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Originally Posted by GoldenXtreme

The characters were a mess.

This is probably the biggest reason why I fell off of Geats: I just actively did not care for any of the characters. Neon was probably the one that felt the most compelling to me, but it also felt like she completely stagnated after her backstory reveal and she got hit hard by the same "silly girl, effectiveness is for boys" stick that bludgeoned Yua to irrelevancy in Zero-One. Michy 2 similarly felt like he wasn't really going anywhere. Making Ace not be the focus character at the start of the show was an interesting decision that I know Rider has pulled off before (Faiz and Hibiki), but it didn't work for me here. I never felt like I really connected much with Ace because the show pushed Keiwa and Neon more as protagonists than our title character. When he did start getting more central it still felt to me like he was more of an elevated side character than the real main character.

And then there's Keiwa, aka "we have Shinji Kido at home." I do not care for Keiwa. When the show started, I assumed he was going to be the Kagami to Ace's Tendou, but it feels a lot more like he was taking Shinji's role as the character who protested that the game was bullshit and that he just wanted to protect people. Except Shinji had a fire inside of him that made him compelling as a protagonist, while Keiwa just came off as a weenie. He sucked at Kamen Riding, sucked at changing anyone else's perspective on the DGP, and generally felt like a useless sad sack. The main reason I stopped watching the show was because I had absolutely zero interest in watching an arc where the show tried to have him go through an angsty evil phase because dear lord do I not have the patience for an evil Keiwa. I barely had patience for the good version.

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One thing that kept really rubbing me the wrong way is how the show almost seemed like it wanted to make fun of Rider fans, while at the same time not really understanding them. The audience and Kekera in particular felt like a parody of the idea that "Rider fans just want to see people suffer on TV" and more broadly the kinds of people who enjoy these death game stories, without really getting why it is that people want these kinds of things. Generally, fans don't just want to watch a character suffer for the sake of it, characters who suffer are relatable. We want to root for them to overcome their challenges because they seem more real. When they succeed we are reminded that we can do the same, and when they fail we feel their pain. The way Geats approaches it felt like it was talking down to fans when they have very real criticisms like "it feels cheap to constantly revive characters just for a happy ending" and reducing it to all of them being a bunch of sadists. It was almost like the show was smugly looking at the viewer and going "There, isn't the story better this way, where everyone can be happy?" while making an absolute mess. I keep wanting to compare it to Shin Kamen Rider, which had a similar story about human happiness. Shin Kamen Rider was serious and goofy and completely earnest, with a deep love of Kamen Rider and what it was about, while Geats' poor meta commentary towards fans just felt cynical. Ugh, sorry, but this particular aspect just really peeved me.

This was actually one of the things I liked the most about Geats. I liked that it tried to do some meta commentary on toxic fandoms. Beroba and Kekera, obviously, reflect certain kinds of negative fans who are more interested in schadenfreude than they are in healthy enjoyment of their idols, but Ziin and (pause to look up name) Kyuun are also good examples of unhealthy parasocial relationships. I don't think all of this landed, especially since Ziin and Kyuun aren't always shown as being as problematic as they actually are, but I respect the show for running with this as a major theme.