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.