[DreadBringer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

KAMEN RIDER FOURZE EPISODE 27 - “A TRANSFORMATION THAT’S DENIED”

For one thing, he slowly but surely pushes Hayami out of the Cool And Calculating range, straight into his more Blade-reminiscent mode of being a sweaty, pathetic weirdo. Hayami wants to run a tight ship that Kijima is gleefully setting on fire, while the Chairman favors a more self-motivated curriculum that’s okay with sweeping a few dozen imperiled students under the rug in the name of cosmic villainy, so every Hayami scene is now either him sputtering impotently at Kijima’s lackadaisical approach to subterfuge, or him sputtering impotently at the Chairman’s lack of interest in policing his lieutenants. (Also, way more scenes where Hayami has to grovel in apology!) I just feel like things make way more sense when this actor is portraying a character that's struggling to overcome his constant and glaring inadequacies?

I guess, Horoscope isn't like school. While in school, students are expected to obey and listen to teachers, for Horoscopes, Kijima is really equal to Hayami like he said before. Hayami only tries to order and stop Kijima for his own ego, rather than it being done for the good of Horoscopes. Hayami disappointing Gamou now should be clearly seen as where the reason can be Hayami's own flaws.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

But, for another thing, Kijima’s KRC-scaled. He exists on the level of our heroes, and more directly, he exists on the level of Meteor. Beyond just being a kid that they all still go to school with, which is completely insane in the most dramatically-correct way possible (I like how it talks about school as being a place where people can also reinforce their worst attributes), he’s a liar, like Ryuusei, and an outsider warrior, like Meteor. Where folks like Sonoda and Hayami are true believers in the Chairman’s indifferently unfurling scheme, Kijima just got lucky, and he’s going to ride that luck as far as it’ll take him, for as long as he’s having fun. His ambitions align with the Chairman’s generally – much like Meteor can team up with Fourze against certain enemies – but he’s still in it for himself first and foremost. He’s just looking out for himself.

For Meteor, I guess yeah, he's just looking out for himself. Technically not as he wants to save someone else, his friend Jiro, which for many I've said, it means not about himself, but I feel that to only care about certain someone that matters to him is still about only in it for himself. Meteor hasn't shown to directly save someone, like civilians, against Zodiarts, unlike Ren in Ryuki (similar motivation) who's shown to. Though what motivates Meteor to emphatize is if he sees another case of a friendship fallout like Gentaro with Kengo. It seems that Kijima is the one on the villainous side for people like Gentaro or Miu who can read people well, and he exposed Ryusei by this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

It’s that moment at the KRC hotpot dinner, where Gen gives his little Friends Will Always Help You speech, that gives it away. Ryuusei storms out in his usual cloud of not being here to make friends, or Gen doesn’t understand the real stakes of friendship, or a handful of his usual rationalizations to look down his nose at a guy who values friendship more than anything else in the cosmos. But the reality is that he leaves because he knows that all he’d have to do to get the entire KRC to rally behind him and defeat Cancer is admit his secret, and let his friends help him. But that wouldn’t just lose him the ability to be Meteor, it’d give him something brand-new to risk. If he lets his friends help him, he admits that they’re his friends, and look what happened to his last friend. Instead, he goes to confront Cancer alone, at which point Tachibana becomes another punitive educator for this show to deal with.

Gentaro's parents told him to make many friends, of which Gentaro succeeded. But it can be common for parents to tell their child that, and they are just unable to. Moreover, the parents can force the child to make friends like pulling them into crowded groups they hang out or insult them to motivate them to do so. Many people also want to make friends to benefit from them, directly as "friends will save you", and discard them or complain if they have no benefit to them. Ryusei vows to not make friends anymore and dismisses other people because of what happened to Jiro, but there's something that makes Ryusei value Jiro more than anyone else that he's hellbent to save him unlike the others around him. What'd Jiro have that other people doesn't?