Can I just say that I loved how Riona got completely destroyed?
I loved that too.
Remember how smug she was?
"'
I rip people's Souls out, screaming and kicking. It's not pretty and it's not nice. Who knows, maybe I've done it to some 'good people'. Wouldn't know for sure, I wouldn't. But here's how it is: You don't tell me how to do things, and I don't finish a fight neither of us want.'"
I
really want to throw that line back at her, because she was so utterly adamant about deserving it 100%.
Not only did she lose that fight,
it wasn't even a fight, and she completely and utterly lost it before it ever began.
And it says so much about her character, too. She just
assumes she is the be all, end all magical girl when it comes to combat. She assumes she can dictate how things will go at her whim. It doesn't matter if she walks into someone's territory with no intel on who lives there, no preparation, no plan, and allies--she finishes any fight anyone starts, period. The only one who stops her from killing who she wants to is herself.
Which makes what happened here so beautiful. Rionna is so utterly defensive about what she does the moment anyone even
seems to judge her for it. And she's used to being able to intimidate anyone she wants to into backing down or running away. Sabrina didn't even have to say anything for Rionna to get pissed off and indignant that anyone would
dare to judge her to her face without a hint of fear, and so Rionna just threw her methods out into the open, as if saying, "
this is what I do, and there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it; now
stop judging me if you know what's good for you." And it never even occurs to her that she's just damning herself--she's literally
spelling out why Sabrina shouldn't let Rionna go without exacting some kind of compromise or deal with her, but to Rionna, the very notion of compromising is absurd and offensive.
She came to take Sabrina's soul, like she has all the other grief manipulators, but she found that Sabrina isn't some immoral monster deceiving people and exploiting them. So she's not interested in making any deals, unless Sabrina is willing to give up her soul (or start a fight, which gives Rionna justification to steal her soul anyway). She doesn't immediately leave because she's interested in Sabrina's weird soul, more out of curiosity than anything.
But Sabrina is good at digging, and fearless, to boot. And she touches a nerve, gets too close to the truth, and Rionna reacts. She corrects Sabrina's assumption--she's not trying to revive her sister, but to exact revenge against her sister's killer (beyond what she's already done), but hasn't had much success so far. And then she
demands to be allowed to leave (not that we'd ever explicitly or implicitly said she couldn't), immediately trying to mind control Sabrina to let her out of the privacy sphere--a reaction no doubt fueled by how utterly unsettled she was at being cut off from her shades, and feeling actually
vulnerable for the first time in a very long time. Given how obsessed she is with being the top dog, and her inability (and outright refusal) to play nice with others, she can't handle not being in a position of absolute dominance, even when she willingly goes out of her way to walk into such a situation. Go figure. Play shitty games, win shitty prizes.
Rather than being the world's top dog, she was just an annoying (and unbearably rude) interruption to an otherwise very pleasant evening. A disappointing footnote whose main accomplishment was wasting a lot of our time and patience.
*is being pedantic*
