What is better – to be born virtuous, or to be born sinful and only attain virtue due to great effort?

It’s a good question, and one would probably ask it in relation to the “Salvos” series, but it would be a mistake. You see, “Demons”, as described in the “Salvos” series, are nothing comparable to the Demons in Christian worldview. Christians understand demons as spiritual beings, fallen angels who followed Satan in his rebellion against God and were cast down unto hell, damned for all eternity.

In “Salvos”, Demons are physical beings, native to the Netherworld plane of the Nexeus. They are born out of pools of Demon blood, as Demon larvae, and they evolve as they reach certain thresholds of levels – 10, 40, 70, 100, 150 and 200. Their evolution is reminiscent of how caterpillars moult and emerge as butterflies, and as such, they could be described as insectoids akin to the Zerg from Starcraft games, than Christian Demons. The only area of overlap with the Christian Demons is that of nomenclature. The Netherworld, also commonly called “hell”, is a bad place, but it’s not a place where sinful souls who rejected God are cast in punishment; it’s just a place where Demons are born and try to survive by levelling quickly enough that neither the world nor other Demons kill them. It imposes incredible evolutionary pressures on the natives, and mostly in a direction of pure power and survival, where all other qualities are either irrelevant or actually stand in the way of survival. Also, a large percentage of it is pure luck; of not being near something lvl. 114 when you’re lvl. 25, for instance. Not being there when lava explodes from the ground, or black lightning strikes from the sky. Not being in the path of the Beast, or in the vicinity of two Primordial Demons having a fight. Not being captured by Demon King’s slavers. You get the picture – the place is incredibly deadly and survival of the young, low-levelled Demons is unlikely. Even the survival of lvl. 180 Hellabominations is improbable if something like the Beast is around. You hide. You learn to kill first, ask questions later. You learn never to get into fights with something of much higher level. You learn to not get into Demon King’s territory, or if you’re captured, learn to act submissively and obey all orders, and even then he’s likely to get you killed as part of his foolish, deadly plans.

Salvos was not born sinful; she was born completely ignorant, with only her basic character traits which are to strive to be more, survive, make friends, and fight those who want to kill her. One can hardly call those traits sinful. She is very reminiscent of a human baby, if a human baby were physically more capable; for instance, being able to walk, talk and look like an adult at several months old. When she gets to Mortal Realm, she looks ignorant because she is, does foolish things because she’s a year or two old, has childish ideas because she’s a child, and the only reason why her behaviour is perceived as silly is because she looks like a teenager while in fact being two years old. At the age of five, she enrols in Mavos Academy at lvl. 106. At the age of eight, she already knows more about the world than most adult Humans, has won terrible battles against overpowering enemies, and ascends to Primeval Demon and Lesser God. At less than ten years old, she traversed the Multiverse with her father, Samuel the Devil King, fought the End of the World, met Belphegor in his doomed mission, survived two attacks by the Great Agarus, and is officially titled the Enemy of the Demon King, leading the uprising against him.

Let this sink in. She’s not confused, ignorant of some social customs and human emotions because she’s dumb. She looks like a beautiful girl in her twenties when she’s in human form and people naturally interact with her with certain expectations, and they are surprised when she acts immaturely. She’s not an emotionally retarded young adult, she’s a super-genius baby. At eight years old she commanded the victorious Human army against the forces of the Demon King, and then moved to the Netherworld and leads the uprising there, either killing or converting to her side a significant portion of Regnorex’s generals, and liberating fifty of his legions. She’s still in her first cycle of the Netherworld, which is around ten years.

So, she’s not someone who was born sinful and then developed virtue. She is someone who was initially a blank slate, the way human babies are born, only with less physical constraints in her early years; and by the age of ten, she’s an inspiration to entire civilizations.

Kerrigan as the Queen of Blades

If we ignore the label of Demon, her evolution resembles that of Sarah Kerrigan, but if she started as a Zerg larva and gradually evolved to Queen of Blades, and then to Xel’Naga.

Kerrigan ascended to Xel’Naga

So, essentially, she’s an insectoid with open-ended evolutionary potential, and the “demonic” names and labels are there just to mess with the Christians whom the author probably assumes to be dumbasses without much capacity for abstract thought. The main difference between the “Demons” and the Zerg is that the Demons are not forming swarms; they are individuals, with the exception of some evolutions (Lesser and Greater Legions) who seem to be collective entities. This makes the fact of Demon becoming an Angelic Devil Princess and a Lesser God merely a matter of choices, decisions and acquisition of virtues on an evolutionary blank slate, where some decisions end poorly, and some open up endless possibilities. Salvos is not a cursed being who attained redemption; she was a child born in a terrible place, who evolved into something more because she chose to.