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Kamen Rider Zi-O Episode 22: "Zi-O Strongest! 2019" Discussion
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02-15-2019, 09:04 PM
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18
Diamondmatter
Junior Member
Join Date: Sep 2015
Posts: 194
I really love a lot of the ideas and presentation they have going on in this episode/arc. I love the acknowledgement that Ryuki doesn't exist when all is said and done and the whole idea of Mirror Sougo/the way the Mirror World is used. It makes me want to know a lot more about the Mirror World, honestly, since in Ryuki it was never really explained and was mainly just implied to exist from mysterious imagination power, or perhaps kids somehow tapping into it when no one else knows it exists. I had the impression that the Mirror World doesn't exist outside of what causes it to exist in Ryuki and the idea that it does exist on its own and is just the mirror of the real world with the opposites of ourselves dwelling inside is really cool. Given that Mirror Shinji in another timeline transformed into Ryuga, I kinda wish we got Dark Zi-O, with some proper repainting and a more interesting name, rather than just Zi-O flipped in editing (which is still cool but, you know, Ryuga). Also kinda makes me wish Ryuga's V-Buckle and Drag-Visor were mirrored in the original movie.
I fucking love Zi-O II and it's one of the most badass designs in the franchise, both on its own and as a power-up. I love the transformation, jingle, and all the implications it has - it's the power of Oma Zi-O Sougo created/finished by "accepting" the darkness within him. Who knows what Sougo will do with it next?
But, uhh... when Mirror Sougo tried to grill Sougo on how he's really capable of terrible things, he kinda came up empty-handed. He says Sougo asked Geiz to explain his plan to kill Ryuga and get himself killed in the process, and that Sougo wants to use Geiz's self-sacrifice as an excuse to become Oma Zi-O. But those things really have nothing to do with each other. Geiz was going to do it regardless of if Sougo asked him to and Oma Zi-O still stands as a "possible inevitability" (how's that for an oxymoron?). It also wasn't Sougo's fault that Woz gave him the first half of the Zi-O Ridewatch II.
We've had 21 episodes already to fit in nasty tricks and mind games Sougo could have played to demonstrate that he's not only capable of but willing to do bad things, more so than other Riders (almost every main Rider has been manipulative at some point. A smaller subset of them have been huge assholes at some point, too, if not all the time).
I've always been puzzled by Sougo's presentation and writing as a character, with his explicitly dumb and childish desire to be a king and the huge gap between his super-nice, heroic kid personality and his evil-incarnate future self. I've crossed my fingers that the show had a trick up its sleeve to justify the odd aspects of Sougo, but it seems to just think it did and it fell flat where it mattered in terms of Sougo as a character. From the get-go, Sougo has not been written properly to be a character who goes from a heroic warrior to a truly evil king. He's been written to be a strange, nice kid with some mysteries surrounding him involving time travel and potential liars and manipulators. The show never convinced me that he would really want to be a king, regardless of his single strange dream, and it still hasn't convinced me that he's capable of becoming a selfish, evil overlord of death and destruction who has delusions of being heroic.
And while I really like this arc and how it builds into Zi-O II, I think the fact that the show is so confident you believe Sougo wants to be a king and that he is capable of being truly evil is a bad sign.
I think it would have created a lot of opportunities to fix this if they
actually explained any of the Rider gear
. And the weird, roundabout mechanism of giving one to the original Rider in their debut year and then getting it back in 2018 doesn't count. We have no idea where the Blank Watches come from, no idea where the Ziku-Driver comes from (neither the origin of it or where the copies come from), no idea why or how Geiz got his own personal transformation Ridewatch, no idea where the Beyondriver came from, and it seems the way the Miridewatches are created is whatever the writer feels like at the moment since White Woz has a handwaving device.
We really do not know
anything
about how or why the Riders and their gear exist and that's honestly a giant hole in the plot. The franchise doesn't have a high standard for good lore behind and explanation for the toys, but come on. They're pretty much the entire source of conflict in the show here, and we don't even know where they come from. Did someone create the Driver and choose Sougo to use it and become Zi-O? Is Oma Zi-O responsible for all of it and it's a paradoxical origin? That might be very cool and interesting if they explore the implications of it and don't just leave it as a footnote, but I'm sure it would be the latter. And if that's the case, where does the
Beyondriver
come from? Does the "winner" of Oma's Day just get the power to poof up Rider gear? There's so much potential for awesome explanations for the gear and we just don't know anything about it.
Every new form widens the gap in the show's story and Zi-O II isn't an exception, as cool as it is. Zi-O II is said to be the power of Oma Zi-O, so why isn't it just Oma Zi-O? Did Oma Zi-O look like this as an intermediary form (in which case when, why, and how does the gold Driver come in)? Does it not look like Oma Zi-O because Sougo is taking the good path instead of the evil one? In that case, Oma Zi-O's future has assuredly been erased or altered, but Zi-O has already proven itself to be a show that doesn't account for paradoxes such as how Geiz and Tsukuyomi should have been affected by the butterfly effect.
The first half of the Zi-O II watch seems to have come from the same void as the Ziku-Driver, but the second half was created when Sougo accepted the dark within him.
How does that work?
Did Oma Zi-O have to do that in his original timeline and ascension? It seems to fit with the nebulous "taking/containing essence/power" way Legend Rider Ridewatches are created, but we don't have any groundwork for why any of that is in the first place.
It also fits with the idea that each Rider's power comes directly from the person who transforms into the Rider, which I love and think is a really cool idea, but it hasn't been addressed at all by the show and 22 episodes in I doubt it ever will. We'll see how Geiz Revive, Zi-O Trinity, and Grand Zi-O go, I guess. And Woz Ginga, which hopefully won't just be the same as any other Woz form but extra strong for some reason.
But it sucks after Build so thoroughly explained and justified every little device and trinket in the show and its movies.
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Last edited by Diamondmatter; 02-15-2019 at
09:21 PM
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