[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

There’s that moment when Kenzaki tells Hajime that he had a crush on a girl in the first grade, there’s a secret, now tell me one of yours.

This is such a small thing, but it's probably one of my favorite moments from the entire series. There's just something so natural about the idea of Kenzaki spending an entire episode thinking really really hard about what he doesn't want people to know about himself and then effectively coming up blank. A sort of childlike earnestness to him genuinely trying to earn a secret out of Hajime just by telling him one of his own, which would be presumptuous even if the secret he came up with was at all a big deal. But, you know, even though he's incapable of being smart about this, his concern for a friend is as genuine as it gets, and that's why we root for him. It's a really smooth bit of writing with these two characters, and the kind of thing Aikawa's episodes excel at, going right back to his first few and moments like Kenzaki telling Hajime "I want you to understand why people help each other" when asked about his motives for supporting him.

The Tachibana plotline here, though! I remember being more than a little frustrated with it watching the show originally, and also much more recently, I remember not finding it a big deal at all on a rewatch. I'm not if anything actually changed in-between. Like you said, it's both entirely in-character, and also fundamentally a bit unsatisfying as a viewer. I can't blame you for not being into it.