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Are Kamen Rider Drive themes anti-rider?
Now this isn't exactly my opinion of the show but it's one that I do hear a lot from detractors of the show and so I would like to see what people here think and discuss about it.
A major criticism I see from people who don't like Drive is that it's themes and concepts are anti-rider. Before you say, no it's not because he drives a car, it's more because he's a cop. The basis of this criticism is that Kamen Rider, most especially the showa era riders, are for all intents and purposes, lone vigilantes fighting against a collective authoritarian force/group who abuses their power. Drive, being a cop, completely flips this notion as he's part of a collective authoritarian force. This makes it so that when Drive evokes classic rider themes, specifically those about power, they get really muddled cause they're coming from a completely different perspective. I would also like to bring up the Roidmudes. This doesn't exactly fit into the "anti-rider" criticism but I've seen a lot of people take issue with the treatment of the Roidmudes since they are a numbered race that Drive is trying to completely wipe out (insert robot genocide joke here) and the show at multiple points say that the human antagonists have to go through due process whereas the Roidmudes should be destroyed on the spot, not addressing that the Roidmudes are sentient on a borderline human level until the end of the show. Again, this isn't exactly what I think of Drive but it's the criticism I've seen that I find most intriguing and one that I sort of see where people are coming from. So what do you all think about it? |
The people who say this kinda stuff obviously never watched a Showa series because Showa Riders aren’t "lone wolfs". They have a close group of friends / family supporting them and in most instances a whole squadron of children operating as their allies.
The number of people involved is close if not more than what Drive had within his Special Investigations Division. It serves the same purpose. Riders always have a close group of human allies, in some cases even government supported Special Forces, and a group of criminal investigators is no deviation from this trope at all. To the second point: Showa Riders also had "tribes" of enemies. Amazon had the Beastmen, Black the Golgom Mutants. And we can observe a pattern here: Both had individuals (Mole Beastman, Whale Mutant) who disagreed with the evil nature of their kind, betrayed them and joined forces with the main Rider, proving that not all of them are made evil but instead chose to be. It's the same with Drive, I can’t recall which episode number it was but it was somewhere in the middle, we got an episode where a Roidmude didn’t want to fight. He copied the nerd-character whose name I cannot recall either, but it was the exact same setup: A "good" monster emerges from the ranks of the enemy, proving that they are not evil because of their nature but because they want to be evil. This is a classic Rider trope and Drive fulfilled it. The Roidmudes aren’t addressed as sentient until one case forces the heroes to rethink their ways. |
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Kiwami already said everything I would've really concisely, but I will admit that when Drive started airing, the Roidmudes explicitly being destroyed... well, bothered wouldn't be the right word, but something about it did seem off to me. At first. But as has been pointed out, the way the show handled them is actually very true to the franchise's roots.
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This subject is a tricky one because of Kamen Rider's blatant anti-fascist themes since the original and the current western political discussion about the police. I say western as I'm admittedly not familiar enough with how Japan's society handles police officers and the politics around that.
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Also, it's not like Drive was a tool invented and utilized by the police force. His real identity is a policeman, but his Drive-persona was not created nor used by the authorities. He was a vigilante from the very start who had helpers within the police, wasn't he? |
Drive does reveal his identity to the public by the half way point of the show and the police does start making their own rider based tech, though it was more of a side gag than anything else.
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If this is anything to go by, Japanese cops would be delighted if they had monster attacks every week since then they’d have a purpose in life again. |
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