[DreadBringer]

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Not sure I'm taking your point here, but I don't think Otoya's really shown to be disloyal here. There's a difference between an Otoya who dates women (so many women) and an Otoya who's in a relationship. Relationship Otoya is more focused, less obnoxious. His flirting is all to entertain Yuri now.

Not exactly talking about him being disloyal, I said " He'd try to please every women as womanizers do that, but still.". While he did have more meaningful relationship to Yuri, I'd think his flirting to other women is also to entertain them, womanizers who actually value women, opposite to Spider Fangire, (but would be detrimental to non-women) would be an ally and protector to any women.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Yeah, there's a real positive change in the two triangles, where we now have one with two fantastic people fighting over one generally-decent person, which is a better dynamic than Yuri needing to choose between An Abuser and An Unreliable Clown. I much prefer two competent, compelling women trying to navigate their feelings for a funny, passionate champion of justice!

I'd wanna ask regarding Otoya being viewed as generally decent or even worse... "champion of justice". I thought before it's agreed that it's undebatable that everyone in this thread has pointed out that Otoya is awful, that we're all on the same page there.... and btw, those people who point out Otoya's nasty stuff are generally those who have watched Kiva in its entirety.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

KAMEN RIDER KIVA EPISODE 26 - “METRONOME: MIRACULOUS MEMORY”

The Yuri/Otoya one is very sweet. Maya wants to see what it means to Otoya to be in love. She’s lying to him, pretending she’s Yuri, but it’s just to get him to talk about what it means to love Yuri. Maya doesn’t want Otoya to love her (yet!), but she wants to know what loving her feels like for him, how it motivates him. For Otoya, love’s about sacrifice and dedication, despite his normal womanizing ways. As he plays his violin, it connects him to his feelings for Yuri, and a promise he made to find her mother’s ring that was lost at a beach. The first thing he remembers about Yuri is a vow.

Maya gets at the other side of the equation when Yuri tracks them both down at the beach. Maya wants to know what it feels like to be loved. Yuri’s answer is Otoya’s answer, but with words instead of actions. Being loved is motivating, it’s empowering. It gives you the strength to be your best self, to be better than your best self. Loving someone and being loved, they’re a power.

Admittedly, the bold, "macho jerk" trait Otoya had to be more aggressive in a relationship (not physically, but like shameless filrting, etc.), to approach girls out without the fear of being seen as intrusive is the one that saves the day here, something that can change Maya's mind regarding humans. I'd think that power or intelligence doesn't necessarily equate to morality but is something that contributes the most for saving the day, and I'd also think power doesn't only come in the form of fighting prowess, which is what I'd say for Otoya's case here, he had the charisma and charm to attract women, as shown in his debut to temporarily take away a women from fiancee. He's doing that all for hedonism and pleasure (along with those getting their lives ruined by Otoya), and at one point also enraged a woman Fangire who Otoya charmed but ditched shortly for Yuri, which is how I talk about it not equating to morality, but for this one, it potentially can make Maya change alignments. Otherwise, would agree that love is power, in contrast to how antagonistic force (not talking about Maya here) usually cites that as weakness.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

So, naturally, we get the Mio/Wataru story, where the power of love takes on a darker context. (I mean, Otoya almost drowned because he wanted to fulfill a promise to Yuri, so it ain’t like that story was all happiness!)

For the resolve part, this is similar to the Japanese Spirit trope that I talked about earlier regarding Megumi moving with gimped leg. Love is often interchangable with something like friendship, which uses up non-romantic type of love towards their friends, and used as something to give characters resolve to overcome the odds. Either friendship or romantic love, those are the ones already be memed (not in a good way!) by community, as it can feel deus ex machina to some to have someone be reminded of love and suddenly overcomes the obstacle.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

There’s a third look in at The Power of Love, and it’s delightfully off-beat. It’s Megumi using the Fangire’s love for her against it, delivering an unbelievably overdue kick to its balls as she swipes back the IXA Knuckle for Nago. It feels like it’s going to be a story where Megumi and Nago find that the spark from their teamwork is maybe more than they thought, but the show swerves away from that. Instead, Nago uses his love for power to give himself the strength to lie to Shima’s face, claiming contrition (he even fake cries) so that he can retain the IXA Knuckle. It’s Nago as an Individual System (!!!), his own relationship, and using that to push himself to achieve his goals.

This is a clever trick yeah for Megumi, if someone is willing to temporarily put away their pride. Megumi actually submits into Spider Fangire's love to her, until . Actually my opinion for this scene is that this has been commonly used in media to portray men's total weakness being women, and can be used to pain men as being beneath women, which can instead make me pissed seeing it, but for this one, it's satisfying to see a depraved Ryo Itoya getting the just desserts for his lecherous approach. For Nago, this seems to be the opposite for him compared to Kusaka, that he's actually like most secondary Riders, he developed to be better. I don't know if status quo of Nago's nasty trait will apply for next Nago part though, I know little about Kiva.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

I don’t know that anything here really blew me away, but there’s really nothing I can point to as subpar. I thought the IXA fight was fun (those hand puppets on the IXA suit are… did they put them in the Seihou?!), and I thought Mio’s justification for killing the Fangire was fiendishly clever. Beyond that, the story was just relentlessly well-executed, front to back.

Would hard agree here yeah, Mio's execution of Spider Fangire is outright genius, and really an ironic way to end the depraved Fangire's life. They beg for Mio to serve her role as a Queen, and had been committing brutality to her, and Spider Fangire is ended exactly because of their begging for Mio to do that, as Spider Fangire has loved a human, like what the Queen forbids, and thus Mio can do good here with her Queen role to save the day instead.

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

Most egregious? I have to disagree with you here, since I think that both of the 1986 love triangles are easily some of the most exciting that Inoue has made. While Yuri did become a passive role in the Otoya/Yuri/Jirou triangle, that propels her in to a more active role in the following Yuri/Otoya/Maya triangle where she shows a lot of resistance to stop Maya from trying to homewreck them. It's not even done in a spiteful way, since as the current gf, Yuri has every right to want to stop Maya and defend her position in the relationship. I actually support both Otoya/Yuri and Otoya/Maya. Otoya loves Yuri, but he loves freedom as well, so it's difficult for him to be content when there are two very interesting girls in his life and I think Inoue does an excellent job at showing why they are both viable options and why Otoya is so conflicted between them.

I'd prefer to not paint something as good or bad actually (though I can seem to do either), I meant to use a neutral term to describe the part of love traingle here btw, though I searched it again and "egregious" seems to be a negative term, seems my mistake there. Likely the word I'm looking should be something like "blatant".