The Ex-Aid Riders just got their Bugster Vaccine.

Wouldn't this follow the standard of injecting a person with an altered or inert version of the thing that needs to be cured or quelled?

While not following the precise themes of "Remodeled Human", it does tackle the moral conundrum of using live people as test subjects, which is a theme I don't recall Ex-Aid addressing too hard if at all.

Ex-Aid didn't really address that, but Build dealt with human experimentation through the various Nebula Gas experiments, and IMO did a good job showing multiple sides of the issue: Experimenting on unwilling humans for the sake of power, like Faust and Evolt did, is evil, but volunteering as a test subject to get a chance at beating bad odds, like Kazumi, Gentoku, and the Three Crows did, is heroic even if it's also sometimes tragic. The show didn't get into more morally complex cases, but Build was juggling a lot of big ideas already so it's understandable that they'd keep that one simple.

I mean, given the Bugster Virus, it could also be something like "Training to beat all levels of Angry Birds".

But yeah, that wasn't really an area Ex-Aid was ever interested in. The closest it ever got would probably be the Snipe miniseries, but that's far more interested in just giving Taiga a bad time than being an exploration of medical ethics.

Well, this was pretty fascinating.

I, sadly, don't really have much to add of any substance. I certainly like the classic era and their use of Cyborg Humans, but I can see why Toei wouldn't wanna risk pushing such a message. But I never really got that when watching the Classic Kamen Rider; if anything, I saw it more like how one would adapt to a pacemaker. It didn't make him a monster, it just made him different and he had to live with it-and, in the context of the show, use his new abilities for good.

But I'm just a guy looking at the show after the fact, and only after, like, 20 or so episodes. I'm sure at the time, it was a pretty taxing decision and better safe then sorry.

I always thought that is a well known tropes that done to death where the man made rider suppose to be like the motw turned good to fight his creator during showa era from ichigo to black. It was after the death of the creator of kamen rider where the creative team for kuuga began to conspire and create something new and Mature for the turn of the millenium. Even agito was supposed to be a loose sequel like v3 until ryuki begin to make independent series . Deno began trend of kid friendlier and rider vs. w began the heroic goody2shoes of a rider that's either uptight or clownish. It might not be so bad for the next rider to pay homage to the cyborg idea again for the 50th anniversary. Kamen rider brain made a parody out of it. We're moving toward Ai with roidmude and humangear. Maybe they'll do a ghost in the shell where humanity all become cyborgs.