I’m just going into full Scissors Posting mode tonight but he is literally unironically (though also slightly ironically bc he is very funny) one of my favourite evil riders ever bc like
Even compared to the likes of Kuuga and Shin, Ryuki was purposefully very VERY much about trying to absolutely tear down Kamen Rider’s image to completely redefine it and make you think about what a Kamen Rider really is, how much justice is defined by power, what exactly justice IS and why you hold certain ideals, etc. It’s a season that at the very worst you have to respect the sheer nerve and bravery of for completely going against everything Kamen Rider is on the surface because the creators’ belief of needing kids to question these core concepts of ideals and truth was so important.
And Scissors for me is the absolute biggest statement of that at the start. Now it’s not like Ryuki hadn’t made that mission statement clear from the moment Shinji contracted Dragreder — everything from allying with monsters to Ren’s whole deal to Shinji constantly being treated like an idiot for being in this to save people (the very thing that has defined a Kamen Rider until February 2002) does this redefining of Rider expertly, but Scissors really pushes this into high gear.
So he’s introduced as this mysterious character almost that’s fighting Ryuki for no reason, and especially coming off of Agito doing something similar with Another Agito and how Ren’s clearly hiding down some motivation this is a thing where you might think, oh, well he’s a Kamen Rider. There’s some misunderstanding now but surely, eventually, Shinji will bring him around to the side of good and they’ll be allies of justice. This is, in fact, exactly Shinji’s mindset throughout the episode — much like how he is with Ren he is deadset on convincing this Kamen Rider to join his side and stop fighting each other.
But that was never going to work — there’s not even really a tragedy here in Shinji’s failure to pull Scissors over, no; Scissors as it turns out is a corrupt cop who’s been a terrible asshole for a while. He’s completely irredeemable, and worse, Shinji’s attempts to redeem him are used and manipulated by Scissors to place someone Shinji cares for in great danger. This isn’t a case of Kaoru Kino truly being a good person inside, or Mutsuki needing to overcome a Spider Undead. Scissors is just an evil bastard using what power he’s acquired for selfish ends, and that’s it. And what makes this even better? Kuuga and Agito before Ryuki had made the police a MASSIVE part of their seasons, either being the biggest ally Kamen Rider had or being Kamen Rider themselves! The police were presented as a major ally of justice with at best a few bad apples to be rooted out. Here? The most major cop is a villain, and all the others are clueless, useless and ineffective.
And at THIS point you might think... well, this is setting up Scissors as the exception, yes? A special case where he’s so horrible he doesn’t deserve the name Kamen Rider. He’s going to be if not the main villain, definitely one of the biggest villains in the show! But... no. He’s not special, he’s not some evil mastermind; he is once again some corrupt cop in it for his own ends, and that is the case for the majority of the Riders.
And then he dies in his second episode.
It’s difficult to not understate how groundbreaking that is for 2002. Every single Kamen Rider up until this point had been such a major character and such a major player, with their own stories and arcs that had them either live or die a hero. There were subversions of course like with Another Agito, but it was really nothing like this. Here we have a Kamen Rider who is a one-off irredeemable villainous character. In any other show before this guy would be Crab Kaijin, but this is Kamen Rider Scissors.
To take both the idea of a Kamen Rider and the helpful ally of the police, and to turn them into a one-off villain to truly subvert the expectations of the franchise and to make you question the undeniable inherent goodness of these concepts and make you think harder on what can be done with the power they hold... that’s Ryuki.
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