[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by cosmicrescend0

When Seine starts spouting off lines that she's obviously learned from watching videos featuring Seiji's daughter, it's so....sad. Forgive me, but it even starts to get deeply uncomfortable for me. Just like, Seine has the appearance of an adult woman, but all the lines she's learned are taken from obviously a much younger stage of the deceased life? I suppose we've all done it, remembering our loved ones in a super speific, often idealized angle, but bringing technology in the mix.....Seine exists to be Seiji's daughter, and fill out a dream his late daughter had. Isn't it kind of fucked up to ""revive"" her in such a curated form, as if there's nothing else to remember? (Not to mention the overly complicated angle of him "profiting" off of the voice and face of the deceased as her manager depsite his intentions, but that's far too much to get into.)

It's a story that sort of immediately disregards Fuwa (he briefly shows up in the finale to marvel at Yua's badass new form) despite him kind of having a really good point about how Seiji's actions are both illegal and massively disrespectful to Seine's memory. (Fuwa sort of frames it in a How Dare You Treat A Robot As Your Child way, but the laws he's righteously protecting seem to be more about not trying to replicate the dead.) The episode elides the grosser aspects of Seiji's actions -- the infantilizing nature of his idealized relationship with his daughter, not least of all -- to focus on how badly he's processing his loss, and I wonder if it would've been improved by adding Fuwa as a forceful advocate for the daughter's independence from her father's grief.

Quote:

Originally Posted by cosmicrescend0

The ending for Seiji, ah....I say I dont like judging chars by how they react/cope with grief, but I wonder, is that solution really for the best? Only time will tell. At least, for now, Seiji can grieve without the threat of jailtime over his head.

I really like this part, how the show treats emotional support as kind of nebulous and hard to quantify. It's better for Seiji to not try and resurrect his daughter, but maybe it's still not okay to have conversations with her everyday? If they'd attempted to end this story with Seiji all fixed or whatever, it'd seem callous. This open-ended conclusion, where this guy needs to figure out what his world is going to be like without his daughter around, that felt nicely observed.