[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

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.

Yeah, I feel like it wouldn't have been a huge stretch. In general, if you've known someone for a while and they've hidden a massive secret from you, something that feeds into some of your fears and prejudices, I think it's easy to wonder what else they might be keeping from you. Everything about Takumi's reveal is played as WAIT WHAT HOW, and they aren't doing super great even before Mari shares her suspicions. (Keitaro in particular is barely holding it together, and that dude loves Takumi.)

Like, I think they could've leveraged some of Mari's feelings about Sawada to fill the gap of what the murder mystery contributed. She just got briefly killed by someone she trusted who was an Orphnoch. If they'd played with that idea for a little bit, rather than letting it sublimate into I'm Swallowing My Fear To Help Takumi (a plot point I really liked!), I think you could do a lot of the same stuff.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

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!

cool cool but they managed to turn on their belts at least once before that tho right