[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switchblade

OOO is a lot of Eiji and co. just inserting themselves into the story of some complete rando who got misfortunate enough to wander by a Greed and that leads to lower stakes for the show's A-plots, which in turn can make them feel more padded when they have to fill out two episodes.

I think the versions of these stories I bounce off of the hardest -- like I did with 31 -- is where the monster stuff is just happening around the victims, rather than being a specific problem that the heroes need to solve. The shows that make the victims in some way culpable for what's going on (using a Switch, buying a Gaia Memory, eating Dark Candy, probably some other Addiction metaphors I can't remember right this second) are way more interesting to me than the ones where a Boss Bad Guy just points at someone and decides to ruin their lives this fortnight.

On the one hand, I can sort of point at Wizard as a show that's the nadir of that concept for me, where it's just the Phantoms emotionally torturing some new guest star (short a few Phantom spotlight stories that are perfect), but it's weirdly also the same template for Ex-Aid, which is the show that made me fall in love with Kamen Rider as a franchise. (Like, OOO is 100% the same format that Ex-Aid would eventually rip off for its Monster Mystery template! I kind of can't believe I never put that together before!)

So, yeah, not sure where I fall on this whole thing, other than finding 31 to be both a brisk installment of OOO, and a hookless installment of OOO.