#kamen rider meta
Kamen Rider Ryuki is in such an entertainingly hostile conversation with Pokémon.
Like, it’s 2002, there’s this juggernaut kids media about what amounts to superpowered cockfighting, with a protagonist whose goal is to become the number one superpowered cockfighter by sequentially defeating the reigning champs, and then Kamen Rider, a show about how violence is abhorrent even when necessary, a show about a hero who draws power from a monstrous, systemic evil and turns that power against itself, has a season where said monstrous systemic evil is a Mons card game where the mons have an abusive, destructive relationship with their trainers, where Mons evolution is a parasitic process fueled by killing trainers and mons and absorbing their life force, where every “trainer” is drawn in either by desperation or egotistical derangement.
Absolutely a point was being made there.