[Fish Sandwich]

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Originally Posted by barnstenchfartface

That being said, I'm with Fish Sandwich

Those are not words I hear very often.

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Which is why I'm hoping they're going for a little bait and switch.

I totally see the potential for the show to basically do both angles at once. Like, yeah, something happened to Emu to make him weird, but at the end of the day he's still just himself. Aside from the the whole way the twin Ex-Aids work out their beef with one another so quickly this episode, I feel like there's some other evidence pointing towards that direction.

First off, Emu "switching" personalities has never been some hard binary thing. Consider stuff like when he selflessly risked getting a game over (something we've learned the hard way is no joke) back in episode 3 to save some kid in the middle of a fight. And like, consider how hotheaded he was acting during the whole introduction arc for Drago Knight Hunter. The show didn't feel the need to have wind dramatically blow his hair around every other scene then.

Second, unless Ex-Aid pulls out a real twist in the fourth quarter (I'm talking something crazy like "M/Emu becomes a separate entity from Emu/M and becomes Genm and also evil for some contrived reason"), we pretty much know Ex-Aid's future upgrades are back to just being one guy, so I figure the show's options here are either to make Emu and M the same guy if they aren't, whether by literally merging them somehow or just having them be cool with each other (essentially keeping the status quo), or get even ballsier than killing Kiriya off and basically gut half the hero's personality and get rid of the "fake" part, which is a pretty nuts thing for a kids' show to do. It may not be actively traumatizing the way offing a character is, but the hero of a Rider show is meant to be like, this nice, stable role model for the kiddies, even in a show like Gaim (where Kouta is basically the anchor to keep kids from running scared when s*** gets real) and suddenly dropping the bomb that either chunk of Emu's character basically doesn't matter on them would be pretty hugely damaging to that.

And that's the thing. As cool as it would be for shock value, the idea of actually doing that is insane. The two halves of Emu are clearly meant to be one whole. Neither half of him would really be much of a character on its own.

Basically, to make a long story short, I think there's very little chance of whatever the show ends up doing having too huge an impact on anything. Keep in mind, however, that I didn't believe Kiriya was really dead until I saw the flowers, and that I consider Graphite's early death a complete violation of storytelling common sense.