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01-23-2021, 08:10 AM | #1 |
Yodonna oshi
Join Date: Jan 2021
Posts: 748
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Cat on lap, I finally watched the entirety of Kobayashi Yasuko's Kamen Rider Ryuki, which is full of unnecessary grimness, punctuated only by moments of tiresome slapstick. Having re-watched Den-o last year, I find myself increasingly convinced that Kobayashi's better work is certainly on the other of Toei's big franchises, her Super Sentai shows; Ryuki is barely a Kamen Rider show, a conceit that it openly admits in the absurdity of its dream sequence Hyper Battle Video special, Kamen Rider Ryuki vs. Kamen Rider Agito. For much of what this show is, I understand the thinking behind why it happened, 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. Having said that, I'm not sure what is worse, the idea of these standalone shows as their own contained things where the term "Kamen Rider" is used but means something very different from the Showa era, or the later attempts by Toei to connect the dots in these shows and fashion a new multiverse of Heisei Riders. Perhaps I should not be too judgemental regarding this approach as the DCD and Zi-o arcs dealing with Ryuki's story are the only times I really enjoyed being in this world.
For the most part, Ryuki is a dry run for its successor, 555, another show that fails to present the audience with any traditional Rider characters but does a slightly better job of it. The story of Ryuki details the machinations of Kanzaki Shiro as, in order to address his personal loss, he opens the door to an alternate dimension glimpsed only through mirrors and offers a chance to thirteen different individuals to become "Kamen Riders" and compete in a battle royale against one another for the prize of reshaping reality. For 50 episodes, one movie, one TV special, and one video tape that came free with an issue of the magazine, Terebi-kun, Ryuki presents a number of iterations of the events that comprise its story, but none of them really add anything; in different versions, there are glimpses of different characters who each make their specific timelines notable—Sakakibara Koichi, the former Ryuki in 13 Riders, Kirishima Miho in Episode: Final—but for the most part, the story is a bland back and forth as main character, Kido Shinji, struggles to convince other Riders to not fight, and they ignore him. Every episode, there is also a considerable amount of time wasted on the supporting cast of Kido's workplace, a internet news site named Ore Journal; every character in these sequences could have been expunged from the narrative and it would have made no difference. I disliked the heroes of Ryuki so much that I actively began to sympathise with minor antagonist, Asakura Takeshi, and major antagonist, Kanzaki. For a Kamen Rider show, even after watching the whole thing, I find that I still don't actually know half of the official aliases of the Riders, and now they will forever be stuck in my mind with names such as Scissor-Man-Crab-Hands. Ah, you might be thinking, but dreamcastegirl, we know you of old, and we've long since learnt not to trust your opinions on things. Well, fear not friends, because Toei have just uploaded the first episode of Ryuki to youtube, which you can now watch to form your opinions of, safe in the knowledge that I specifically went out of my way to go and play that video and spitefully give it a thumbs down. Take that, you 19-year-old TV show (Jesus, really?). |
01-23-2021, 09:09 AM | #2 |
Veteran Member
Join Date: May 2019
Posts: 2,554
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I had much the same reaction as you towards Ryuki, which you’ll see if you go back and find Die’s thread from when he was watching it (we were watching it at roughly the same time and pace). Since I’m watching Ryuki’s sister series for my own thread, expect more than a few unsubtle jabs at it (the first one is coming tomorrow, where we meet a scissors monster who was supposed to be themed after a crab, until Ryuki did their own scissors-themed crab villain, forcing them to change it to a rabbit).
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01-23-2021, 09:25 AM | #3 |
Yodonna oshi
Join Date: Jan 2021
Posts: 748
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Quote:
Again, I wouldn't wish to shame someone for liking it, I can even understand why someone would like it, and I think there are some genuinely tender moments in the development of Kitaoka's character throughout the series, but, like Kobayashi's later Amazons, to me the whole thing comes across as a joyless, soulless exercise in trying to make the franchise appeal to dead-eyed teenagers who have long since outgrown such things. |
01-23-2021, 09:50 AM | #4 |
Some guy. I'm alright.
Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: Michigan
Posts: 4,435
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You might be one of the few who prefers the US adaptation in Dragon Knight then. Maybe try checking that out for a "better version?"
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01-23-2021, 10:01 AM | #5 |
Yodonna oshi
Join Date: Jan 2021
Posts: 748
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oh, I've heard of that but I know very little about it. I might take a look, thank you for the tip!
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01-23-2021, 10:22 AM | #6 |
Showa Girl
Join Date: Jun 2018
Posts: 9,064
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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:
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.
"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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01-23-2021, 10:52 AM | #7 |
Yodonna oshi
Join Date: Jan 2021
Posts: 748
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Quote:
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.
Your post helped me appreciate the context, which I really appreciate, but it also makes me mildly sad in a way that I haven't been able to enjoy the show without that additional context, and I feel as if that says something about both the show and sadly about me. I hark on a lot about Death of the Author whenever it comes to media, possibly because I am all too aware of my "problematic faves" when it comes to music, literature et al., and I absolutely believe that such a thing is super important, that a story should live and die by what is in the "text" of the narrative, but at the same time it's difficult when we begin discussing stuff outside of the time in which it was made, the events that the work was a reaction to, and I think that Ryuki maybe suffers from that. Possibly there is no greater example of Death of the Author than in the way some/many of us, during the early post-internet boom of file-sharing discovered Japanese media as more than just, say, dubbed cartoons from childhood, and fill-in animation studios, and certainly I remember encountering Ryuki absolutely outside of context of everything, and whilst my understanding of what defined a Kamen Rider was still tenuous, the show still felt strongly anachronistic when contrasted with what I knew. I wish now, having read your post, that I had known a little more then, that my Japanese had been more proficient, as I'm really a lot more interested in this context now that I am in the show! Ugh, anyway, thank you so much for your post, I really enjoyed reading it, and it really helped my consider the show differently, even if it didn't make me feel any warmer towards it. |
01-23-2021, 11:38 AM | #8 |
Showa Girl
Join Date: Jun 2018
Posts: 9,064
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Quote:
And... yeah, fully agree on the death of the author part! I don't think you actually need to know what was going through the heads of the producers and writers when they were making Ryuki, but it's always such a fascinating story for me to think about and it's what brought me around to respecting what this show was attempting (and I think in many way succeeded) to do. Glad to share; Ryuki if not one of my favourites is a show I'm always happy to talk about Have a good one!
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Last edited by Kurona; 01-23-2021 at 11:44 AM.. |
01-23-2021, 12:12 PM | #9 |
Yodonna oshi
Join Date: Jan 2021
Posts: 748
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Quote:
It's nice to talk about this in such a way despite not having been a fan of it, so thank you for putting up with me rambling about it! |
01-23-2021, 12:22 PM | #10 |
Showa Girl
Join Date: Jun 2018
Posts: 9,064
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Quote:
Something I do like seeing with post-series Ryuki content, though, is Shinji finally getting to stand and fight alongside other Kamen Riders against evil. Even though it's usually just another silent suit in a crowd, it's just nice to see Shinji being able to beat up a monster with Faiz or Zi-O or Shinkenblue; where he can finally fight alongside fellow heroes. It feels earned.
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