#kamen rider faiz

I made sticker sheets!!! wahoooo
If you want one, you can get them on etsy. com/shop/wmolecules

I tried out some brushes yesterday so please enjoy this super sleep deprived doodle of Takkun

Kikuchi Cleaning – Please chose your worker
☐ doesn’t wanna be here
☐ will do your son’s homework, you can’t say no
☐ also doesn’t wanna be here but with free insults
☐ you found hair on your shirt? let me cut your hair as an apology

Their whole thing so far is just *chef kiss* so i drew em how I see em

Takkun, you dropped something

Pinky promise: Keitaro and Yuka! are so!! in love!!!!

In reply to @tissue–box’s wolf!Inui I offer you cat!Yuji

Yuka is so fucking funny

Fuck it, I’m taking those tag rants I did and expanding on them now. This is a Kamen Rider 555 lovemail zone.

Major Spoilers for Kamen Rider 555 ahead straight through to the end of the series.

I love Kamen Rider 555 because it’s a tragedy. A complete tragedy. But it’s cathartic. People are lost through the inability to accept themselves and people make foolish decisions through having been abused or manipulated and those choices lead them down paths that get them killed. 555 has Yuka who is obsessed with love and loves all the wrong people because she has come from a home where she never had love and in her state makes a lot of dumb choices and decisions that border on infuriating. But also she herself is easily manipulated as she’ll do anything for a community or people who she thinks will love her back. She also is a teenager with no way to properly channel her trauma and anger at the abuse she faced at home and in school so she begins using her newfound powers to kill men who are harassing her and anyone who might remind her of those old bad times. In the end she loses herself in the torrent of lies that she has found herself caught up in. The police are closing in on her as the one to have murdered her class in a violent outburst, she’s horribly experimented on in an attempt to revert her back into her human self, she is telling everyone else that she believes in peace and still killing behind their backs. She never is able to find peace and so is ultimately lost.

Then there is our protagonist; Takumi who fights with no dream in mind. Takumi who claims to hate the very thing he is, and has known what he is from the start, and seeks out punishment and people to hurt him because he thinks he deserves it. Actively seeking fights and leading his friends to believe that he has done terrible things in the hopes that they will kill him. Faiz is ultimately a story of the importance of communication and how those in power can control the message and manipulate others where there is a lack thereof. It wants you to know that you should speak up and be honest even if it’s just you, a single person, being impacted by something terrible.
Kusaka has twisted everyone around his finger in this story. He is, to me, one of the true antagonists of the show. When he dies, it’s purely of his own hubris and Kiba’s rage. Takumi despises Kusaka but when he finds out he’s died at the hands of an orphenoch he returns to his personal crusade of self hatred and  internalized rage at his own kind. He declares that he wants to kill every last orphenoch and then himself. But for Kusaka? Someone who abused and gaslit him and his friends? Of course. Because Takumi still hates himself. He never fully got over  this, because how could you? It’s not something that can be undone with a wave of a hand. In Heisei vs Showa he says it himself, Kusaka was a creep and a terrible person but for him the thought of someone dying instead of himself was unacceptable.

 In the end he finally comes to terms with everything he is and decides to accept himself as a member of society. He tells Kiba that he wants to save him because he’s human too. He sees orphenochs as a part of humanity and not some greater next level monster separate from everyone else or one being better than the other. Takumi becomes one of the few orphenochs to fully accept himself as a part of humanity. Even in the very final scene, we are given a confusing and open ending where we are unsure if he’s already dead or if he’s simply dying and choosing to spend what little time he has left with Mari and Keitarou. He has found himself one small dream to live for with what time he has and it’s a borrowed dream from his friend Keitarou. He wishes to make all the laundry as clean and bright as he can, he wishes to stay with his friends working in the place they built together, and to help others in little ways that might brighten their day.

Naoya is a simple man. He’s a college student and incredible guitar player who has lost his ability to play music through a horrible attack that left his hands wounded and in constant chronic pain. He becomes and orphenoch and for most of the story is highly irresponsible, a massive dick to others, and refuses to take part in most societal functions. He’s a freeloader drifting through everyone’s lives and causing problems for himself and others. But he’s also lost. He’s trying to find something to do with himself that will satisfy that void that music once filled. Surprisingly, Naoya finds his purpose. He struggles at first but then after reflection finally begins to mature through supporting a young boy who lost his family to a fire that Naoya pulled him from. He is able to recognize Kiba losing his way in Smart Brain’s ideology and is the one to stick it to him and walk away. Naoya’s lack of loyalty, in the end, becomes his greatest strength. He finds friends and never had any trouble accepting what he was from the start so he survives.

and Kiba….augh. Kiba who swung from one extreme to another trying to find some form of peace. First he wanted to represent Orphenochs who refused to kill. But after Yuka’s death and the constant harassment of Kusaka, he finds himself drawn into the warped belief of Smart Brain. The president who is trying to convince him that Orphenochs can NEVER be peaceful and that it is within their nature to destroy humanity before humanity destroys them. Coerces him at his lowest point to believe in the radical idea that Orphenochs are superior to the human race as a next evolutionary step. And Kiba does believe it. Because he’s tired.He just wants to exist and to not lose any more people around him. And in the end, following in the trend of many of the deaths of 555, he himself is lost. He dies making the choice to help destroy the king but also still remains unsure of himself. He states that he isn’t sure what the right answer is anymore.

555 covers a lot and can be silly and messy but so intensely human. It is rare to see a show reflect so many real emotions and misunderstandings in an exaggerated way that still rings true. One of the biggest takeaways of it for me personally was that if you cannot decide to live your life accepting yourself as a valuable part of humanity, no matter how small the part you play is, then you will not survive. It is critical that you take a look at yourself and do not hold yourself above others but you also need to find a way to love yourself and have a reason to be, and it’s alright if it’s as simple as doing laundry.

Bit of an interesting topic here… Has anyone heard of Card Warrior Kamen Riderbefore?

From what I’ve been able to find, it was a Bandai toyline and manga from 2009 that introduced these neat little exclusive forms for a bunch of Riders. A lot of them, most notably the early waves, seem to be a Rider combined with a thematically appropriate robot creature. For example, Ichigo with a grasshopper, or Knight with a bat.

The figures themselves seem to be little chibi-esque dudes, and each comes with a card of the animal/insect robot they combine with.

I wasn’t able to find pics of every figure released, since the line is so obscure, but here are some I did find of the boxes. There was also a Hibiki and a couple others but I didn’t realize tumblr had an image limit.