[Kamen Rider Die]

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Originally Posted by GodSpeedLove

Keep up the good work!

Aww, you're incredibly sweet for saying all that! And you have excellent taste in great Kamen Riders who are also sort of terrible friends! Or at least terrible to be friends with!

Quote:

Originally Posted by GodSpeedLove

Now for some random OOO thoughts/comparisons as a somewhat newbie: I think Eiji/Ankh is like the Shinii/Ren dynamic, but much more interesting. So much of Ryuki is Shinji pleading with Ren not to do a thing, Ren does it anyway, and Shinji shrugs his shoulders (and vice versa). It just got very tiresome and repetitive. Here it's a lot more push and pull, especially with Eiji leveraging his ability as OOO, which is much more fun to watch in my opinion! It feels like they really could break apart at any moment, while Ren and Shinji lacked spice in my opinion (they're supposed to be fighting for their lives! Why does everyone just kinda hang out in Ryuki!) Also, another side note, the counting medals screen at the beginning of each episode is SO helpful. I have no idea why they didn't do something similar with the Build bottles. It was so hard to keep track, everything moves so fast in Build!

I can definitely see what you're saying about Eiji/Ankh evoking that Shinji/Renenrgy (there's a real sweet and sour thing going on in each pairing) because that's sort of the stuff that Kobayashi likes to talk about, but I mostly enjoyed the dynamic on Ryuki -- even -slash- especially the ways it might feel repetitive -- because so much of Ryuki was about the hard work of understanding another person. Staying in each other's orbit like that speaks to how Shinji is innately trying to understand Ren's intensity, while Ren can't stop wondering why Shinji can be so generous to everyone he meets. I think both those guys fundamentally don't get the other for large chunks of the series, but they're fascinated by the ways each other doesn't make sense.

I genuinely don't know why they all work at a cafe, though, other than the crushing gravity of that setting in this franchise. Not even Gotou could escape it, and he's a former police officer who became part of a private Medal-powered corporate army! Dude still needed to do time in the Cafe Mines to become a real boy!!!