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Thread
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Kamen Rider Die watches Masked Rider Agito
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02-16-2020, 11:26 PM
#
232
Kamen Rider Die
Kamen Ride Or Die
Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 6,159
MASKED RIDER AGITO EPISODE 50
This last Agito story is
so, so good
. They are nailing all the thematic stuff I’d want them to, making it a story that’s about both what being Agito means, and what the show itself means.
The metaphor of Agitos drives a lot of this story. To me, the Agito metaphor is change. (I’m sure there’re plenty of other interpretations!) Change doesn’t have a moral dimension. Change can be seen as growth, or change can be seen as disruption. Change occurs, but it's how people respond to it that gives it meaning. For this story, that meaning is applied by civilization, as portrayed by Houjou (truly the best of us), and Kana.
The stuff with the police department, honestly, it’s a little heavy-handed as far as laying in the metaphor of change. The Agitos are referred to as chaotic, and the police would rather the terror of the Unknown than the terror of the unknown, the Agitos. That whole part of the story, to me, it’s about how society would rather have a dangerous stability than an uncertain future. The police would rather have the devil they know,
who may be an actual devil
, than trust their future to Agitos. Houjou, bless him, is a man who sees the whole world as a reflection of himself, a variation on his perfection, so he naturally believes that his innate fear of Agitos, of power not his own, is not only valid but
common
. He’s willing to protect the Unknown, even though there’s this nagging voice inside him saying, “This is too far.” (I assume that voice comes from a lower height and smells like yakiniku.) The Agitos must be worse because they‘re new, right? Fear is justified when things change, right? Being unafraid of change, embracing it and hoping for the best, that’s just naivete, right? Houjou, like humanity, would rather keep things the same, even if that means allowing terrible things to occur.
Which, you know, that’s why we have shows like Masked Rider Agito. The world can be a scary place, and things can seem bleak, so a show that says that changes are going to happen, and that you should embrace them and make a better future, that has real value as art. The stuff with Kana, and her metamorphosis into an Agito, it’s got the same fear baked into it that the Houjou/G3-X stuff has, but it’s also got Shouichi, so there’s hope. Shouichi’s been where Kana’s been, but he’s also felt the weight of choices that women like Kana have made. He’s had to find a way to balance the demands of Agito with the need to live a life, and he’s watched people give up rather than try to live as Agito. Kana’s surrender, it’s got two moves on it. The first is that it’s a way for Shouichi (and Truegami) to save a version of Yukina, a woman who sees no hope in a life as an Agito. They can be the support that Yukina couldn’t accept, living proof that it gets better. The other thing it does is remind people of the kind of show the producers have been trying to make, a Kamen Rider show with heart and hope, and how that should be an important ingredient going forward, to balance the monsters and terror with optimism and joy.
But, man, you still need stakes and consequences, and
of course
those were going to land on Ryou’s shoulders. As a man who loses people the way the rest of us lose skin cells, Ryou barely starts to let Scorpion in (he’s only negging her
medium-hard
, the ol’ softy) before she’s monster-murdered and he’s fighting like he has nothing left to lose. (And this is all happening
on his birthday
, which,
show
. Amazing.
Chef’s kiss.
) I said before that I like how this show was running Shouichi and Ryou through the same story, and this is one of the reasons why. If there’s just one woman in it, and she has to die so that a man can have something to avenge,
lame
. Tacky. Gross. But! Two women, in two versions of the same story, now you've got one can be saved so Shouichi’s hope can be rewarded, and one that can die so Ryou can suffer endlessly. It allows for multiple lessons, instead of a binary Heroes Always Win or Everybody Always Dies lesson. Agito as a show, it gets to do both, to have a story about how change is good or bad, how some people can be saved and some can’t, how life is something that has light and darkness and joy and pain and all of that. A thing that happens is a thing that happens. How we respond to that, how we move on from change,
that’s
a story worth telling.
And, man, that’s the big difference for me between this story and the one that preceded it. The last one, it was just things that happened. This one, it’s about how we respond to change. The last one was plot, this one is theme. I will take a theme story any day of the week.
__________________
Currently working on: Go-Busters is next! Archive of previous shows on
KamenRiderDie.com
!
Last edited by Kamen Rider Die; 06-03-2023 at
03:22 PM
..
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