[Kamen Rider Die]

I don't have a ton of time (getting ready for work), but I want to thank everyone for putting up with me the last couple days, and assure everyone that I'm not some neurotic mess right now -slash- in general. I can get a little... overly dramatic when I'm talking about something, get a little heated, but it's not, like, torturing me or anything. Just a TV show I got some feelings about.

One of the things I've found instructive in trying to figure out how Den-O's plot is screwing with me is to look at the perfect Kamen Rider show as a comparison: Kamen Rider OOO.

Thinking about OOO made me feel pretty confident that there are big structural problems in Den-O's framework, because Kobayashi corrects them in OOO. The main villains in OOO, the Greeed, arrive literally fully-formed in the first story. We know their names, their history, their goals, their personalities, everything. Same thing with Ankh, Eiji, Gotou, and so on. Oh, there are things we learn about them all later, but (and this is absolutely crucial) those things are never presented as mysteries. We're not (to my memory) teased with some aspect of Eiji's past being hugely important and mysterious for a dozen episodes before it's revealed. It's more I Wonder Why Eiji Became This Way, and then we slowly uncover it. There's still plenty of room for twists and turns and reveals, but they get built up and explode in a much shorter window. We don't see some random train line and then ignore it for a few episodes while saying Well That's Very Mysterious. We get to know the characters, fully, and then we get to see them make decisions. There's very little obfuscation in OOO. It mostly plays fair with its audience, so we can connect with everything in its world. Den-O wasn't doing that, with a key piece of its plot, and this is the result.