[Switchblade]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Tackling the second one first, because that?s how unnecessarily convoluted this series has gotten: You can do a multiverse story, or you can do a time travel story. You cannot do a time-traveling multiverse story. This was a show where characters met Kamen Riders by traveling back in time, or by meeting them in the modern day. Now, at the eleventh hour, we?re told that this has really been a multiverse story, where Sougo?s been tricked into leaving other worlds defenseless by stealing their Rider?s powers.

This reveal bothers me so much because it feels like it was written by someone who watched the early Heisei era, watched Decade, and then just didn't watch anything else after that point. The idea that every Kamen Rider series takes place in a wholly isolated universe* is not how Kamen Rider had worked for an entire (lower case) decade by this point. Now, personally, I've always been of the view that Decade merged all of the older worlds together in the end; that's just personal head canon, though, and I don't mind if the show doesn't follow it. What I do mind is that there have been multiple occasions since then that have explicitly shown that every show** since at least W takes place in the same world.

Now Switchblade, the devil may advocate, many of those crossovers happened in movies and Kamen Rider movies have always had fairly tenuous relationships with their shows. Many are blatantly not canon and the team-up intensive ones, in particular, are often completely divorced from the show's narrative. That is a fair point; you could probably make a convincing case that something like, say, GoRiders may not have really happened in the main Ex-Aid timeline. In response, though, I would point out that many of these films are, again, explicitly canon to the shows and elements from them absolutely turn up on the series proper. Also, Haruto was on an episode of Fourze. Takeru was on Drive. This is not the 2000s again, where the closest we ever got to crossovers were an HBV and the one Den-O movie that even Den-O ignores. It is patently absurd for Zi-O to start its endgame with "So there are 19 separate Kamen Rider worlds..."


*Build notwithstanding.

**Build still notwithstanding.