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He’s ten years old and his sister is six and you would call him a monster for not knowing how to take care of her.
They live on a world full of monsters, besides. Enough money that Tsukasa at least knows how to spend correctly. Enough power that when they’re young, they’re safe.
He’s ten years old, all but alone in a world of monsters and you would call him one for looking through the dimensional veil and wanting to run through it.
(You would ignore every time he encouraged his sister to join him, every time he brought back pictures to tempt her until he forgot it was a temptation instead of simply a gift.)
He’s thirteen years old in a world of monsters and you could hardly call him one for killing the one that tries to enter his house. It’s only natural, kill or be killed and drop your enemies into dead worlds, push them through the veils into the worlds you were taught to summon.
Or so he’d say.
You’d call him a monster like later he didn’t look back at the world and shudder at his enemy’s corpse.
Maybe you can call him a monster. It gets easier the next time and the time after that and now he has a unique power and the eyes of everyone.
But you can’t call him a monster for liking it, not when any human would like to be surrounded by praise and (fearful) respect.
You’d call him a monster for making a grab at Dai-Shocker’s leadership when he’s just barely sixteen but he has the power to do it so he’d simply ask you what the problem was.
He’s young, but he would hardly call himself naive. He’s found that other worlds are kinder than his own but he’s also found that it sucks when those police people say he can’t steal the bike he defeated the owner of. And more importantly he’s powerful enough to take what he wants and nothing much else really matters.
His biggest selling point is when he helps his new forces realize just how much out there there is to take and the ten worlds full of monsters that already follow him into the throne room.
You’d call him a monster and he’d say he wasn’t because he simply wasn’t dumb enough to be called such a name.
You’d call him a monster for the Rider system he had developed from the moment he became aware of their existence.
Perhaps it’s more of a simple tradition, however. The villains and the monsters create the hero and the hero has to make a choice when it lands in his hands or his body.
But Decade is his own monster at the end of his nonexistent storybook.
You’d call him one for planning to fight back.
(Call him a monster, but ask yourself this: why would he choose the name Kamen Rider? The name of heroes born of the darkness they fight?
Why would a monster name themself a hero unless it was something he wanted?)
Daiki does call him a monster when Tsukasa takes the former enforcer from Fourteen’s world and back to his own. Tsukasa laughs and simply explains that he has the power to take what he wants.
But Kaitou Daiki has become a renounced thief in his world and Tsukasa has decided that he wants the man, himself.
Call him a monster and say he deserves it but Daiki’s fading pleas of morality cut off when Tsukasa kisses him and for a short time as he teaches Daiki his own world’s rules, he has someone he can trust.
Someone he might love even though he doesn’t know how.
Call him a monster but others are worse. That’s the secondary reason Daiki warns Tsukasa of just how many of his subordinates want to kill him.
Tsukasa laughs because he already knows. He’s nearing nineteen and been in power for years. He has rivals and enemies and he doesn’t care. He’s stronger than any of them.
Call him many things but he is no form of unwitting. He even knows about their secret weapon.
So he points Daiki at DiEnd and knows that it’s saying goodbye. He’s turning Daiki into his bird, but it’s time to say goodbye.
It’s a selfish selflessness.
Maybe you can call him a monster for that.
Call him a monster for merging their worlds when the nine Riders who just wouldn’t go down like they should start allying, regardless. He doesn’t really know what it will do and certainly couldn’t predict its effects.
That’s what he has scientists for. Scientists who by this point are more rival than proper ally and didn’t mention when they suggested he attempt to merge the worlds that it would slowly implode every one of them with Riders in them, make their job a thousand times easier.
They all fight him, of course, but Tsukasa matches them all. Kiva is the most unrestrainedly violent and later he will say he can hardly blame him, not when he’d killed his brother for refusing to ally the Fangire with Dai-Shocker.
Kuuga is the most deadly and when he attacks, Tsukasa falls, and he disappears into another world.
He forgets how or why.
He forgets everything.
Call him a monster but how much better are his predecessors, as they realize that their worlds merging is a dangerous stability and that any others merging could easily become deadly for all of them. Realize that it all ties back to him, back to Decade.
Realize that if he can destroy their parallel worlds and if they can kill him, afterwards, then everything can be saved, perhaps even reset. Perhaps easy to do, they realize when they find him nigh on completely amnesiac, with a true innocence in his eyes yet fear when he catches sight of them, because he’s grasping at straws for who he is and maybe they can lead him along with answers.
Don’t call them monsters, however. They hate this option.
(Kuuga will leave, entirely.)
They hate this option but what is the life of a monster next to the lives on every world that will be otherwise lost?
You can’t call him a monster like this. An asshole, certainly, and selfish as well, not even vague not-memories of how to care about others, but not a monster. He thinks he likes this, though. Helping others.
Being a hero.
He doesn’t know why he turns to Yuusuke for it the way he does, or why he simply doesn’t seem to know how to be a good person.
He wants to know his past. He’s terrified of it.
One day as they pass between the worlds he says as much without realizing and Natsumi says he was probably an asshole then, too. But she also says that it doesn’t matter because he’s here now.
She smiles at him and Tsukasa takes a picture and it almost doesn’t come out terrible.
She smiles at him and then Yuusuke comes in and teases him about showing an actual emotion and he remembers for a second that this can be his world if he lets it.
You can call him a monster but monsters don’t love like Kadoya Tsukasa does.
He returns to his world feeling the multiverse right on the edge of a total collapse and when they say Dai-Shocker can stop it he doesn’t question it because dictatorship is better than destruction, surely.
Call him a monster, the people he loves certainly do, and he’ll lay in the rubble of the dying multiverse and agree with you.
He does but he’s reminded how little that matters, if he wants to change.
He wants to change.
He remembers that day because it was the ones from the worlds he’d merged on purpose who came to his aid that day. It was the time where they didn’t look just at the monster.
Before he realized just how much he’d fucked up.
Call him a monster for fighting back when they tell him how much he failed and how he needs to die, but what human wouldn’t fight back against their own destruction?
It’s not that he doesn’t understand. The worlds would be fixed. None but the Riders would remember.
Everyone would come back.
Call him a monster if you want but when he holds down Ultimate Kuuga in the hopes of at least giving Yuusuke a choice in this fight like hasn’t in so many other it’s also to say goodbye.
He doesn’t explain.
Yuusuke would defend him if he did.
Call him a monster but he doesn’t want to die and be forgotten and he doesn’t want anyone to die for him, either.
Anyone else, that is.
Yuusuke says he’s gone too far. Natsumi says he’s done too much. Daiki shoots him point blank.
Call him a monster if you like but he realizes by the fourth card that he can’t end this until all his predecessors are dead and it’s not just fear or conjecture by the tenth.
Call him a monster when he dies in Natsumi and Daiki’s arms but at least he knows he served his purpose…
Call him a monster however much you like. But a monster would never be loved enough to be brought back on love and memories alone.
He’s a Kamen Rider for better or for worse. And he’s a hero.