So, Selector, what even is it? Depending on who you ask it’s either one show with two seasons, or a one season show, Selector Infected with a one season sequel, Selector Spread. Either way it’s also, if you believe it, a card game tie-in anime; it released concurrently with the card game WIXOSS, making the game in the show more or less real, similar to what was done a decade and a half earlier with Yugioh. While WIXOSS never achieved the international success of its predecessor (perhaps because its first western release is scheduled for this November, several years and formats after Selector), it’s very much an actual game and is still going strong.
Especially in the West, game tie-ins are seen sort of as poison when it comes to cinema or shows, what with the stigma around video game movies and the inability of Magic: the Gathering to launch any sort of film endeavor despite over two decades of popularity and several surprisingly good novels and fun comics (and plenty of trash ones too). Even anime isn’t immune. I can’t deny that when a show’s derived from a game, it’s generally working uphill, and that’s with video games that have stories to provide. Some are hits while others… aren’t. The closest famed thing to what WIXOSS was attempting with Selector would, of course, be the Yugioh anime, but while it’s extremely successful and certainly a beloved show I’ve always gotten the impression that it’s loved more for cheesy fun than held up as actual quality storytelling.
Despite this, I was told up and down that Selector was different. It was good on its own. Selector Infected WIXOSS, that’s the tabletop game tie-in that really works as an anime. Well, curiosity got the better of me at last, so it’s time to look at Selector.
To start, we’re introduced to your main character, Ruko “Ru” Kominato coming home to her family. She’s an isolated teenage girl who thinks she doesn’t need friends. On the way home she hears some of her classmates talking about playing cool popular card game WIXOSS and, to try to solve her asocial ways, her brother gives her a starter set and instructions to make some friends with it and stop worrying their grandmother. The latter being an incentive for Ru, she goes ahead and opens it up to teach herself the game.
And, wouldn’t you know it, the card shop the brother hit up must be the kind that sells Mogwai, cursed puzzle boxes, and the like as the set’s LRIG (Deck avatar card, something like the Ruler in Force of Will or Commander in Magic’s EDH format) appears to be alive and capable of moving around in her frame and talking (though no one else can hear it). Hilariously, Ru’s initial response is to slam that stuff back in the box, in her desk drawer, and try to go to sleep to forget about it. As possible reactions to magic trading cards go, I’ve got to admit that’s a good one. Of course, the plot doesn’t like being denied, so she has an actually really horrifying nightmare combining imagery of her city and otherworldly beings and catapulting her awake. The card is still making noise, so she actually address it and finds out that it wants to battle. So she takes her cards the school the next day and gets a little more than she bargained for when, rather than struggling to overcome her anxious shyness to get an ordinary game in, she’s accosted by another Selector – someone with her own living LRIG who’s eager to face off. Her first opponent here is decent enough to fill her in on the facts, that Selectors are battling for the right to become the chosen one, called the Eternal Girl, and have their wishes granted by the power of the cards, but that if a Selector loses three times her special LRIG will vanish and she’s out for good.
She doesn’t, though, bother to actually let Ru learn the rules of the game itself before dragging her into the card game dimension to fight with… how does that saying go? With real monsters and real magic? The match with our first rival here, Yuzuki, doesn’t last long before her brother interrupts the matter, first talking in to give Ru the most basic tutorial and then to let them know that the bell means this intro duel will have to end with no contest. Later, Yuzuki approaches Ru again, to talk rather than to duel, and they do actually start to become friends.
One thing I feel bears mentioning at this juncture are the visuals. Normal space gets us some really excellent shots of a city that’s beautiful, but also kind of desolate and washed out a lot of the time, while the otherworldly stuff (like the opening scene, the nightmare, and the duel dimension) and the more emotionally charged ‘real’ moments are colorful but threatening. To an extent, it’s like Madoka Magica‘s visuals for the normal world were wedded to the high-saturation darkness of something like Unlimited Blade Works. Or, for a single comparison, a little like Black★Rock Shooter if not quite so bold and creative. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising; the same person who did the script for Shooter also worked on Selector here, while the director is better known for Steins;Gate, so at least some of the credits are familiar with delivering quality.
Ru and Yuzuki team up, looking for other Selectors to face down against so they can both finish with the prize, as evidently it’s not a straight-up battle to the last Selector standing. They find a peppy and upbeat idol, Akira, and (also out to challenge Akira her at the same time) an extremely shy and nervous girl called Hitoe. Akira turns on full cruelty mode in battle, not only playing a ruthless discard-focused deck but also savagely mocking her opponent to the point where Hitoe basically throws the duel in her despair, making Akira our first real antagonistic Selector. Unable to take on everyone in a row, Akira browbeats our leads into giving up their contact info, intending to pick on them later. This gives them a chance to, with a little luck, tune their decks for the next game, but Yuzuki is clearly badly shaken.
Part of that seems to have to do with her intended wish, which we’re fairly clearly let in on: she’s in love with her brother and wants to actually be able to be with him and have him love her back. Now, this is a kind of delicate issue for the show. In a sense, it’s kind of clever since that’s not something she could get freely without magic (unlike Hitoe’s wish to make friends), but there are, of course, issues. Yuzuki is a main character, and she is supposed to be largely sympathetic. And, the fact that she’s desperate to keep her wish concealed, including and perhaps especially from him (among other things) indicates that she does know and feel that she’s kind of in the wrong. It paints a picture of someone who’s kind of tortured, and who powers forward with something she knows is ‘wrong’ because she can’t stop herself from desiring it anyway. But despite the fact that her reaction to her own wish is well-depicted and sympathetic, it’s still kind of a big ask to root for her victory in the whole magic card game/get a wish thing, even as we sympathize with her and hope that she’s going to come out of the show a happier person somehow.
After a trip to the card shop and, the next day, an attempt to avoid Akira that aborts when Ru is unwilling to hide in a Karaoke place without knowing what to sing, Ru and Yuzuki split up, with Yuzuki in her frustration taking on Akira while Ru runs into and agrees to battle Hitoe, clearly taking some pity on a girl even more nervous and friendless than she is. During the games, Yuzuki loses her cool in the face of Akira’s needling, while Ru finds some resolve to enjoy the contest and engage properly. This ends with a formative win for Ru and her LRIG, Tama, growing stronger while Yuzuki earns a bitter loss with her reckless play and lack of preparation. Despite everything she quite naturally cheers up a bit when it turns out that what looked like her brother going on a date with the lady from the card shop was actually him trying to score some help for her deck. Only a little, though – she knows how wrong what she wants is, after all, just got a step farther from it, and receiving kindness only makes her want it more.
Akira isn’t doing well either. With two fresh wins under her belt she turns, in private, from snide and superior mocking cruelty to outright berserk fury at the fact that she hasn’t made any huge steps to having her wish granted. She even threatens to tear her LRIG in half when it won’t spill the beans on exactly what it takes to get her prize, and leaks to the audience that what she really wants seems to be the destruction of a girl named Iona – A fellow Selector, fellow Idol, and currently Akira’s partner in the latter business, evidently provoking the jealous rage. Iona and her LRIG seem to be both our last color of duelist (Black – the colors match Magic: the Gathering) and kind of the inverse of Akira, with Iona having a fairly flat affect like Akira’s LRIG while Iona’s LRIG (Urith) is vicious and teasing like Akira’s in-game demeanor. So, obviously a second-tier villain Selector? Well, that can get complicated.
After the mess of that night, Yuzuki invites herself over to Ru’s place to stay the night. She apologizes for blowing up at Ru, and lets enough of her guard down that Ru starts to guess what exact desire has Yuzuki so ashamed of herself. They make friends with Hitoe and bond (and brush up their strategies) with some non-magic card game playing. Akira, meanwhile, practices her social manipulation to try to hunt down Ru for a duel, using her cute act and star power to turn the other girls at Ru and Yuzuki’s school into her pawns. Ru isn’t quite so insistent on avoiding the encounter – in fact, she’s actually kind of eager, having to face the fact that she’s coming to like serious fighting for fighting’s sake –, but after the previous Akira fights were so traumatic, Yuzuki is determined to keep her away from that and protect her. Eventually, Ru is caught and brought to Akira, which also introduces her to Iona, who quickly shows herself to be quite creepy, and chews Ru out for participating without a wish after psychically determining as much.
There’s a bit of discontinuity – Akira clearly doesn’t get her duel there (she’s dragged off for a photo shoot) and we pick up with the friendly girls getting ready to go a tournament. There are a few small threads as well, like Hitoe’s LRIG growing morose and warning of something bad to happen if she’s kept around now that her wish came true on its own, Yuzuki’s brother trying to still be nice to her and his kindness frightening her, or this odd persistent weirdness about a new tower being built being something sinister.
Of those, the first pays off into our new threat as Hitoe is dragged into some sort of shadow realm battle and her LRIG tries to warn her about something terrible that will happen if – when – she loses. We don’t hear it, but when we find Hitoe she doesn’t know who Ru and Yuzuki are and their very touch hurts her. Under duress, as apparently this is something that’s not supposed to be talked about, Hanayo (Yuzuki’s LRIG) reveals that there is a cost for washing out: the reverse of the wish the girl had comes into being. So, since Hitoe was fully defeated (losing to Ru, Akira, and the shadow duelist who was blatantly to the audience Iona), she’s magically severed from the friendships she has and is cursed so she can’t make any.
Naturally this leaves Ru depressed and sends Yuzuki into a spiral, horrified that she wasn’t told (though Hanayo offers the out of being thrown away, rather than winning or losing) and at the possibility of losing as much of a relationship with her brother as she has. They split up, Yuzuki to feel miserable at home while Ru drowns her sorrows in melon soda at a restaurant, which is where Akira catches up with Ru. She reveals she knew about the penalty (having seen Iona finish off another Selector, which gave the girl a possibly-fatal stroke) and needling Ru by putting down poor Hitoe, leading to them finally having their card game battle.
Of course, Akira’s normal strategies don’t work terribly well. Making Ru mad doesn’t make her stupid like it did Yuzuki, and she doesn’t have any wish to be needled with (a fact that bothers Ru, but that Akira doesn’t know how to use), getting Akira summarily destroyed as her blind pursuit of the Selector nonsense gets her fired as an idol for reasons of not showing up to work and generally being a trashy mean girl. Iona (whose life, recall, it’s Akira’s wish to ruin) calls out her cruelties and failures alike and provokes her to a battle that she’ll be unable to win.
We don’t see that outcome right away, but we do follow both Hitoe sliding into deeper depression as the curse strips away her memories of her friends and her ability to sense records of them and Yuzuki socially self-destructing over her brother even without losing her Selector battles (as, apparently, she’s unsubtle enough and him popular enough that there are rumors). Ru, for her part, is having horrific nightmares and becoming terrified of herself and her own potential viciousness. As a low point for all our heroines at once, that seems to hit bottom when Hitoe’s mother finds and talks to Ru, trying to learn what happened to drive her daughter from “doing better” to the absolute and potentially suicidal pits.
So, at this dark turn, a look at our character arcs. Akira is finished as a villain, taking her last loss from up-and-coming baddie Iona. Hitoe is suffering the tragedy of loss, and the cuts back to her rather than her falling out of the show seems to suggest that she still has some part yet to play. Yuzuki… is actually looking up, in a character sense, at this point. Normally I don’t like it when a character spends most of her time moping, but for Yuzuki it makes sense. She can’t stop herself, and every motion either towards or away from her goal is causing her pain. With the change to the stakes, it’s easier to root for her too: whatever you feel about her desires, she doesn’t deserve the backlash that would result from her wish being inverted, so at least we now really want to see her not lose. And for Ru? Her arc is kind of an interesting one to give to a lead character, especially a lead character with her normal voice, demeanor, and to a lesser extent even her design that makes it look like she’s cosplaying Ayano Tateyama half the time. She has this deep-seated viciousness in her, arguably even a bloodthirsty nature, and that horrifies her. Not usually cute girl fare. If Selector seems to have a theme, it’s one of intemperate desire. Akira was defined by her envy and spite, Hitoe is defined by her timidity and longing, Yuzuki by her incestuous love, and Ru by her desire for meaningful battle. In all four cases, the girls let their base drives rule them, unable to stop themselves or control it even if they know they should. Ru can’t just give up battling. Yuzuki can’t just be content with a normal sibling relationship. Akira couldn’t just do her own best. And these characters are (with the exception of Akira) remarkably self-aware about their problems.
And this, really, is what makes Yuzuki’s arc work and work well in the context of Selector: the show is about (other than selling WIXOSS cards, which it’s pretty low key about pushing all things considered) obsession, addiction, and these girls who feel helpless in the face of what they want. This isn’t Madoka Magica where we hear a lot of thoughtful and high-minded wishes; instead, Selector wants to examine the darkest and most insistent yearnings inside its characters, and a taboo love that sets a character legitimately against the whole of society would really seem to fit the bill.
From there, Yuzuki is challenged by a total newbie Selector, whose cheerful persistence in looking for a battle breaks through Yuzuki’s wavering distaste for fighting, and wins. With a new grim determination, she goes on the offense, dropping off the grid, not answering her phone, and seeking out Selectors. Ru, trying to find a lead on Yuzuki, attempts to check in on Akira and finds Iona. Iona confronts Ru, revealing that she hunted out Hitoe on purpose and then challenging Ru over what her wish is. She now seems to believe Ru has a wish, and that it’s the same as hers, as she also has a thirst, possibly addiction to the sense of battle, resulting in a card game fight between them that’s a weirdly friendly battle for one so heated between two characters who should have a decent amount of bad blood. It’s interrupted, ending with no contest, but Ru really does hit her stride and get into it, forgetting her resolve and hostility thanks to the heat of the battle, while Iona seems pleased as punch to have finally found someone like Ru, indicating she was looking for such a person for a long time. Yuzuki catches up with her after, having earned at least another win, and reveals a message from Akira, inviting them to meet, where it’s revealed that unlike Hitoe she still remembers the facts of Selectors… and now has a disfiguring scar across her face, the inversion of her wish ensuring that she could never, no matter how much she works, overcome Iona in the Idol/Model business ever again.
Despite Akira picking an abandoned warehouse to motive rant and try to stab the two of them, a guard interrupts and Yuzuki and Ru get away. Each tries to convince the other to give the Selector business up, but Yuzuki especially won’t be swayed and Ru now knows that she cant no matter how much she knows she should. Ru drags herself home, now more or less out both her friends (since Yuzuki doesn’t want to drag her through more sorrow). Yuzuki’s spirits are high. She goes home herself and actually starts bonding with her brother normally before going out looking for trouble again. She and her LRIG both seem to feel something different in the air. Yuzuki is brimming with confidence, both in her wish and in her closeness to making it come true, while Hanayo seems… a little disturbed by everything.
Meanwhile, Yuzuki’s brother is confessed to by another girl, who he turns down. The girl suspects Yuzuki may be the problem and confronts him about it, including rumors of incest between them as the possibly reason he wouldn’t be available.
As Yuzuki’s battle reaches its end, Hanayo once again tries to turn her away from continuing, clearly (as with the losses) knowing something is coming but being unable to say. Yuzuki affirms her resolve and is drawn onto the board for the final attack. And yet something in it brings Hanayo to tears.
Now, through this show, we’ve been told that the girls will have their wishes granted (if they win enough) by “Becoming the Eternal Girl” (or an Eternal Girl), and with Yuzuki’s ascension, we get to see what that means.
On the outside, her brother’s thoughts turn to Yuzuki, who he clearly does (and always had) deeply love and admire, now with some dark suggestions thanks to that confession and confrontation. He encounters her at home, where she’s acting a little off and ultimately seems to seduce him, though it doesn’t quite take totally, her voice sounding… off.
Meanwhile, a catatonic Hitoe is given a WIXOSS pack by her mother, desperate to cheer her up. A red deck, this time, and after the curse in her memories causes her to initially recoil, she’s once again chosen as a Selector.
The new red LRIG in her card set is none other than Yuzuki.
That’s, of course, an episode-end wham but the truth comes out in short order: It’s Hanayo’s spirit that’s living out Yuzuki’s dream, while Yuzuki has taken Hanayo’s place in the cards (Her voice was off earlier because, and I looked this up, it’s Hanayo’s VA doing her best Yuzuki impression). After a long day of dark rumors and painful confessions, Hanayo/Human Yuzuki and her brother are together (with some implication that the feelings may have been reciprocated on a repressed level before this), while Ru is pulled into a battle with Hitoe and Card Yuzuki where the truth is explained. Not any sort of why for this convoluted system of soul swapping and wishes granted to half-wrong targets yet, but we’re still in Selector Infected at this point, so it can be forgiven for not really giving us that info yet.
All the same… when we heard about how the system works in Madoka, pre-twist, it made sense. Get a wish as payment for a life of fighting evil monsters. Post twist, it still makes sense, because we’re quickly clued in on the reason for the more convoluted system. In Yugioh, things are more scattered, but most of the supernatural stuff is still rooted in “Dark Ancient Egyptian magic has been recreated as a children’s’ card game”. Here, we didn’t really get why Selectors existed in the first place, and we certainly don’t have a reason why the wish of a Selector is granted to that Selector’s LRIG, causing a chain of disturbing body swaps. And that does hurt how easy it is to accept.
After the explanation, Hitoe has an epic freakout that hits the point of medical crisis, ending the battle (no result) and sending her to the hospital. In the aftermath, Ru is able to talk more to Yuzuki and learn what the experience of becoming Eternal Girl was like, including meeting an entity called Mayu in an otherworldly white room. Mayu told Yuzuki that the LRIGs are forbidden from sharing the whole truth and that if one does, and her selector leaves the battle, that LRIG will lose her chance at escaping the cards.
Which of course brings us to Yuzuki basically telling Hitoe the truth here – a decision made after a fairly long flashback to how Hitoe has been doing since receiving Yuzuki, with Yuzuki initially having been ready to carry on the chain. Ru takes Yuzuki to see her human self at her request, and they’re able to watch a tender moment between Human Yuzuki and her brother, sharing an umbrella. Which Yuzuki is oddly thankful regarding. I guess there’s some degree of catharsis knowing it worked out as much as it could. In any case, with Hitoe unconscious in the hospital and Yuzuki hoping she never battles again, Yuzuki stays with Ru for a while.
There is one weird note – Tama, Ru’s LRIG, seems to have been ignorant of the entire system and its results, which is consistent with the portrayal of Tama as being very child-like but at odds with what Yuzuki learned from Mayu, suggesting that Tama might be something special.
Meanwhile, Iona’s not lying down on the job; she announces a “fan event” with coded language to call out to Selectors, essentially triggering what’s likely to be a massive tournament now that we know any end for a Selector’s quest is bound to be a tragic one. This ultimately pulls Ruko to that sinister tower being built in the center of town, the dark tower that’s been looming over the show up to this point. In its shadow, Ru tries to resolve to pull the “Free everyone turned into a card” wish only to have it shot down with Yuzuki, spilling the beans on her encounter with Mayu, getting us that the wishes are largely smoke and mirrors – they rely less on magic and more on the desperation of the LRIG to join the living world again in order for the LRIG to do what her master couldn’t. So, there was presumably nothing supernatural in Hanayo-Yuzuki’s confession to and seduction of her brother, just the magic of not giving a damn about human limits or mores anymore.
Which doesn’t jive with the fact that the losses have some flagrantly supernatural misfortune to them, as demonstrated especially by Hitoe (Akira less so – she could have gotten herself hurt on the face any number of ways), but it’s pretty clear that Mayu is still, pardon the pun, holding plenty of cards. Tama is more hopeful, though, and some of the cryptic Mayu speeches do confirm that there’s real magic lurking in the corners. As they’re working out that they need more information, Hitoe shows up and reclaims Yuzuki, declaring her intent to participate in the ‘fan event’. Presumably, she was at the end of her rope enough that turning into a card rather than continuing her friendless life seems like a good deal. Hitoe’s insistence as well as the presence of Iona, draws Ru into the great Selector tournament. Iona, however, has the matter set up as a single-elimination tournament rather than a free-for-all, with herself as the final boss for the champion alone. Girls fall in the background, Iona reveals to the audience that her goal is to reach Mayu’s white room (apparently aware of it), and Ru gets paired against Hitoe, fighting with Yuzuki to break through Hitoe’s repressed memories. Apparently Hitoe managed to fight through the extreme pain to recover her memories after their previous encounter and now wants to free Yuzuki even if it means taking her place in the card. The display of friendship and sacrifice brings Tama back into sync with Ru; she hadn’t wanted to help Ru achieve her wish, but does see beauty in doing something for friends. And, assured that she’s one of Ru’s precious friends, she wins the battle and moves onward, ready to carry the plan forward. Hitoe in tow, Ru manages to make her way to the rooftop final battle, where Iona is expecting her.
The battle with Iona takes place in a much darker arena, with a much more tense energy to it. Tama gets a vision of Mayu (who’s really stepping up despite the late introduction) trying to break her will to fight for Ru, or at least to keep Tama from agreeing to Ru’s wish. After some especially impressive battlefield blasting that starts to bleed into the real world, Ru gets into the winning position and is pulled down for her own Eternal Girl scene, with Tama hesitant to seal the pact while the chance remains that Ru would be sacrificing herself. Tama notices Ru, at peace with the possibility of being a sacrifice, and gets cold feet about the wish-granting, Mayu’s warning that she’d be left behind and isn’t part of the “friends” Ru is fighting for ringing in her ears. As Ru’s magic charge putters out rather than letting her become an Eternal Girl, Iona, who had already won enough battles but whose wish wasn’t ready to happen, moves forward with her own ascension. Dark waves wash over the city, and Tama vanishes from Ru’s LRIG card, only to be replaced with none other than Iona, now the LRIG of the Selector whose thirst for battle she had long sought.
In a meta sense, it’s kind of funny how much this arc is Ru saying “I want to be Madoka Kaname” and the rest of the show saying “Oh no you don’t.”
Thus ends season 1, or Selector Infected, with still plenty of “What the hell?” about Mayu and the system, but other than that essentially with a win for team villain. Yuzuki is a card, the experienced LRIGs know something great and possibly terrible happened, rich and famous Iona’s life is now being lived by a LRIG who was absolutely cruel well beyond Iona’s own scope, and Ru seems to have lost her chance to wish everyone free since Iona evidently desired nothing more than LRIGhood with a Selector exactly as battle-hungry as she is. And with that blindingly obvious “to be continued” also the reason why it’s better to address Selector as one thing rather than two separate shows. However you slice it, there’s really no conclusion to be found in Infected.
That said, if I were to break here, I would say that Spread has an oddly easy-looking job: there are a lot of moving parts, but with Mayu already on the table (again, pardon the pun) it’s going to be more about getting the characters through their trials and less about revealing a constant barrage of twists, or at least one would hope. Obviously some reveals are still needed, but more than that Ru and her friends need to lick their wounds and recover.
Selector Spread, after a mysterious battle cut between LRIG Iona and Tama that’s very reminiscent of the battle that never ended up being flashed forward to at the beginning of Infected, catches back up with Ru some time after Infected ended, with Ru going out to meet up with Hitoe (apparently fully recovered from her earlier backlash) and Yuzuki. They spend a lot of time having fun, though it’s clear that Ru at least is still deeply disturbed by her experiences, all the losses she’s suffered so far, particularly the loss of Tama
We also see that weird theatrical little girl Yuzuki battled late in Infected, Chiyori. She shows up and challenges Ru and Hitoe to Battle, but of course neither of them wants the consequences, and do their best to warn her off while reminiscing about the events of the previous half, serving as a handy recap. Of course, Chiyori is young and crazy and is still enchanted by the magic more than she is frightened of the consequences of it all. Iona LRIG whispers to Ru, pushing her to battle and driving her to flee the scene. The resulting flashback gets the proper explanation that it was, in fact, Iona’s wish to be the LRIG for someone even better than her, hence why she was only able to finish it when Ru beat her. Iona, still hungry for battle, continues to prey on Ru’s desires, goading her onward and feeding the darkness within that Ru still has trouble resisting.
We then have the reappearance of Akira, working with Urith (Iona’s body) who reveals the truth of the Selector rules to her and seems disturbingly turned on by how cruel and hateful Akira can be. Of course, since what Akira wanted most was love and attention (hence why she couldn’t stand being second in the public eye to Iona) this makes her putty in Urith’s hands. Urith works hard to pick Akira out of her pit of misery, offering her professional-tier makeup to hide her scar and even the opportunity to work again while ensuring that her spite stays strong, using her (like Hitoe, now a two-time Selector) as an attack dog against Iona and Ru. Their battle is interrupted, but it’s clear from as much as played out that Ru’s really lost her groove without the kind of bond she had with Tama. She talks with Iona about how she feels being without her friends, and that it isn’t the same.
Ru goes back and forth with Iona, also hearing from Hanayo that she should keep battling, with the suggestion that she might know something. Iona pushes and pushes for Ru to give in to her battling urges, while Ru becomes more resolute in her desire to see Tama rather than battling for battle’s sake. We catch up with Tama in the mysterious white room where Mayu tries to get Tama to give up on Ru and, when it doesn’t take, tries to tell her that the outside world is too frightening to bear. Mayu even seems to break down herself, considering she might be projecting her own fears and misgivings in the advice she gives Tama, begging Tama to stay forever. Eventually, Tama’s resolve gets through, and Mayu says she’ll let Tama out to see Ru. Of course, though, there are bound to be strings attached.
In the outside world, Akira continues to become ever more unhinged while Ru, Yuzuki, and Hitoe talk out their problems and the issues of their self-sacrificing desires, leaving Iona somewhat in the cold. Meanwhile, Chiyori, still eager to be the main character of her own version of the show, ends up facing down Urith. The actual main characters show in time to witness the battle, and Urith’s LRIG is, of course, Tama.
So, a quick rundown for those at home who’s in what body and controlling whom: Ru and Hitoe are fine, while Yuzuki is the latter’s LRIG. Ru has Iona as her LRIG, while Iona’s former LRIG, Urith, pilots her body and now possesses Tama as a LRIG. Akira is back in the fight with a new LRIG, while Yuzuki’s body is being driven by her old LRIG, Hanayo, who seems to be running out of steam in a way I’m sure won’t come back to mess with things. It’s not actually that hard to follow watching it, believe it or not.
Iona seems to know something, and finds Mayu’s play with Tama in bad taste. She does take the opportunity, though, to butter up Ru and try to turn her against Tama, only for Ru to sense Tama’s pain and grief in the current circumstance and do her best to apologize to Tama as Tama despairs and apologizes for her own part in their separation. That doesn’t stop Tama from, at Urith’s command, having to finish off Chiyori (Current Losses: 2. Mood: never been higher). After the battle, Urith vanishes with the ultimatum that if Ru wants to have any hope of regaining Tama, she’ll have to do battle. They talk with Chiyori after the battle and find out that her interest in stories about the game (in-universe, a tie-in novel) might actually give her useful information, since it seems to mention the white space referred to as the time labyrinth, White Garden. They borrow the book from her, looking for a clue. Sure enough, Mayu appears to be the main villain of the novel, but only appears at the end of the current volume. This sends the girls looking for the one person who must have known some sort of truth about Selector battles and Mayu that LRIGs like Yuzuki can only guess at: the author of the novels. They find some degree of contact information and send along an e-mail, looking for answers.
The information so far leads to more questions and guesses about Mayu: the girls notice that Urith gaining Tama (and Hitoe getting her former friend Yuzuki for that matter) seem too convenient for chance, and Iona confirms that the system of Selectors is, essentially, a game for Mayu, who might want to see interesting outcomes. I will say, a lot of the contrivances (like the second runs for Hitoe and Aki) are more palatable knowing that Mayu’s whim is in play for things like who becomes a Selector and what LRIG they get. All the same, Ru, Hitoe, Yuzuki, and Chiyori meet up with the author the next day finding her to be a strange and kind of reclusive young woman and, at that, a Selector herself. Despite knowing the full truth, she’s still eager for battle, and insists on having a battle before she provides the information which, with the threat of Chiyori potentially taking the fall first, Ru steps up for.
In the battle, the author and her LRIG detect something special about Iona, and play hard to try to force Ru to match up better with Iona. Iona once again tries to awaken Ru’s true potential, and finally finds the way to do it, reminding her that she needs the strength she gained from her fervor if she hopes to win and save Tama, Yuzuki, or anyone else. With the two of them in synch, Iona is able to reach a brand new level and turn the tables, crushing the formerly undefeated author.
They learn the Author’s story starting when she, as a LRIG, was paired off with the Selector whose body she now drives. Her Selector was initially resolute about wanting to achieve her dream herself rather than through card game magic until a broken home and literary rejection wore her down enough to give up on such ideals. She took fulfilling her former master’s wish to be a novelist very seriously, but before going forward to do it, met with Mayu and learned our next clue, a story Mayu tells about the “Girl of White” (happy and pure) and “Girl of Black” (pure in her misery) who were originally one. Further, it seems that Iona is probably the Girl of Black, driven by her envy to try to become pure-hearted white despite that being fundamentally against her nature. They don’t get much more out of it, though, as the author is finding herself crushed by the effort to continue her predecessor’s wish, thus becoming a Selector again in the search for a spark.
Iona, meanwhile, seems to have become physically ill after the encounter. We get a dream sequence or possibly flashback to Iona’s existence as the Girl of Black, Mayu’s presence and voice emphatically reminding her that she’s misery incarnate, bringing only suffering, a fate that was driving her mad. It seems, though, with a cut to Mayu, that the real curse for Iona is the fact that “white” things like friendship and care seem to do her harm even as she longs for them.
Hitoe leaves Yuzuki with Ru and Iona to walk home, but on the way runs into a more unhinged than ever Akira, who challenges her to battle on Urith’s orders and, when it turns out she’s without her LRIG, turns to kidnapping and beating Hitoe to drag out Ru and Iona, resulting in Ru meeting with her in an isolated place where Urith also shows. Urith’s response to the scene is a knee to Akira’s gut and a quick crushing of her ego for the shameful display of brute violence instead of what Urith would prefer, artful sadism. She goes on her motive rant, that she wants to break Ru and Iona because ruin is what she finds beautiful, revealing her past as a messed-up psychopath even before she became a LRIG, evolving from the traditional sick kid hurting animals to a cruel manipulator who takes joy in making people hate themselves, which served her well in her first run as a Selector, reveling in making other girls lose their wishes and their hopes, revealing that her wish was the same as Iona’s if for different reasons: to become a LRIG not out of any appreciation of strength, but so she could just go on hurting people.
Honestly, it’s kind of refreshing just how straightforwardly twisted and monstrous Urith is. She’s like Junko Enoshima if Junko actually had the time and consistency to support her whole “I want people to fall into despair” thing. She’s not arbitrary or stupid, but she is flagrantly unwell. It ties in nicely to how she picked up Akira, and in a show where most of the foes, even nasty Akira, are some variety of non-malicious, deeply hurting, or complex, it’s certainly quite different to have someone who’s just awful. Creatively awful, but just awful.
The resulting battle catches a lot of interest. To an extent, Urith comes off almost as a bystander, with the real fight being between Ru and Tama. But, with both aware of the importance of the battle, they’re also able to give it their all, though in the end Tama begs to be defeated. Not that there aren’t a lot of bystanders – Hitoe and Yuzuki serve as a peanut gallery, and we even cut to Mayu watching that one. That much becomes relevant when Iona spills the beans about Mayu being the original and “mother” of her and Tama, an isolated and lonely girl, and Mayu gives her, basically, the force choke treatment, leaving Iona writhing in agony and blaming her for ruining the fun. Despite the wrath, Iona manages to power through her mother-creator’s anger and tell more of the story.
It seems, from Iona’s description, that human Mayu was so sick as to be bedridden, knowing nothing but silent isolation for her life until she actually picked up a picture book (one of many items her mother, in pity, left in her room not knowing how to cope) and learned that there was such a thing as a world outside her window, and friends. Eventually, one of the other toys left with Mayu was a Wixoss starter set and, with no actual human interaction, she invented some imaginary friends (Tama and Iona, then called Shiro and Kuro by her) to play with. Mayu, essentially in naive innocence, though increasingly bitter, dreamed up the rules of the Selector battles, dark twists included, in order to draw in girls from the outside world to play with. Those were her imagination games with her imaginary friends, but the scenario slowly soured, leaving Mayu painfully aware that she was still trapped in a sterile interior, unable to access the outside world. It’s unclear where Mayu’s mania became a source of real magic, warping reality until her normal house became the otherworldly White Room and the Selector battles began to draw in actual girls rather than constructs of her mind, but none the less it did happen, and by this time Mayu’s wish had become, more than anything, vengeance against the world that had what she was denied. We have as many LRIGs as we do because Mayu’s other imaginary constructs were also sent out, but all of those originals have since been fully replaced by real trapped people, leaving only her favorites, Tama and Iona, still in the fight. Iona in particular is still around because she’s stolen life after life, going from LRIG to Selector to LRIG again as Mayu’s ‘bad girl’, slowly becoming more alive and human with every transition, feeling like she had her own life and soul as something more than an imaginary construct made for battle… and Tama, presumably, because she was Mayu’s precious good girl doll and generally held back.
Together, Iona, Tama, and Ru hatch a plan to end Mayu’s playtime by reaching her and sharing the feelings of love and friendship they’ve learned in the outside world. But, of course, neither Mayu nor Urith are particularly eager for this, Urith in particular only seeing it as a spark of hope that will be fun to snuff out, both in Ru and in Tama. Like Ru was able to do for Iona, Urith brings Tama to a new level, but instead of Ru saving Iona with her care and friendship, Urith overwhelms and stains Tama with her cruelty and spite, resulting in a powerful psycho-Tama that reminds Ru of those creatively horrific nightmares she’s been having and beats the tar out of Iona. Tama returns to herself quickly, though not before Ru loses the battle, but in some ways that might be even worse as she’s forced to deal with blood (Iona’s, but still) literally on her hands.
To make matters more complicated, the next day sees Akira, broken and insane by Urith’s rejection of her and greater interest in Iona, Ru, and Tama, go ahead and stab Urith before shambling off looking for more selector battles to heal the scar Urith left on her heart quickly.
With team main characters, Iona can’t understand how everyone is still being so nice to her when she’s part of the origin of the Selector battles, and as Ru, Hitoe, and Yuzuki come to terms with what the story of Mayu means for their path forward, Iona comes to terms with what friendship means to her, and how she wants to hold onto that light even as it hurts. Mayu, for her part, rages at the situation, how things aren’t going according to her script.
Chiyori takes on Hitoe, since both her LRIG Eldora and Hitoe think it would be good for her to lose (with the reversal of her childish wish being fairly low cost), but the emotional stakes still get intense as the friendship between Chiyori and Eldora is at stake and ultimately lost.
On Urith’s side, it seems she got away with a brief hospital visit and shortly feels good enough to start verbally abusing Tama again. And, it seems she’s on the edge of becoming a LRIG again, talking Tama into accepting as a human body would put Tama on even footing with Ru. She ultimately summons Aki for a now-antagonistic battle . She crushes Aki, but evidently things didn’t exactly work out the way they expected as the individual later found in Iona’s body is not Tama but the original Iona.
We find out that her wish was to be anything but herself, having been upset and adrift in her life, which resulted in her fully accepting her fate and driving Mayu a little crazy as such. Mayu does not like things going off script, and the admixture of depression and kindness of the Original Iona were pretty far off script. That’s probably part of why Mayu stuffed her back in, but what happened to Tama? According to Iona (LRIG one), she had the right to refuse that incarnation and took it, those pesky morals combined with guilt over having come face to face with her dark side getting the better of Tama. Once again, this infuriates Mayu – she really is a petulant child with unexplained godlike powers. She cages Tama and seals her in a dark place within her realm.
Human Iona says a pleasant thank you and sorry to Card Iona, and Ru assesses the situation to now be a lot simpler, if a bit horrifying: now that Tama is trapped with Mayu, Ru only needs to win her battles to get there. With the real Iona back in the picture, the LRIG formally known as Iona or Kuro takes on the name Yuki (“Snow”) from the first thing her dark self actually liked.
Before Ru can make her way to Mayu, though, there’s some unfinished business – an overdue meeting with Hanayo (Human Yuzuki, recall) who has been struggling with keeping Yuzuki’s wish alive, in part because she’s developed her own unrelated feelings for Kazuki and feels that she’d be betraying Yuzuki if she came to love him as herself rather than as Yuzuki proper. Kazuki manages to walk in on the situation and learn the hellishly awkward truth that Hitoe is able to tell. This leaves Hanayo in the awkward place of possibly fading away for being unable to fulfill her part of the bargain.
Honestly, while they’ve excused the convoluted nature of the setting pretty well with Mayu (kids’ games of make-believe are ultimately arbitrary and can get obscenely convoluted, after all) it’s still at the level where… sure, I’ll take it, but I have to admit that this is pretty pointlessly intricate. With Hanayo’s existence as a time gun, Iona hatches a plan to get Ru to Mayu and the white room faster by taking a spare route through the battle dimension to reunite Ru with Tama, since they should be able to make the magic happen together, so long as Tama accepts Ru’s wish this time. They have a battle to reach the adjacent battle space, and Yuki reaches out to Tama, letting Yuki act as Tama’s proxy for an Eternal Girl ceremony with Ru, carrying them into Mayu’s realm while Hitoe and Yuzuki’s brother decide to search for the real world analog to that space, where Mayu’s physical body should be.
Mayu, of course, is determined to make this a pain, denying Yuki’s growth and insisting that with Tama still imprisoned, Ru’s audacious wish still can’t be granted. Ru gives Mayu the big friendship speech, but there’s someone else determined to not leave Mayu alone: Urith, who recognizes Mayu herself as her Selector thanks to how Mayu has caused the suffering of countless girls, resulting in us getting a grand battle of Mauy & Urith against Ru & Yuki in the hope that experiencing something that can have joy in it with other people and not just her imaginary constructs will bring Mayu around. Mayu’s hatred of things going against script applies to her card play too, unpredictable moves throwing her off her game, but Mayu does still have a trick left: Like Hanayo, Yuki is now failing to fulfill a Selector’s wish, Iona being Iona once again, and her time is short. Tama’s voice calls to Ru, and she grabs Yuki, gets up from the battle, and starts running for Tama’s prison, and we get our penultimate episode cliffhanger when it’s discovered that Mayu is probably dead in the real world and it looks like Yuki may have been struck dead in the White Room as well.
Of course, things turn around quickly enough. Tama busts out of her prison and arrives at Ru and Yuki just after some very emotional words are said to suggest that she and Yuki can be merged into one – a new LRIG that, by combining Mayu’s light and darkness, is fully her mirror. Their card game fight starts really afflicting the original Mayu, facing up to her despair at having been denied choice and care in life. Ru tries to invite her to see the outside world, but the analysis of her psyche only forces her to accept her death, causing her realm to start crumbling into oblivion. After a brief fall, Mayu manages to pull herself together enough to face Ru with a single test, gambling the match against Ru and presumably the fate of all the souls associated with the White Realm on a trick question requiring an honest understanding of Mayu’s psyche.
Of course, Ru gets it right – what color is Mayu’s card? Colorless. Urith is banished to the Shadow Realm, and Ru tells Mayu that rather than representing a void end her emptiness can be a beginning, a blank canvass for all the colors she wished she’d seen the first time around. That and a last hug from Ru finally brings Mayu to the end (or beginning) of her line and Ru is able to complete her wish with LRIG Mayu, undoing all the body swapping horrors that old Mayu caused, reuniting the girls in a world where they can have fun playing card games without supernatural BS, letting us see some of the old LRIGS in their human forms looking much more happy in their lives, along with the formerly active Selectors and even, in one last spark of magic, possibly granting a human existence to Tama (or Tama/Iona Mayu), though Ru hasn’t met her as of the final narration that hints at her existence.
And, I have to say, having gotten through all that, I’m impressed.
Selector… is the “good one”. I know, without question, that this thing before me is a marketing tie-in, but it pretty much never feels like one. It’s got bits and bobs from Yugioh or Madoka Magica or Black★Rock Shooter but it successfully weaves them into its own thing, a full story with rounded and surprisingly deep characters who use both their supernatural circumstances and mundane bonding over a shared interest in card games to work out their issues. It’s a show that’s really strongly about loneliness, pain, spite, and redemption.
Where Selector really manages to win out over a lot of other attempts at imitating the Madoka formula is that it’s good at contrast. When it comes to storytelling, if you want to use your darkest colors, there’s an extent to which you should pull out your brightest too. If you’re just all miserable all the time you get incompetent slogs like Magical Girl Raising Project or Magical Girl Site, just like you can get insipid over-sweetness if you use nothing but the light material. Selector, however, has that contrast down. Similar to Yuki Yuna is a Hero, for every horrible thing that happens, and for all the time we spend dwelling on characters who are either deranged and psychotic (like Urith or Akira) or in constant pain (like Mayu or Hitoe), we also get fun times, where there is genuine laughter and genuine smiling even out of the characters who usually provide the drama. One funny running joke is that for all the Selector battles and the like, Ru’s grandmother seems to be the most capable actual player, routinely defeating Ru and other Selectors in the ordinary version of the card game – it’s the kind of thing that’s usually going for a smile even when the situation is rougher.
Infected has us spending time with Yuzuki, who is constantly being hurt by her crush on her brother. But despite this, Yuzuki is still fun. She can be a goofball, and even a good friend to Hitoe and Ru. They spend time together and it’s not hard to see why someone would like these characters. Spread is a little more depressed, but even as we deal with Urith’s cruelty, Akira’s downward spiral into obsessive insanity, the bad situations of just about everyone we cared about in Infected, and ultimately Mayu’s tortured past and deep sorrow, the biggest single emotional arc of Spread is probably LRIG Iona’s transformation into Yuki, going from the seemingly heartless villain she was in Infected to a good person whose chance at life we don’t want to see cut short.
Because the focus is not just on pain, but on pain and catharsis, the show is able to be much more balanced and watchable. It really is like a 24-episode Black★Rock Shooter with a much more consistent story that just happens to use a children’s card game as the locus of its supernatural mayhem.
On the whole, I feel like Selector deserves an A-, the same grade I gave Black★Rock Shooter. It’s less visually wonderful, but the story and characters are stronger. The universe and rules are convoluted as hell, and the pace I needed to take it at to deal with all the turns in the major plot is part of why this review is so darn long, but that’s really the only significant problem, and it does reach for some good heights. Is it sometimes hard to take card game battles seriously? Well, kind of, but there’s also a show where the setup is that the God of Time and Space who lives in the main character’s imagination just because that’s a cool place to hang out gives him a magic cell phone that can see the future. A silly premise doesn’t make a silly show. I’d really recommend Selector no matter what your stance on card games is; it’s just a solid show about the emotional issues of a bunch of girls, made both better and worse through magical means.