[Kamen Rider Die]

MASKED RIDER RYUKI EPISODE 15



This one was... fine? Didn't totally click with me, and I'm not sure why that is. Didn't do anything wrong, but, I don't know. Just wasn't feeling this one.

(Also, hey, sorry it's been a second. My stores are closed to the public, which means we've got to do a lot more online orders for shipping and delivery, which is basically a 24/7 job right now. Orders come in at weird hours, everyone's got questions, the whole comics industry is in upheaval, it's a lot. It's a lot. The last few days have been, like, double work. Not a lot of time to even look at the boards.)

The stuff that I thought worked great, that did totally click with me, it's all of the Knight/Quarter stuff. I just, I really like how they're playing Ren's part in the story, as a guy who's trying so hard to be a friendless bad-ass that he's going to get himself killed for no good reason. That thing where he's just picking fights with anyone so that he can turn off the part of his brain that wants to be kind, that wants to have friends, to isolate and punish himself into becoming the person who can kill other Riders, I love that story. It's moody without being bleak, it's playing around with the Dark Hero trope, and it creates a very unpredictable version of Ren. I kind-of love how you can't tell what dumb/weird/mean/sad thing he's going to do next.

It helps that Tezuka's a big part of Ren's story. I love how he's, like, Ren's sponsor, trying to get him to quit being Kamen Rider I'm A Loner Dottie A Rebel and start being a healthy person who might actually survive these Rider battles. And it's, man, it's not like Tezuka has to be that clever! Ren sincerely just needs someone to talk to, and Tezuka's a guy who gets the stakes of what's going on, works in the same field as Ren (murdering monsters, an essential business), and has an insistence that never becomes too forceful. It's like water, smoothing stone over time. Tezuka just needs to keep letting Ren know that someone cares about him, and sees the lies he's telling himself, and it feels like a nicely humane solution to Ren's... just his whole Being Ren thing. (Dude is just a bundle of self-destructive tendencies and unprocessed grief.) I like it, all of the Knight/Quarter stuff. It's a richly dramatic storyline.

The main Ryuki one for this episode, though, yeah, just not feeling it. And, y'know, I love me some Ex-Aid, so a bunch of gamers getting killed thanks to the machinations of Kamen Rider Poor Man's Genm, seems like it should be right up my alley. Especially with the whole text of their battles being This Is Just Like What's Happening With The Masked Riders. (Thank you, Yui! Figured that one out on my own!) On paper, it all works. It's thematically resonant, and it echoes one of my favorite Kamen Rider series. But I thought it was fine, nothing more. Not bad, not at all, but I didn't really care much about what was happening, the case Shinji and Yui were investigating. (Also, Yui gets a job at ORE, because this show has two workplaces when it should really only have one. Clunky storytelling, but at least Yui's more in the mix.) The smarmy gamer assholes don't make much more of an impression than the beginning of this sentence, so I didn't really care why they were killing themselves. It's cool that there's a new Rider, and the fight between Ryuki and Poor Man's Genm was neat (I love that Poor Man's Genm has his driver in his shoulder, that's super unique), but the escalation in this story didn't feel that solid to me. I guess I mostly didn't care if a bunch of nerds want to have a Mortal Kombat fight club or whatever. The stakes, I didn't really feel into them. It was an alright story but, beyond that final fight with Ryuki and Poor Man's Genm, I was mostly checked out of it.

It's really the Ren/Tezuka stuff that popped this time out. They've got an undeniably compelling dynamic. More of them, please!