[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 13 - “A SIAMESE CAT, STRESS, AND A GENIUS SURGEON”



A SIAMESE CAT:
Let’s not talk about this episode’s Yummy design, because I hate it. (Why does this Genius Surgeon Yummy need to be dressed up in lingerie?! It’s a terrible design that doesn’t really suit the narrative!)

Instead, let’s talk about Kazari.

I like that Kazari is already starting to put a plan into place that, even if it doesn’t immediately secure his Core Medals, at least gets him the passive income-equivalent of earning Cell Medals. He’s got his Yummy out there plumping itself up on desire and metabolizing that into Cell Medals, which is Plan A. But if the Yummy gets defeated by OOO, he’ll just move on to Plan B: taking the 60% of the defeated Yummy’s Cell Medals that OOO will pass along to Kougami, which Kougami will pass along to Maki, which Maki will pass along to Kazari. It’s a cunning yet lazy plan, which is the perfect one to come from the Cat Greeed.

Meanwhile, the other (lazy) Greed are starting to realize that Kazari’s schemes in the human world are putting him far ahead of their meandering lair-based plots, so they’ll need to follow Kazari and Ankh’s lead and start leveraging human society and connections to speed up their regeneration.

STRESS:
Ha ha, but just ask Ankh how that’s going!

We’ve landed on something close to a status quo – any other show would lock this in for a series, with OOO we might get a few episodes – so it’s time to see how this whole “living at Cous Coussier and letting Chiyoko think Ankh needs socialization” thing is going. It’s not going great for Ankh! He’s a Greeed, so he’s a lazy piece of work that assumes all of humanity exists to serve him, which means that having to choke down Chiyoko’s (very well-meaning) attention while also being tethered to a human form that needs constant care and is overseen by a freakishly-strong sibling… it’s not going real good for our favorite avian asshole. He lacks humility, and this is the most humbling situation he’s ever been in.

AND A GENIUS SURGEON:
Just like our Yummy victim of the week, Doctor Tamura!

I don’t get this story, for the most part. I mean, I get what it’s about – thinking too much of your own abilities is a great way of driving yourself crazy, hurting others, and keeping you from getting what you want. (See also: Ankh and Gotou.) But the initial medical conflict in this episode, that comes back up to kick off our Yummy climax… what?

Like, why is the hospital keeping Tamura from doing surgeries in the first place? We’re told that she’s a genius surgeon, these are her patients, she’s never shown to be a liability in the operating theater, but the closest we’re ever given to why she hasn’t operated on anyone in a month (A MONTH!) is that she needs to be humbled because she's too cocky. And, yeah, that’s this episode’s whole thing, but everyone at the hospital is such a condescending prick about it (ALL DUDES!), and people’s lives are probably at stake here. Why in the world are they keeping her around if she’s going to get basically suspended for being passionate about her job? (Her first meeting with the main boss, she’s completely blown off while her dipshit colleague smirks over her upbraiding!) Like, for sure, it is not cool to do a bunch of surgeries at night all by yourself with zero authorization, but the impetus of this plot is that a bunch of dudes are trying to put a female surgeon in her place. I do not love the optics on this one!!!

[Androzani84]

So I can’t get into a lot of details until the second part, but I think if someone held a gun to my head and asked for my favourite episodes/storylines from every series (Ryuki and GAVV might be hard, but I’m sure did come up with something), this would be my strong contender for this series, mostly because I like the Yummy’s design (primarily for not going for a more stereotypically ferocious feline and just settling for a simple cat look) and the gag of Ankh being taken to a hospital. Also the Birth Driver debuts, but that’s neither here nor there (they don’t even name it, I think)

Also, the return of this section of the feature.

Rider-lert

Our head doctor for this two-parter is played by one Akira Hamada. While Heisei fans might know him for having his cane broken in a scene that went memetic, fans of Showa Rider will know him as Titan, the villain for Kamen Rider Stronger’s first third (along with voicing his monster forms, One-eye Titan and Hundred-eye Titan). Notably, his appearance here is his one Rider role that is not a) a villain, b) a regular role and c) on TV Trope’s page for community agreed “Complete Monsters” (ie. The character is utterly evil, depraved and unsympathetic to a greater degree than other villains in the setting) for Kamen Rider

[DreadBringer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

It's also... like Saving The World is sort of insane thing to say, and it's also a task that's almost impossible to achieve, What would that even look like? How could you even do that? What Eiji's doing is addressing the immediate problem, and letting that trickle up into being a larger good. It's a very empathetic goal -- just helping people -- rather than a goal like Fame or Saving The World that never quite reaches a resolution.

I feel wanting to save the world is a common trait in the franchise, or at least most of the main Riders. The fanbase also seem to view those main Riders as those who wants to save the world (and nothing else, character wise, for some). Maybe saving the world is about defeating something that threatens the entire world (those who can/want destroy the world), and by defeating them, the world won't be destroyed by them, thus is saved.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 13 - “A SIAMESE CAT, STRESS, AND A GENIUS SURGEON”

I like that Kazari is already starting to put a plan into place that, even if it doesn’t immediately secure his Core Medals, at least gets him the passive income-equivalent of earning Cell Medals. He’s got his Yummy out there plumping itself up on desire and metabolizing that into Cell Medals, which is Plan A. But if the Yummy gets defeated by OOO, he’ll just move on to Plan B: taking the 60% of the defeated Yummy’s Cell Medals that OOO will pass along to Kougami, which Kougami will pass along to Maki, which Maki will pass along to Kazari. It’s a cunning yet lazy plan, which is the perfect one to come from the Cat Greeed.

Yeah lately, only Kazari is the Yummy who's in league with Maki. So the difference is noted by the other Yummies. Then again, Maki might not be that trustworthy to work with, which I find suspicious when he brings up his promise and that Kazari expects Maki to fulfill that, which may be also a downfall for the Yummy who works with him. Kougami unwittingly makes the situation seemingly heads I win tails you lose as regardless of the outcome, a Yummy (who knows their machination) would benefit from either.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

We’ve landed on something close to a status quo – any other show would lock this in for a series, with OOO we might get a few episodes – so it’s time to see how this whole “living at Cous Coussier and letting Chiyoko think Ankh needs socialization” thing is going. It’s not going great for Ankh! He’s a Greeed, so he’s a lazy piece of work that assumes all of humanity exists to serve him, which means that having to choke down Chiyoko’s (very well-meaning) attention while also being tethered to a human form that needs constant care and is overseen by a freakishly-strong sibling… it’s not going real good for our favorite avian asshole. He lacks humility, and this is the most humbling situation he’s ever been in.

Other than still being overseen, it seems Hina has been more tolerant of Ankh, seemingly also accepting Ankh's baby steps to be more civil. Hina only carries Ankh away in this episode as it's something necessary, Ankh is scaring the children in the hospital, and she tried to reason with Ankh from fighting Goto.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Like, why is the hospital keeping Tamura from doing surgeries in the first place? We’re told that she’s a genius surgeon, these are her patients, she’s never shown to be a liability in the operating theater, but the closest we’re ever given to why she hasn’t operated on anyone in a month (A MONTH!) is that she needs to be humbled because she's too cocky. And, yeah, that’s this episode’s whole thing, but everyone at the hospital is such a condescending prick about it (ALL DUDES!), and people’s lives are probably at stake here. Why in the world are they keeping her around if she’s going to get basically suspended for being passionate about her job? (Her first meeting with the main boss, she’s completely blown off while her dipshit colleague smirks over her upbraiding!) Like, for sure, it is not cool to do a bunch of surgeries at night all by yourself with zero authorization, but the impetus of this plot is that a bunch of dudes are trying to put a female surgeon in her place. I do not love the optics on this one!!!

This is a 2 parter, so yeah it might be brought up in the next episode, but yeah I don't understand why the hospital forbids Tamura to perform surgery. I thought it's done to give other surgeons a chance to be better and increase the number of competent surgeons in the hospital other than Tamura, but the director is just overbearing boss with authoritarian way of leading. I don't know if this is an intentional misogynistic stuff though just because the one on predicament happens to be female.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Androzani84

(ie. The character is utterly evil, depraved and unsympathetic to a greater degree than other villains in the setting)

I don't know, this might get a vote from me after the first part!

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreadBringer

I feel wanting to save the world is a common trait in the franchise, or at least most of the main Riders. The fanbase also seem to view those main Riders as those who wants to save the world (and nothing else, character wise, for some). Maybe saving the world is about defeating something that threatens the entire world (those who can/want destroy the world), and by defeating them, the world won't be destroyed by them, thus is saved.

I would maybe push back on this? Most main Riders (the Heisei/Reiwa ones, anyway) tend to be more focused on the little ways you can change the world for the better, like what Eiji's been doing over the past dozen episodes. The goals are usually Protecting Journeys and Protecting Smiles and Making Friends and Making Positive Changes In Your Life, you know? Sure, a Rider's going to step up during an apocalypse, but that's not their everyday goal. If anything, the misguided Secondary Riders are usually the ones that come in with impossibly high-minded goals and need to learn empathy and humility from the main Rider, leading to an embrace of the main Rider's worldview. Which, y'know, Gotou...

[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 14 - “PRIDE, SURGERY, AND SECRETS”



ONII-CHAN:
We’ve got three characters dealing with Pride this week – five, if you count the two cats! – and I don’t know that I loved any particular outcome.

Gotou comes out the best, weirdly enough. (I’m mostly bummed we didn’t get to see him filling in more for Satonaka. Everything with the Kougami Foundation was comedy gold this story! The cutaway to her enjoying spicy food is one of my favorite Kamen Rider things of all-time!) It’s relatively brief, but I liked how the show makes a solid case for Kougami’s advice, that Gotou’s pride is getting in the way of his goals, by mostly just pointing out that Gotou’s inability to stay on the same page as everyone else is only getting him knocked out by Ankh and playing second fiddle to a vagabond. But then he’s like, No, It’s The Rest Of The Cast Who Are Wrong, and just rolls up to shoot a shotgun around the heroes like nothing ever happened. It’s a commitment to Gotou’s current prickly irrelevance that I actually sort of love.

Ankh’s story… I mean, what’s even going on here? His departure from Shingo doesn’t really help him in any clear way – it only puts him at risk of being mauled by an adorable corgi while the non-stop cry of ONII-CHAN acts as the only discernible soundtrack to this episode. (Hina probably said it an infinite amount of times, at a minimum. I can still hear her saying it. I will always hear her saying it.) It’s mostly just Ankh throwing a tantrum, and I can’t articulate anything that changed in the core dynamic to bring him back. Like, Eiji begged Ankh to come back, but I feel like he’s done that before? It’s weird. It all seems both charmingly minor – I do actually like that the whole story is just Ankh being a pissy little baby about nothing in particular – and also not really about much that ties into the two-parter. It’s just Ankh being Ankh, but at a slighter higher volume?

ONII-CHAN:
Which just leaves Doctor Tamura, and, man, I did not like this plot!

The whole thing ends up being about her dad/boss trying to get her to feel the fear of losing a patient, in order to make her care more about saving them. This is a vaguely good thing – I like empathy! But, man, I do not think it’s good for a surgeon to be scared that she’s going to fail and kill her patient! (The hospital specifically has rules against family members operating on each other, which tells me that an emotional distance between doctor and patient is sort of considered a good thing?) We never got a sense of Tamura being sloppy or overconfident before, either. The two-parter starts with us being told a) she’s incredibly good at being a surgeon, b) she’s very happy being a surgeon, and c) she’s gotten some acclaim for being a good surgeon. I feel like all of that is good enough for a surgeon? I don’t think she needs to be scared she’ll fail and kill someone? I feel like that sort of terror would actually being counterproductive in a surgeon?

It’s super weird. I don’t think the show did any work making her seem like she was haphazard with her patients’ lives pre-Yummy, and I don’t think Benching Her Indefinitely was proving any sort of point about internalizing the fear of losing a patient. (Boss Dad is right that this is all his fault! Bad boss! Bad dad!) It’s a lesson that’s super useful in general, and worth telling on a show about people letting their desires blind them to their weaknesses, but none of the setup for this two-parter really establishes what this conclusion is trying to tell us. It’s like the heartwarming ending was supposed to be attached to a completely different previous episode.

ONII-CHAN:
Meanwhile, so many things are happening in secret!

As Ankh is dealing with Kazari and his Yummy, the rest of the Greeed have just, like, been effectively farming Cell Medals completely undetected. I like that they aren’t just waiting for their turn in the story to come around, you know? Uva distracted Ankh and Kazari (minimally, but still) while Mezool spawned Yummies off of some rich guy’s embezzlement. It’s not a flashy plot, which is why it’s the fourth-string one, but I like that it lets the other villains move forward independent of the heroes. Mezool and the gang didn’t take a week off just ‘cause it was Kazari’s turn!

And then there’s our end-of-episode stinger, teasing the imminent -slash- currently in theaters debut of Kamen Rider Birth. Feels a little gratuitous to just toss it in at the very end when we didn’t spend any other time this episode with Doctor Maki, but hey! We’ve got a goddamn movie and Secondary to promote! Don’t let a little thing like pride in storytelling get in the way of your desire to set up Q2!

[Androzani84]

Yeah, the family reveal between Titanba and daughter is why this isn’t a definite favourite. I don’t think it was foreshadowed even in the episode. And like I said, the reason it was in the running is due to the monster design, so it probably didn’t leave that much of an impact otherwise.

[DreadBringer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

KAMEN RIDER OOO EPISODE 14 - “PRIDE, SURGERY, AND SECRETS”

The whole thing ends up being about her dad/boss trying to get her to feel the fear of losing a patient, in order to make her care more about saving them. This is a vaguely good thing – I like empathy! But, man, I do not think it’s good for a surgeon to be scared that she’s going to fail and kill her patient! (The hospital specifically has rules against family members operating on each other, which tells me that an emotional distance between doctor and patient is sort of considered a good thing?) We never got a sense of Tamura being sloppy or overconfident before, either. The two-parter starts with us being told a) she’s incredibly good at being a surgeon, b) she’s very happy being a surgeon, and c) she’s gotten some acclaim for being a good surgeon. I feel like all of that is good enough for a surgeon? I don’t think she needs to be scared she’ll fail and kill someone? I feel like that sort of terror would actually being counterproductive in a surgeon?

I do feel that Tamura is the kind who prioritizes maintaining her reputation and record as a surgeon, rather than saving lives because it's the right thing to do, and it's the problem the director brought up about her. I felt she was being smug and throwing her weight and superiority around to others before in why she insists on doing it. It's never about her skill, it's the opposite about her being potentially sloppy. It can be likely that Tamura would for example, refuse to perform a surgeon if it's something she doesn't feel confident for, so she can maintain her acclaim, rather like Kitaoka's lawyer verdict in Ryuki before, but she's forced to face her fear of mistake/failure, as it's her dad that needs it in this case. But I do think the dad is at fault, him just forcing Tamura to follow his orders and dismissing her completely obviously won't help her problems (which I admit, it'd be problematic for a doctor to have no empathy), just contrived miscommunication stuff.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Androzani84

Yeah, the family reveal between Titanba and daughter is why this isn?t a definite favourite. I don?t think it was foreshadowed even in the episode.

It's not foreshadowed, but it's also not not foreshadowed. There isn't really anything in the previous episode that precludes the two of them being related. It's just a sort of dumb twist.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreadBringer

I do feel that Tamura is the kind who prioritizes maintaining her reputation and record as a surgeon, rather than saving lives because it's the right thing to do, and it's the problem the director brought up about her. I felt she was being smug and throwing her weight and superiority around to others before in why she insists on doing it. It's never about her skill, it's the opposite about her being potentially sloppy. It can be likely that Tamura would for example, refuse to perform a surgeon if it's something she doesn't feel confident for, so she can maintain her acclaim, rather like Kitaoka's lawyer verdict in Ryuki before, but she's forced to face her fear of mistake/failure, as it's her dad that needs it in this case.

This is all definitely possible. The problem is, none of it is shown at any point pre-Yummy. The first thing we're shown is her getting ready to operate and being told No. The next thing we're shown is her fighting for the chance to operate on her own patients, and being told No. I'd be way more into this story if we'd spent any time pre-Yummy showing Tamura to be reckless, egotistical, selfish, etc. It's just a bunch of dudes telling her she thinks too highly of hereself, though?

[Kamen Rider Die]

originally posted on December 4th, 2021, as part of “Kamen Rider Die rewatches Legend Rider projects (and more!)”

KAMEN RIDER X KAMEN RIDER OOO & W FEAT. SKULL: MOVIE WAR CORE



Not my favorite movie. I didn’t really love it the first time around, and I don’t love it now. The thing is, my opinion on the two sections/portions of this film – OOO and W – have sort of completely flipped around?

I really disliked the W portion on this viewing. Like, a lot. Setting aside the incredibly weird Daddy Issue stuff of having Akiko’s actress play Melissa, a woman who is in love with Skull (HER DAD), it’s a story that traffics in one of my least-favorite Kamen Rider tropes: Heroic Abandonment.

Skull’s portrayed as a stoic, suffering hero. He’s betrayed by his closest friend, called a monster by a woman he gave up everything to save, and unable to ever touch his daughter again. It’s a story all about the lengths Kamen Riders have to go to in order to protect the people they love, even if it means they have to cut those people out of their lives.

It’s horseshit. Even before he became Kamen Rider Skull, Sokichi wasn’t answering his daughter’s phone calls. (He totally forgot about her birthday!) He lives in a completely different city for reasons that aren’t established in this film, and I don’t recall from the series. He’s making a choice to ignore his responsibilities as a parent, way before he’s forced to abandon his daughter for her own safety.

(Which, two things. The No-Touching Spider in his body will only kill Akiko if he touches her. He could still, like, see her. Or call her. Like everything else in their screwed-up family, it 100% feels like Sokichi is looking for any excuse to bail on his parental commitment. The other thing… like, killing Matsu doesn’t kill the spiders? It dissolves the webbing immediately, but it doesn’t defuse the time bombs infecting everyone in the city? What… what did Sokichi even accomplish by killing Matsu, then? Everyone who didn’t already blow up is forced into a life of misery? This is what we’re calling a victory now?)

This should be a story about sacrifice and duty, but everything in it reads like a story about deadbeat dads with poor work/life balance. Which, honestly, fine. I don’t need my Kamen Riders to be completely logical and emotionally healthy. I like Faiz, you know? But there’s basically no judgment on Sokichi’s actions in this movie. Akiko is furious about the ways her life has been negatively impacted due to Kamen Riders failing her as friends, family, and lovers, but the moral at the end is just Her Suffering Is A Small Price To Pay For Justice. It’s an entire story where Akiko’s theatrical-but-honest emotional turmoil is brushed aside in the face A Man’s Silent Suffering. Whatever.



The even more galling failure of the W portion is that the OOO portion is specifically refuting that worldview. The W portion is about how Kamen Riders are solely focused on helping people, even if they have to give up on happiness as a result. But the OOO portion is about how hollow and unfulfilling it is to solely dedicate yourself to anything! The OOO portion – which I originally thought was laughably bizarre and generally irrelevant – pretty much ended up being the only part of this story I liked.

It's Inoue, which was nice. Inoue Forever and all of that. (There's a bit where Eiji says that Nobu is still Nobu, which feels like a secret message between me and Inoue.) It does the Eternal thing of crafting a villain that reflects/inverts our hero’s shortcomings, but turned up to Evil. Nobunaga, a man whose name autocompletes with ‘s Ambition, is someone who is consumed by his need to attain, to control. He’s everything Eiji isn’t. Nobunaga sees the world around him as both a birthright and a banquet, all of it waiting for him to claim it.

But in seeing the world that way, he misses the point of it all. Nobunaga can’t understand how Eiji can find joy in a life without taking. What Eiji points out to him is that the world exists outside of the ambitions of men. The sky is blue. Art is created. It doesn’t need people to control it, because it doesn’t bow to that control.

It’s a pretty basic Stop To Smell The Roses moral, and it could probably only work when applied to the story of Oda Nobunaga. (It’s a bit like only being able to land a simplistic message like Don’t Bite People in a story with Dracula.) But I think it worked here due to its own bonkers commitment to the story of a cloned warlord who used his heretofore unrevealed healing powers to undo the damage he caused a woman he was stalking, as well as the proximity to a much less appealing story in Skull’s celebrated abandonment of his daughter.



But at least Kamen Rider Birth shows up!

I like Birth okay, but its introduction here is like nearly every other Fan Service thing in this story: missing the point entirely.

It’s just the Birth suit, not either of the Birth characters. Date isn’t in this movie at all, and Goto’s turn as Birth is both noncanonical (pretty sure the series doesn’t let him be Birth for a good long while) and robbed of its significance. There’s a really great arc in the series about Goto becoming Birth, but here it just happens off-camera. Same thing with Tajador; awesome suit, fun to see it kick ass, but it’s almost unforgivable that it’s introduced with Ankh just showing up with the medals.

And, man, I said how great it was that A To Z managed to find time for its entire TV series cast, so here’s a movie that Ankh’s human form is in for about forty-five seconds, and the full cast of W is almost entirely sidelined for a prequel story. It’s a bummer. It’s a movie celebrating two TV shows, and it’s compromised versions of both.

Plus, not super crazy about the concluding section. The villain at the end, Kamen Rider Core, doesn’t make much sense, or have a defensible viewpoint. It’s just a monster that hates Kamen Riders, and thinks they make everything worse, all so Akiko can feel bad about holding the men in her life responsible for abandoning her. He’s a giant flaming Ghost Kamen Rider, and defeating him isn’t clever or anything. It’s just new power-ups and Early-Bird suit debuts. I had honestly completely forgotten about him, and now I know why.

Yeah, man, did not dig this one! The OOO stuff is good enough, but it sucks to not really have any Eiji/Ankh scenes. (I mean, they literally never share a frame, so I’m just going to assume that Ankh’s couple scenes were filmed separately from the rest of the cast.) The W stuff features my least-favorite W plot – Akiko and Terui’s totally unconvincing romance – and one of my all-time least-favorite Kamen Rider tropes. It’s okay to say that Sokichi was a good Kamen Rider but a shitty dad! That would’ve made the movie so much better! Instead, we get a middle section that exposes the lie the first part is telling, and then a third part that ignores the exposure.

Not one I liked rewatching!



---

OOOH MY GOD NOT AGAIN



I can’t believe I watched this movie again.

It continues to be a weird chore, and yet every time I watch it it’s a weird chore in subtly different ways. I skipped the W stuff this time, since I watched that part last year, leaving what I thought would be the terrific OOO installment and the historically terrible Core finale. That turned out not to be so much the case?

(The Core stuff was still abysmal, in case you were worried that I’d suddenly come around in it.)

While I recall really enjoying the OOO installment a few years back, and I still like it now, I sort of hadn’t realized that its successes are all thematic, and its deficiencies are in the tonal. Like, in my initial write-up, I glossed over the fact that Ankh barely appears in this story. (Miura is literally never on screen at the same time as Watanabe or any other name character in the film. It’s all the Ankh hand puppet, which also barely shows up. There’s one shot of Ankh’s legs in the same shot as Eiji, but we never see Ankh’s face in the frame, so it’s probably a double. At least it’s the right team-up for that!) That’s kind of a huge deal! It’s not really an OOO story if it’s just Eiji and Hina, at least in all the ways people love Kamen Rider OOO as a TV show. You need that constant Eiji/Ankh chatter during a fight to give it that relentless energy of the OOO experience. Without that, it feels strangely empty.

What you get instead of that non-stop excitement is a slower, sadder story of the ways grasping, bottomless ambition can rob you of the ability to enjoy the world that you’re trying to control. You get these treasures back, and you lock them away. You care about someone, but can’t do anything more than control them. It’s tragic, and sort of beautiful, but it never quite feels like a proper OOO story in the telling. (I mean: Inoue. There’s your answer.)

I wonder how much of this was intentional – Inoue just being like I Don’t Want To Write For The Asshole Bird Guy, which, now that I see it, feels impossible – versus a victim of scheduling. It’s a movie that feels as weirdly incomplete and shambling as Kamen Rider Core, with huge chunks missing as the film plows along anyway. (Why were the Greeed hanging out in the Toku Caves?!) The OOO contribution to the finale of the film feels infuriatingly haphazard, never feeling looped in to the larger W story of Kamen Rider heroism that it’s trying to pay off, nor saying anything of value about the OOO perspective. Eiji’s just there as the Other Guy, the end. The Tajador stuff is still criminally undercooked, which you just can’t do with poultry. It’s all sloppy, and I kind of stopped caring why.

Please, Kouta Kazuraba in Fruit Heaven, let this be the last time I watch this dumb movie.

[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

This is all definitely possible. The problem is, none of it is shown at any point pre-Yummy. The first thing we're shown is her getting ready to operate and being told No. The next thing we're shown is her fighting for the chance to operate on her own patients, and being told No. I'd be way more into this story if we'd spent any time pre-Yummy showing Tamura to be reckless, egotistical, selfish, etc. It's just a bunch of dudes telling her she thinks too highly of hereself, though?

I think you might've immediately contradicted yourself here? In the context of the complete two-parter, surely the actual meaning of this dialogue is more clear than it might've been when you were watching 13?





Without going back to watch the episodes in full myself, I can't really get too deep into any counterargument, so I'll probably leave it at this, but -- did Tamura ever directly express concern for the well-being of "her" patients anywhere in the story? Because if her only real concern the whole time was just whether or not she'd be holding a scalpel, the basics of the narrative might check out more than you're giving them credit for.