[Fish Sandwich]

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

You've got the easy, visceral, cruel reactions of Keitaro and Mari, stung by the way they found out and scared of what else they might not know about Takumi.

I think this might be the core of the disagreement we're having on this? I really can't imagine any "what else they might not know" that would get Keitarou and especially Mari to react in a negative enough way to actively push Takumi away without making it look like they've just arbitrarily decided none of the previous 30+ episodes of Takumi being grumpy, but never shady counts. It wasn't too long before this that Mari was giving a relatively glowing evaluation of Takumi's fundamentally good nature to Yuuji. There's a lot of trust built up between them by this point, and it would logically take a lot to test it. Kusaka would have to be spinning s*** out of nothing, and since, as I've pointed out, he likes to work the truth into his lies, that isn't really his style. I feel like that approach would've taken an absurd amount of fine-tuning to not just end up feeling even more contrived than what we got.

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The way you equate "constantly injuring yourself" with "heroism" makes me suspect that you, too, are a graduate/survivor of the Ryusei School. It's all clear to me now, Fish.

Look, I'm just saying, it's a common theme! How much did I talk about Yuusuke getting horribly injured during my Kuuga write-ups? How often was Eiji sitting around in bandages during OOO? How many times did Sento give an inspirational speech while picking himself up off the ground after getting beaten up in Build? I'm not saying you have to repeatedly injure yourself to be a hero, I'm just saying that if you are a hero, it tends to happen a lot!