I only kind of explained this in the post but "betrayed" makes it sound more dramatic than it was. I think I might have had the opposite of your situation. I had seen so much Kamen Rider by that point I had a very clear idea of what I wanted, and when Gaim started getting really different it threw me off a lot.

Den-O and Fourze are two shows that are close to my heart but even trying to look at it more objectively I really do think they're both more solid shows then Gaim. Den-O has the best character development of any Rider show in my opinion, and Fourze might have the most consistent theming. They're also the kind of shows that just keep getting better with each episode whereas I feel Gaim is very much a bumpy ride.

Loved the essay!
I noticed all the same problems that you did but they really never bothered me. I think my train of thought was "All this... To sell some toys?". Meaning, of course, that it was just really mind blowing to me that a kids show was even attempting something as ambitious as Gaim. Just wild, especially considering the 'seat of the pants' aspect of creating a TV program, particularly one as regimented as an FX heavy, toy commercial / kid's show.

It's not perfect, none of the KR series I've seen are, but Gaim touches greatness more often than not. I'm glad you came around!

Not confusing, but confused, and that's a fine distinction. The majority of Gaim's Riders are frequently confused, suffering from a lack of information, proceeding on false assumptions, and missing one another's points. They make bad decisions. This serves to maintain dramatic tension. Gaim is mostly a tragedy, and this is one of a series of moments in which the tragedy is ratcheted up. In this specific scene, Micchi is aware of the irony, and it's part of why he's not listening or connecting to Kouta. Kouta's words would just seem hollow. This scene won't pay out until their final battle, when Kouta finally knows who he's fighting, and can make good on his values.

In addition to the good points you already observed, it's worth noting that one of Gaim's primary themes is moral compromise, which often manifests in characters forced to make horrible choices. We see this most clearly with Zangetsu, but Kouta is presented with his own share.

Some of this is baked into the premise of the show, which felt to me like an attempt to make a better version of Ryuki. (I watched the shows in reverse order, so I only observed this after the fact.) Riders are going to fight, and Riders are going to die.

Moral compromise is a tricky theme for a kids show to tackle, so it's no surprise that Fourze was more consistently able to riff off its theme.

It's stressful, though, because we're led to care about the characters more than I usually do in Rider shows. Amazons is grittier, I guess, but it doesn't register so much with me because I care dramatically less about its characters. (I'm also not finished with it; I haven't been that motivated.)

I clearly enjoyed it more than you did, but I'm very surprised that Toei let them get away with it.

No arguments from me. Then again, I'm not a kid, and these episodes felt like they were aimed more at an older audience.

I think part of why you disliked it may have been because it feels distinctly unlike modern Kamen Rider. This is part of why I loved it - Gaim was daring - but I sympathize with people who didn't enjoy it. This isn't what any of us signed up for, and although I loved it, hating it is valid.

It was also a key moral compromise situation for Kouta. He couldn't just disarm Kaito. Kaito had transformed himself into a supernatural weapon, and Kaito's express intention was to destroy the world and start anew. It's excruciating for Kouta and for us, since we're invested.

In terms of Gaim being a rehabilitated Ryuki, it corrects the most glaring flaw of that series, which its unwillingness to tarnish its hero, even though the series was about a Rider battle to the death. I don't actually seek out grittiness for grittiness' sake, which is part of why I'm not loving Amazons, but I do want a series to follow through on its premise.

I utterly hated it at the time, I but I think my feelings were also colored by knowing that 46 was Gen Urobuchi's last episode. The closing scene in 46 was, to me, a perfect ending to the series, so 47 struck me as totally unnecessary. Getting closure for some of the minor characters was nice, but after I finished 47, I chose to pretend that 46 was the last episode.

You've clearly thought a great deal about the show, and I enjoyed reading your thoughts on it. Although Gaim is far and away my favorite Rider show, I agree with several of your criticisms. The time travel foreshadowing was poorly-thought-out, both the huge Rider battle tableau and Mai's attempts to intervene. I was a little surprised that the show did that, since I thought Decade sufficiently proved that it's a bad idea to write a end-of-series set piece into the first episode when you don't have a plan to make that pay off.

I think Gaim's a terrific show, but also a messy one. Heck, if I were to recommend it to someone, it's be with caveats to skip the Hikaider and ToQger crossovers. I'm surprised it managed to carry off as much long-term planning as it did, but it absolutely stumbled over some of the things the first episode committed it to.

I'd call Gaim a lot of things but tragedy isn't one of them. Sure it's really sad sometimes but the show's message is ultimately a hopeful one. That's what Kouta and Kaito's whole conflict is about, optimism vs cynicism, and the show comes down on Kouta's side. I hear the word "deconstruction" thrown around a lot in reference to Gaim, but it's only tearing things down to build them back up stronger.

But he isn't talking to Micchi in that scene, he's talking to himself. It'd make total sense if he said what he says directly to Micchi and we get some sort of reaction shot from him, but Kouta is just trying to reassure himself that Kaito is full of crap. The show itself is taking it at face value, not just Kouta, and that's why it's so weird.

A fair enough point, but that's sort of an excuse, isn't it? I'm a lot cooler with what they did now but I don't think it should've been that easy to spend 2 years calling Kouta a hypocrite. I get what they did with him now, but it's pretty sloppily handled, to be honest.

How far did you get? It only gets better with every episode. The characters in that show actually end up really sympathetic and what makes it less stressful to me isn't that I care less (because I don't), but that the tragedy comes from how a lot of the characters (mainly Haruka) try to live happier lives in spite of their situations. There's an underlying sense of... warmth, I guess(?), throughout Amazons that keeps it focused, but in those last couple episodes of Gaim it's basically thing after thing going wrong until the ending. I can't stress enough that there isn't anything wrong with that, but I still wish they had done it a little differently than they did. As it is, it feels really out of sync with the rest of the show's tone.

That's why it caught me off guard, but it isn't why I didn't like it. For comparison, I adore Kuuga's atypical final fight and whole episode epilogue, because they felt to me like absolutely perfect resolutions to the themes of the show, without me having to think about it for years to come to that conclusion.

Which I always understood, I just questioned why the show was written that way in the first place.

But that's totally missing the point. Ryuki constantly tears into its protagonist's idealism at every turn, way more so than Gaim does, showing Shinji's beliefs getting him absolutely nowhere. He spends the whole series talking about stopping the Rider War (when he isn't massively doubting those goals), but he never even can in the first place. Ryuki absolutely tarnishes its hero, just not how you might think.

No seriously, Amazons is not grittiness for grittiness' sake, or else I'd hate it too. I really recommend you finish it up, it's quite good.

I still think it's so unfortunate anyone who likes Gaim would ever choose to ignore episode 47. Urobuchi even had input on it, so it isn't like you can use the excuse that it was just someone else playing with his characters, like with the tie-ins and whatnot. If he had directly wrote it, I don't think it would've been that different from what we got.

And I've enjoyed reading your response, so thanks! I put too much thought into most shows, but with Gaim I've also looked at it from two completely different perspectives. It's kind of amazing the things that used to bother me about it that just sort of don't anymore, even though I still consider them flaws.

There are probably Rider shows more messy than Gaim (but I don't think that many), but Gaim is hurt by it so much more because it's nominally a very tightly plotted series, making the gaps in the writing stick out way more than something like Kiva or Ghost, at least in my opinion.

Maybe next I need to make a giant post about why the crossover stuff was actually good. :p

I know they're inherently sort of incongruous with the show but I think they get way less credit than they deserve.

I'd read that in a snap. My enjoyment or lack thereof of those two episodes had to do with how much I knew of the "guests." Kikaider I didn't know much about, so it was just okay. ToQger I knew and like a lot so I enjoyed that one more.

Well I don't think I have that level of energy right now but I will say a couple things.

The ToQger crossover is basically the Sentai/Rider teamup everybody had been asking for. They meet a minute in, are instantly on the same side, and they fight bad guys. It's simple and it works, and while the Gaim characters are admittedly a tiny bit off, I think they deserve credit for taking two very different shows and putting them together as well as they did, like making Gaim's darker tone a plot point as Kouta basically tells the ToQgers to skip town. It's not even close to perfection, but taking two shows with polar opposite tones should've been a total trainwreck (pun not intended), and it wasn't, and for that I think it deserves a lot of credit. The Drive/Ninninger crossover was actually worse in my mind, and those shows lend themselves way more to doing a crossover.

The Kikaider crossover is mostly just a neat done-in-one side story. I won't stick up for it nearly as much as the ToQger one, and it suffered from poor timing too, but I think they were clearly having fun with it. You get to see Professor Ryouma put his brain in a robot death machine, and if that isn't in character for him, I don't know what is. I'm also personally fond of how many scenes in it involve Kouta hanging out with Akira in their apartment. Kouta's domestic life was an element of the show I always liked seeing because I felt it really grounded Kouta's character in a way other Rider protagonists usually weren't.

I also really like all the movies Gaim was in, although the Movie War with Wizard suffers from Kaito being massively out of character, but only because the writer made the same assumptions about his personality early on that audience did, so even that I find hard to hold against it.

I really need to rewatch Gaim again after reading this back and forth so I can better get in on this conversation.
Still working through Ryuki and loving it.

This is one of the best exchanges I've read online. It's a careful (some would say obsessive, as if that was a bad thing in this case!) examination of taste and text, so much thanks, Fish Sandwich!

Good to hear! Ryuki was one of my first Rider shows and while I wouldn't consider it particularly above average it's always had a special place in my heart. It's also another really unique, daring kind of show. I find it so funny the first Heisei show to actually use the name "Kamen Rider" in dialogue was the one that changed about as much as you could while still calling it that.

Aw, geez~ You'll make me blush... :o

I'm glad you were able to make peace with it. I definitely feel that it has a lot of writing flaws in it and the more I examine it they didn't have a lot of good direction in it. I know a lot of people loved the changed the formula for Gaim but I hated that because I love how Kamen Rider was and is now. Gen Urobuchi is a equally a very good writer and a very flawed writer as I have watched multiple things of his they have a combination of brilliance and atrocity. I feel like I might rewatch Gaim down the line to see if I can make peace with it but that is going to be difficult because this show betrayed me pretty bad. Like I am scarred because of this show lol.