There has to be a much less offensive term for this concept (giving, and then taking back) but it escapes my grasp. I first thought fickle might be what I'm looking for but it's not.

I'm trying to find a word or phrase that can describe a person who's nice, charismatic, and makes you feel welcomed but occasionally kinda sets off alarm bells in you?

Some context: this person is very warm and can make friends with just about everyone but sometimes there's just something that seems off about them that you can't quite pin... or maybe you can but they're so charismatic, people tend to look past it.

The best thing I've heard to describe it was the phrase "the uncanny valley of charisma" but if anyone has something more specific or a word that you can use to refer the person to that'd be great.

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The example in my case is that I work for a group home. There's a weekly rec night for the residents with activities.

Residents can say no if they don't want to go and that's fine, however we're required to take all non-verbal residents to rec night every week, because as management says, "they can't say no".

This is because having more residents attending recreational activities hits metrics mandated by the government. We need to provide a certain amount of recreation for residents, and it only counts if they attend, not just if it's offered, so the people who can't say no are forced to attend.

Don't get me wrong, recreation is of course valuable to people's wellbeing and there's a lot of positive from this.

However if staff fail to take the "mandatory attendees" to rec night, there's penalties, and circumstances aren't taken into account. The biggest example being that some of these people have health issues that flare up from time to time and make them extremely ill. It's obvious that they need to stay home and rest and won't enjoy being out at rec night, but management doesn't care, they have to go anyway and if we don't take rhem we're written up or given unpaid suspensions for as they put it, neglecting the needs of residents.

I mean obviously they're just pretending to help these people just to meet metrics and sometimes doing them harm in the process. Is there a word or phrase to describe this kind of thing?

Malicious compliance seems close, but it isn't quite right.

I mean things like where something went on for so long that nobody knows why it's being done. Like fighting for so long you forget what started the fight.

I swear that I've seen a word like this before somewhere, but now I can't find it and I'm wondering if it even exists.

Or alternatively, for a woman who holds someone else's fate in their hands?

I'm not really looking for "amazon", as that implies physical prowess, athleticism, and warrior skill. I'm looking more for someone with rulership and authority of some sort, as perceived by someone who hopes to stay on her good side.

The specific use case is in this sentence, from the POV of a character who's trying to become an artist. She had a meeting with the curator of a local gallery, and the curator is very no-nonsense, but said the viewpoint character should bring some samples. Now the viewpoint is trying to decide which of her paintings to use, and I wrote this, with the absolute wrong word capitalized:

Which pieces to show to the ice-eyed ODALISQUE who held Jessie’s artistic fate in her pale hands?

At the time, I thought an odalisque was similar to a caryatid, maybe somewhat statuesque even. Then I looked it up and discovered this word is 100% wrong for this situation!

I don't mean a termagant, or a harridan, or a harpy. She's not mean or nasty, just... in charge.

What's the opposite of an odalisque? (The "dissimilar words" section of a thesaurus lookup on "odalisque" had absolutely nothing useful.)

Edit: I'm sorry, I should have made clear, I'm looking for a noun, not an adjective.

A word or short phrase to drop in almost anywhere, if you can't be bothered to think of the actual word. I have a feeling that there are hundreds of these in every language if we really put some thought into it.

English by way of British Polari: Zhuzh (up)

English: Thing - "I got the thing."

Hawai'i Creole English / "Pidgin": Da Kine - "Kimo and I went da kine at da kine yestaday. Was choice!"

French: je ne sais quoi (I don't speak French; this might have a more concrete meaning than other items on this list)

Ok, your turn!