[Sh Ranger]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Yeah, it's weird how universal it is to have had a not-great high school experience. Maybe it says something about my upbringing, but the horrible mistreatment Yuka suffers at home feels impossibly terrible, so as to be absurdly funny, while when I watch the high school stuff it's just Yeah I Can See That. I didn't have it particularly rough as a teenage boy, nothing that really stuck with me, but everything that happens to Yuka in school feels like what could happen to a teenage girl. They got it real bad in life!

I think you need to have the narrative counterweight of Keitaro. You always need someone in the cast to push against the other characters' assumptions and strategies. What I love about Faiz is that in any other show, Keitaro would be the hero character and Takumi would be the disgruntled anti-hero. Keitaro would be the voice of the plot, the focal point for the story, and Takumi would be the one acting in opposition. Here, they switch it, and Keitaro is the contrarian, asking terrible people to be slightly-less terrible, while Takumi is the Only If I Have To spirit of the show. It's such a fun inversion of the Kamen Rider formula.

Unfortunately, while it's a little contrived how all the terrible abuse Yuka suffered is compressed in to 2 days, that abuse could totally happen in real life to a person with no friends or popularity. This is an introductory arc in a superhero show rather than a school drama so I guess Inoue wanted to make it as dramatic as possible. I talked about how it brings back bad memories, but when I first watched it in 2015, I was still in high school. It's a totally different experience rewatching it now since I can identify with not just who she is at the start but who she's going to become as the show progresses.

Keitarou acts a lot like a typical heroic Kamen Rider and his name even has the first 3 kana of "keitai" which makes it even more ironic that he can't become the cellphone Rider. He plays an important role in the Faiz trio as an equivalent to Kiba in the Orphenoch trio, being the moral center of the dynamic that keeps Takumi from being too apathetic and unmotivated. He may not be Faiz, but he's as much a part of what Faiz is as Takumi. There are "Kamen Riders" and then there are Kamen Riders and that's the ideal that he wants to imprint on Takumi.