[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

The thought occurs to me that this two-parter is actually the first ever time Inoue got to use Yaguruma, and that's kind of shocking to me when he seems like exactly the sort of unstable, obsessive character he'd be eager to write. It's maybe appropriate, then, that the first thing he does when given the chance is put the Hoppers in a subplot where they're basically written like children, with Kageyama getting upset with Yaguruma for having a crush on a girl. That definitely feels very Inoue to me. Like, you can replace the spiels about darkness with Kageyama saying Rena has cooties, and the plot plays out exactly the same. It's no wonder they get handily outmatched by Gon with a fire extinguisher...

If you break these two episodes down to their basics, it's just Doomed Romance, right? So Inoue's like What Variations Can We Do On That, which gives us:

-the doomed romance of Reina and Daisuke, which is dark and sad;

-the doomed romance of Tsurugi and Misaki, which is funny and bizarre;

-and the doomed romance of Reina (to her surprise) and Yaguruma, which is dark and sad and funny and bizarre.

It's... these Inoue stories, man! They're only ever about one thing!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

Which is why it's all the more remarkable to me how utterly spectacular these episodes were, in retrospect. You see, Rena lived and died by the grace of the overarching plot. She was a character defined by function more than personality or individual goals – introduced to give a mouthpiece to the Worms, building the world by creating an easy way to give a sense of them as an actively scheming group intertwined with ZECT, and she's only leaving the show because her role has become unnecessary. They didn't need to make anywhere near the event out of this they did (she could've easily been bumped off in a big Plot episode that didn't center specifically around her, for example), and that makes me all the more grateful they found this latent storytelling potential and proceeded to deliver on it to this level. These are likely two of the show's best episodes, and they didn't even "need" to exist. The more I think about these ones, the more impressed I become.

Yeah, I loved these episodes, maybe in spite of how little I really understood Worm Widow as a character? Like, we're at, what, Episode 40, and I've got zero idea what the Worms want as a species, or how they're going to achieve it. Everything they do for the last three dozen or so episodes is just tiny skirmishes, random ambushes. I don't have a sense of where they're going, you know? So to have a story like this to really drill into the, like, collateral damage of Worm Widow's existence... it's both the opposite of what I wanted (looking for more of a big picture), and so brilliant that I can't complain.