[Sh Ranger]

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

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Oof.

Oooooooffffff.

Heavy episode, man. Some real joy, and some real darkness. One of my favorite characters gets an end to their story. One of my other favorite characters struggles with their core defect. Kaido abducts a child I guess?

It’s a big episode, for good and for ill, for Team Orphnoch.

I'm so glad to hear that Yuka is one of your favorite characters! She's one of mine as well. So as you'd expect I'm just as sad as you are about her death. Unlike Mari, she doesn't even have a corpse anymore.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

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Hey, let’s talk about Yuuji first.

Yuuji’s most heroic quality is his belief in people, both singular and plural. He has friends and family that he’ll fight for, but he’ll also protect total strangers from Orphnochs. Yuuji’s most fatal flaw is that he can’t handle being betrayed. When his compassion is taken advantage of, he’ll straight-up heart-murder someone.

So, you can imagine the conflict he feels when it seems like humanity as a whole has betrayed him. Everything he’s been doing for the last year has been to protect humanity, and now he feels like they’re manipulating him, betraying him. Does humanity deserve his help when they’re trying to kill him and his friends?

It’s tough to see Yuuji so pitiless, so enraged. (I mean, it’s fun to watch. There’s a really fun almost-single-shot dialogue scene with Takumi and Yuuji in a car that’s a little showy, but still impressive. The way the camera starts on Yuuji’s side and then rotates around the front of the car to end on Takumi answering his phone? Definitely working hard to make that scene pop!) He’s long been the most empathetic, most measured of all the Orphnochs. To see him decide that Orphnoch safety isn’t worth jeopardizing anymore… huge development.

The episode doesn’t really get much of a chance to interrogate it, beyond a few characters being unnerved by Yuuji’s new attitude. With Yuuji’s tentative hope that things could improve being assaulted by a ton of snipers, I’m guessing we’ll get to spend a little more time with Angry Yuuji.

Takumi and Kiba have opposite character developments. Takumi used to see Orphenochs as a force of destruction but now he sees both sides of them, the good and evil that's also present in humanity. Kiba used to see humans as a force of good which extends to Orphenochs but now he's losing his faith in them as his kind is being betrayed by them. Takumi believes in Kiba's ideal of co-existence between humans and Orphenochs but with Kiba's faith slipping, Takumi might have to take charge of that ideal. Takumi looks up to Kiba as someone he should strive to be as a hero fighting for the good in both species which is why he's worried about what's happening to him.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

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Hey, let’s talk about Yuka.

I mean, it felt like she wasn’t going to make it out of this one. She was so happy. Everything was working out. Dramatically, it all felt like One Last Good Day. And, like, she’s got a date with Keitaro planned? Jesus, was it also her last day before retirement?

But it was still a lovely episode for Yuka. She got to have some affection from someone. She spent some time fretting over whether or not she’d ruin Keitaro, before Mari told her to choose happiness instead of misery. And she died like she lived: with someone telling her to just drop dead already.

That Kageyama scene! I keep rolling it around in my head. Of all of the last people to see Yuka alive, they made it Kageyama. And she tells Yuka to die, here and now.

There’s a clear disappointment to it. Kageyama hoped for so much more from Yuka. Every other young Orphnoch, all of the pretty boys, she’d treat them sweetly, nurture them. With Yuka, she was stern, imperious. She knew that Yuka held back, and it insulted her. She tried to tell her that caring for humanity would get her killed, and it did. So she sees Yuka there, wounded, unable to summon the Orphnoch form that could save her life. And she just watches Yuka.

But she changes into an Orphnoch beforehand, and I feel like I know why.

I think it’s breaking her heart.

I think she saw something in Yuka that she didn’t see in any of those others. She wanted her to succeed in a way she didn’t for any of those others. And this is the end of Yuka’s story. She’ll never be anything more than she already was. She’ll never be the person that Kageyama hoped for, and it’s shameful. It’s a loss for all Orphnochs.

I think she’s crying.

But, y’know, Yuka isn’t. She’s been through so much, suffered so often, rarely felt accepted. But right at the end, at the very end, she got to live her dream. She was accepted by someone, and she knew she deserved that acceptance. It didn’t last, but dreams rarely do.

Wow, your take on what happened between Yuka and Saeko is totally different to mine! I doubt Saeko would be so reckless to assume her Orphenoch form just to hide her tears. I'm sure such an act of emotional suppression would make Troy Burrows proud but I'm pretty sure she just killed Yuka. The secret science society reduced her to human and killing humans is part of the job. She may have cared about Yuka's potential and saw herself as a mentor who could nurture it but I doubt she actually cared about Yuka as a person or she would have considered her feelings. Yuka never wanted to hurt anybody, she had a modest desire of living a happy life with the man she fell in love with and Saeko took that away from her.

Saeko having those Kaixabrows is fitting since my hatred for her immediately surpassed my hatred for Kusaka when she killed Yuka. It's the same reaction I always have when a bad guy kills a character I care about. Kudos to Inoue though, he built a very high tower of happiness and then demolished it. He's always breaking my heart like that. At least Yuka got to die happy with a sense of fulfillment. That's the least she deserved after so much suffering in her life. But Keitarou gets left behind and he's going to have to live with the pain of never seeing her again.