly building a reputation of such magnitude, that the evidence breaks all but the most villainous of the bigoted minds. You just can’t ignore the fact that she leaves the trail of goodness behind her, and that the best and the most virtuous people in the world tend to form her closest friend group. When the truth about her becomes known, the greatest shock is the revelation of how many people actually knew her secret and protected it, and how many members of that group were the supposed sworn enemies of Demons.

Maybe the most shocking aspect of Salvos’ character is her ability to completely ignore one’s past actions and offer forgiveness if a person truly changes. In case of people like Daniel and Edithe, who initially wanted to kill her, and she gradually converted them into friends for life, this is still something one would find reasonable, but she also offers the same option to someone like Belzu, treating him like an individual person with a name, a personal worldview and emotions, and never thinking of him as a thing, the way Humans do, calling him “it”, or Primeval Demon, never bothering to learn his name, let alone his reasons; then it becomes shocking. She has a profound, intimate conversation with him even while he forces her to kill him, and they continue to talk about the differences in their beliefs while he’s dying. It feels incredibly personal, and I don’t think Humans are capable of doing something like that; to kill someone without depersonalising them, trying to see them as a thing so that they could destroy it. There is deep respect there between the two enemies, of the kind that reminds me of the Star Wars cartoons where Obi Wan mortally wounds Maul in a duel, and then holds him in his arms and talks to him while he dies. But it isn’t consistent – for the most part, she just destroys her enemies without giving them much thought. Also, she offers forgiveness and amnesty to the Deathsquad Hunters, to Hartia the sadistic murderous general of Regnorex, and Manos the Executioner. Haec, her brother who was raised in the service of Regnorex, is vindictive and can’t easily let go of his resentment; for instance, he wants Hartia killed for what he’s done, and is annoyed when Salvos forgives him. This is particularly jarring when we know that Haec is personally responsible for all kinds of terrible evils. His full name is Haec the Tormentor, and one can assume that he didn’t get that name by being nice to his fellow Demons. Salvos, on the other hand, is known as Secely’s Sentinel. Haec personally trained the Dukes and Duchesses of the Netherworld, who were sent to the Mortal Realm to spread chaos and destruction – Ira, for instance, committed one of the worst crimes of the whole war, where he sacrificed all the students and staff of the Cedric Academy to summon more Demons. Ira, as well as his colleagues, was stopped by Salvos. Where Salvos left a trail of protection and kindness, Haec left a trail of murder and havoc, and yet, he is unwilling to forgive others who did no worse than himself.

This is a profoundly Christian element of the story – a sinner who is willing to cast stones at other sinners, not seeing a log in his own eye while condemning a speck in another’s eye. Salvos, on the other hand, offers true forgiveness to those who accept her ways and truly change. However, what makes it particularly believable is that she isn’t consistent, and she doesn’t make it into a worldview. It’s mostly the result of how Truth Divination affects her, making her see directly into another person, which is then no longer something on the outside. She talks a lot about always being Salvos and not changing, but she changes and evolves and becomes much more than she initially was, but she also has regressions and relapses into old patterns, which makes the character incredibly relatable and alive.

Also, what makes Salvos feel alive and genuine is that she doesn’t conform to the trope of a good person who is, essentially, an inert victim. She has the innate core of warrior savagery that activates when she fights, and she’s able to make it coexist seamlessly with protective gentleness, often at the same time, without being either lost in her murderous rage and having it consume her, or being softened by her kindness into inability to respond effectively to threats. She’s the counter-example to the Star Wars trope of being lost to the Dark Side once you use it in a fight; to Salvos, this is not a thing. To her, the warrior savagery is merely what it takes if you want to protect those you love from threats. In the same fight, she can protect Hartia with incredible gentleness, and savagely destroy Jofis the Winged Horror in every way imaginable. To her, there is no contradiction. The sword is a shield. To her, there is no dichotomy of means; no “light” and “dark” use of force. Violence gains moral character from the way you use it, and has none of its own.