[Kurona]

... man. I feel bad for saying this because so many people here have connected so much with this episode, but...

That was... pathetic? Like. Just very lazy and very little effort it felt like. Fish summing it up as a parody is a much better way to put it than I ever could have because it really feels that way! There's no real depth here, not much of a revelation, just... he gets two short flashbacks to having a bad father (wow! The scumbag had a bad parental figure?! I never would have guessed!), and got to cry over a wee robot dog. Turns out all he needed to do was talk to an AI whipped up in under an hour to make him IMMEDIATELY come to terms with all childhood trauma and do a complete character turnaround! It's just that easy!
They just... didn't even try to sell me on this, and it was a damn hard sell to begin with because Gai is just not set up as this type of character. It is genuinely as if someone looked at Kamen Rider's history of trying to give every villain a sympathetic side and decided to parody the dumbest examples of it. Nothing about this came across as legitimate or like a story anyone actually wanted to tell.


How the hell did Gai get more of a backstory and a redemption than Yaiba by the way