Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider

Episode 14

This week's episode is about two things: character growth and world-building. Last episode, Fuataba fought her brother, unleashing years of pent-up frustration and hatred at him. After all, thanks to his way of acting, she spent her young life socially isolated—no one wanted to be friends with the sister of that crazy guy who thinks he's Kamen Rider.

However, there was one exception to this: Tiger Master, Futaba's martial arts teacher. Thus, she's willing to put her life on the line to protect her teacher from the yakuza—pretending to be Tiger Master herself. Of course, things go off the rails rather quickly once it is revealed that the hitman is anything but human—and is more interested in turning her into a minion than killing her.

To Futaba's credit, she holds her own for quite a while. This is clearly the first time she's ever been completely outmatched in a fight. And even when Spider Man reveals his true form, she still fights back—in between her attempts to escape, of course.

Yet, the biggest thing about this episode is not the fight, but its implications for Futaba. She realizes for the first time that her brothers aren't just delusional man children playing pretend (well, they are delusional man children, but the “playing pretend” part is very much not the case). This means Fuataba has been in the wrong for years—that every time she got angry at them for “lying” about how their grandparents died, she was the bad guy.

However, even in her near-frantic state, she is quick to re-establish her worldview. While she was wrong for not believing her brothers, her brothers, specifically Ichiyo, still acted incorrectly. There was no need for Ichiyo to destroy her social circles the way he did—and him being so in his own world that he never realized how much he was hurting her is still unforgivable in her eyes. It's just that now she can see the core reason for his behavior—and even see the justice in it. In other words, she still hates him with her whole being, but is now an ally against the greater enemy.

As for the world-building side of things, the conversation between Spider Man and Bat Man—along with Yukarisu's reaction to Futaba's story—gives us much-needed information about Shocker. With the existence of combatants and monsters, it can be easy to forget that this is not the TV show. We know nothing about the Shocker organization itself other than it 1) works hard to stay in the shadows and 2) kills any traitors with no mercy. Even the idea that they are after world domination isn't specifically stated until this episode (to my memory at least).

With Bat Man and Spider Man, we see that, while their current task seems to be increasing the number of combatants (with the ultimate goal of turning every human alive into one), the monsters have seemingly full discretion when it comes to going about that. Bat Man has decided to just turn everyone in the idol industry into a combatant one by one. Meanwhile, Spider Man is selectively choosing only the strongest humans to get the strongest possible combatants. It's a simple matter of quality versus quantity in their lines of thinking.

Yukarisu's key bit of information is that combatants can be turned into monsters—that it is the ultimate reward that every combatant (herself included) aspires to obtain. This means that technically any human could eventually become a monster, leading us to wonder if Spider Man and Bat Man were once human as well.

All in all, this is a decent episode. While it's unfortunate that we didn't get to see Air Master Tiger Master in action, it's likely only a matter of time before Spider Man tries to recruit her again—unknowingly going into a fight against one of Japan's top fighters rather than her hot-headed apprentice. Honestly, I can't wait.

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Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.