You may remember (or you may not, I never know), I had a very open, outspoken dislike for Ryuki when I watched it (which was roughly the same time as you did) and had a tendency to prefer the franchise when it was in the hands of ANYONE but Kobayashi.

As such? I LOVED this episode. The idea of people fighting to enforce their ideas of justice being taken absurdly literally is just incredibly more entertaining than what Ryuki did with it. And I don’t mind Abyss’s design, since he does have two Contract Monsters (seriously, that’s broken as hell) and at least he manages to actually look like them (looking at you, Imperer).

Also Tsukasa’s line “I suddenly want to find her very much innocent” is one of my all time favourite lines in anything.

And finally for this, an etymology lesson for the counterpart’s.

Shinji Tatsumi - Tatsumi is a portmanteau of tatsu (dragon) and kagami (mirror)

Ren Haguro - Haguro literally means “blackwings”, as in the name of Knight’s Contract Monster.

Atashi Journal - atashi is the feminine equivalent of ore (keeping with the theme of Ichijou’s and Maya’s equivalents being a female and a male respectively)

Addendum. The kanji used for Tatsumi in this case are the ones used in the Chinese zodiac. Tatsu'辰' is dragon, Mi'巳' is snake. Keep in mind that these are not commonly used to describe dragons(龍) and snakes(蛇) although exceptions can happen such as this, since these specific characters are used within the context of the Chinese Zodiac.

Just out of curiosity, is there a reason as to why you severely disliked Kobayashi as a Toku writer? Admittedly, I thought she’s basically hit-or-miss myself and that’s just from judging on her works on Super Sentai and I have yet to really start watching her works on Kamen Rider. OOO, just going by its first two episodes, does look like it’s going to be fun though.

I predicted Zatyme, Fish and Androzani for the last few arcs, but I wasn't expecting DreamSword to be so excited about Ryuki and have so much to say about it!

Apologies in advance to whoever's doing World of Blade BTW, I haven't watched that show yet (before Die reaches Day of Oma) so I'm probably going to skip that discussion for now so I don't get spoiled too much.

Haha, this is great banter! However, I would like to compare Tsukasa joking about Natsumikan totally being guilty to Akiyama Ren doing the same thing to Kido Shinji once. Although in Ren's case, it was a convenient bloodless way to remove Shinji from the Rider War. Here, it's just Tsukasa being petty to make Natsumi beg for his help since he wants to enjoy himself a little, which is also very in character. He would never actually let her take the fall though. Tsukasa and Natsumi do care about each other a lot, but people who care about each other a lot can also disagree and argue, similar to you guys actually!

Yuusuke is just a passenger in this world though, where Tsukasa is the one given a purpose as a lawyer that allows him to interact with the Mirror World. It makes sense that Decade, being Decade, can do that, but not some unrelated yet very helpful Rider like Kuuga. Yuusuke could definitely henshin more often than he does but I think his reason for staying out of the fight is justified here. Even though he didn't remember anything from this world, Tsukasa did and has a slightly higher opinion of him as a result of his moral support. Cause if anybody needs moral support, it's Tsukasa!

And I just happened to be eating a cake while rewatching that episode! Clearly it was meant to be. I didn't get framed for a murder though, so that's good.

There's this out of nowhere part in the TV-Nihon sub where Ren says Shinji's name and the text at the top reads something like "Shinji - to believe". Did they just forget to mention that when they were subbing Ryuki and suddenly remember in the second episode of this arc? It feels so tangential to everything that's happening in that scene where Shinji is about to use the Time Vent.

Atashi isn't the only feminine equivalent of Ore/Boku. There's also Uchi which is most recently the preferred pronoun used by Sudo Mei.

Now for my own thoughts about World of Ryuki. The Rider War as a very literal example of might makes right was interesting. I'm not sure how you could call it fair and impartial though, unless there's an even 7:7 ratio between Riders fighting for innocent and guilty verdicts. Even then, considering how the Rider War in the show was rigged by Odin who is stronger than the others, what if the government are using Odin to get the verdict they want? Then you have Kamata, the true culprit, entering to play judge, jury and executioner on his own crime. This is a terrible idea for a justice system!

Ryuki is 11/19 in my Heisei Rider Ranking. Even though it's behind Den-O due to just how humorous Den-O is, I think Ryuki has the best plot of any Rider show written by Kobayashi. Specifically, the plot I'm talking about is the escalating interactions between the participants of the Rider War. Not the actual plot which is the Kanzaki stuff, which is good in theory but flawed in execution. If that was done better, this show could easily be maybe 8-10/19 instead.

Tatsumi Shinji and Haguro Ren were intriguing versions of the main timeline characters who are weirdly inverted in their behavior. Like Kido Shinji, it's actually Haguro Ren who joins the fight for a reason other than why the fight was started, not caring about the verdict and aiming for Odin's Time Vent card instead. When Tatsumi Shinji joins the fight to prove Natsumi innocent while believing Ren is guilty, it's Ren who refuses to fight! I also think it's cool how the first episode depicts Ren as this mysterious character who disappeared a long time ago. He's also the first AU Secondary Rider to appear, since there was nobody called Keisuke in World of Kiva (and nobody called Geiz in World of Kuuga :p).

I mostly can't believe that, in a Ryuki-themed Decade story, we didn't once have the beige-trenchcoated Mysterious Fisherman appear and tell Tsukasa to TATAKAE.

Did the people making this show even watch Ryuki at all.

I don't know if the actors or the writing found the right levels for it, but Shinji Has Very Strong Feelings About A Situation is incredibly Ryuki for me. As bizarre as I found the details of Shinji and Ren's feud (is it really just that Ren took a different job?!), the fact that Shinji dives into a situation he doesn't have all the facts on, ignores any evidence that contradicts his snap-judgment, and then has an 11th hour realization that he's made a mistake... that is, like, 60% of stories from Ryuki. The actor doesn't have the charm to pull it off, and the writing doesn't have the nuance to give the character cover, but the idea of it is very Ryuki.

Yeah, he's a shark man? In a show where everyone's an animal man/woman? Works okay for me.

It's both more corrupt (Is there no vetting for this system? Three of the victims co-workers are jurors! That's the opposite of impartial!) and somehow more elegant (the last person standing decides who lives and dies), which is why I feel like this story didn't do nearly enough with the idea. It's so bonkers, and yet we spend more time with fill-in actors who are trying to evoke better performances in less time. I ain't going to be thinking too much about Not Shinji and Not Ren, but Rider Trial? Probably going to have that in my brain for a little while yet.

That explains alot, thank you.

Thinking about it, that actually checks out. The show definitely could've been slightly more blatant about it, but I feel that does seem to be what they were aiming for.

thats why reiko fixed the silverware.

she knew kitaoka would be accused of murder otherwise.

This basically sums up my feelings on every arc so far, even as someone who hasn't seen Kiva in full yet.

To be honest I was surprised I even got the Ryuki spot, considering how popular of a pick it seems to be on the boards. The spots I gunned for were Kuuga(which let's be real, everyone knew Fish would get), Hibiki(which I suspected Switchblade would get), and lastly Ryuki. Very happy I got it in the end!

me? care about that guy??

pheh! phsaw! tch! bleh! no way. not in a jillion years.

I would've accepted that as an explanation if there were a quick scene where Onodera goes to jump into the Mirror World and fails, but as it stands there's nothing saying that Kuuga couldn't jump in to join the battle.

Kogami Intensifies.

Can't speak for where I'd put Ryuki as a whole since I'm terrible at ranking things, but currently I put in third place for Phase 1 Heisei shows. We'll see if it stays that way whenever I finish Kiva and get around to seeing Kabuto and Den-O.

But they had a stand-in for Ichijo in the Kuuga arc, bro.

It’s mostly a mix of hype backlash (wherein something is nowhere near as a good as everyone else who watched it before you made it out to be) and just not aligning with my personal tastes (I’m fond of shows that focus strongly on ensembles, but a lot of Kobayashi’s shows don’t give the ensembles a lot to do)

Something I really like about Abyss design-wise is that he's kind of an example of working backwards! His two contract monsters - Abysslasher I think and something else - are actually Rider-less Mirror Monsters that were in the original Ryuki TV show!! So they're basically saying "what if a Rider contracted with them" and arrived at that. Just a super cool concept!

I know that this part of the talk begins with Dickeido being recognized as unpleasant, but the next part of the talk kinda seems like minimizing Dickeido's behavior due to DreamSword calling him out on it (which is deserved), and actually these kind of people can face even greater scorn like being accused as not understanding the show/character properly (deemed as slow-witted or such for that), or just irrational hater (you can like while acknowledging their behavior as bad, albeit DreamSword admitted that they don't like the characters), etc. I'd approve with what DreamSword said there (...as well as directly criticizing irl stuff... like praying you to not become lawyer, dunno if all of that are also meant for joke, but no offense but you'd have no right defending Tsukasa if you'd use "what would I do" excuse, though I admit your reply to Enchilada645 softened this somewhat), and I hope that these moves won't be ridiculed due to it being a (sociopathic) comedy, particularly from the part of "landed in the world of a TV show" talk there. This'd make me kind of question about previously, you insisting to not create an unhelpful or inconsiderate joke in Den-O thread. Other than that, DreamSword seems to defend Onodera here, but he'd be the one that commonly gets disliked by people more AFAIK with nicknames like Yuuseless (another reverse view he has?). Though I also don't know about what makes the Natsumki complaint here of "sitting around" makes it a sarcasm for "true companions". For DreamSword talking about Tsukasa having memory loss, for consistency talk, like before probably I'd think of Tsukasa's a douchebag who has limits of that, when the world is on, but he'd not care further more from that, just about the people/world being saved, not about other problems (as he said, he can't feel the pain of others).

I thought that the law being judged by a Rider War to determine who gives the verdict, is a parodic take (probably even the reason it's not explored much) of a Rider War, as I'd think the system would obviously not work (there's only a newspaper claiming criticism for this system). Of course being a lawyer is something that is unrelated to power and fighting skills, and this determines a lawyer via unrelated things in those 2 by a Rider War. This is a blatant might-makes-right view. Though I do agree that I also want for this theme to be explored more, but if I want too, I'd want for the theme to be used to show how wrong and dangerous the might-makes-right mindset is... Otherwise, for a setting that revolves around law, this part somehow doesn't really feature a Ryuki rider who was an actual lawyer, Zolda (as probably it won't be the original Kitaoka like Ryuki and Knight here), other than as one of the fighters.

For the Ryuki-ness of teamwork (even if Ryuki doesn't have the Riders eventually team up at the end actually...) and understanding, dunno if I got that too even in main characters, as I'd think the understanding is the main part of Shinji (Kido) getting the dilemma in the series for his plan to stop the war, as he'd get to know about other Riders' motives and that he can't please everyone in his actions, causing hesitation. Shinji and Ren were common primary-secondary Rider dynamic (albeit Ryuki probably kickstarted that like you said as unique), so that'd be probably not Ryuki-centric thing, but almost all of the Rider series (the outlier is when they're more cooperative Blade except at first, Hibiki, OOO for Date, and iirc Wizard).

I feel like that Tsukasa is also a hypercompetent protagonist (except at photography), like Tendou before, so other characters would rely on him, whenever they like it or not, to solve problems? He was the one who figured out Gegeru at Kuuga two-parter before, albeit it can seem to others that he played a New Game+.

For the first phrase, dunno if that's a joke or not, but as I've seen that phrase "heroes needs villains" used seriously to demean heroes and glamorize villains, just a reminder about how world without monsters like real world is already full of people who need healing, care, love, compassion and help, and you also did talk about appealing part of Kamen Riders being about helping people psychologically. Other than that, the powers can be used to solve daily problems easier (if you can control) or rescuing someone from accident or disasters. For Abyss, there's an outlier for him compared to the other Ryuki Riders, that his Final Vent is summoning a stronger Contract Monster, combining Abysslasher and Abysshammer into Abyssodon. But... dunno about it being Final Vent worthy tbh, Dragreder can go toe to toe with it no problem! For Ryuki stuff, Abyss isn't even free from ironic death, but it's later talk as he'd be involved in Blade story too.

Well.... for Raia not showing up... be careful what you wish for (but continuing this would be spoiler). For Scissors, it's probably a show about how weak him as Rider is, he employs sneaky tactics to gain upper hand. His meme was caused by how short his death was iirc, and how joke character he is among Riders. Other than Scissors, I also wonder if the Rider War here kills every single Rider involved (faithful thing to have finishers one shot and destroy any Rider.. including Decade's here), is that a one-time thing or continuously done? How would the Decks appear again to determine who to judge, unless that the Deck isn't destroyed after the Rider loses somehow. I don't know what's Odin deal here either, as he as usual abuses his teleportation powers to clown on other Riders, but when Knight uses Final Vent, he just stands there doing nothing? For Shinji and Ren (yes they're... but different surnames with Tatsumi and Haguro), probably not as severe as Onodera, but I got similar feeling for Shinji (Tatsumi) here too, he'd be more willing into give in into his darkness compared to Kido. And a play of ORE Journal, as already said above, is that here, it's named Atashi Journal, which is a feminine word for "I" in Japan (ore is masculine but also rough word for "I").

Just to clear up any possible confusion on the matter, any and all digs that Die and I make at eachother are purely in jest. We're buds, it's all cool.

And I'll admit, I probably should've been a bit more clear on my stance towards Natsumi, but I wanted to try and stay totally focused on the two-parter itself, rather than go on a tangent about her role in the show overall so far.

So for those interested, here it is. My problem with Natsumi and her doing nothing isn't just what I find to be a plot-related problem, but a characterization one as well. If this show wants me to seriously believe that her and Tsukasa are close, then I feel she would've actually done like, something by now.

The main point of contention is her vision of the future, which by now is being proven to be more and more something that's very likely to happen in the future, given the circumstances of the plot at hand. I feel that if they really wanted to emphasize her faith in Tsukasa, then they should've had her show trust and respect for him and tell him outright about the visions she's been having.

Instead she's just all "Well, let's wait and see" and it drives me crazy.