Yeah, I’ve been on record saying much the same. I find it’s habit of stuff being given to them at any random point a lot more exciting than the standard “tap into willpower” or “gets given an artefact after an hour’s training” cliches.

KAMEN RIDER KIVA EPISODE 09 - "SYMPHONY: IXA, FIST ON”

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kiva/kiva09a.png

Well, that was an hour spent writing a shitty version of this post.

It was an hour where, as I neared the end of it, I was like Wataru at the beginning of this episode. You get to this moment and you're like This Is Garbage, and then that's it. There's no salvaging it. There's no fixing it. You made a wrong turn so early in the process that you can only burn it up and start from scratch.

I really liked the start of this episode. I liked Wataru realizing that he'd built himself a prison of Almost Bloody Roses over the last eight episodes. It's a ballsy cold open, the hero of the show feeling so disappointed in his art that he needs to watch it be destroyed. It's sad, and awkward. Wataru throws a little fit. It's childish and slightly obnoxious. I get it, though. It definitely fit this episode, a story about how much we care about art and the ways we try to protect it.

Oomura is a pretty great Guest Dad for Wataru. I mean, Murakami from Faiz! Sure! You don't have to talk me into it! He's got a really great attitude in his scenes with Wataru, where he's kindly and gently trying to get Wataru to stop looking to other people for validation. The world doesn't need Wataru to make another Bloody Rose; Otoya already did that, and it's three feet away. What the world needs is the violin that only Wataru can make, if he'd actually let himself make it. Wataru's struggle isn't just to make his dad (or Guest Dads) proud, it's to find a way to communicate his art to the world. Oomura sees that, and tries to give Wataru the tools to express himself. It is incredibly lovely.

So, of course, Oomura is a murderous Fangire. He's in the 1986 scenes, bumping off people who would play a perfect violin badly. (That scene of Yuri playing the Black Star so badly that fish died!) It's his dedication to art and craftsmanship as a mania; as some futile attempt to create a space where only beauty can exist, no matter the cost. He is furious at a world he can't control, and a world that won't live to a higher standard.

So, of course, he has to fight Nago. The eventually-returning Nago officially takes up the mantle of IXA in this episode, the infuriatingly obvious choice made by the higher-ups at W.A.K.E.U.P. (I like the suit! He looks like Kamen Rider Catholicism, and that's exactly right for the secondary Rider of a vampire show.) There's a nice move made by this episode to at least have Megumi argue for her candidacy, even though this is a franchise that's always going to have some handwavey reason why the strong, capable woman can't be a Kamen Rider. (Kiriko can't be Drive why, exactly?) Here at least, the frustration caused by Nago's inevitable coronation is sort of the point, where him shouting Henshin feels like a huge mistake. His inflexibility matched against Oomura's inflexibility makes for a fun thematic concept, as well as an eventually tragic outcome.

Because, like... Oomura is maybe just misguided? There's a lot of time in this episode given over to adding nuance to the monsters of Kiva. Oomura is a decades-long murderer, but he's also someone who clearly cares for Wataru. He believes in the work they're doing, and treasures the music that work could create. He just cares about it to, like, a fanatical degree. He doesn't come off like someone who's thrilled to battle a Kamen Rider. He comes off like a craftsman who regrets his choices. He's not exactly innocent or evil, and that's a way more interesting story to tell.

The 1986 portion of the episode adds more of those details, as Zanki meets up with the other members of the Monster Squad to talk about why he's working with Yuri and the rest of W.A.K.E.U.P. It's a scene that's mostly about later payoffs, considering we know that the kid is a Gillagoon and we still don't know what the other monster is, but it does manage to fill in some more backstory. All the other monster races, the Clawolves and Gillagoons and Yummy Mummys (?), they were all nearly wiped out by the Fangires. The Monster Squad is all that's left, and Zanki's like Hey What If We Worked With Humans To Kill Fangires. It's a very Inoue take on teamwork, more about briefly-aligned goals than about deeply-held altruism. It makes Zanki a nicely pragmatic antihero, someone who can be counted on but not trusted. I dug that scene for how it added some new shades to the monsters, slotting in well with the tragically misguided Oomura.

I really enjoyed this episode, which is why I maybe wrote so badly about it before. (This one felt a little better, less laborious.) It's talking about art and validation in ways that are... difficult to untangle. It's talking about our need to find our own voice, and about how the very desire that leads us to create art can cause us to feel ownership over art, and about how gross that rigid definition of art can be. I hope I made any sense in trying to explain how smart I thought this episode was!

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kiva/kiva09b.png
https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kiva/kiva09c.png

You made sense enough to me, Die! This is definitely a story for the show with a lot of complex stakes going on, and one I remember better than usual as a result. That being said – I mostly just really wanna talk about Ixa right now, and more specifically, his musical motif:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okbCkMqVjl8

This is hands down one of my single favorite pieces of background music in the entirety of Kamen Rider. It sticks in your head like crazy because it's such a perfect theme for a character who is pretty crazy. Like, again, I can only analyze this so well, but it's the ideal musical distillation of Nago's single-minded pursuit of justice. Those initial few seconds heralding the transformation itself are tense and suspenseful, maybe even a little ominous. It doesn't necessarily sound like a good thing is about to happen, and then the rest of the song really kicks in and just starts pummeling the listener with those strings that almost never let up their raw fiery intensity. Ixa isn't really a hero, and he's not a villain either – he's a mission, and that's what this music conveys better than this paragraph of text possibly could.

And I mean, the guy himself just makes a pretty cool Rider, right? The whole light/dark contrast with Kiva is the most obvious/smartest thing ever, and as someone who came into this franchise during OOO, I honestly prefer it when the main and secondary Riders are meant to be like complete opposites this way. Ixa pushes that whole motif so far too, with things I've always loved like the face that evokes a cross; and things I only just found out about that I wish I had known sooner, like how the silver design on his chest is representing a mirror, because he's fighting vampires. Like, Ixa is the holy light, exposing the truth of these sinful creatures! ...or something. And then apparently his index fingers are black instead of white because they've been stained by having to bear the weight of pulling a trigger? It's all trying so hard, and it's so, so appropriate for everything that makes Nago who he is.

(Also I like it when the visor does the thing. That part is neat too.)

Part of me sincerely hopes that Megumi sees IXA in action next episode and just goes Oh Yeah No That's A Nago Suit. It's so completely him (a divinely-ordained warrior against sin, destruction as purification, the visor opening to signify his horrible judgment), that, like... no, Megumi. No, you cannot be IXA.

I wouldn't be surprised if Boss tells her next episode that Nago himself spontaneously generated the IXA System, and willed it to have always existed.

There ya go. Nago is a self-righteous punisher, giving excessive treatment towards anything wrong done by people. And I don't know if this is a parody of tortured hero's backstory, there are LOADS of anti-heroes (talking about good guy as you refer to "tortured hero", there's loads of actual villainous characters who feel they're doing the right thing though like well-intentioned extremists) in media that resorted into pay evil unto evil for misdeeds like Punisher. Otherwise yeah, Wataru being neutral should have him approach both sides, him approaching Megumi here gives him the clearer conclusion he probably needs.

Wataru and Megumi interacts amicably further as it's revealed that Wataru builds violin himself too. Megumi now has to accept Wataru's demeanor actually, while Wataru's shyness has to be improved, Wataru's job of being musician and art creator suits the ones who is less sociable (and focused as compensation)! Shizuka is overprotective of Wataru to prevent him interacting with people she has a beef with, and this is far from the worst of this case which exists. And for Wataru being a prop to be fought over by Shizuka and Megumi, well, that's Inoue's stuff of adding love triangles anywhere, but didn't you like this part in Faiz? I mean otherwise the story is MOTW type to investigate and figure out that the restaurant owner is the real monster here. Also the castle's name is mentioned, Castle Doran, so this is the first time the "megazord" fight of Kiva happened and this is directly after Den-O with DenLiner.... but Kiva still takes the finishing blow here with the kick as Castle Doran empowers Kiva (and I don't see a problem of the fight being CGI or not personally, it's just another KR fight like Rider vs monster, and I wouldn't mind CGI if it's done for more smooth fighting).

Yeah, Jiro is, at least for this time, not exactly good. He's like how Momotaros, Urataros, and Ryutaros started at first. Jiro eats woman daily. It's simple, he's still a Fangire, but recurring Fangire can have him change. And for the cliffhanger with Yuri flirting with Jiro, that's also likely one of the other Kiva sexist aspects for people as it seems to symbolize that no matter how much of a badass fighter Yuri is, the fact is woman exists only to fall in love with men and have babies.

For Otoya part, I don't know where do you get that the audience is supposed to be invested in Otoya's attempts to win over Yuri, when before Otoya's awful traits is widely acknowledged here (and many people who discuss Kiva here has finished the series), but otherwise, I like the consequences of Otoya get here better than others, getting himself harmed for his lecherous attempts on women, it's better than harming others in his attempts for that like other men or inadvertently the women themselves. Plus, this is not spoiling, and talking about the current situaiton, but Wataru is Otoya's child, and Megumi is Yuri's child, and neither seems to be related here, so the answer for Otoya to Yuri is quite obvious there...

I mean, the joke is that Nago's moral code had Clerical Error = Embezzling = Crime = Sin. Most tortured heroes do not have Clerical Error as the inciting incident for their war on crime! Pretty sure this part is meant to be ridiculous!

I don't know that I'm going to put a random distraction in the back-half of an otherwise unrelated Kiva episode up against series-long character work on Faiz. Again, the answer to this contradiction is Execution Matters. They feel like building an episode around some of these ideas, maybe I'll feel more warmly towards them.

The second-to-last scene in the episode is Otoya serenading Yuri by moonlight, and the final scene is Yuri approaching Zanki to flirt with him. The audience is absolutely supposed to be, at least to some degree, invested in Otoya's attempts to win over Yuri. The placement of those scenes is to make you care about the Yuri/Otoya/Zanki love-triangle.

Most of these shows have secret siblings! The last series had a plot where a character was revealed to be a secret offspring! It's not like I'm grasping at straws to come up with these theories!

And here we are, at the actual debut of Kamen Rider Intercept X Attacker (no, that is what IXA is short for, in addition to being a play on the kanji for war), the Wonderful Aozora (which I call them because A) that’s what the subs I watched call them and B) there is (or rather was, Disney had it bought out and dissolved recently) a real world animation company using the translated name) Organisation’s attempt at replicating Kiva (he even has the same whistles, only in black instead of white), though there’s one key difference, which will appear next time.

And I’ll point out that, like a lot of elements in the show, IXA has a song that’s not in the show, entitled “Individual System”, which I’ll present for your consideration.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cpgOs-Ju2ks

But what does appear is the Keisuke Nago version, entitled “Fight for Justice” (and I deliberately went with subtitled videos to compare and contrast.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SeH1qkUM1jQ

And now for the main feature.

Frog Fangire

True name: The Evolutionary Theory's Golden Ratio Will Be Buried Between Papers (進化論の間紙に黄金比は埋葬される Shinkaron no Kanshi ni Ōgonhi wa Maisō sareru)

Human identity: Takeo Omura

Class: Aqua

Rank: Pawn

Actors: Katsuyuki Murai

And as a final note, the suit actor for IXA isn’t anybody you’d expect, like Eitoku, Makoto Ito, Jun Watanbe or Motokuni Nakagawa. Instead, it’s Jiro Okamoto, who was the main suit actor for the Showa Riders after 1984. There’s a subtle reason for this.

I have conflicted opinions about IXA. I like the knight motif, color scheme and its importance to the backstory. But I think it's annoying how the distorted voice emphasizes every syllable, probably the only Driver voice I actually dislike. I know Fourze Driver kind of does the same thing but it does it in a cool voice, not an annoying one. I like Fourze Driver. There's also the lame and frivolous final form but I'll complain about that in a few weeks.

Regarding Nago's debut as IXA, it's appropriate how his first opponent is the most sympathetic Fangire we've seen so far.

Ixa is one of those Riders that makes me wish I liked this series more. I don't have a lot of love for the suit or anything - it's pretty good - but the belt being a weapon, and that weapon being a knuckleduster? I'm glad Build used this concept later because it's a hell of a cool one! The way it slides on too is just great.

Oh, and the way the mask opens is. So good

Huh! I've only heard it the one time, and I can't say it bothered me. I will be sure to pay more attention in the next episode!

(Also, I don't know that I consider the Fourze Driver's voice "cool"? It's adorkable, maybe. I love that whole RoCkEt oN thing, but it's mostly for how goofy it is. It always felt very... DIY, befitting the afterschool project-nature of the KRC. Not cool, but, like, charming.)

Yeah it's super-important that IXA's debut is him being merciless and unyielding towards a monster who might just need understanding. I really loved the brief shot of Wataru de-Henshining when he saw Oomura. It's Wataru's shock and sadness mixed with Oomura's shame and embarrassment. There's a desire from both of them to explain, to reason with, to communicate.

And then IXA's like Cool Story Bro and explodes a park.

The knuckleduster is perfect for Nago, because he needs to punish with his hands. I'm sure there'll be other weapons and stuff, but Holy Punching is pretty much the exact skill I'd expect Nago to utilize as a Rider.