Clockwise from center: Red Keeper, Hibiki Sakurama (or possibly D disguised as him), Yumeko Suzukiri and the Dusters.
Go, Go, Loser Ranger! (Sentai Dai Shikkaku / 戦隊大失格, literally "Sentai Disqualification" or "Ranger Reject") is a manga series by Negi Haruba (The Quintessential Quintuplets), which began serialization in Weekly Shōnen Magazine in February 2021. It is licensed in English by Kodansha USA.
Thirteen years ago, the immortal Evil Army Kaijin attempted an Alien Invasion on Earth, only to be shortly thwarted by the Ryujinnote Sentai Dragon Keeper and their Divine Weapons within a year. All of their commanders were eradicated, and their mooks, the Dusters, were eventually forced into a ceasefire agreement: The Keepers would stage weekly live battles on Sundays, where the Dusters are forced to be their butt monkeys and purposely lose to them every week in exchange for their lives being spared, maintaining a public impression that the Keepers are still hard at work fighting against the seemingly neverending invasion attempts. Thirteen years of this have passed, and one Duster, D, decided he's had enough of this farce. Using a Human Disguise, he plots to eliminate the Keepers from the inside through enlisting in their recruitment programme, but soon learns that he isn't the only person with the same plan in mind, and realises he may have gotten way too in over his head.
An anime adaptation was announced in December 2022
, with Keiichi Satō (Tiger & Bunny) as director and being animated by Yostar Pictures. The adaptation premiered as part of the Spring 2024 anime season.
Go, Go, Loser Ranger! provides examples of:
- 0% Approval Rating: In the following weeks after Sosei's outburst, the Ranger Association is all but vilified by the general public. From the press heckling them on patrol to corporate backers pulling out, the Rangers are forced to cancel the Sunday battles as anti-Ranger sentiment grows.
- Actually, I Am Him: Chapter 2 has D seeking out Red Keeper amongst a group of his apprentices. One of them, Shun Tokita, declares himself as the Keeper, only for Yumeko to promptly out him as just a third-rate apprentice (even though Shun insists it's only a matter of time).
- All Part of the Show: Inverted. The public and most of the Rangers are convinced the weekly confrontation with the Kaijins is an actual Blood Sport where the Kaijins are Killed Off for Real, but in actuality it's a Staged Shooting Propaganda Machine made to glorify the Dragon Keepers as the heroes of Earth, while the Kaijins are usually spared from death to be recycled for the following week. To the public, it seems the Kaijins permanently chained their ship to Earth and haven't given up on their invasion for thirteen years, but in reality it was the Keepers who chained it down to prevent the Dusters from going home in order to keep up the farce. D theorises that the only people who know the truth are the remaining Dusters and the Keepers themselves.
- An Offer You Can't Refuse: After the Kaijin were defeated at the end of their attempted invasion of earth, the Dragon Keepers gave the surviving foot soldiers a choice: in exchange for Dragon Keepers not exterminating them, the surviving foot soldiers will keep up the ruse that the Kaijin still want to take over earth, all so that the Dragon Keepers can reap fame and fortune, while the "Dusters" get sent back to their fortress until the following week's "battle".
- And Then What?: D kills Red Keeper, but soon realizes that the Rangers just replaced him, leaving D to question what he's actually doing.
- Anti-Climax: How D kills Red Keeper. There is no high-stakes battle or fake out; D sneaks up on Red Keeper as he's changing and stabs him in the back. The only thing that surprised D was how easy it was.
- Awesome, but Impractical: All Rangers have a multi-purpose energy weapon issued to them, but it is currently only limited to a sword and blaster form. Koguma tinkers with them to unlock a "Burst" form, which makes the weapon shoot out an incredibly strong energy wave but exhausts the weapon's battery in minutes.
- Backhanded Compliment: After D, Usukubo, and Hisui trick Yakushi into believing Death Messiah's horn was its weak point, D calls him a "true Invader fan". While it's technically correct, as being a fan of the Invaders was a chunk of Yakushi's character, in this battle he was trying to become an Invader and deciding to follow "canon" instead of selfishly pursuing his newfound powers for his own sake is what really separates him from a true Invader.
- Big Damn Heroes: After the Invaders Rights Association turned all of their would-be recruits into monsters, the Dragon Keepers and the remaining Rangers arrive just as they began making a beeline for the IRA compound's outer wall.
- Blessed with Suck: Despite having immortality, the Dusters' bodies are highly fragile, and they can experience pain from damage. Even as shapeshifters, any disguise they don, human or Monster of the Week, can be shattered easily with the right amount of force.
- Cape Busters: Due to having thwarted the Kaijin's attempted invasion of earth, the Dragon Keepers became Earth's most beloved heroes, and to maintain that image, they forced the remaining Kajin foot soldiers to play out battles where they lose every Sunday, in exchange for not being killed. However, tired of being forced to lose over and over again for the sake of entertainment, D comes up with the plan to pose as a human and infiltrate the Dragon Keepers and take down the "heroes" once and for all. However, he gets caught trying to infiltrate the Red Keeper's garrison by Yumeko, a Yellow cadet over on business, who rather than turning him in, decides to partner up with D to take down the Dragon Keepers from the inside.
- Chance Meeting Between Antagonists: In Chapter 2, just as D discovers Red Keeper's identity through a poster next to an elevator, Sosei Akabane/Red Keeper himself comes out of the elevator and passes by him.
- Later in Chapter 52, D happens to come across someone getting arrested under suspicion of being an Invader and managed to talk down the police into letting him go. D would later discover he saved Green Keeper while he was in his civilian clothes.
- In Chapter 82, D stumbles on Red Keeper changing out of uniform, and takes the opportunity to try and kill him. Much to D's surprise, he succeeds.
- Cleanup Crew: Pink Battalion's real purpose is erasing all evidence of incidents involving Invaders outside of their Sunday battles, the most recent of which being Magatia's illusory school.
- Condescending Compassion: Why D turns his back on the Invader's Rights Association despite absolutely agreeing with their goal; it becomes apparent that the organization doesn't view invaders as equals, but as pitiful beings who can't do anything without human intervention.
- Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: The Dragon Keepers clearly show that they aren't true superheroes due to them indulging in the profits of their actions. From merchandising to a Sentai military training program and even creating their own T.V. show, they are getting rich and famous from their needlessly cruel actions towards the Dusters.
- Crapsack World: Japan is still mostly functional, but the Kaijin war has taken a lot out of everybody. Constant attacks have destroyed homes and orphaned thousands of children, leading to many dropping out of school and joining the Rangers for a slim chance of survival. The Rangers themselves have gotten to the point where they're forcing the remaining Footsoldiers to play-act painful battles every week to keep the populace dumb, and a number of their ranks have become corrupt or have deserted to team up with Executives.
- Chapters 73 & 74 introduce reptile-like monsters that range in size from roughly a large alligator to significantly larger than a building. The Keepers believe they may be related to the Invaders as they had caught wind of the Executives attempting to revive the Giga-Invader Death Messiah but research from Yellow Battalion has been slow due to lack of living specimens.
- Dark Parody: In a similar fashion to The Boys (2019), this manga plays on Sentai superhero genre tropes to the extreme. The villains had already lost and they lay at the mercy of the heroes. Now the villains are forced to continue playing their roles by the heroes in fear of the dangerously powerful weapons the heroes used against them. One day, a Duster named D decides that he's had enough of the Sentai and plots to take down the Sentai one by one with the help of a Ranger Cadet named Yumeko.
- Decoy Protagonist: Early promotional materials for the manga indicate the main characters to be the Dragon Keepers themselves; however the plot actually follows Villain Protagonist Duster D, as he sets off on his own plan to infiltrate and defeat the Dragon Keepers from within their ranks. The anime averts this, promoting D from the start.
- Double-Meaning Title: Sentai Dai Shikkaku can refer to the current Keepers, who are by and large not the heroes they make themselves out to be; or it can refer to the team D forms in his qualification test, made up of a group of weak, hopeless people (who even D doesn't want to know the backstory of) who no one expects to move on to the colored rangers.
- Disproportionate Retribution:
- For having attempted (and failed) an Alien Invasion on Earth, the Dusters were forced to become the Keepers' permanent butt monkeys, with their ship permanently chained to Earth and not allowed to return to their home planet.
- Mook F was mercilessly killed by Red Keeper for coming down to Earth on a non-Sunday. The problem is the poor guy wasn't even causing any harm in the first place, but was just looking for D, who hadn't came home in days. This also gave the Keepers a reason to deploy Ranger Cadets to guard the Dusters' base to prevent other Dusters from having the same idea of roaming Earth without permission.
- Dairyuu Azuki, the acting Junior First Class Red Ranger after Jin Humura was beaten to death by Red, suffers the same fate as his predecessor after spilling tea on Red Keeper.
- Fantastic Recruitment Drive: The Rangers, an organization that recruits and trains many young cadets to mainly support and, if needed, succeed the Keepers' mantle should the time comes. They are mostly relegated to ordinary field work such as being security guards for the live battles or assisting the police.
- Five-Man Band: Invoked by the Ranger organization, and its archetypes have spread so far that everyone under each Keeper has to adhere to their leader's main personality trait:
- Reds are the primary attack force, and usually have the ego to match. They have a good public face, but they are action first, talk later kinds as well. This can also manifest in a self-centered personality.
- Blues are the second in command. They can talk some sense into the Red, but they have their own brand of justice they'd like to follow.
- Yellows are smart and tech savvy. The group as a whole acts as Research and Development for the Rangers, as well as a Propaganda Machine that keeps the populace wanting Ranger support.
- Greens keep to themselves and are focused on their work. They are widely seen as grunts who do nothing but mop up after the other battalions, but this image is exactly what the greens want since their real mission is to investigate and destroy any and all surviving Executives without alerting the public.
- Finally, Pinks serve as little more than the emotional center and especially eye candy. Many people mock those who focus on their form as "trying for Pink", and pinks are generally kept to a supporting role. What they actually are is the cleanup crew, keeping major incidents under wraps and being privy to what goes on in Green Battalion.
- Foreshadowing:
- To Chidori being Green Keeper:
- When Chidori and Hisui meet up with Usukubo and D, Hisui asks Chidori if he told the latter two what he does, and he replies in the negative. This could either be referring to him neglecting to tell the new Rangers that he's Green Battalion's informant, or that he's really Green Keeper.
- Chidori has access to Green Battalion's base, holds some very high level technology like Sloth Brain and Gluttony Way, and personally knows Hibiki Sakurama, despite only interacting with the Greens. You could justify it with the fact that he's giving out information to a top-class organization, but you could just as easily attribute it to the fact that he's a top ranking Ranger, and thus would have a lot of access to that information and those tools.
- Then there's this line when D gets some information on Green Keeper:
Chidori: I'd be risking my own safety if I just handed out info on Green like candy. - Before the reveal that the Dragon Keepers were originally in a show, some odd statements from certain cast members give an early hint. Akabane mentions in Chapter 41 that his favorite "episode" was number 35, and Wakaba talks about watching the Keepers on television as a child before learning that they were a real force. Both are seemingly innocuous statements given that the Keepers have been active for over a decade, but work under the understanding that a show of them outside the Sunday Battles exists.
- To Chidori being Green Keeper:
- Genre Deconstruction:
- This is used to deconstruct the whole superhero tokusatsu genre from a henchmen perspective. The "Keepers" appear to be nothing more than a bunch of figureheads who are also psychopaths who repeatedly kill the Duster mooks just so people can praise them long after the actual battle ended just for glory, and are even willing to kill their own just to stay on top. Meanwhile, the main character, a Duster named D, while sympathetic due to circumstance, is a Villain Protagonist with Orange And Blue Morality who wants the Keepers dead, but rather than fight, is forced to bring their organization down from the inside. It gets more complex as more is revealed about the individual Keepers and what they do outside killing Dusters, but the initial impression isn't entirely wrong: there is an attention-obsessed psychopath among the Keepers, and the others are enabling them, willingly or not.
- The Bailong Exams also examines the headspace of the kinds of villains who don't care about the common grunt getting killed, and whether the grunts' ingrained loyalty or their new experiences will win out.
- Good Running Evil: At some point during the 13 year war between alien Invaders and human Rangers, the Invader Executives all fled or were killed and their flying castle was abandoned. The Rangers moved in and forced the remaining footsoldiers to hold mock-battles against them once a week or be Killed Off for Real, so the Rangers maintain their popularity.
- Good Thing You Can Heal: D's main power as a Duster is that he can't be killed, only turned into smoke to reform his body later. Yumeko has a habit of cutting off D's head when he annoys her, or even just as a greeting. D gets used to it.
- Grey-and-Grey Morality: On one hand, what the Dragon Keepers do to the footsoldiers is horrible. On the other hand, it is true the Invaders intend to conquer Earth by any means. Further complicating things, since the truth behind the weekly battles is top secret, the ranks of the Rangers have many good-natured people who just want to do good and protect innocent people, but for D they are also enemies since they help the Dragon Keepers. And while D does make a point to avoid targeting those who are ignorant, not everyone on his side bothers doing the same. There are also some Rangers who are awful human beings even without knowing the truth. It's also shown later that the Executives are every bit as evil as the Rangers claim, so them beating the Rangers isn't a good result for Earth either. If the fight was purely between the Dragon Keepers and the Executives, it would be a full blown case of Evil vs. Evil.
- Headbutting Heroes: Yumeko with the entirety of Pink Battalion. Chidori mentioned offhand Yumeko clashes with Pink Keeper often, something her Battalion takes exception to as they're all deeply loyal to Pink Keeper.
- Immoral Reality Show: Thirteen years of Sunday battles have led the entire public to treat it as a Blood Sport, constantly looking forward to the Keepers' slaughtering of the Monster of the Week every week while heavily jeering at the Dusters.
- Impostor-Exposing Test: How D identifies which person at the school is controlling the time loop he's stuck in. D triggers the time loop as fast as possible until someone at school changes their behavior, revealing they remember previous loops.
- Jobber: The footsoldiers are forced to be this by the Rangers after their executives are killed or scattered.
- Juxtaposed Halves Shot: The initial anime visual, featuring D in the middle of changing between himself and Sakurama.
- Keep Away: The Colorless rely on tossing their only Kaijin-damaging weapon, their laser gadgets, back and forth to each other to prevent Peltrola from destroying it. Doing so also helps them buy time when the gadget needs to cool down, since the Burst Form they use to hurt Peltrola uses up a lot of energy.
- Market-Based Title:
- The North American translation of the series title, Go Go Loser Ranger!, evokes a different feel from the original Japanese, being a shout out to the Power Rangers franchise.
- The French title is instead the Literary Allusion Title No Longer Rangers, referencing the English translated title of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human which uses similar syntax (Ningen Shikkaku).
- The Mole: D's main plan was to be one within the Rangers in order to get close enough to the Keepers to eliminate them. Yumeko reveals herself to D at the end of Chapter 2 to be one against the Keepers as well, but for a different reason.
- Mood Whiplash: Chapter 78 ends on a rather dark note with D Laughing Mad and pledging to spare none of the Keepers after Green Keeper gave him a verbal beatdown due to his lack of resolve. Over half of Chapter 79 on the other hand is D trying (and failing) to assassinate Green Keeper in comical, if also creative, ways.
- Mook Promotion: Played with. The Dusters are forced to come up with a Monster of the Week every week, which whoever is on duty transforms into and replicates the appropriate abilities to fight with. Due to their immortality (and the fact that the Divine Weapons used on stage aren't the real ones) however, once defeated they revert back to being a normal mook and retreat to their fortress to recover, letting another mook take the next shift the following week. This was how they were able to keep this up for thirteen years.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The end of the Dreamy School Life arc sees Green Battalion tearing down Magatia's illusory world and freeing all the kidnapped students. Upon D announcing to them that they've been saved, the students collectively start chastising Green Battalion for ruining their paradise with many starting to break down over having to face reality again.
- No Name Given: D's default human form never had its name revealed. One would think he would have had used a human name to register with the Rangers, but his result slip did not state his name and was instead signed off by Hibiki, due to the latter being assigned as his mentor. Characters that know his true identity also explicitly refer to him as "Mook/Footsoldier" rather than using any name he provided for his disguise.
- Oddly Small Organization: Green Battalion in a nutshell. Considering their primary function is hunting the Executives, it's unknown how big they were during their peak but presently there's only four members including Green Keeper. At the very least there were around half a dozen when Magatia was encountered in the ruins of an abandoned school but between the team sent after him being presumed dead and Green Keeper regularly disappearing for days to weeks at a time, there would only be one active Green Ranger at any given time. Other characters had commented that their low numbers were due to being wiped out in the past, though it's unknown if they were alluding to the encounter with Magatia.
- One Cast Member per Cover: Each cover of the manga's volumes has a different cast member.
- One-Letter Name: The Dusters are all each named "A" to "Z". This also heavily implies they only have 26 men within their ranks.
- The Power of Friendship:
- Subverted. In the fight of D against Hekiru, Hekiru makes a grand speech about how it is the power of his bonds with others and their support that makes him strong enough to fight D in typical shounen fashion, but because D is an alien, the concepts he keeps spouting are totally foreign to him and he doesn't understand or care about them, but he points out that it is not his feelings or convictions that are beating D, it's the fact he has a weapon that was tailor-made to kill those like him. Hekiru takes him up on this challenge and drops his weapon promising that the feelings others have for him will work even if they were to fight bare-fisted, but D sends him flying with a single punch, at which point he changes his tune to say that the feelings of his friends are imbued in his weapon instead.
- Played straight towards the end of the Graduation Exam, in which the Colorless all earn a hard-fought victory over Peltrola by combining their individual strengths, and D breaks his loyalty to the Executives by marrying his own sense of justice with the bonds he's now developed with the humans he's been stuck with.
- Also played straight with Blue Keeper's real power, as through the loyalty of Blue Battalion he's able to invoke the powers of the rangers under his command.
- Putting the Band Back Together: Green Battalion functionally collapsed toward the end of Volume 10 as Kanon was captured by the Invaders Rights Association, Angel was revealed to be The Mole for the IRA, and D was struggling which lot he should throw his hat in, leaving Green Keeper as its only member. Fast forward nearly 30 chapters and Green Battalion is reunited once again to fight the Giga-Invader Death Messiah.
- Red Is Heroic: Subverted. While Red Battalion plays up the trope when the cameras are rolling or the public is concerned, most of the named members introduced throughout the series are anywhere from Social Darwinists to actively sabotaging each other for power.
- Red Shirt Army: Red Battalion, appropriately. Since they're the most active battalion in frontline fighting, they also suffer the most on-screen fatalities. Even named Red Battalion members aren't safe as the majority of them are killed the same chapter they're introduced.
- Secret Secret-Keeper: Very early on and briefly, Yumeko Suzukiri to D when he poses as Sakurama. His inability to act like Sakurama or a normal human in general meant he needed her to bail him out several times. She reveals this as part of her plan to team up to steal the Divine weapons.
- Green Ranger 1st class Hisui to D, after he saves her during the illusion high school arc.
- Secret Test of Character: The Cadet Graduation Exam consists of ten cadets forming pairs of two and set to steal a key from a more experienced color Ranger. D, in disguise as Sakurama, deduces that there is only one key per color so only one will graduate, meaning the Rangers expect you to betray your teammate. He's thrilled to have the chance. This is subverted later when Shion determines the real test of character: forming a team of five different color cadets and co-operating to get all the keys, abandoning D entirely.
- Shout-Out:
- The series' English title is an obvious reference to the theme song of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.
- When the final battle with Magatia begins, he dares D to come attack him while standing on top of a staircase. D moves to attack, but he's unable to get very far up the stairs because Magatia keeps moving him to his starting distance. He even taunts D the same way DIO does to Jean-Pierre Polnareff.
- The illusory world Magatia/ Juji creates is one big obstacle course similar to Fall Guys, albeit with a lethal twist as many of the traps could easily crush a person.
- Show Within a Show: The weekly Sunday battles are Engineered Heroics forced upon by the Dragon Keepers and "assisted" by the remaining Dusters, analagous to a weekly stage show with very practical effects. It was hinted, and later revealed in Chapter 87, that the Sunday battles aren't even the original iteration of the Rangers vs. Invaders conflict. At least 20 years prior (seven before the Invaders appeared) there was a non-Staged Shooting version of the conflict with regular human actors - that is to say, there was a fictional Dragon Keepers series well before either side turned up in real life. It was cancelled with no renewal. One episode in particular, Episode 35, becomes of interest since both Akabane and Yakushi Usukubo both claim it as their favorite episode and it seems to concern a Near-Villain Victory for the Kaijin.
- Smart People Play Chess:
- Parodied. In D's ideal life after conquering Earth, he imagines two Dusters intelligently playing a national-level game of Tic-Tac-Toe, the same way one would play Go or Shōgi.
- Later played straight with Yumeko and Chidori at Green Battalion headquarters.
- Social Media Before Reason: Despite the past war the Invaders waged and the repeated massacres from the monsters Hwalipon releases, the human population is feeding into Hwalipon's anti-Ranger rhetoric and is turning against the Ranger Orginization. It comes to bite back the human population hard when a number of civilians and ex-Rangers get duped into joining what seems like a gathering for new Invaders Right Association recruits, with most if not all of them being mutated into Monsters.
- Staged Shooting: The weekly Sunday battles. The "Divine Weapons" the Keepers use there are non-lethal substitutes that purposely (and painfully) spare the Dusters from death, so as to continue using them for the next show. Hibiki notices the real Divine Weapon used by Red Keeper to execute Mook F as punishment looked drastically different from the mechanical-looking ones used in the show and marketed as toys.
- Invoked in Chapter 87 where to curb Hwalipon's growing influence the Keepers force the Footsoldiers to make an off-schedule invasion with one of them posing as Hwalipon.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The war, while certainly prolonged by Kaijin violence, ultimately lived and died on civilian trust in the Rangers. As powerful and large as the organization is, killing the figureheads of the Rangers wouldn't do anything big because they can always replace the ones missing regardless of work ethic and motivation, just as easily as Red Battalion can replace the second in command when Red goes on a tantrum. But all of their influence was undone in a moment when Hwalipon streamed Red Keeper tearing off Yakushi Usukubo's hand in a blind rage; no matter how much good PR someone has, no sponsor or civilian is willing to be protected by what appears to be a psychopath.
- Take a Third Option: Discussed in chapter 92. An army of monsters and an army of rangers are fighting and D was told to pick a side. Watching the old Dragon Keeper TV show, he sees Red Keeper say that Rangers fight for their friends while Invaders fight for themselves. D decides to join the fray and wipe out both the monsters and Rangers.
- Time Loop Trap: Magatia's lair becomes this for the heroes since getting caught breaking school rules triggers the loop, including leaving campus or fighting teachers. They have to identify the disguised executive and assassinate him without witnesses.
- Time Skip: Happens between chapters 125 and 126. The story jumps ahead many months after the Three Way Battle arc.
- Too Dumb to Live:
- The Dusters are expected to keep up the ruse that their entire organisation and superiors still exist, despite being just mooks and the only sole survivors of it. This results in them having severe difficulty coming up with plans and monster designs as their superiors were the ones handling it all before, to the point the Rangers had to provide them reference books and scripts to try to give them some ideas.
- A concerned Mook F came down to Earth looking for D without donning a Human Disguise just like the latter didnote . The public unrest he caused walking around soon caught the attention of Red Keeper, who executes him for leaving the floating castle without permission.
- D himself, despite being shown to be smarter than the average Duster, is very prone to giving in to his reckless impulses, and is terrible at acting despite having human disguises as his specialty. It ultimately gets him almost Killed Off for Real in Chapter 5 by Blue Keeper for attempting to confront the Keepers instead of running away after they found him stealing Red Keeper's Divine Weapon.
- Un-person: The looping school usually retains the same amount of people trapped within it, but when one person dies and isn't observed as breaking school rules, then they're gone for good and no one remembers them. One student, Romio Ooji, had a girlfriend who was also kidnapped with him, but no one in class has acknowledged her since she committed suicide.
- Villain Episode: Red Keeper has his own arc where after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt by the Rangers Association, he becomes an amnesiac trying to discover his past.
- Villain with Good Publicity:
- Through the Dusters' perspective, the Dragon Keepers are the truly villainous people who gain the respect of the public by taking advantage of their weakness and forcing the Dusters to continue playing their roles as the "villains" of the Dragon Keeper show. That said, like any good organization, there are members who are more self-serving and many who are dedicated to the surface cause of the Rangers.
- On the flipside, the Rangers are baffled as to how the citizenry have taking a liking to Hwalipon's streams despite him regularly releasing monsters that have a habit of massacring anything they see.
- Weaksauce Weakness: The Divine Weapons, obtained and developed by the humans within a year into the invasion, are the only items capable of permanently killing the Invaders. It allowed the Keepers to swiftly execute the Kaijin executives, while the remaining Dusters live in fear of being executed by them.
- Wham Line: During a very ordinary Dragon Keeper stage show, one of the people playing a Keeper mentions that an Invader becoming popular with the citizens would never happen 20 years prior. But the Kaijin Army didn't show up until thirteen years prior, so that seems off. And if it does to you, you're right; the guy was referring to the original show of the Dragon Keepers, not the current Ranger-Kaijin war.
- Wham Shot:
- Red Keeper gets two: when D stabs him in the back without much fuss, showing that he can be killed, and when the current Red Keeper is revealed to be Akabane during the IRA-Keeper debate—which happens after D kills him.
- Zodiac Motifs: The Kaijin Army's 12 Executives are supposedly themed around the Eastern Zodiac. Seven of them were killed prior to the start of the manga, but the remaining ones are the Snake (Magatia), Rooster (Peltrola), Horse (Hwalipon), Rabbit (Yakekokab), and Monkey (Chakobul).
- Zombie Advocate: The Invader Rights Association. They are a combination of anti-war and pro-"Invader Rights", wanting the Keepers to unilaterally disband. They are at first seen as nutty suicidal pacifists, since Invaders started the war, and caused quite a lot of damage and casualties, with no shortage of Keepers and Rangers being able to point to tragedies in their lives caused by them. However, they rightly notice that after the first year of the war, the 12 years of "Sunday Battles" are fishy, with no recorded human casualties since, and instead the Invaders being shown to be killed horribly (the fact that Footsoldiers are immortal isn't known, or that the whole thing is a staged fight). Amazingly, they actually become widely and wildly popular throughout the story, especially after Red Keeper tears off IRA president Yakushi Usukubo's hand.
