[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER GHOST MISCELLANY PART 2 - IKKYU EYECON CONTENTION AND IKKYU INTIMACY



This was barely a trifle. It's based pretty heavily on Japanese language puns, which, y'know, don't translate super well. Still, it's a fun little diversion, if you can avoid Onari just being a total creep to some lady who needs help beating up a ghost. Dude has no sense of professionalism or respecting boundaries or asking for consent!

It's weird, looking back to the first first act of Ghost, how educational it seemed like the show was trying to be, maybe to the detriment of characterization and coherent storytelling. This special reminds me how much the early episodes were about learning who the Eyecons were, what they'd done that made them famous, why people would idolize them, etc. Eventually, in the second first act and the second act, the show used the Eyecons more to tell us something about our cast. Like, the Houdini two-parter with the ghost dad wasn't really about Houdini's distrust of mystics or his skills as an escape artist, it was about how various characters dealt with grief and loss. Before it would've been a list of facts, later it was beats of a story. It's strange to see the old ways, the less interesting ways, on full display again.



Oh, shit, Poppy's in this?! Hot DAMN! This was actually really funny, and way more enjoyable than the previous one. (There's way less creepy regressive gender politics, and only one body-shaming joke, so I guess that's progress?) I don't want to make this all "one performer can save a show", but Ruka Matsuda is so, so good in this. I can 100% see the producers watching her work in this and knowing she'd need to be the female lead in the next show. She's fantastic.

The whole story, like its predecessor, is a lot of goofy puns and a ton of physical comedy, but when you've got the right performers (or the right performers and Makoto) that's going to be enough. Totally worth a fifteen-minute or so viewing.