Suga reminds me of a fusion of Zero-One Jin (appearance) and Revice George.

But while Jin was a childlike vilain at first and George a fun-to-watch Kamen Rider nerd/mad scientist, Suga really looks cold to me and makes me not like him at all.
Which is kinda a good thing because I don't want him to be redeemed like most vilain/unlikeable characters.

Please don't give him a tragic backstory to explain why he looks shady and make him be that curious guy who goes to far and ends badly, like, I don't know, Ghost Saionji ?

Haven't you considered the possibility that these pieces of evidence were deliberately left behind as a calling card to Hanto? Either to motivate him to accept the operation, or to warn him what happens to journalists who put their noses in dangerous places. Journalism is about finding the truth, which means thinking of solutions as well as problems. You can't just blame everything on a higher power, or else there would be no point in journalism.

Good practice for when Shouma and Hanto need them to die for real.

Kusaka, Hiiro and Isamu had a similar experience, except for the being awake part. Sunred already compared Hanto to Kazami Shirou, but I didn't expect them to even have the same origin story. If the MOTW was a jaguar instead of a mushroom, I'd think it was on purpose.

Can we be sure about Shioya's death though? After all, we didn't actually see Granute Otake or Nyelve kill him, so it's possible that the broken Hitopress is a fake. We saw Otake's method of using magic tricks to raise his victims' spice value while concealing himself, which doesn't match how he attacked Shioya with his Gavv exposed. I believe there's something else going on here and Nyelve is probably the mastermind. A hostage is worth more alive than dead, like how Masamune revived Saki as leverage to manipulate Hiiro, so maybe Nyelve could "revive" Shioya later by revealing that he never actually died.

Reminds me of an interesting moral dilemma: If you take hair from a horse's tail, is that stealing or borrowing? On one hand, the horse can easily grow it back, but on the other hand, the horse is also a financial asset to the owner and the loss of hair reduces their value. I can see both sides, but personally, I think it's stealing if you don't at least offer compensation, like Suga giving Shouma money to buy more chocolate. I guess we'd have to hear Shouma's opinion on this. He's okay with Sachika handling them, so maybe he'd be okay with Suga using them for his technology, since it helps to protect happy humans.

Seems like Hanto has good journalist's instinct to compensate for his lack of fighting skill, like how he knew where to look for Shioya. If he can hone that to predict the enemy's moves, strengths and weaknesses, then he could become a competent tactical fighter like Geats and Majade. Of course, we can't be too harsh on Valen's first performance, due to him recovering from his operation, but even the fact that he won in his condition is pretty impressive and shows the strength of his determination.

Saionji did have a tragic backstory though, well, kind of. He was a fan of Da Vinci and believed he should've been included in the 15 Heroic Eyecons, but Ryu believed that heroism was stronger in people who had endured through hard work rather than relying on natural talent. I think Ryu's criteria made sense and embodied the "letting life burn bright" philosophy more, but if you look from Saionji's perspective, it must be painful for your idol's worth to be denied like that, especially by a close friend.

https://i.imgur.com/WfUWMi8.jpg

Yeah, I'd definitely say that's some bitter chocolate!

I probably don't need to explain that the whole reason I tried to take stock of my opinion on Hanto last time was because I expected his big Rider debut might change a lot about his character. Between the episode preview and the way the narrative has been set up, I fully expected to see a very different side to the guy here. What I expected a bit less was just how far they went with it.

That being said, considering everything about the sort of overall story Gavv has been telling so far, I'm not sure in retrospect what part of this I shouldn't have seen coming? Kamen Rider Valen's debut is very much in line with what Gavv has done with Gavv himself. He has an origin story rooted so deeply in classic Rider tropes it almost feels like a retro throwback -- a man with a surgically altered body who shoulders great solitude while fighting an evil organization connected to those origins. It's harder to get more true to the original than that.

The modern part of it is that, as I was hoping for, Hanto is set up as the #2 Rider in the way we generally think of that term nowadays -- a foil who exists to contrast with our main protagonist, the differences serving to emphasize each character's uniquely interesting role in the story.

This is a debut that's placed pretty much perfectly. Those first five episodes seem to have left Shouma in a fairly stable place after a lot of wandering around, so with Gavv firmly settled in as the hero, the show immediately sets to tearing down Hanto's world to make Valen's introduction as unstable as possible.

I loved how the broad strokes are so close, and yet the emphasis of everything is completely different. Chiefly, Hanto doesn't seem to be in this for quite the right reasons. Shouma first became Gavv solely because he wanted to keep other people from losing what he did, and only later realized what he himself stood to gain by fighting. So of course, Valen is the opposite, with Hanto single-mindedly focused on avenging a personal loss before anything else. Gavv represents Shouma finally being able to liberate himself from the cage he spent his life in, but it's made readily apparent that Valen may well turn out to be a cage that Hanto has shortsightedly stepped into, manipulated by people using his sorrow to their gain.

It's pretty freakin' great, and I gotta give major props to action director Satoshi Fujita for cooking up such a wonderfully unique fight scene to cap this one off, because I think a wounded gunman viciously smacking around his foe melee-style in a desperate effort to compensate for his injuries is exactly the kind of memorable visual encapsulation of everything going on in the story that'll keep people always looking back on this episode very fondly in the long run.

I find it incredibly hilarious that instead of teaming up with Gavv like I originally thought, it would seem that Valen's powers will come from Suga literally stealing the Gochizo in broad daylight and booking it.

That does give rise to the possibility of future villains stealing Gochizos for themselves and making their own Kamen Riders though.

I keep seeing Zenkai Zyuran whenever I see Suga because Asanuma who plays Suga was the voice of Zyuran in Zenkaiger. Now I want someone to draw or photoshop a picture of Zyuran stealing Gochizous. :lolol

Something I want to note is that Hanto's mentor/father figure died exactly the way his actor's character in Amazons did: snapped in half. Well, in Amazons the guy was ripped in half, but it still counts.

All I will say is this: Hanto's suit is cool and the episode was great.

Agreed, it's a fantastic actions sequence, sloppy and dirty, exactly what would happen if you give a former street brawler a reason to hate your guts, a power scaling operation and a fisher price glock.

It's far removed from the flashy, clean debuts secondary Riders can have, Riders who are immediately and flawlessly able to master their new powers, win their first fight and then go on like nothing happened.

Not our chocolate man, he gets in there hurt badly, he wins because he's too angry to loose, and knows he screwed up by giving in to the one thing the very person he did all of this for warned him about.

Although the team-up can still and most likely will happen in the future, but yeah, it's funny how things work right now :lol

That might just be Suga though. Valen is his lab rat right now, who knows to what end.

All valid points! :D

They did have characters like Ryoma and Banno for mad scientists, and honestly they're blatantly evil from the get go in their first appearance unlike Suga, who's only sus as for now.

Yeah, I forgot to bring this up about how Soji's attack doesn't match the usual operation of Stomach Inc, to prioritize happy humans to improve the flavor of Dark Treats. Though Otake's method is to hide the Stomach's operation too, as humans would just think it's a magic act. Though this also happened before, to Michiru, who was clearly miserable, and the Stomachs compressed and murdered her due to her being a human. Nyelv can still be a mastermind with Soji being killed, likely to see and learn the human Kamen Rider project or other evolution, and some think Suga may be involved in this too. Guess gotta wait to know more about this case.

Maybe they meant they don't want Suga to be like Saionji including about Saionji being given a tragic backstory.

Took a long time to do this, after Ryuki introduced henshin items that can be carried around with pocket, which'd be mostly used in most series later. What'd you think about that tarnishing of KR franchise? Even also about non-bug animal motif.

While there's nothing wrong in them repeating a common trope, dunno if this can become tiring that Hanto would just be like most other secondaries being revenge-driven and wants to destroy enemies completely type, considering that previously Hanto was seemingly presented as a laid-back secondary unlike most (though Reiwa actually often did this, albeit some who got a heel turn in later story), and he had suffered tragic loss too before, twice in his mother and grandmother.

Though I'd think perhaps Suga would be able to perhaps replicate it by producing Gochizo-like something on his own, so no need to be reliant on Gavv, he's a toku scientist, after all. And I wonder why the villains want to make Kamen Riders with Gochizos, if seemingly half-Granutes are inferior and more of a defect than full Granutes, but events may change later.