[Blade Raider]

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.