[Kamen Rider Lucha]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Librarian

The toys are nearly all sold armored except for the collector market. The device looks to be the same with the addons/gimmick piece dictating additional functions.

So I don't see why this will limit sales in any fashion whatsoever. Same amount of figures of both as normal. Same amount of Roleplay gear. If it's cool, it's cool. Sales numbers will be the same to higher. Doubt it'd have any negative effects whatsoever, and instead will likely cause a sales spike.

So I doubt bandai will limit it at all or act conservative. BoJ isn't as limited as BoA on views. If this were BoA then I might agree and worry. But even they used to cater to wider and this limited view is more of a recent thing.

Having the male background character overshadow a female lead rider in her own show on the toys is also instant bad press. So that'd be a really dumb thing to do.

Right, I mostly agree. Since the line is so built around roleplay items, and since there will be another male rider who uses the same items as Zi-O, that part of the line will almost assuredly sell just as well, if not better than, Build. So long as the collectible gimmicks are cool, at least.

But I do think we have decades of evidence to show that BoJ is pretty married to a specific business model for their heavily gendered toylines like Rider, Sentai, and PreCure. So when it comes to the action figures, even if a girl Zi-O gets the exact same number of toys and variants as usual (which I do agree will be the case), I think her figures will look very genderless and I think there will be a disproportionate marketing focus on this male, secondary Rider character compared to previous secondary riders. I also suspect there will be more figures and variants of him than than there usually are for supplemental heroes.

I'm pretty sure we're seeing this already. How often does a Rider show's initial marketing so prominently show a secondary Rider in its first volley of promos? It's very, very rare. You could point to Cross-Z, but IIRC, that early image of him in the toy catalog was one of those prototype drawings, and he wasn't part of the main photo-spread like Zi-Q is in these leaks. If fact, his prominence in these early leaks, more than anything else (even the weird-ass chest armor), is what's giving me the most hope that Zi-O will be a woman.

TL;DR, I think we're in almost total agreement that a lady Rider won't negatively effect sales at all.