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:
Kamen Rider Die watches Kamen Rider Den-O
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04-13-2021, 08:45 PM
#
732
Kamen Rider Die
Kamen Ride Or Die
Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 6,159
Hey, it's my night off, what if I spend a whole bunch of time trying to articulate my negative feelings toward a beloved section of a critically-acclaimed Kamen Rider series.
It...
(I don't know if this is going to feel cathartic or just make me more miserable, but I'm willing to find out if you are.)
It's easy to ignore the series-arc stuff, for the most part. There are these little flashes of humor, or clever shots. Usually, there's a specific character insight or touching moral. There's always
something
more than just a janky plot and Time Nonsense and Answers TBD and all of that. There's emotional content that shakes off the chains of a constricting plot and reaches for something real, something memorable.
The last episode just 100% wasn't that for me. What emotional content there was, it's mostly just an echo of better Ryotaro stories. His willingness to see something through, even if it's misguided or he's out on a limb by himself, is a compelling aspect of his heroism. His ability to knowingly make bad decisions because to do otherwise would be a denial of the truth, that's nice.
It's one scene of this episode, though, and the opposing force is Yuuto at his most charisma-free Immovable Object. It's what was irritating about the start of Yuuto's story, ramped back up for its finale. It's the show, as seemingly always, giving Yuuto zero credible reasons to dissuade Ryotaro. It's the show grabbing the plot by the ankles and dragging it away from an imminent resolution. It's stalling, and it's so blatant that it's difficult to overlook.
And what makes this so shitty to talk about is that this is the main move for the show's series-long plot. These problems, they are the same problems as always. It's absolutely demoralizing to try and talk about a show that is just going to keep doing things that are frustrating. It's why people quit shows, you know?
Like, I don't usually get this mad when a show screws up an episode worse than this one did for me. Intermittent failures can be really fun to analyze! When a good show borks an ending, or squanders a cliffhanger, or decides to send a fan-favorite character to France for the remaining episodes of a series, that can be fun to pick apart. When a show is usually good at one thing and then they aren't, it's worthwhile to talk about how they missed the mark.
But, man, Den-O's just a show that is stretching half an idea over the length of a series; it's giving you the stakes after it gives you the resolution; it's grounding a ton of the Sakurai story on Ryotaro alone, which creates a plot that almost no one else on the show can take part in (Hana was pretty worthless in the last one!); and there's almost nothing visceral in the plot, because no one can really articulate what the hell's even going on beyond We Should Stop Kai.
(To be
abundantly
clear: there is a
train car
full of emotional content and visceral storytelling
in this series
, as witnessed by the recent Momo/Ryotaro fight. There is so much to love about these characters and their interactions, but none of that is present in the Sakurai plot.)
It sucks talking about this. This is a show that was fresh and vital when it would do these Imagin of the Week adventures. Someone has a problem related to their past. Ryotaro, Hana, and the Imagin investigate. There're jokes, there's character development, there's some action, and there's thematic weight to everything that happens. Those stories were so much fun.
Even the Yuuto plot stuff, it felt grounded in him as a character. It's still full of things that only make sense in retrospect, but at least there was someone who was struggling with a part of themselves, a choice they made, and we got to see how they overcame the adversity.
This last episode, all I'm getting from Ryotaro is his frustration. He's as in the weeds as he's ever been, and there's no sense of achievement at any point in the episode. Watching him try to solve a puzzle where no two pieces are from the same image, it's grueling for me to watch. If you're this deep into a mystery, you need to at least give the audience a plausible solution, even if it's inevitably wrong. I genuinely don't even have a
theory
any more of what could be happening, let alone the ability for the show to subvert it. It's like instead of providing me with a framework to invest in its endgame, a group of possible outcomes that might be reasonable to expect from the evidence shown... it's like I'm being asked to pick a number between 1 and 100, and when I randomly say "5", the show goes "HA HA, wrong, it was 72!" What am I supposed to do with that? I was picking it out of thin air.
But, anyway, yeah. That's me being frustrated by this type of Den-O story, and more frustrated for how ingrained this type of storytelling is. I feel like an asshole for harping on the same flaws again and again, and it's not fun or funny. It's repetitious, and I hate repetitive flaws more than I hate abject failures. At least abject failures can be enjoyable to dissect.
Hope this was fun to read!
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