He looks good even without his torso.
I'm surprised we're getting more female Riders than usual. I was thinking they'd use the whole violent and physical e-sports thing premise as an excuse to make Naago the token girl trying to play with the boys.

Female riders are popular even if their toys don't sell very well. I think Toei tries to please all categories of fans and, if possible, attract new ones. Plus, I personally think they are slowly setting the stage for a female main rider.

I just remembered, we had two blue Secondary Riders called Kagami and now we have two green Secondary Riders called Sakurai. What surname is going to repeat next?

Naago being the token esports girl was a reasonable prediction for sure, but then I thought Merry's silhouette looked vaguely female. Didn't expect a third though! Not even Sentai gets that many girls. I hope this means there will be more chance of having a good female Rider. The last full-time female Rider I kind of liked was Valkyrie and even she stumbled in a few places.

I would've expected Bandai to sell the Bugle Driver Zwei with Poppy's Gasshat, so people would've had to purchase Cronus' Gasshat separately. I was definitely surprised by how much confidence they had in Poppy to not do that.

A female Primary Rider though? They haven't even done a female Secondary yet. I doubt they'd go for such an extreme jump. But if they did, I'd like someone with a good record for writing competent girls, like Komura or Fukuda. It has to be done right if it's going to stick.

Kinoshita was told immediately that he couldn't do a female Main Rider, which is why Jeanne was as prominent as she was, and I doubt that's changed much.

I think we might someday see a female Secondary, but probably not any time soon.

There were some early Reiwa rumors a long time ago that suggested a lead rider duo of brother and sister and I think that would be a good idea to bring a female rider into the forefront.

Speaking of riders, the most repeated surname is, of course, Tachibana. Although, maybe Reiwa decided to abandon this tradition.


I'm not saying it will happen soon. But I bet that in the era of Reiwa.

I think it was right after Zero-One. And if you look, Geats is the third season in a row where we will see brother and sister riders.

I'm excited by the prospect of having 3 (and potentially more as the series goes on) women riders... though I do wonder about Takahashi's ability to handle it? Takahashi has always come off to me as a guy who "wants to be progressive/inclusive but sometimes fumbles things in practice" or something like that?

I'd say Valkyrie is kind of a good example of this... Generally I liked Yaiba but i feel like compared to our other riders in that show she sort of got the short end of the stick a lot of the time...

I also really like Nico in ex-aid quite a bit in terms of how much personality she had, but the way she was handled in terms of being a "kamen rider" well, personally I'm still mad she never got her own suit lol (though who knows if that was up to Takahashi at all or of it was a toei/producer thing)

I have faith Takahashi will try his best, I'm just not sure how good that will be? In the end it's just an "only time will tell" situation though so I'm not going to worry about it too much for now

Maybe I?ll go a little off topic, but it always seemed to me that the claims to the plot of the Valkyrie were not justified. That is, she is the third rider of Zero-One, and third riders have traditionally received less forms and more suffering since the days of Agito and the suffering Gills. I mean, is Yaiba's story really that different from Saber's Kento? And he still received a lot of attention, as for the third rider. So I still think Valkyrie's gender has little to do with her role on the show.

One of the benefits at least of having more than one female Rider is the onus isn't to get a single one "perfect" because they're the token, at least, even though Naago will probably be the main one as the (presumed) tertiary.