I really think bringing in Mayu at the last minute and trying to build her up as important after rushing her debut in a 2-episode arc several months previously was a dreadful idea but, although I like Beast (and I agree that he's entertaining, more so than Haruto or Koyomi) not having him might have given a chance to focus more on her story
That involves assuming that camera time not given to Beast would've gone to Mayu instead, and I don't think that's the case. Since her status as Mage is clearly meant to be negative, it was probably never meant to be something developed extensively on-camera. She was meant to disappear with White Wizard for awhile and return in time to set up the end game. If Beast didn't exist, we'd probably just see Nitou's filler arcs replaced with filler where Haruto was a central figure. Whether that's a better or worse status quo will probably lie in the eye of the beholder.
In short, if we're going to get into "what ifs" like that, we might as well stop talking about the show as it actually is entirely.
I disagree. In a well-written story, discussion of these "what ifs" serve to highlight the narrative's underlying logic. It will become very clear, in discussing the possibilities, why things
couldn't have happened differently. It will be obvious that the alternatives would make less sense, or would at the very least completely change the story's meaning. When you can discuss things happening differently, and it seems like that change would have no substantial overall impact on the narrative, then you are by definition dealing with weak writing.
I think Beast's core problem isn't so much how he's been handled (because that just gets back to Wizard's core problem of mishandling everything - Beast is collateral at that point), but how he was conceptualized in the first place. They just never really gave him much to work with to begin with (which gets back to how the show never really cared about plot for most of its run), and, as I just said, with the show almost never focusing on plot as it was, it took until now - when it finally decided to care about plot - for Beast to actually get the table scraps of a plot of some kind.
I disagree with this, too. I think Beast's set-up was extraordinarily rich from a narrative perspective. There's a lot of stories about him that
could have been told, had the writers chosen to take the character seriously and give him a substantial role. I will outline just a few of the obvious ones.
He could've served as an additional obstacle to Haruto for a time. Perhaps Nitou could've been in such fear of being devoured that he'd side with Wiseman for a time, hoping to ensure his own survival by ensuring that more Phantoms are born. That would've put Haruto in a position to display his own heroic virtues, by allowing him to sway Nitou into accepting a less certain but also more heroic life. (The show flirts with this by having Medusa make this argument at Nitou early on, but he rather improbably dismisses it out of hand, ensuring that the story will never focus on his problems for too long.)
He could've been treated as a wild card, pursuing his own agenda so much that it's hard to tell whether he'll be friend or foe when he wades into a battle. What if he'd tried harder to pursue Phoenix, perhaps hoping that devouring a being of infinite mana would sate Chimera once and for all? He could've fought Phoenix to a standstill, gone in for the kill, and then perhaps discovered that Phoenix's power was too much to devour. Or perhaps White Wizard would've made it clear to Haruto that if Chimera devoured Phoenix, Chimera would in turn become a new threat. That could've heightened the stakes for the already-tense Phoenix battle. And I promise, it would've been more interesting than Haruto going, "Hey, I think I need to kill Phoenix myself to regain my confidence" and Nitou going, "Sure, bro, good luck."
Beast could've been presented as a thorn in White Wizard's side, interfering in his plans simply by existing. Perhaps at a critical juncture, Haruto allowed Nitou to get a kill instead of pushing to do it himself. If Beast was presented as effective enough to slow Wizard's evolution, then White Wizard's sinister nature could've been demonstrated far earlier in the storyline, forcing Haruto to have more of an emotional reaction to it. If White Wizard began clearly trying to undermine and destroy Beast, Wizard then could pro-actively go to defend his brother Kamen Rider, and begin questioning the whole status quo more actively. Wouldn't that be more interesting than White Wizard meeting Beast once and going, "Pffft, don't get eaten, loser"?
The only reason why stuff like this didn't happen was because the writers clearly didn't want to have anything really important in the story hinge on Beast's presence. They wanted it to be the Haruto show, where only Haruto did important things, and only important things happened to Haruto. Beast generally stepped forward for either storylines that were irrelevant, or storylines that involved failing. Most of Beast's potential conflicts were simply written out with brief scenes of dialogue, instead of being used to create more drama and enrich the storyline. And there's a LOT of write-out scenes like this, because Beast was a character with lots of good conflicts built into his premise!
Daguva's outfit was mostly, if not all, white and he was evil. :loltongue:
There's a good reason for this. In traditional Japanese folklore, white is the color of death. It's the color associated with the dead, since ghosts are believed to wear long white robes and have pale faces. It's also the color worn at traditional funerals. The Western idea of white = life and black = death doesn't get imported into Japanese culture until the years following World War II.
