"Any card—so long as it exists—has a power that is needed."

homura-bakura:

…

Okay.  I was gonna ignore this.  But there’s a weird thing that seems to infect a lot of people and it’s black and white characterization.  I think we need to try and stop making characters only “good” or only “bad.”  It saps creativity and makes things…flat.

Selena is not a good person.  She’s just…not.  Not yet, anyway.  She has the potential to be a good person, but she is not a good person yet.

But that doesn’t mean she’s a completely bad person.  By saying that Selena has done bad things, I am in no way saying that she herself is completely bad.  There is absolutely no such thing.

Selena is gray. People in general are gray.  They are a mix of bad things and good things and terrible things and wonderful things.  I like Selena because she is very clearly a mix of these things.

What Selena did to Hokuto was inexcusable.  She jumped to a conclusion, basically cornered him into a battle that he was not prepared for, and thought that she was justified in doing so.  I’m pretty sure at this point she still thinks she was justified.  Remember the way that she talked to Yuzu earlier?  To paraphrase, she told Yuzu that the XYZ duelists, even if they fell, should be proud to have fallen in battle.

That’s what Selena is.  She’s a girl raised for the sole purpose of combat and she doesn’t know anything else.  She thinks that all people, all duelists, are automatically soldiers and thus fair game.  This is wrong.

Hokuto was not a soldier.  He was a young boy in training to become a professional duelist, in a universe where dueling is not combat, but entertainment.  He was in no way prepared to handle Selena any more than a professional football player is prepared to handle a trained military specialist.  But to Selena, all duelists are soldiers, automatically.  And if they fall in battle?  Well, that’s part of the job.  They ought to be proud that they fought well.

She comes from a culture that teaches that might makes right and that winners are better than losers automatically.  I wish that we could see more of her reaction to the Synchro Dimension because I feel like she would agree with them.  I want to see more of that part of her.  I want her to continue to be portrayed as girl mislead into believing that she is right as long as she wins.  I really, really, really want to see this worldview bite back at her, and I want to see her confronted with the errors of her worldview.  What I want from Selena is her to be forced to see her entire way of viewing the world crumble down around her, so that she has to build it back up.

We got close, I feel like.  When Shun told her what happened in the XYZ dimension, you could see in her eyes that she was horrified.  She’s been raised to think that soldiers are respectable, honorable, and then was basically told that her people are nothing of the sort.

But I don’t think it’s hit home yet.  I really don’t.  Selena has not yet been forced to take real steps to rectifying her skewed worldview.

I like her as a character because of her skewed worldview.  Because of her strange sense of justice and her belief that winners are more deserving than losers.  She has done some absolutely horrible things and she has not yet been asked to atone for them.  I’m still waiting for her character to be given real justice.

I really want her to see the horrors of war with her own eyes and realize that she was wrong.  That she is not, and has never been, one of the good guys.  Not yet, anyway.

And then I want to see her slowly pick herself back up and learn to view the world differently.  To try and make up for her actions even if she can never fully atone for them.

Yes, she does attach to Yuzu and she does do some good things, wanting to protect and fight alongside those she has determined are the “good guys.”  But that doesn’t change the fact that she has not yet been forced to confront her twisted way of viewing the world yet.  She needs to do that in order to grow.

Selena is not a good person.  She’s not a bad person.  She’s a person.  And that’s why I like her.

Tl;dr: people are not black and white.  They are elements of both, and that’s what makes characters like Selena interesting and open to growth.  So please don’t erase that part of her.