[DreadBringer]

Oh and I forgot to talk about this, in ep. 39, there's a scene about Tendou losing his shit over Juka potentially gaining love. That's what I meant for Tendou being overprotective, like for Hiyori in early part of the series when Daisuke hits on her. Daisuke may be someone who deserved to get that treatment from Tendou, but Tendou's just overprotective on her, because this is his response regarding Juka (and she only got a call, not even knowing how's her "boyfriend" if it's the case).

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

Hmm, that's actually pretty normal for Japanese culture though.

Yeah, but talking about Die's reception for these kind of stories.

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

I thought Tendo and Jyuka were related through their grandmother?

Juka is Tendou's stepsister/adoptive sister, not blood siblings, that's what I meant.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Maybe! But I worry that the Kamen Rider policy on Worms changing to Only Take Head Shots could have some slightly unforeseen consequences. Feels like it's not going to save a lot of Worm lives!

This is just doing usual Worm attack, every other Worms are killed and destroyed after all, it's either usual outcome (Worm dies and explodes), or something significantly better (them living like humans they were, non-malicious, you can never treat kill and replace lightly though).

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

KAMEN RIDER KABUTO - EPISODE 40

Like, right away we get Daisuke assuring Reina that she’s not a Worm, or a Worm who thinks she’s Reina. She’s just.. her. Reina is Reina. It’s an obsession with Inoue, the ways people measure themselves against others, chafe under expectations, fret about how others see them, worry about the parts of themselves they don’t understand. He literally did an entire series about a Rider learning to stop judging himself. (Two, if you want to say that was a theme of Agito, which I wouldn’t fight you on.) His answer to those stresses is always the same, and it’s self-acceptance. Don’t worry about how the world sees you. Don’t think of yourself as too much something or not enough something else. You’re you, and that doesn’t need to be qualified.

It’s… this episode is so minor. The threats are largely psychological, not physical. It’s monopolized by this sweet relationship between Daisuke and Reina, how he doesn’t even give a shit if she’s actually a Worm. The only person in jeopardy is the memory of Reina. But it feels massive. It feels like a series finale. And it’s only really about how we learn to live with ourselves, which is maybe the most important lesson there is to learn.

Yeah, of course, this is once again about your species doesn't matter, it's how you behave that matters, either if you're a monster (someone having a horrific body without acting malicious, in this case, the Reina personality), or you're a human (humans are the real monsters trope, like Banno). While this is about Daisuke falling in love for real outside of his usual ladykiller tendencies, and this making his care about Reina more genuine than what he does to other women, this is still Daisuke though. Reina is a woman, and a beautiful one, Daisuke would just inevitably defend her and given as she's a woman. While Daisuke's right here about Reina being Reina, and not the Uca Worm, I just think Daisuke can pull this on any woman, even to those that are at fault, going to great lengths to defend any women in any circumstances. I catch this one as more of Daisuke's white knight practice, but also the time he fell in love for real, won't treat this one as similar ones as how Kagami deals with humanities in Worms.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

So many things in this story that could feel vestigial, or a distraction, are just different parts of the same journey. All of the stuff with Tendou missing Hiyori, it’s echoed in Daisuke’s scenes with Reina. Daisuke even says lines from some of Hiyori’s most famous scenes, telling Reina that she can do it, that he’s by her side. It’s two stories that are about how it doesn’t matter what someone is, the negative parts, the things they hate about themselves. If you really care about them, you’ll find some way to support them, work to help them care about themselves. Hiyori being a Native, Reina being a Worm… none of that really matters. What matters is how you feel about them.

And that’s really all this episode is trying to do, which I love. There’s almost no plot to speak of. A bunch of little incidents create some dynamic action scenes, but the only objective is to let Reina have a moment of self-expression before Worm Widow snuffs her out for good, and then the reveal that Worm Widow can’t even really get rid of Reina.

This part is also addressed inside the story, where Daisuke threatens Tendou not to deal with Reina, and also asks him to consider his feelings, which makes Tendou rethink about him with Hiyori. Though the main difference is that, Uca Worm has done actual atrocities, and Reina's personality takeover is still under a threat by that, while Hiyori, being a Native, hasn't done any Worm slaughtering, making the Uca Worm still a threat unlike Hiyori (Reina is Reina and that assurement is important, but that's to confirm that Reina doesn't make any faults, but Uca Worm is still a threat).

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

That idea, that we can never really close off those parts of ourselves, it even comes through in the slightly-wacky Yaguruma plot, taking the place of last episode’s tonally incongruent but thematically relevant Tsurugi plot. Here, it’s Yaguruma seeing some sadness in Reina, something he thinks of as Who He Is, but he quickly finds himself reverting to TheBee-style Yaguruma heroism in the need to defend her. It’s goofy, with him totally forgetting that he’s Sponsored By Whoever Makes Leather Pants now and not some corporate do-gooder; and it’s poetic, because the arc of it is just the all-time repeating story of Yaguruma Is Full Of Shit And Kageyama Starts To Despise Him, but now in leather pants; but it still lands because it’s looped into this theme of not being able to ignore who we are, with Yaguruma still craving the love and self-respect he’d claimed to despise. Much like Reina’s never gone for good, Yaguruma is still the egotistical hero somewhere underneath all of that S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders cosplay.

Yaguruma still kicks monster ass on a regular basis like this one, and he had the impluse to act on by fighting said monsters, but there's also the time where he's aware on this, and gets so nihilist that he chains himself to prevent himself acting on that, because that's seeking the light. And from here too, Yaguruma, just like what he did on Kageyama, had selective "care" for those that is on the darkness, like Reina here. Although Tendou, bad attitude aside is still a better person than Yaguruma, pre or post ZECT, this scene is similar to Tendou taking care of Keiko in the previous 2 parters. Something on a stranger takes an interest in those 2, and those 2 seeks to care about them intimately, more than just saving their lives, getting into them. And also why I support the implementations for the nameless nobodies, and it's not exactly a quantity trade-off to the quality, those 2's good deeds here, or Kageyama's bad deeds to people like Gon doesn't mean it's necessarily similar (probably Tendou's one is) to those doing good or bad deeds to nobodies, the "quality" part being done because of a something specific (like for Kageyama's, it's someone hindering his plans, but...if Gon is unrelated, then he won't do anything to her) where the nobodies one is done in more unconditionally manner. I give props to you for acknowledging Kusaka's villainy, or not treating Tiger Undead as good one for showing care only to Mutsuki, but I feel that, you downplayed Kiryu's atrocity in Blade for what he did to innocents likely due to not being invested to those.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

But Reina is gone for good, at the end. She gets her chance to sing on stage, partially. Worm Widow takes over in the middle, but keeps singing anyway. She can’t even really explain why, but Daisuke already knows. It’s Reina, still in there, always. But she doesn’t deserve to be buried alive, and even Worm Widow knows that. She fights Daisuke, hoping to end the pressure to recognize Reina’s memory. She loses, because she probably didn’t want to win anymore. She’s trapped with two half-lives, and she can’t put them together in a way that makes sense to her. She’s pushed away a part of her she needs to survive, and the loss of it is too much. She finds some acceptance, though, at the very end. Reina's feelings for Daisuke, giving her some solace for her final moments, become a window into an existence that surprises her. And then that window closes.

And this unfortunately also proves Tendou being right, for both Kagami and Daisuke. Even with Reina getting some chance to continue her human form's life within a Worm's body, it's still not enough for Reina to be completely safe to others (Reina's never gone for good, but only temporarily). The episode still had the Uca Worm personality threatening, and succeeding to take over her body back. Reina's chance to get to sing is just like someone dying making up their last time to do something necessary to them before finally gone for good. Non-lethal solution to deal with Worm is still unapplicable here, Reina after this will revert back to Uca Worm, which forces Daisuke to kill her. I'm also giving a massive prop for the last scene, of her singing, interwinding with Daisuke fighting Uca Worm and killing her, with all the song lyrics. It's one of the most poetic and meaningful death scene, it's so good yeah, albeit, something that doesn't make sense had to be done (it's minor, but doing this just to be fair, if you question about this in ep. 32), which is Uca Worm not exploding after being killed, dying in Daisuke's arms.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

It’s a tragedy, something Inoue excels at. He writes some beautifully flawed characters. Monsters who want to be heroes. Heroes who want to be monsters. People fighting for their voices to be heard. Ending an episode with a hero fighting a monster so a person’s voice could be heard by the monster, because every hero and monster are just parts inside people who want their voices to be heard...

And the TV production team putting Inoue on the leash and trying to restrain him from pulling what he can when he's completely free. But the "heroes who want to be monsters", if you refer to Yaguruma here, it's not Inoue's exclusive sthick for this episode though! Yonemura wrote him since ep. 33, his comeback. Also, while it's important to consider the values beneath those flawed person, I'm afraid that Inoue may have taken that too far; outright glorifying and normalizing it, with how his works can play off negativity as the norm that characters bounce off of on a regular basis, pushes positivity to the side (means something that is relatively more worthless) and has grayness take center stage.

It's not merely looking at the value beneath them, but rationalizing and justifying those acts as right, downplays or cuts off anything bad regarding it, asking to exclusively look at the valuable part of those people, relying on sympathetic POV centered about them (as they're major characters) a,nd give them free pass solely due to that side. It's disastrous to only exclusively look at the good side, and be ignorant to the bad side. What I implement for seeing values behind those people (and there are other Rider series too which teaches that someone's selfishness isn't exactly bad, but a product of the environment they were brought up in, and sometimes you need that desire to survive) is that, it influence what kind of treatment (including things like punishment, advice, etc.) we should give to them, that excessive punishhment is wrong, you can't inflict that to anyone, like resorting to murder for anything. But those that actually did bad thing should be corrected and guided, not being overlooked or given free pass because "he had valid reasons for doing it so he's nothing bad". Also, as I want fair treatment to anything, no double standards (for audience too to let them realize here), what I want to see is flawed character writing which is not about morally ambiguous ones, but being fully good with ordinary flaws and hindrances.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

A QUESTION

The Tsurugi stuff in this episode, that’s something I have a hard time finding room for, thematically. It’s funny, though, with him fully onboard with his two favorite people dating. I don’t mind it myself, Kagami and Misaki. I think they’ve got some pretty solid chemistry. What about you? Do you think Kagami and Misaki would make a good couple?

For what I thought of Kagami and Misaki slowly becoming more equals, actually here, Misaki still puts Kagami beneath him ._. "don't compare me with Kagami". And this is alternate take of how Tsurugi processing this happened; it's him trying to just support both, as both are important to him (I saw him falling for Misaki coming, but didn't see him befriending Kagami coming though when watching, which is what I was thinking later about Misaki being Kagami and Tadokoro's partner). For the answer I don't think so though for them being couples, I think they have a solid chemistry as work partners and colleagues, which means platonic, but not intimately, I feel like their chemistry resembles those done in action flicks between a major male and female, and one of the bad handling regarding that is to shoehorn a romance in simply because one lead is male and the other is female.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Also, this stupidly beautiful and sad episode had THE BEST GODDAMN SCREENCAP, and I couldn't add it to that post because it would've felt wrong, but I'll be damned if it goes unheralded:

Yeah, this shot also amazes me, leaving me with jawdrop, with the kid actually saving Daisuke from superpowered fighters in the Riders.