[Tokumonkey]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MKDremare

Either way, dead people have ALWAYS been one of the motivators for Kamen Riders to take action, so it's a little silly in my opinion to get upset over Ryuga's girlfriend amounting to "nothing but plot device" when that's happened MULTIPLE times in past Kamen Rider shows before with very little issue.

The specific trope people are referencing is not just dead people: it's specifically an extremely-thinly-characterized female character - most often a girlfriend or wife - who exists in the story solely for the purpose of dying in order to provide motivation/pathos to a male character. Kasumi in this episode was a pretty standard example. It's not merely a trope that comes up often in Kamen Rider, it's all over the place; there's a specific element of prevalence, and also that it rarely happens with the genders swapped. I'm also probably not doing the concept justice.

If it doesn't bug you, no big deal, but I gather it was distracting for several of us.

For me, the part with Kasumi also echoed other Rider series just a little too loudly, maybe because of the specific stuff I've watched, and not just due to the Dead Girlfriend trope. The confrontation (before the teary goodbye) reminded me more than a little of a similar confrontation involving the primary and secondary Riders toward the beginning of Kabuto.