[DreadBringer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 21 - “A GRASSHOPPER, A FAMILY, AND A HERO”

It’s always neat to see a Kamen Rider show try to balance the visceral thrills and toyetic idolatry of its milieu with a bit of caution for the children in the audience who might be missing the existential battle against violence that Kamen Riders are actually fighting. (I’d say it’s a Kobayashi special, but she didn’t even write this one!) It is incredibly difficult to have your karate bugman cake and eat it too, but it’s such a worthwhile endeavor. The act of teaching children that you can fight for justice without literally fighting for justice, or that the goal of a hero should never be punishment… I like that shows try to do that while also showing off the TajaSpinner or whatever the hell the wrist-shield thing is for Bird Form. I don’t ever want this show to lose its heart for its salesmanship, or vice versa.

Unlike Takuya in Ryuki who clearly had the wrong motivation to only want to have fun fighting, Takashi seems to be righteous to want to not tolerate bad guys and stop injustice, but this is something that I also have a hard time conveying to the audience regarding the part of heroes' goal shouldn't be punishment. Maybe it's just hard to explain why a twisted sense of justice is wrong. I see some complaining that the bad guys in fictional medias don't get enough suffering/punishment, namely if they got redemption, which means letting them get off easy and not properly giving the crime its supposed weight, like what Takashi complains. But heroes are also often described as fighting for justice, and justice is often used to refer to punishments by law done for the victim's sake so they get closure, so making bad guys pay are expected for heroes' job by this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

But, yeah, Gotou! He’s got to talk this kid down from thinking that the point of a good life is battling injustice with your own two hands in the name of making the world a better place, and he’s just got nothing. You might as well have a story where Ankh needs to tell a kid why eating popsicles is wrong – blank stares and slack jaws, from credits to credits. We’re in that stage of the story, where the problem is presenting itself to the heroes. While characters like OOO and Birth deal with the more immediate threat of Rampaging Righteousness Monster, we’re slowly getting Gotou into a position where he can see how weird and childish his conception of things like Justice and Helping are. He starts off this story confronting a litterbug with only slightly more maturity than the child who kicked a stranger in the leg, which is setting a very clear tone for this thing when contrasted with Eiji’s calming attempt to defuse the situation without ceding ground to inconsideration. Better to stick Takashi with Gotou, since Gotou has to learn the exact same lesson as a little boy.

It's expected for Goto to react first in this, as Goto's an ex-cop, so he can't stand by seeing a kid got hurt. Reminds me of Terui in W reacting to Nagi pushing a kid in the zoo. Otherwise, I too can have a problem on how to react against infractions and injustices, as indeed calling people out (or characters) can get one dismissed or ostracized by people for disturbing and offending them, perhaps including in this website. For the one supposed to be role model like most main Riders, the obvious thing they'd interfere and stop are the monster attacks, but people'd need help even without monster's existence, which is usually what differentiates main Rider types and those who care less about people's plight and mainly just beat up monsters (e.g. for revenge), which can be also due to normalized bad behavior done to them (e.g. not respecting boundaries).