[MKDremare]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tokumonkey

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.

Dude, plenty of the dead characters I mentioned had very little characterization, too. The characters who don't fit that are Sokichi Narumi, who we get to know more about in the Double portion in the Double/OOO Movie War (and even then, THAT'S pretty much it besides some hints in the TV show and other movies before it), Koyomi 'cuz it's a twist that she's dead (and even then the personality she has probably wasn't exactly the same before she died), and Otoya Kurenai because Kamen Rider Kiva was just as much about him as it was Wataru. The rest are like, given a scene or two of characterization, outside of some bit scenes like Terui's dream of his sister marrying Jinno.

I understand that it's a trope, but it's a trope that I feel like people get annoyed by TOO much. Like no one gets upset about other dead people as much. Dead parents? No problem. Dead siblings? Eh, how tragic. Dead friends? Looks like people need to avoid being friends with that character. A dead girlfriend? How DARE they just randomly bring up that the character had a girlfriend out of "nowhere" just to kill them off.