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dreamcastegirl Watched All of Kamen Rider Ryuki and Now Hates Herself
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01-23-2021, 10:22 AM
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6
Kurona
Showa Girl
Join Date: Jun 2018
Posts: 9,064
I think I have a similar outlook to you when it comes to Kamen Rider -- I might not have seen much Showa, but the ideals and themes within are not just core to the franchise to me but what drew me to Kamen Rider in the first place. I have a big soft spot for how they often frame heroes, and how it tends to run with the assumption that people are ultimately good and how it's neck-deep in The Power Of Friendship. It's why I love shows like OOO, Hibiki and Kuuga, why I'm extremely turned off from the likes of Kiva, Amazons and Gaim, why I was confused about why I didn't like Saber beyond the toy deluge, why I like Ghost a lot more than others and why I'm giving it another shot with my rewatch at the moment... and why I couldn't get into Ryuki at all at first.
And in many ways it's still not quite my thing. I'm not entirely turned off from seasons about Riders fighting each other - Build and Blade are shows I find it difficult to shut up about - but the battle royale style is certainly something I don't associate with what I see as Kamen Rider. The constant belittling of the wide-eyed protagonist, the only one who's a decent person; is something I found a little untenable at times, as was quickly killing off the Rider who was my favourite character (Raia), and I to this day do not understand what a lot of people see in Zolda. You're right in saying that it's a very un-Kamen Rider show, but...
But what sets it apart for me is that the more I interrogated it, the more
intentional
I found it. For all the fun every character and the series in general makes of Shinji, how he's made out to be a complete idiot, how the only person really carrying the ideal of Kamen Rider is one that's a fool for not getting with the real world and participating in a killing game? For all of that, the season makes clear by the end that make fun of the dork all you want; he's
right!
He's
right
that Riders shouldn't be fighting each other, he's
right
in his naive ideals of heroism, he's
right
in everything he tries to do, and that's what sets this show apart for me from other shows that try something similar. The story of Ryuki in general is a fantasy concocted by a broken man, a completely
wrong
series of events he's forced into reality but which cannot help but be undone into a better world in the show's ending; perfectly foreshadowed by Shinji breaking through his Time Vent just enough to deliver a single punch to Kanzaki. Other characters like Ren hide behind a veneer of cynicism and 'reality', despite the fact that the one time he does finally take a life - of a person he doesn't even know, of a person he believes is the mastermind behind the entire killing game - he breaks down in tears because for all his talk, the act of actually taking a life is too much for him to take.
Which isn't even going into the intention behind Ryuki yet, which... well, to quote you:
Quote:
Originally Posted by
dreamcastegirl
the Heisei shows were three series in and beginning to find their feet, to work out what kind of stories they wished to tell—it's just a shame that these stories are only really tangentially related to the idea of what a Kamen Rider represents and the kind of stories that had gone before them.
This is what inspired me to leave a reply here, because - aside from the deep urge to go on yet another rant about the perfection that is Kuuga - this actually wasn't the thinking behind Ryuki at all. It wasn't taking the stage of Kamen Rider and using it to tell a random unconnected story that would be as much as out of place in Super Sentai or Ultraman or Metal Heroes as it would here; but instead, Ryuki is very emphatically about Kamen Rider. The inspiration for the show at the time was what the effects of 9/11 had had on society, the deep unsettlement it brought and the way it forced people to view their ideals. As such, the producer of the third Heisei Kamen Rider, Shirakura; was tasked on high with the memo "now more than ever, we need to teach children about justice". And I'm sure to many that sounds noble, but for Shirakura he couldn't help but relent. To quote him - and this is Google Translate, so, naturally; it's a bit more like paraphrasing, but:
"Children sometimes envision themselves as the heroes and think they might also be justice. There is also the idea that people often don’t accept themselves as being wrong, because in one’s mind “I am myself, so I’m not wrong” is the prevailing thought process. These thoughts lead to selfish patterns because kids might not see themselves as themselves but as the heroes. Mr. Ishinomori had fears that too many people would think this way when working on his creations."
(source:
https://dot.asahi.com/aera/2018081000056.html?page=2
)
That last bit sticks out to me in particular: Ishinomori was a man who was very intentional in what he was portraying in his works, and would constantly embed his ideals into it: there's many infamous lines I could quote from Kamen Rider, but the one that comes to mind the most here is "Human Life is more important than justice". To me, if you consider the way Ishinomori viewed life and what he held as most important; even going so far as to say that human life should always be prioritised over one's ideals of justice in a show about one man fighting for justice against an evil, fascist conglomerate... to respond to a society effected by 9/11 with "we need to show justice", to me, is maybe the worst thing one could do with Ishinomori's creations.
And this is what spawned Ryuki: as is perhaps obvious from the quote there, it turns Kamen Rider on its head because as an icon of justice, Kamen Rider taking this sharp a turn both from the Showa Era and from Kuuga and Agito is a statement on what ideals we hold dear and why; and really interrogating the concept of Kamen Rider in an uncertain age and how those ideals really hold up today. It's not like this hadn't been done before - again, trying very hard here not to go on and on about Kuuga - but Ryuki really drives it home with everything it does. The concept of most the Riders being evil, for instance; that's not a coincidence or just something they done because "it's cool and edgy" - it's something that is incredibly significant in a franchise where you didn't really have any evil riders before! You had a few one-offs like the Shocker Riders or Fake Amazon, and Another Agito was absolutely an antagonist but he still ended up joining up with the heroes and getting some kind of redemption; and Black very smartly never, ever called Shadow Moon a Kamen Rider. But Scissors is the first time someone is explicitly called a Kamen Rider, is
framed
as what a Kamen Rider is, and begins and ends life as a terrible person - and that's the norm. That to me represents what Ryuki's doing: it twists ideas of justice we previously thought of as pure and immovable, and completely turns them on their heads to make its audience question what justice is and why we hold it to our hearts, in an era where that couldn't be more important.
I'm not saying all this to try and convince you that you're wrong, or anything like that; at the end of the day, the show had an effect on you and the effect clearly wasn't positive. If you don't like it, obviously, you don't like it. But I guess just since the day I finished it, my feelings on Ryuki as a show have constantly been complex, and so this topic was one I really couldn't help but comment on with how my own feelings have developed on the series and what truly inspired Ryuki in the first place, and how that makes me feel about the series as a whole.
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