Kamen Rider 555

Livetweets

Overall: End was not justifaized

555 is like good literally up until Delta is introduced.  Delta is so irrelevant I put all the pictures in this post and was like yep this is all the important characters and I'd completely forgot about Delta.  Then the end is an absolute mess where nothing makes sense and I have no idea who wants to kill and who wants to save the orphenoch king.

However, 555 is really good in the sense that it's not tripping over that issue Kamen Rider loves to make a mess of.  This is one of the monster is a minority stories which sometimes (555, Amazons) Rider can handle well.  Other times we get Ex-Aid, and I've been told Drive has really bad issues with this.  Kabuto made a complete mess.  The shows track record is abysmal.  However, 555 does a very good job in how it handles a lot of it.  We have our main orphenoch who don't want to be "bad orphenoch" but are constantly put through it by humans and it can start to break them.  It's not entirely their own fault because it was humans that couldn't just not be awful and let them live.  It also is interesting to have the kind of closeted orphenoch that doesn't really accept himself as one of them and hides it and therefore doesn't face the same kind of issues.  He's still dealing with a lot of the judgement directed towards orphenoch but not the "people are offering """electrotherapy""" (read: just electrocute you to death) to cure you of being an orphenoch and make you a normal human".
This is one of those where yeah this sounds like an allegory for something huh.

Of course, this is rider so the orphenoch are commiting murders.  We can't tell these stories perfectly.

Takumi is a good boy, he's just very bad at communicating and for some reason believes things that Kusaka tells him, despite Kusaka literally always lying.  Sometimes he meets new people and tells them to die.  He's not well socialised.  It's interesting having a protagonist just starting off dreamless and going with the flow and eventually growing to decide actually he likes helping people and wants to make the world better.  I do feel they kind of under did his change to "I think all orphenoch should die, myself included" which may be why years later we got Jin Takayama.

My meatball angel, my sweet horse meatball.  Oh how the final act failed you.  You just had no idea what you were trying to do, you just knew humans sucked and you wanted Takumi to be with you.   Yuuji is such a good boy.  He just wanted to get along with people and be nice but everyone was awful and it's not surprising that it broke him especially when he was constantly being lied to to stop him having any idea what was actually happening and who he could trust.

I understand he couldn't of been Delta because we have an entire deal of the orphenoch's being orphenoch's and embracing that not turning against their own unnecessarily but also Come On.

Oh my God poor Mari she's only 16 she doesn't need any of this.  She just wants to be a hairdresser not deal with whatever mess everyone around her is creating.  Inoue you're a coward for not letting her be a rider if she's gonna have to put up with this.  The human group triforce is very delicate and Mari is very important because she can and will bully Takumi relentlessly at any given opportunity.

Yuka deserved so much better but what we primarily got was the world's most confusing love pentagon.  Otherwise though, we get Yuka kills a lot of people in self defence or because they're relentlessly bullying her.  She just wants things to be good and to get along with people and to get a boyfriend but the world is so stubbornly working against her at every turn.

She could of also been Delta if Inoue wasn't a coward.

Keitaro is the pure point of their triforce.  He just wants to have a girlfriend and do laundry.  He'll work hard to help literally anyone with anything and believes in people constantly.  Keitaro is just the hard stuck morality of the group that doesn't waver because he genuinely wants the best for everyone and there's nothing really testing him on that the way it does with Yuuji.

Kaido is also a strong part of completing the triforce for the orphenoch side.  He's not sold on protecting humanity, he's not really against Smart Brain's message because he doesn't feel he owes humans after how he was treated.  However, he can grow because he has positive influences around him helping him to reach a point where he does want to get along with people.  For the most part however, he's gonna be comedic relief.

Kusaka sucks.  Weirdly, I don't feel that strongly about him however.  A lot of people seem to fall completely in love with him as a character or hate his guts and quite frankly, as long as he isn't projecting his mother onto a 16 year old, I don't feel that much about him.  I do feel it can be a stretch to call him an anti-hero when he seems to more often just act as an outright villain.  He wants all the orphenoch dead, he wants Mari to be his mother-girlfriend.  At least it seems clear you're not meant to root for him in the slightest because he's just awful constantly.

I legitimately forgot to add him into this.  I forgot he was a character.  He's so irrelevant you can literally remove him from this show and nothing changes.  This man exists cause they needed more action figures.  I had to go back through this post and add all these comments about Delta because he just doesn't matter at all.

Watch 555 but not if you can't handle suicide or neck trauma because that's all on screen in this show

Also Kengo Ohkuchi and Masato Uchiyama were in this.  They even appear in the same episode.