Quick answer: hi, I'm Kamen Rider Die. Thanks for checking out this collection of my writing on Kamen Rider.

Less quick answer... hoo boy.

I discovered Kamen Rider through Ex-Aid toy posts over on TokuNation. After getting particularly obsessed with Snipe's Bang Bang Simulations suit ("Wh-- why is that man wearing half of a battleship?"), I decided to start watching the show. Kamen Rider Ex-Aid got its hooks in on me and, after a brief detour through the easily-accessible Amazons series on Amazon Prime, I went back to Kamen Rider W and started working my way up to the present. It was relatively smooth sailing (I think I did all of OOO in about three days) up until Kamen Rider Ghost.

Ghost was rough. ROUGH. I didn't enjoy the pacing, and found several of the characters to be somewhere between Annoying and Repellant. At this point in my fandom, it was a fairly solitary endeavor. I didn't even browse the boards, for fear I'd stumble upon a spoiler. But I kind of couldn't suffer in silence; I needed to work through this perplexing and infuriating show with other fans. So, out of the blue, I created an account based on the best/dumbest pun I could think of in under three minutes ("Kamen Ride Or Die") and started a thread to discuss Ghost with other fans. On August 11th, 2019, "Kamen Rider Die watches Kamen Rider Ghost" began on TokuNation.

It was an incredibly fun experience, but it was also a much richer and more rewarding way of watching Kamen Rider shows. Instead of breezing through programs and getting annoyed, I was venting to other fans, and getting good feedback about what I'd just watched. It made me appreciate things I'd normally overlook, and think more critically about the parts that didn't work for me. It moved Ghost from a source of irritation, to one of my favorite Kamen Rider experiences. It was so much fun that I just kept going: Ghost into a rewatch of the Ex-Aid movies into Build into Kuuga into Agito into Ryuki into Faiz into Blade into Hibiki into Kabuto into Den-O into Kiva into Decade into Legend Rider Projects into Zi-O into Zero-One into Saber into Revice. A lark in 2019 turned into almost four years of continuous analysis and writing.

And now here we are, with enough material to archive it on a site of its own. (Also, TokuNation's formatting became problematic back in 2022, and I really wanted to make sure all this work didn't just evaporate somehow.) I'll be porting everything over from TokuNation, complete with links back to the original discourse, since that's at least half the fun of the process. New threads will appear on TokuNation first, and then get archived here once complete. I've added a comments section to the posts here, though, so feel free to start your own discussions fresh.

This is very much a one-cubist-monstrosity-show right now, so please bear with me as I figure out how to do all of this. Feedback and requests can be submitted to me via email, since I don't ever want to deal with social media. (There are currently no plans for a Kamen Rider Die Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc, because I value what remains of my sanity and happiness.)

Above all, I'd like to create a little space to share my journey with Kamen Rider, and enjoy everything this franchise has to share with us. Thanks for stopping by.