Lostorage incited WIXOSS Episode 2: Girl / Ideal and Reality

Is this what despair tastes like?

Impression 

Stop. Stop this right now. Bullying Chinatsu is not allowed.

How can you make such a cute girl suffer?

I want to give Chinatsu a hug. I want to hold her tight and tell her that everything will be okay. But why do I get the feeling that, even if I could, it’s already too late for her? I’m not sure she even wants her smile protected anymore. It’s actually a little scary. Of course, I’m aware that this sort of suffering is more than within the realms of possibility for WIXOSS, but this is just the second episode and Chinatsu’s already been dropped into a festering pit of despair and has given up from climbing out. Perhaps the greatest irony of it all is that Okada Mari isn’t even involved this time. I was looking forward to Chinatsu doing really well! I thought her self-confidence meant that she would succeed, and that her first major obstacle would be her reunion with Suzu! If we compare how the both of them were introduced to Selector battles and the sort of subsequent experiences they had, Suzu has been relatively well off. Although her father isn’t around much, at least she has a stable home. She’s not having fun at school, but neither is she going to be ostracised or the subject of rumours like Chinatsu will now be. She will probably make friends with Hanna and Nanashi, in all likelihood. Even her mental health is better. And Ril doesn’t unsettle me as much as Mel does. In contrast, in the space of a single episode Chinatsu has lost her friends, her reputation, her house and her job. Her first battle had fucking Piruluk arrive out of nowhere to tear her a new one seemingly without any effort. Now she’s going to throw away both Suzu and her former ideals, and will embrace the darkness of battoru.

In the end, it was a combination of bad luck and her own actions. Running into Piruluk (or is she calling herself Kiyoi again) was just really unfortunate. Even if she isn’t the mastermind behind this new system of Selector battles, Piruluk has more experience with WIXOSS than Chinatsu can even imagine. Going up against the last boss for your very first battle is so unfair that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. That encounter did have some speculative value though – the fact that the entire battle was effectively off-screen indicates that Piruluk will be important. We have no idea who her LRIG is (potentially herself) and neither do we know how many coins she has. If she’s even bound by the coin system at all, that is. The only thing we can be reasonably certain of is that her coin bet ability is something similar to Peeping Analyze. At any rate, I’m pretty sure the writers chose to bring her back for a reason. It’s just all up in the air as to exactly what that reason is.

Or maybe they just have excellent taste. Piruluk a cute.

Also, if it really is Piruluk behind everything, I wonder why she’s made it so that the reward is to be able to change one of your memories? And it’s your memories, this time? How far does that stretch, exactly? I can see it being useful if you have some sort of mental trauma that you’d like to forget, but does changing your memory of something mean that everyone else’s memories are altered to fit your recollection of things? Let’s say Chinatsu decides to change her memory of her exam results and make it so that, to her, she topped her year. If no-one else’s memories are effected, then the only result is that she’ll be extremely confused when she realises the school has her down as #20 when she remembers being #1. Suzu really should have asked Hanna more about both that and the concept of ‘disappearing’, because those two are too vague to make any sense of as of yet. I’m sure disappearing has some really twisted, cruel connotation beyond what everyone currently thinks it does, anyway. Also, is it wrong that I want to see more Hanna so that I can see more Nanashi? Her voice is too lewd.

Anyway, back to Chinatsu. I think running into that genki Selector girl can be chalked up in part to bad luck, and in part to her refusal to use her coin bet. As for those rumours about her staying out late, which led to her assaulting her friend, it was all a bit bizarre to me. For one, I have no idea how going to a different part of the city once even conflates into a rumour about always staying out late – nor do I understand how that even made it to the the teacher in the first place, unless her ‘friend’ is actually a toxic little snitch. The subsequent assault was just an unlucky sequence of events. I think we all know Chinatsu is (or was) a good girl. But her financial, academic, part-time job and battoru-related stresses have been building up all this time, and at that very moment she must have seen her friend as someone who not only seemingly has zero cares in the world, but also the potential cause of even more problems for her. Because if it was only those two who saw her out late, then it must have been one of them who grassed, right? Another possibility is that losing so many coins meant that her memory of events have been altered, and so to her she’s certain that they were the cause of it all.

What I’m really confused about is how she was suddenly fired from her part-time job. Surely her track record at work should make up for anything that happened outside of work – not to mention the two are totally unrelated. It’s like telling a smoker that they’re being fired for smoking hundreds of feet away from the job location, even though they would never think of smoking whilst on the clock. Not to mention it’s unrealistic for her school to even contact a freaking fast-food chain out of nowhere. I’m pretty sure both this and her father being let go from his job (thus leading them to lose a conveniently company-owned house) were just events added to make her suffer even more.

I’m worried about her reunion with Suzu. Really worried. Based on this episode and the last, the dynamic that’s been building up between Suzu and Chinatsu is one of opposites – both in terms of their lifestyles and ideals as well as their response to the Selector battles. Chinatsu has a relatively loving family but no money. Suzu is affluent but has distant family relationships. Whilst Suzu was initially terrified about having to battoru and took the idea of ‘disappearing’ extremely seriously, Chinatsu was clinical and self-confident, accepting everything instantly but treating it as a game. And most importantly, whilst Suzu draws strength from her childhood memories of Chinatsu and is terrified of losing them, Chinatsu has now twisted them into becoming a hindrance and wants to let go of them. All this time, Chinatsu has been trying her best to live up to the ideal version of herself that Suzu sees in her – the one who will always ‘ganba’ and can achieve success with hard work. And that’s why she refused to use her coin bet, because to her it’s not morally right to manipulate people’s minds. But recently, literally nothing in her life has worked out by sticking to those ideals. The one time that something does go right is when she stops doing so by forgetting about Suzu. It’s a spiral of mental instability from here on out, because her logic is now that if her life gets better when she forgets Suzu, then she doesn’t need Suzu.

In fact, I’m quite certain that the OP is being sung by Chinatsu. Well, it’s Iguchi Yuka and she voices Chinatsu, but what I mean is that it’s as if Chinatsu is singing about her own situation.

If her life is this shitty now, imagine how it’ll be when the real, Hanayo-level plot twist comes halfway through the season. I have an idea as to how everything will play out, actually. Now that she’s abandoned her previous morals and is becoming addicted to battoru, she’ll become something like a darker version of Ruu. Even bullying little girls and making them cry won’t be beneath her. My theory is that she’ll get really good at WIXOSS now that she’s stopped holding back as Piruluk said. She will collect four coins, and her fifth battoru will be against Suzu. Using her coin bet, she’ll manipulate the one person she used to care about the most to secure her final win. As a reward for winning, she will choose to erase all her memories of Suzu right in front of Suzu herself, and the great circle of suffering will be complete.