[Kamen Rider Die]

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Originally Posted by FreshToku

Yeeeeeah Kusaka hitting Mari isn't great. Not that I find it particularly out-of-character for the people involved, but it's treated simply as just one more instance of Kusaka's facade cracking instead of the tipping (spilling, really) point that it should be. I don't think the show realises that action is on a completely different level from everything else he's done.

It's going to be different for every viewer, but for me it's just not something you sprinkle in, you know? This is so far from the realm of That Dastardly Kusaka, and it's a frustrating misstep for a show that was saying such smart, empathetic things. Bummer!

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Originally Posted by FreshToku

...because he's actually pretty cool as the big-brained leader of Smart Brain.

It's not just that he's smart, though, it's that he's damn near unflappable. He's literally clear-headed!

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Originally Posted by FreshToku

Speaking of, Mari has a flashback that shows Kitazaki there during all the traumatic stuff, and it's probably fair to assume that he's more responsible for all that slaughtering that happened that day instead of Takumi. You mentioned that you like Mari has to make up for how she treated Takumi, and I do too, so that's why this revelation kinda bugged me a bit?

Obviously I get why they wouldn't just have Takumi responsible for killing a whole bunch of Mari's old classmates, but the way this plays out now, it feels less like Mari is getting over her biases and more like 'hey it turns out I was just mistaken and never had any reason to be afraid of Takumi after all'. I wished her inevitable coming-around to Takumi would have been more remembering how close they've gotten over the last 30+ episodes and that becoming more powerful than her fears stemming from the past. Again though, maybe actually making Takumi responsible for her trauma would be too much, even if it was something like him going berserk due to a full moon or something, so I understand this decision.

I didn't really get around to talking about it because it very much felt More To Come, but I don't love the Ryusei Bloodbath story element. I'll probably talk more about it next time, but I think they went about misleading the audience badly. Like, I don't fault them for trying to mislead the audience, but they did it badly.

And, yeah, it's not great that Mari's epiphany is more about, like, Takumi being One of The Good Ones (ugh), but I'll try and withhold judgment until I see how the show plays it. In fairness, she was 99% of the way to fixing herself before she remembered that stuff about Kitazaki.