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Quote:

Originally Posted by DreadBringer

Of course mostly monsters are superior beings to humans, but I'd wonder how the Fangire is left unchecked between 1986 and 2008 and especially, how much the damage she has caused for being left free in 20+ years....

This is one of those things about Kiva that always bugged me and it's an unfortunate side effect of the show's split timeline premise. We almost always see the 1986 and 2008 characters confronting the same Fangires at the same time. It's a neat tie between the events, but it also means that a) we know that Team '86 is going to fail to defeat the monster. Again. And b) the monster was just left free to roam and do whatever it pleased for 22 years.

Now, I do have a theory about why the Fangires may have kept relatively quiet in between the two periods, but it involves stuff that happens much later in the series so I'm going to shelve it for now and forget to come back to it near the end of the show.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Halfway through Episode 3, and I figured out where else I recognized Otoya from:

Literally laughed out loud when I saw this. He is. He totally is. I love this.

Two major points I need to make about episode 3:

1. Yuri's 80s hair and fashion game is fucking ON. POINT. As a child of the 80s, this brings me so much joy. It's also why I keep forgetting that Yu Takahashi (Yuri) and Kouhei Takeda (Japanese Jean Ralphio) aren't 20+ years older than the rest of the cast (in fact, Takahashi had just turned 17 when the show started airing, which makes her younger than everyone but Shizuka and the dog).

2. The bit where Wataru, Shizuka, and the crossing guard are struggling to stand up in the wind and two little kids just casually stroll past them was comedic gold.

So yeah, I think I'm pretty much in total agreement about the Otoya parts of this episode. They are absolutely delightful in how just completely awful Otoya is. I'd remembered some of this, but really forgot the extent to which he was just completely the worst. The show is generally aware of it, too, which I think helps justify finding it more amusing than obnoxious. If Otoya was being presented as anything like a role model or someone whose behavior was at least partially acceptable I think this would all play a lot worse. The show is totally in on the premise that he sucks, though, and I can work with this.

This episode also solved a mystery that's been bugging me for a long time now. Inoue mostly disappeared from Kamen Rider during the 2010s, but one of the few things he wrote was the OOO section of Movie War Core. You know, the part that only barely resembled the show and felt like it was written off of the series bible with no idea of what the show actually looked like. There's a bit in there where Eiji makes some money and is immediately swindled out of it by jerks taking advantage of his naive kindness, at least until Hina steps in. I knew that Inoue had done that scene before, but couldn't remember where. It was this episode with Wataru and the newspaper salesman. Nice to have that partial memory fully filled in.

Finally, I want to point out that I had forgotten how delightful Megumi was. She's a character that I kind of ignored the first time through the series, but man are her interactions with other characters delightful.