the thing about salem is that her design of her younger self in volume 6 SLAPS. it really gets across that sense of spoiled, naive elegance- down to the way they animated her moving, she looks like she's dressing up as a mature, experienced adult. but she isn't one! and i think you still get this same sense in some of her behavior even now that she's much older. she's not interested in teamwork despite her claiming so, she wants yesmen who will see her as all-knowing and never question her. by all means, she and ozma are now the closest thing remnant has to real, living gods, and i think while both of them have grown arrogant because of this, salem has bought into it much more, entirely unwilling to put herself on the same level as the people she associates with for even a second.

a good character design will reflect these core traits and ideals of a character, and salem's flashback design does this. her current design (both v7-present and the one before) tells me nothing about her except that She Is Evil. both of salem's more modern designs feel like a first pass at creating a better one.

first off, i do actually like the bones on her arms. i love the idea of incorporating features of the grimm into her design, but the fact that this is the ONLY place this is done makes it feel clunky, over-complicated, and unnecessary. the amount of detail on her upper half in general makes her feel top heavy and graceless, because it isn't matched in the rest of her outfit. a lot of her design points look like they're meant to flow down in an interesting, sort of liquid way, and having something as an interruption to that would be good! - but again, the bones don't do that for me. had they given her an additional mimicry of grimm-like ribs on the dress, i think it would have added some further stability and cohesion without continuing to overcomplicate her top half.

the silhouette her dress gives her is very fun to me, very elegant evil queen, but the top half is again too complicated and they must have been unconfident in that silhouette, because she is, for some reason, wearing that cape.

even from a side angle, this cape looks super weird and clashes with the long train of her dress. if this cape was also long enough to flow, it would be a lot less of a problem to me, but because it doesn't it ends up looking like a cape they added just because Evil People Love Capes! if they were worried about her ability to contrast with her surroundings, they should have invested more time into making her surroundings contrast her. i mean, oscar in this same scene is wearing red himself, but since his outfit is primarily green, he appears as the primary focus of the entire image. and he is- but so is salem, and she feels like an afterthought. your eyes are drawn to him, away from her. (also the entire set of the whale is awful, don't get me started on this damn whale LMAO)

back to her long train, though, I love it. the way it hides her legs to give her movement an unnatural glide, the way it gives her the appearance of melting into the ground- hello, WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST! it's EXCELLENT.

but it's rarely onscreen. it's once again distracted from by her cluttered top half, back to that- what the hell is with this whole thing?

the slightly open neck? it being held together by this weird ugly clasp because if every girl in this show doesn't have a boob window the whole staff will die, i guess? these random sleeve hole that exist to show off her weird spider veins? i get that it's cartoon fashion and not meant to be realistic, but it's so ugly. the boob window on her first dress actually did something for the design- it matches and lines up with the rounded diamond shape on her forehead. but this one feels both gratuitous and useless.

this is more of a problem with rwby's general design and is not in the least exclusive to salem, but i feel the need to point out that her eyes being such a dark red against black scleras makes it very difficult to read her expression if the shot isn't right in her face, her eyes aren't angled a specific way, and the lighting is bright enough that there's heavy contrast on her features.

vs

I could definitely go on forever about every tiny detail i hate about this design, but i want to end this here:

why, and how, is salem meant to look like a jellyfish?

it's pretty clear, to me, that her and the seer grimm are meant to have similar design cues- even moreso for her v7 design. the hairstyle being one large bun with the pieces that jut out and match the bones on the seer. her pieces of hair that flow downwards and the red lines on her v7 dress are clearly meant to be jellyfish tentacles, it's a cool idea- but why? why is salem represented by jellyfish? what does this tell us, in-series, about her? i don't think i can recall a single mention of jellyfish in the entire series. are we meant to go research jellyfish facts on our own and draw a conclusion for ourselves? jellyfish don't really have easily recognizable narrative meanings in media. it's not really symbolism if it doesn't exist anywhere else in the show.

salem looks more like a spider than a jellyfish. the legs, the thorax, her narrative role. she manipulates people into trusting her, and then ensnares and destroys them. it's a much stronger theme, if a little overdone.

to close i'll answer the last question you had about making her look younger because tbh i completely forgot that was part of this- salem was given eternal life at a very young age. i think because of this, it makes no sense for her design to age her, and it does rub me the wrong way a little bit that the only older women who are allowed to actually LOOK older than 20 are maria, a character who keeps me up at night because she is so useless, that old lady in the mech who hated maria whose name i literally don't know, who, again, WHY IS SHE HERE? and salem, the MAIN SERIES ANTAGONIST, granted eternal life when she still looked like this.

first off i made her look generally younger bc i think there's a missed opportunity for a stronger narrative on how eternal "youth"/life causes her immense suffering. there's this thing about her assembling the relics because she wants to die that gets touched on once but i think it needs more there. i would like a scene where salem laments to herself her inability to age.

i will be real with you, my original idea was just that i was spitballing birds the main cast would be, but i grew very attached to the idea of salem as a secretary bird. big, elegant birds of prey who crush snakes under their talons, their color scheme- it just felt very fitting, and like the exact kind of visual cues i would rather see in her than this confusing ugly jellyfish with spider veins thing they gave her.

i wanted her hair to more closely resemble her human design- but i really liked the idea of those weird spider-y hairpieces she has, and i think the feathers here give her a sense of confidence and self-assurance- but they also make her look a little standoffish. they're emotive. i tried to keep every other element pointing downward both for cohesion and to give her that sense of sleek, collected grace she puts out- that bit at the bottom of her dress is supposed to be representative of her weird grimm-making slime- which i like to think she'd sort of just slide around with for an even more off-putting inhuman vibe.

in my mind she would have to artificially expand the wings in order to use them, which could also be her answer to how birds like to fluff up their feathers to seem larger and more threatening.

lore-wise, i think her being a bird could also be used to explain why it's seen as ~such a curse~ that the branwen twins can turn into birds; all of the old world's "magic" has been converted to fairytale and/or mainstream superstition, but people did used to know about salem, so it could have remained in one way or another in the public mind that birds are universally bad omens and messengers of evil- think of it how people in the modern day think rats are all disease riddled, mouth-foaming and malicious animals, even though they are literally just rodents who happened to get the blame for disease outbreak pinned on them.