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Kamen Rider Die watches Masked Rider Agito
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01-31-2020, 11:39 PM
#
151
Kamen Rider Die
Kamen Ride Or Die
Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 6,159
MASKED RIDER AGITO EPISODES 30 - 31
Hey, let's spend a story with the tenth-best hardcore band in the Tokyo area, Mana & The Mutants!
I really like what this show's done with the Mana character. She started off as a fairly stock Girl With An Inappropriate Crush, but the show quickly moved her out of that role, in favor of a younger sibling sort of space. Eventually, thankfully, the show's slowly evolved her into an ally, a support system for Shouichi that has a stake in his battles. This story did a great job levelling up Mana's character, as well as Mana's role in the story, and it leveraged a half-season of hard work with her character to make it a great story, to boot.
Mana's a fairly upbeat girl, so it's doubly effective for this story to put her through the wringer. I mean, you make a character like Hikawa or the
forever-dead
Ryou have a hard time, it probably doesn't mean as much to viewers. You make Mana put up with Mean Girls, kidnappings, and a possible inadvertent role in her father's death... it's
rough
, you know? It's rough to watch her get chewed up by the world. It's also an incredibly effective way of establishing the stakes of the story, because I'm 100% invested in Mana. I want her to live, to be happy, so a story that threatens her physical and emotional well-being, it's a story that's already done half the work. And to have those threats be things like The Mutants or Truegami, it takes those at-times nebulous threats and makes them immediate and visceral. It's a great use of a character I like, and some antagonists I don't really get yet.
The Mutants come into focus a bit more from this story, though. Not all the way, their various personalities and outlooks don't totally cohere (that glasses girl Mutant is
the worst
), but enough for this story to land its beats. I mean, once I was like, "Oh, they're all mutants, like from the X-Men,” it was easier to go along with their story. You know, Hated And Feared, etc etc. Their powers are an evolution that puts them above humanity, but it makes them a target. Because of that, they can really only trust each other. Truegami may have pulled some strings to get Main Mutant to kidnap Mana, but he really does think she's better off with them. They're a bunch of weirdos, and they don't really like each other, but there's value in them sticking together. It's an understandable motivation from a character that I was not really getting before.
It's also, uh,
the theme of the show
, so, yeah, definitely going to work well with these other characters at this point in the show. The idea of needing a place where you feel you belong has been a recurring theme in Agito. Shouichi talked about it before, and Mana reminds him of it when she says that she's staying with the Mutants. (I kind-of wish she hadn't explicitly stated the themes of the show when talking to Shouichi, but what can you do.) It's nice to have that exploration of Found Family fall on Mana. As a teenager, she's at a point in her life where she's trying to define herself outside things like school and family, so a weird Mutant cult that gaslights her into thinking she's a danger to every non-Mutant around her seems like exactly the kind of emotionally true but irrational decision a teenager might make. It seems reasonable to me, anyway. I get how she took a journey over this story, scared of her growing power and looking for people that understood her. The show maybe botched the last 3% of its story, though.
I don't get how the Main Mutant died? His whole power was healing himself. We'd seen him heal himself after other Unknown attacks. This one, he just...
doesn't
? And then he dies? It feels like a plot contrivance to me. He had to die so Mana could unlock her power, but there's no way he could've died, so the show just goes Okay But He Died Anyway. It's a cheat, is what I'm saying. If they'd had a line of dialogue explaining why this fight was different, I'm good with it. But they didn't, so it feels forced to me.
I'm not that mad about it, really, since Main Mutant and the rest, Truegami, were just a way to tell a story about Mana. Even Main Mutant's dying speech was a way to land some of the story's points about homes, about families, and how those ideals escaped him and he hopes they don't escape Mana. It was a nice story, a solid exploration of the show's themes, a good way to make Mana more central in the series' conflicts, a face to the idea of the Mutants as a group worth caring about, and maybe even a way to bring back Gills.
Who is still dead!
__________________
Currently working on: Go-Busters is next! Archive of previous shows on
KamenRiderDie.com
!
Last edited by Kamen Rider Die; 05-20-2023 at
01:01 PM
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