[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by FreshToku

I'm sure you're going to find yourself met with all sorts of posts about the ending, probably even some suggestions on how you should feel about it. If it helps, it took me nearly a decade before I solidified my own feelings about Ryuki's ending.

I was expecting you to dislike it mostly because the ending comes down to Shiro letting Yui and himself disappear, which also has the side-effect of undoing all the harm he's done. The story ends on the note of the Kanzaki's tragic story being allowed to end, and I knew you didn't care at all for them, or at least not for Shiro.

I'm not really invested in the Kanzaki family and their weirdness myself, but... I do get it. All the other characters reach the end of their story, and the show decided it was not their place to see this whole Rider War to the end, but the man who started it all. I think that's fair, even if a more conventional ending of either Shinji or Ren being the ones to put the end to it would have personally made me happier.

Most people's gripes with the ending is just that it rewinds everything like nothing has happened, but I don't see it that way. Like I said, that everyone gets a second chance to live is just a side-effect of Shiro's decision, that he wouldn't burden anyone's lives anymore. I honestly think if everyone stayed dead, it wouldn't make much difference to the narrative, other than being sadder.

That all said, I still don't care that much for Shiro. He was certainly cool as a villain, at times appearing like an antagonistic force of nature, and seeming utterly untouchable whenever our heroes tried to physically confront him. But I wasn't interested in his story. It was Shinji, Ren, Kitaoka, and all the other participants of this battle for survival, and all of their tragic ends that leave me with fond memories of Ryuki. If you don't end up ever coming around to the Mirror World and Kanzaki parts of the show, then I hope all the Rider vs Rider stuff outshines all that whenever you think back to this show.

Thank you for that! Yeah, I'm interested in what people thought of the ending. It's definitely got some ups and downs to it, relative to what people wanted from Ryuki as a story.

I'll probably touch on this in a series overview post, but I don't think Kanzaki story worked that well dramatically. There're a lot of reasons, more than I want to get into right this second. Some of them are super-subjective, I can't lie. But overall, I was not that invested in Shiro's redemption. And it's not an I Didn't Want To See The Villain Redeemed complaint, because I really loved Ghost's (real) ending, with The Hug That Ended A War. I just didn't care about this villain getting this redemption. That said, it's imagined inventively, with both versions of Shiro and Yui surrounded by their happiest memory, working together to devise a refuge from the world. That's a great visual to end their story on. A+ set design.

But, no, it's the character stuff that's most rewarding to me in this show. It's a testament to how great the character stuff is that my dislike of the Mirror World story couldn't overshadow how invested I was in these people.

Bringing everyone back... still not sure about that. It's an incredibly bleak ending, for sure, if they all stay dead. I'm not super worried about the stakes argument, that none of it mattered since it was all undone. I mean, "mattered"... what the hell does that even mean? It's a story. Them making it so a new story can be told instead... did they delete my copies of the first 49 and a half episodes of Ryuki? No? Then I'm not mad about that part. But everyone coming back, even if it's just a by-product of him never leaving that room when Shiro and Yui were kids, I'm not sure what it says about Shiro learning his lesson. I worry that it undos some of that character development, even incidentally.

Like, I'm not mad about that final third. I wouldn't argue that it's a mistake. But it feels weird to me. It's a weird choice.