[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switchblade

The Yuka stuff is one of the biggest obstacles I've had to watching this show again. I agree that it is ludicrously over-the-top, but everything about her backstory is so senselessly cruel that I find it hard to even thing about sitting through it again. This is what I was saying about Faiz and melodrama; it's a show that never met a dial it didn't want to turn up to 11.

My favorite touch, and the one that had me dying, was there's a point where she's getting basketballs thrown at her during gym class. It starts with her missing a pass, then her teammates are just whipping them at her. (In fairness to her bullies, there're a few of these that, like, she just needs to put two hands up to catch them. I don't have it in me to physically bully someone, but even I was like Jesus Yuka.) So it's this quick montage of her getting hit with a basketball, and then she's hit by multiple basketballs in succession. Her classmates grabbed other basketballs just to throw at her! Amazing!

It's, again, totally ineffective at garnering sympathy. It's like a fairytale, where her struggle is all cautionary tale, all metaphor. And the way it's divorced from any sort of realistic human psychology, it makes it work gangbusters as comedy. And, you know, your mileage may vary on it. I've definitely found stuff like this a slog before. Here, maybe it's because so much of the rest of this episode was full of charmingly manipulative jerks and pathetically defeatist do-gooders, but the Yuka stuff played great as comedy. I don't know. Maybe this show is just making me an even bigger asshole than I was before?