[Kamen Rider Lucha]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoldenXtreme

I'm genuinely glad other people can enjoy stuff like Jetman and Kiva (my least favorite Sentai and Rider!), because I got nothing out of either of those shows besides a colossal headache. After all, imagine how depressing it would be if there was a show that genuinely nobody liked!

I think people's Inoue Tolerance? mostly comes down to a few main factors. How much they enjoy dramatic romantic subplots, how much his emphasis on theme over internal consistency bothers them, and how much his writing quirks like his sense of humor and uh... women problems annoy the viewer. Probably some other stuff too that I can't think of off the top of my head! I personally find his writing misses the mark a lot of the time for me. I'm not a big fan of romance in stories and I tend to find his characters start to fall apart a lot of the time when you look at them outside of that scope. Like in Jetman, I feel like the romance element gets laid on so thick the show just starts to forget having the characters do much else, which is fine if you enjoy that, but I didn't! His general writing style is hit or miss, I find his treatment of women in his shows significantly worse than the majority of other toku writers and his attempts at drama sometimes fall so flat for me they wrap back around into unintentional comedy. That being said, I do like Faiz a lot, the only Inoue show I like as a matter of fact. Seems to me that everyone likes at least one Inoue show, when the elements are mixed just right.

Disagreements with the bulk of your assessments aside (obviously, art is subjective, and I just don't think our brains work the same way, no judgements from me at all), I have a genuine question that I cannot for the life of me understand.

Why are you not a fan of romance in stories?

I hear this said a lot, and it completely baffles me. Romance, or romantic tension of some sort, occurs in many (if not most) situations where groups of people are forced to live and/or work under intense conditions for extended periods of time, so excluding these fundamental relationships from fiction makes stories without them feel a tad hollow and unrealistic (to me). I don't mind when a story doesn't involve romance (even though I feel like it's usually a missed opportunity), but it seems like a deal breaker for a lot of people that dislike seeing romance depicted.

Over the years, I've gone down many rabbit holes trying to understand this preference, but I've never found the answers or perspectives I was looking for. I'm truly, genuinely curious about this because it feels like a completely alien mindset to me; however, it's so common in "genre" circles that I feel compelled to at least understand where it originates.

EDIT: REVISED FOR CLARITY