Lol i feel sorry for poppy in this episode she get beaten a lot...
and M is no chill either its straight wife beater right there :D
Wow Emu Vs Pallad building is looks good.
I praised both Emu Actor and Poppy actress

https://scontent-ams3-1.xx.fbcdn.net...oh=8923a730d2c
The four horsemen of the apocalypse

I've got to say I enjoy that Emu can mostly ignore Parad with Maximum Mighty X, it makes for some hilarious fight scenes. Like how Parad goes in for a punch and Emu just grabs his arm and twists it back to stop him almost immediately.

This was a great episode. Good to see Poppy back with the team. But what happened with her driver though? She threw it somewhere offscreen and the gashat just disappeared. I was not expecting that ending though. So Parad is Emu's Bugster then? So that makes him M?

I think Lovelyka may have collected it back but she kept the gashat.
Where was Lovelyka anyway?

I'm leaving the plot twist for next week since I think it's a good twist idea, but it isn't completely adding up for me and I expect next week to clear things up.

Let's talk about Poppy. Poppy is one of those characters that I try to ignore. Not because she's a bad character or anything, just that I've been burned before on special female protagonists never being developed or explained beyond a throwaway line in an early episode. Then they made Poppy a Rider and I instantly knew she was getting development I want from characters like this.

Sure enough, this episode dives into what she is. It works as a nice mirror of Ex-Aid's Emu/M identity crisis, which the more I think about it, I think the show's underlining theme is identity crisis. A lot of the conflict comes from things like doctor (Emu) vs. gamer (M), friend (Asuna) vs. foe (Poppy), liar vs. soothsayer (Lazer), detached vs. invested (Hiiro). I'm sure there's more, those are just the ones I've seen pretty clearly.

I also wanted to talk about my issues with Kamen Rider Poppy's design, but I'll come back to that later.

PS soothsayer was the closest antonym I could find for liar.

If he treats his heartbreaks like I do, he probably went to eat multiple tubs of ice cream

I missed his crazy ass this week!

So Episode of Poppy was pretty interesting. The dilemma, Parad being a controlling psychopath, and that heartwarming near-ending all wrapped up to make another roller coaster ride of emotion and speculation. Kind of disappointing we didn't get some kind of music/dance battle to cure the game disease, but the ending we got was still really nice.

I'm going to reserve my thoughts on Parad's revelation until the actual episode happens though (if I even comment on that thread...). Too much ambiguity to reliably ascertain anything. Another thing to add to the growing pile of "can't wait for Ex-aid things", along side the Buggle Driver II and the Lazer Hyper Battle DVD.

Great episode , the twist with Parad and M seems interesting but I will wait for the next episode. This episode really made you fell for Poppy.

Oh man, that was a good one! Poppy got good character development, crazy plot twist, and Taiga sitting around on a frilly bed!

I thought the whole conflict of the episode was very interesting. After kind of brushing it off, we finally learn a bit more of Poppy's past and confirm she did end up killing her victim. I am a total sucker for the theme of moving beyond your past, so I really enjoyed the theme of this episode. Curious to see how Poppy will return to being a Rider after throwing away her driver though. The twist with Parad at the end totally blindsided me too, that was excellent. Obviously it isn't too clear yet, but it looks like he is the M personality to me. Poor Hiiro caught on a little too late it seems. The next episode looks SO good, with the debut of an antagonistic Level 99 form owning everyone, I can't wait for it!

http://i.imgur.com/yNbejRV.jpg

The only thing better than an amazing opening is an amazing opening where all the pretentious visuals turn out to actually be meaningful.

Anyway, stellar episode. The closest thing I have to a complaint is that Emu and Hiiro seem to have forgotten how they cleared JuJu Burger without killing Burgmon, but since Emu ends up doing the same thing anyway, I can't be bothered to care.

It's great that they decided to do stuff with Poppy, and even better said stuff was really good. The whole scene where Emu finally gets through to her was the first time Ex-Aid has made me feel genuinely emotional. It was nice.

What was REALLY nice was that, as if in answer to my prayers, Emu, after spending a huge chunk of the show being an ineffectual punching bag, FINALLY got another genuinely awesome, Ryuki-esque, moment of heroic determination. I love this stuff. Everybody, including Poppy herself, is telling him they have to be enemies, so what does he do? Puts a gun to his chest and dares her to pull the trigger. Hardcore.

I think I have figured out something here. I think the riders, and us the viewers as well, have it completely wrong when it comes to clearing games and curing victims. It is not beating the monster that does it, but completing the goal of the game the monster comes from. Of course, for most of the monster, beating them IS the goal. In the case of all 3 of the Bugsters from non-combat games, however, they have never cleared the game though combat. For Bugermon, the game is about feeding the monster and that is what cleared the game. For Poppy, her game is about keeping the rythm, presumably causing the character to smile at the player, which is how Emu cleared that game. And last week Lovorica, or whatever his name is, was only defeated by Taiga earning the adoration of the ladies, which is what the goal of a dating sim is.

So yeah, I think that explains things.

How about Motors and Charlie? I don't think Bakusou Bike (racing game) and Shakariki Sports (sports game) actually involve combat, yet they're cleared simply by beating them

Maybe they're like Mario Kart/Crash Team Racing?

Still, the only race involving either of them was Motors' first episode (in which the riders did clear the game simply by beating Motors in the race). Motors' subsequent episodes, as well as Charlie's episode, involved zero racing or free styling. So, maybe there are always 2 methods of clearing the game, either by following its rules or just killing the Bugster

Motos was from Bakusou Bike, and one of the rules was that you can do whatever you want in order to win iirc. This includes getting rid of the competition methinks

I just realized that both times Motors returned, he's not defeated in a normal way (only used as a bait by Genm, then got himself reprogrammed by Ex-aid). So that probably explained Motors.

Still, Charlie was defeated by killing him, rather than just beating him in his game. And from how he acted, Shakariki Sports doesn't seem to be a violent game.

Guys, foreshadowing. And this may take the form of a run on sentence with apologies. So if the concept is that to become a Bugster, you have to have taken over someones body that is now deceased, and Emu never received the 'compatibility surgery' but obviously is patient zero, and we've confirmed through Poppy's backstory that in order to exist as a high level Bugster you have to have killed someone, does that mean Emu died as a kid and has been a Bugster this whole time? Because that's some next level meta.

I think I've developed a minor crush on Ruka Matsuda. That is all.

I'm not gonna say anything on the big twist till we get more info next episode, so back to my regularly scheduled minor things I enjoyed:
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Once again, the small detail of the whole game area flashing red as Poppy appears is a really nice touch.

Also love the two scenes comparing how Brave and Snipe handle the RidePlayers:

Brave: This game is dangerous. Cancel your transformation, now!
-Screw you!

Snipe: You're in the way, move!
-But, our game diseas-

-(Fires cannon repeatedly)

-Aaaaaaah!
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As I recall, only Taiga and Nico saw Emu clear JuJu Burger without killing Burgmon. And since only Brave saw Emu use the reprograming on Poppy at the beginning. All three of them were morally justified in their minds, when they started attacking Poppy.

That was what was so great about that scene! They were the heroes, doing the right, heroic thing, but because of the circumstances and how we saw it from Poppy's point of view, it was absolutely terrifying. Even the sadistic "No hard feelings" line was just a sarcastic hero quip from their point of view. I also liked how that scene (and the whole episode, really) treated Nico more like an actual rider than another Ride Player.

I really love how well the Poppy story was handled in general. They avoided the "forgot about his powers" issue by having Ex-Aid reprogram her right away, but still managed to keep her stuck on the villain side through other means. That's really good writing. I hope they don't stop here with her development though- the little clip was nice, but I would love to see Poppy looking in to who her host was and keep struggling to reconcile her existence with the host's death.


The Parad/M thing on the other hand is a little confusing, as the M thing has been in general. From what I understand, the timeline is:

-Emu is a kind kid who wants to be a doctor after the director does the operation on him.
-Dan discovers the Bugster Virus, which is somehow related to the Y2K Bug, and infects Emu with it using a prototype "Mighty Action C" game.
-Emu slowly starts to become more and more like M, who's obsession with games is pretty similar to Parad.
-Dr. Pacman does the operation on Emu, harvesting the virus, and Emu becomes himself again and starts getting serious about becoming a doctor

So yeah, I'm a little confused about how Parad fits in to it, especially since we did see him fighting the Mighty Brothers at one point, so he couldn't just be the same as M. I think the idea of him being the virus that was harvested makes the most sense, and I suspect that might have something to do with why Parad was pretending to be Dr. Pacman in the Genm specials.

The only thing that still doesn't line up for me is the idea that Parad is the bugster of Perfect Puzzle, while M is Knockout Fighter (hence the form's resemblance to Ex-Aid), and the combination results in Perfect Knockout. That seems right, but how does "Mighty Action C" fit into it then?

I was under the impression that Mighty Action C wasn't even a real game. That the disk just contained the raw virus and that the name and blurb for it existed only to entice Emu into putting it into his computer and getting infected.

Emu seemed to remember actually getting a game, though, otherwise that would make sense.

So you mean like Faiz?

Late response, but this episode, man... right in the feels.