[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER EX-AID SPECIAL: FINAL STAGE - THE PROMISED DOREMIFA BEAT



Delightful! These stage shows are delightful. It's pretty much all meta humor and fan service, and it's almost impossible not to have a good time with it.

It helps that so much of the focus is on Poppy. She's integral to the series, the glue that holds all of these competitive assholes together, but she's frequently deployed narratively as little more than a den mother or a Wacky Moment. There's a few good Ex-Aid plots that allow her some depth, but mostly she's just helping Emu with his problems. Here, thankfully, he gets to help her with hers. It's typically sweet of Emu to want to have a dance party with Poppy, and it's typically Ex-Aid for that fun game-playing idea to nearly kill Emu, Poppy, and all of their friends. (And Kuroto.) It's just so sweet, how the whole story is set in motion by Emu wanting to do something nice for Poppy, how her feelings matter. And she gets to help, she's not just left by the heroes, she is one of the heroes. It's her story, too. The Kamen Rider Poppy suit is one of my favs, and the use of it means Poppy gets to be present for a lot more of the action, and less of her time is spent Worrying About The Boys. It's still not perfect, she gets sidelined for about a third of it, but she's easily the non-Emu main character of the piece. She's not got the best track record, as far as how she's used, but the stage show did right by her.

Plus, like, a super-solid stage show. The way the screens were used was next level stuff. (Weirdly more advanced than the Build stage show, that came out a year later?) The way finishing moves and henshins and explosions moved around as screens expanded and contracted, it just looked so cool. Every actor worth anything was in it (Graphite!), every cool suit was in it (Taiga uses Kamen Rider Cronus!), there's a few great new suits (Nico Snipe!! Nico Snipe forever!!!), the songs are fun and energetic, Kamen Rider Genm tells a bunch of kids they suck, everyone dances at the end... Jesus, these stage shows! I love them so much.