[SPLIT LIP]

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Originally Posted by badlander86

You just didn't notice. In the episode with Reiko he talked about he he almost starved to death and if you notice in other episodes he actually does nice things like offering food to other because maybe despite being a psycho he doesn't believe in people starving.

Boy wouldn't it have been cool if they in any way explored that?

But they didn't.

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He was carnage to everyone's ambition. When he found out through Reiko that he missed his brother when he set their house on fire as a kid he lied through his teeth and played a victim all so he could finish the job.

And?

That doesn't tell me anything about him except that he's a psychotic.

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That made him different from any and every Rider to date. Lazy tool for writers? Give me a break.

Maybe if all you've ever seen is Kamen Rider, but Asakura is basically every bad guy from every episode of Criminal Minds.

He was absolutely a lazy tool, you basically admit it in your last paragraph.

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This is why we can't get nice things. He wasn't the strongest Rider by any stretch and his character was a perfect foil to Kitaoka's. He made Kitaoka's character look good.

Kitaoka was ten times the character Asakura was. He was actually multilayered, unpredicatble, and had every right to be an irredeemable scumbag... yet had all this different sides to him that fleshed him out and made him more. Asakura had no other sides. He had no interesting relationships, he had nothing to describe him as beyond "psychotic."

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I mean why do you think Kanzaki offered him the belt in the first place and gave him so many chances? He was Kanzaki's ringer in the Rider War to thin out the herd. Ren was stoic but hesitant when it came to killing, Shinji was never ever going to kill in the first place and Kitaoka was sickly. Asakura was Kanzaki's safe bet.

All you've done is explain why Asakura was there, and validate my claim of him as a lay tool for the writer. He existed to do things, but had no character. He was a mad dog, but even a mad dog has the ability to be tamed and understood. We know nothing of why Asakura is what he is. He's just lazy. Tiger was everything Asakura should have been. An actual psychotic not just obsessed with killing with his own twisted motivation. Asakura had no motivation. He was a child's idea of what a villain is. Beyond that, he was boring and predictable. I never asked what he was gonna do each episode because I knew. He'd smile, hurt or attempt to hurt someone, and... actually, he never did anything beyond that, besides escape the police in ridiculously contrived and stupid ways.

I will say one thing, though. The actor himself did really well for the character he was. It's not easy to make a character so flat convincing. And his death was perfection. And that's not me being sarcastic or petty, but it was one of the best done scenes in the show. But then I thought the entire last episode was perfect minus the last five or so minutes. (you know what I mean)