I have a ‘They Wasted A Perfectly Good Plot’ coming on...
... Thinking about Graphite (something I do rather obsessively), it occurred to me that, as I mentioned @bonjourentrez said before, he’s the only enemy Bugster left. The two who are good and now... Semi good? (what do we call Parad’s change in attitude?) are both predominately noncombatants. Poppy’s a DDR character (okay, not exactly, but) and Parad isn’t even from a game, he’s, like, an embodiment for co-op or something.
For all they’ve been preaching that ‘Bugsters weren’t made to be killed by humans,’ the only Bugsters who have been shown as anything else are the ones who quite literally weren’t. Burgermon, for example, was not an enemy character, and he was the only other nice Bugster for a while (aside from Poppy). All the others have been final bosses of games, including Graphite, and the show hasn’t given a second thought to killing them.
Now Parad is with the good guys (they’d better address what he’s done more, or they’ll be veering into Regina Mills territory and don’t get me started there), but he’s not actually that good an example of the claim they’re trying to make about Bugsters not being canon fodder, because he never was; Masamune was wrong--Parad didn’t become a game boss until Kamen Rider Chronicle.
Graphite, on the other hand, is in that position. He’s the final boss of his game. If they wanted to actually address the thoughts and feelings of game characters who spend their lives being treated as pawns and beaten down, he would be a better choice to examine. Someone asked me what would happen if Graphite survived the next ep; that’s a great question, and I would love for Ex-Aid to explore the answer. Not beating around it by only giving non game enemy Bugsters a second chance, but showing how an enemy character and the human players find a way to work around that fate. Say Graphite does survive, and possibly considers helping them? How would they actually address the idea they mentioned before, of finding a way for everyone to coexist? Parad, Poppy, and even Burgermon aren’t good choices to exemplify this, from my point of view, as another writer. It would be more effective if they actually had to consider what they could do to allow for Graphite’s continued existence--because just ‘if there are no humans who can we play with’ won’t work for a Bugster for whom ‘play with’ means ‘be killed by repeatedly.’ Maybe I’m thinking far too much into a children’s show (probably), but I think there are a number of things in the plot that could have been handled better.
Whelp, nothing’s perfect, and I suppose that’s what headcanons and fanfiction are for--exploring possibilities the show didn’t.
(But, actually, not just in regards to Graphite, what are they gonna do with any of the Bugsters who survive this? Like, okay, Poppy can keep working at the hospital, Kiriya and Kuroto used to be human, so they can probably respectively go back to work and go to jail, but, like, Parad. What are they gonna do? Put him in Super Mario Cart Deluxe 8 jail? Game jail? Is that even a thing? What’s the plan here?)
