His deffinition of "dark' seems to be the "fluff" kind. Not true darkness, just hollow theatrics. To him, if it's not visually dark, it's not narratively dark.

Afterall, he said the gimmick and suit reflect the tone of the show. Which is absolutely not always the case.

No. Gaim is awfully dressed dance crews, pokemon-esque monster game battles, Kamen Riders falling off cliffs like looney tunes. The fruit thing is just the icing on the cringe cake.

Ok then, you all enjoy Gaim and forget that Kamen Rider's best series are in the past I guess. 'Discussion' over

You are entirely entitled to your own opinion, Gatack, and don't think we are attacking you in anyway. However, I don't think you are properly expressing your opinons so that we can understand exactly how you are feeling.

Well, at least we can hear your real opinion now.

So you clearly are just not paying attention to the show.

The entire point of Gaim is that all this happy kids-stuff is hiding sinister happenings. The "pokemon-esque" battles are propaganda, a facade to get children to, essentially, test weapons and gain data. They're intentionally targetting young, impressionable children for their experiments, they say as much outrigth TWICE in these last two episodes.

Are you kidding me?

That was Kouta's imagination. He didn't actually fall like that, that's how he imagined it happening. If you wanted to point out "Looney Toons" anything, you'd think you'd mention Bravo, who has goofy effects follow in his wake because of how fucking bizzare he is.

And this is why nobody takes you seriously.

You make a blanket, irrantional statement, pout, and call "discussion over" when the flaws in your reasoning are pointed out. Much easier to give up then actually consider you might be mistaken.

You, uh, haven't actually paid attention to much of Gaim, eh? Like the characters motivations, the ACTUAL plot points, which as explained before were pretty cool an-

Oh. OH. Oh shit. Lemme just pack my bags then...

I don't think you know my definition of dark, as i havent really discussed it. I simply asked whether the show would return to a similar tone as that of it's older series which are considered darker in the spectrum of Kamen Rider.

If the suits, powers, gimmicks etc. do not reflect the tone of the show then what is their purpose? Now, it's to sell toys of those numerous little trinkets, which would seem is right up your alley?

Do not put words in my mouth or speak for me, you clearly have not read what I've been saying. Obviously, attempting a debate on said question was a poor choice on my part, apologies!

I am not bothered if you take me seriously or not dude. I'm not pouting or whatever, i said 'discussion' over as clearly this isn't much of a discussion at all. From the get go, you in particular, have tried turning this into some kind of "defend gaim because its so complex and not at all silly" argument, instead of discussing the question I put forward. I had no interest in talking about Gaim in my original post. So yeah, forget it

NARRATIVE. The very thign you claim it doesn't support, it does. The point of the colourful riders is to support the idea that these games are for kids, but they're not.

And also visual interest. Colour and detail are good things, not just for kids, for EVERYONE. That's the same kind of flawed mindset that believes Superman should be all dark colours instead of bright red, blue and yellow. Faiz may be dark, but he's also super boring and generic looking. (no offense Faiz suit fans)

Did... did you just pull the "you play with toys" card on this site?

You know, the site DEVOTED to that, which you are also a part off?

EVERY rider series is designed to sell toys. Certainly the entire Heisei era. Faiz sold toys.

So you say.

Luckily you do not decide was discussion is and is not.

The discussion you put forward is "when will rider series be dark again."

They already are. People are mentioning Gaim because it clearly demolishes the very title of this thread.

Okay guys, please keep this thread on topic. Things are starting to get a little too personal, please resolve your problems with other members via PM and if the issue keeps up, let us know. Don't just use this thread to point fingers.

I think Gaim is as "dark" of a series as we're going to get now. Toei's current approach seems to be to move away from gory deaths and high body counts like we got around 2000/01. I'm not going to pretend for one second that I don't kind of miss that (Kuuga and Agito are two of my favorite Rider shows, after all), but recently Toei's been more into monsters that try to make people feel bad rather than kill them. We seem to be getting a bit more mindless rampaging in Gaim, but we're not going to see a bunch of dudes get stabbed and then dissolve into sand anymore.

Storywise, Gaim is shaking up to be pretty dark, but it's more of a psychological darkness than a violent one. We're dealing with a show where a big corporation is handing out powerful weapons to teenagers to see what will happen. There's no monsters eating people, but that's still pretty fucked up. I think that's what we're going to see from "dark" Rider shows - stories with more mature plot twists and creepy motives rather than mountains of corpses.

Personally, I'm largely fine with that. I do miss the days when monsters seemed like a legitimate threat to everyone. It gave the show a bit more edge and made the monsters more terrifying. I will always maintain that Ryuki had the scariest set-up of any Rider series - behind any reflective surface there could be a horrifying creature that could suddenly reach out, grab you, and then drag you off to be lunch. Stuff like that always felt like the stakes were higher than "we have to stop that Phantom from smashing that little boy's model airplane or else he'll be sad!" But we're not going to get that anymore. I think Gaim is a good compromise, though; the beasts rampage, but aren't going on killing sprees, and the real horror is what the people behind the monsters are up to.