[Kamen Rider Die]

Get ready for a million posts about Episode 44 of Ryuki, I guess.

There's a visual this episode keeps coming back to, a caged bird in Sano's shitty apartment. I keep thinking about that image. It's evocative in a way that Kamen Rider... I don't think symbolism is necessarily a go-to move in Kamen Rider. There's camera moves and set-ups that are frequently used to tell a story (that shot from a few episodes of the chair between Shinji and Toujou, how the barrier informs their incompatibility), but using an item, calling it back, it's not really part of the language of Kamen Rider to me.

That goddamn bird, though.

To me, the cage is Sano and Toujou's need to achieve. They're trapped by it, by the need to get rich or be a hero, even while they convince themselves that it's... I don't know, safer, more comfortable. That this prison they've built for themselves of expectation is a liberation, is something that can deliver happiness.

Or, maybe the bird is the concept of happiness, locked away but always visible. Toujou and Sano know what happiness looks like, but they can't possess it.

Or they're the bird, and the cage is the choices they've made that are now containing them, reducing them.

Hmm.