Five Top Kamen Rider Trolls

 Kamen Rider, like any other long-running franchise, has a number of character types that pop up again and again. The asshole who thinks he's right and everybody else is wrong (see: 555's Kusaka, Kiva's Nago). The gentle, sweet-natured hero who wishes we could all just get along (Agito's Shouichi, Ryuki's Shinji). And, in more recent times, another type has become increasingly common: the troll.

 You know that annoying guy who sets up camp on your favourite forum and does nothing but post anime macros in the middle of a serious discussion? Or the one who responds to your nine hundred word essay on why Ultraman is totally underrated with just "u mad?"? Toei loves that guy. He's become a pretty common fixture in Kamen Rider, to varying levels of success. Let's talk about the rise of the Kamen Rider troll and btw, you sound fat.


 5. Sieg (Kamen Rider Den-O)

Every girl crazy 'bout a man in a feather boa.

 Have you ever noticed that when Sieg enters a scene the other characters in it seem to deflate with barely concealed disappointment almost immediately? Despite the fact that he's only slightly more irritating than the other Imagins (Deneb excluded, everyone's got plenty of time for Deneb ♥), everybody hates this guy. They try to push him off on other people, like the time he somehow ended up possessing Tsukasa and none of the Den-O crew really cared, they just wanted to get out of there before Tsukasa and co gave him back. Maybe it's because he keeps hitting on the pre-pubescent girl they have travelling with them. Or maybe it's because he moults feathers everywhere. But I personally believe it's because Sieg seems to exist purely to troll the already ridiculous henshin sequences in any Den-O media.

 Kamen Rider villains are a patient lot, being used to waiting for the Riders to finish their poses and speeches before they attack, but the Den-O crew really push their luck. They spend so much time letting everyone pose and preen and recite their catchphrase, and then in The Onigashima Warship Sieg wanders in to ruin it all, capping the dramatic line-up off with a pat "I already said my line". Is it any wonder they all hate him?


 4. Jun (Kamen Rider Ryuki)
 Judging the men in Ryuki who choose to join the Rider War isn't an easy thing. Many of them have serious, heartbreaking reasons like "I need to save the life of the person I love most" or "I only have a limited time left to live". Jun's reason for joining the War is "there's nothing on television right now and 2chan is down".

 Despite being an intelligent university student, Jun seems to think he's a 13 year old from 1998, uploading a childish virus on to the hard drive of ORE Journal's mainframe and laughing as it does its job. Before that he sets up, and I'm not kidding, his own version of Fight Club where members kind of swoosh about in big cloaks. What is wrong with this guy? Why is he only able to re-enact bad nineties cliches?


 3. Kitazaki (Kamen Rider 555)
 Kitazaki, despite a lot of fandom's great dislike for him, actually contributed a lot to not just 555 but the Kamen Rider franchise in general. Because of this man, we are able to refer to "that time a Kamen Rider hero only survived being killed because the villain got distracted by a paper aeroplane" in total seriousness.


 2. Kazari (Kamen Rider OOO)
 For someone who disappears for big chunks of the series at a time and spends a good deal of what little screen-time he does have just chilling out in other people's cars or random internet cafes, Kazari has managed to ruffle quite a lot of feathers.

Pictured: responsible for the entire plot.

 Kazari's favourite target seems to be Uva, who he goes out of his way to torment. In episode 23, Eiji and Ankh dash to a spot where Ankh senses Kazari and Uva, only to find an incensed Uva trying to remove Kazari's intestines through his nostrils. Why? Pretty much just because Kazari felt like annoying someone that day.

 In fact, roughly 90% of the problems Eiji faces as OOO happen because Kazari felt like annoying someone that day. How many men can say that?


1. Daiki (Kamen Rider Decade)

This is Daiki in a nutshell.

 Daiki has turned trolling into an artform. Lazing around contributing little more to the plot than "TROLOLOL TSUKASA HATES SEA CUCUMBERS" wasn't good enough for him. Stealing the only thing that could restore Natsumi's soul just to annoy Tsukasa for half an hour wasn't good enough. Showing up in The Onagashima Warship for literally no other reason than to inconvenience the Denliner crew wasn't good enough. Daiki's finest moment came in Decade's finale, when he seemed to have had a change of heart. He poured out an emotional speech to Tsukasa, tears in his eyes, swearing eternal loyalty and friendship.

 Then five minutes later he shot him in the face.

 This was trolling at its finest, an effort so momentous that it went beyond simply trolling the characters Daiki shares the canon universe with into some incredible meta attempt at trolling the viewer. I sat in stunned silence barely hearing Toei's announcement that the true ending to the Decade series would be shown in a movie later that year. I could see only Natsumi's shocked face as Daiki shoved the barrel of his gun into Tsukasa's face. I saw myself in her eyes, our jaws hanging at the same distance from the ground. What is truth? What is life? Somewhere a snake walked on two legs experiencing the human condition. I... had seen forever.