I had a dream last night in which I was watching a Kamen Rider show -- not Gotchard, but some dream-original series that I think involved an alien-run evil corporation doing something to the world that, as a side effect, changed the sky and sunlight to look harsher in sort of an early-2000s video processing effect. In the dream, the female lead became a Rider for the first time, and I think she was supposed to be the Primary Rider even though at least one male character had been a Rider before her (as has occasionally happened in real Rider series, e.g. Saber, although I don't think this was supposed to be the first episode). Clearly the dream was inspired by the news about Rinne becoming the first female Secondary Rider.
Anyway, once the female lead was armored up and monologuing to psych herself up for confronting the baddies and demanding they fix the sky or whatever, she made the bold decision that the Kamen Rider title was wrong for her and she would adopt a new title, which was something like Amelie -- not Kamen Rider Amelie, just Amelie. As soon as she made this choice, her logo (on some kind of black screen on the front of her armor) transformed into something more magical-girlish, a stylized half-face next to what looked like a katakana fu (フ) or a rounded 7 -- there's a chance it could've been a very stylized katakana A (ア) for Amelie, but I doubt my subconscious remembered kana that well (I had to look it up afterward to check). And somehow I knew within the dream that all the male Riders would become Amelies as well, and there was an onscreen caption noting that they would adopt feminine-sounding subtitles, something like "Sam will now be Sally."
To be clear, I did not react to this as a bad thing at all as I watched, just an interesting novelty. Maybe my subconscious was thinking of the news item I read a while back that the push for more female Riders in the Reiwa shows is a response to KR airing right after Precure and the producers wanting to hold onto that large female audience. So maybe I was expecting in the dream that they'd try to make KR into more of a live-action magical girl show. Which I would not have a problem with, though I realized after waking that it was the sort of thing that misogynists opposed to female Riders might spin as a worst-case "they'll take over and emasculate us!" scenario. Of course, gender ambiguity is nothing new in magical-girl anime; the '90s Sailor Moon was loaded with it, and I think I read that there have been male Precure heroes who've adopted feminine titles or costumes in transformed mode. And KR and Sentai have had genderfluid and non-binary characters. So in my dream, maybe it seemed like something a Japanese show wouldn't be afraid to do -- if they were going to embrace a female lead, they'd take it all the way.
