I gotta do everything around here? I thought we were a team! A team of five to six color-coded heroes!

I already have my responsibility to praise Tomoko!

KAMEN RIDER FOURZE EPISODE 40 - “OF VALUES AND PASSION”

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I like the little friendship between Tomoko and Emoto. It’s cute, and fragile, in an episode that’s otherwise ridiculous and melodramatic. It’s an oasis of two people finding a little bit of connection amidst cosmic machinations and post-traumatic witch disorder, and I really appreciated that this strange association, of all things, was the way into the reveal that Emoto is Virgo.

It’s something I’m sure we’ll be talking more about soon, but I liked how it all ended up getting revealed, and I like that the show chose this specific episode in which to reveal it. We’re in a story about guilt, and love, and bad choices made in the aftermath of tragedy, and how dreams can get warped into something more nefarious when left to curdle, so that is exactly when you do a little subplot revealing that the generous and kind scientist is actually a Horoscope who may or may not be working to enact Gamou’s villainous schemes. Perfect place for it!

The rest of the episode… I don’t know, it wasn’t for me? There’s kind of three main things going on here – the Emoto/Tomoko/Virgo stuff, the Gentarou/Sayaka stuff, and the Meteor/Taurus/Golf stuff – and they’re all working at such different tonal levels and placed in somewhat haphazard ways, so the end result is more about picking through what’s offered, rather than enjoying a complete package.

Like, in nearly any other episode, “Meteor duels a Horoscope in golf to free the enslaved souls of Amanogawa High” would be the climax of the story, because it’s BY FAR the most memorable and iconic thing to happen here. It’s Meteor! Playing golf for the first time! To defeat a bull-themed fascist! And he wins by using his power-up’s cartoony finisher!!! Instead, this episode drops it in the middle, where Taurus refuses to accept his defeat, and the episode just rolls on to a histrionic climax that’s more about Virgo's warnings than anything else. I can sort of see the episode trying to tie together its various threads this way, turning each resolution into a new problem, but the result just makes each preceding element seem like it was a distraction from the current one; the golf thing didn’t matter, then the Taurus thing didn’t matter, now here’s Virgo.

It didn’t help that the Sugiura/Sayaka stuff just never clicked with me. It’s, again, I can sort of see where it works: Sayaka’s hurt by Sugiura’s overly-permissive take on school governance, and he lets the Zodairt Switch’s cosmic power warp him into a malevolent view of safety through obedience and control, which is the natural enemy of the KRC’s more individualistic ethos. That’s a natural story to tell – safety through control versus happiness through freedom, and the balance to be found within them. But what we get over these two episodes is way too absurd to find much emotional weight: Sugiura’s cosmic breakdancing, Sayaka’s nightmare hospital (???), and the general This Is Over The Top tone to every nominally dramatic flashback scene. It’s a whole bunch of choices that didn’t work for me, in service of a story that wanted to do way too much, without much sense of how to best arrange its pieces.

(Also, man, so many weird questions about this episode! Where were any of the teachers for this story of the school being taken over by Sugiura’s army? Why was Sayaka in the Hospital Of The Damned like she was supernaturally cursed, instead of just fell down a flight of stairs? Why didn’t anything come from JK’s scene of being cheered for his fascism? What happened to Ohsugi? Why does Tomoko not tell anyone else in the KRC that Emoto is Virgo? Why am I expected to care about the love between Sugiura and Sayaka, when they’re both repellant creeps in this story, and only Sugiura has an excuse for it?)

Still, Tomoko and Emoto! Those were some cute scenes.

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I love it when Kamen Rider does genre homages/parodies. Nothing will ever touch the absolutely bonkers episodes where Kabuto became a wuxia movie centered around competitive cooking, but Fourze becoming a zombie horror movie for a couple of episodes was also pretty fun. I want to give some very special love to the scene where the class president is bundled up in bandages and an eye patch in a dark, creepy hospital. Bonus points for the characters wondering out loud why the hospital was so dark and creepy.

I stand by my comments on the ending of Sugiura's arc: it was a really good moment and it sucks so much for him. At least they didn't go with the convenient amnesia to hide Gamou's identity again.

One reason the Emoto reveal works is because while the franchise has had male passing monsters revealed to be women, they’ve never done the opposite. And in another case of anagrams, Emoto is “Otome” (Japanese for virgin, in the female sense) backwards.

Also I didn’t point it out when he first appeared, because I couldn’t come up with a decent enough gag to hint at it, but I’ll just straight up state here that the guy playing Emoto went on to appear in the Geats/Revice movie as Seeker’s dad.

While I don't necessarily love Sugiura's quick redemption*, I like him immediately coming to the aid of Fourze, even at the cost of his imprisonment in the Zodiart Zone. I may not like his redemption, but I like what he does when redeemed!

*I think one of the problems I have with this story, and maybe the ones right before it, is that there's a difference for me between a Zodiart and a Horoscope -- while the Zodiarts are shown as wounded souls being preyed upon by folks like Scorpio and Libra, the Horoscopes are largely presented as making a conscious, albeit misguided, choice. Sugiura is warped by both the Switch (ostensibly) and his love for Sayaka (definitely) but he still serves Gamou and Hayami while enslaving the school. It's neat that Gentarou's typically able to see past Sugiura's poor choices to find the big-hearted kid beneath them, but his actions were still cruel and villainous. I don't know that eventually regretting them should absolve him of whatever enmity the rest of the school may have for him, and it's kind of pushing it for me for Gentarou to forgive him on behalf of the whole school. If he were just a Zodiart, maybe; as a Horoscope? I feel like we are narratively outside the bounds Pobody's Nerfect! Feels like Sugiura should have to earn his enslaved classmates' forgiveness! I am pretty sure we were just in a two-episode story about the value of independence and personal decision-making!!!

Another untrustworthy-but-maybe-misguided father figure!

Fun bit of trivia: Rider occasionally takes a week off due to being preempted by sports coverage, and, perhaps by some cosmic coincidence, viewers at the time had to wait an extra seven days to see Meteor's golf showdown because TV Asahi aired actual golf the week after 39 instead.

Actually, between that and the also coincidental timing of one of Die's usual April Fools gags, I'm now suddenly remembering that back in the day, Igadevil used to do a shtick on Twitter on days like that sometimes where he'd post screencaps of whatever sports thing was being broadcast with joke captions pretending to confuse it for the latest episode of the show. It was always pretty cute! That anecdote barely has anything to do with Fourze, but yeah, that's another nostalgic memory of being a Rider fan around that time for me.

Anyways, I think Die is probably onto something about the different elements of this two-parter not tying together that cleanly? I at least vaguely remember the major things from these ones individually, but going off of memory, I probably would've had a much harder time recalling that they're all from one story than usual for this show.

How DARE you declare my fandom for Megaranger a "gag"! After all that time I spent with a screengrab in my signature line declaring that I didn't have time for love because of Megaranger! Shame on you!

Secret reveals always have the character use different gender voice to hide their real identity, in how Virgo has female voice when it's used by an old male scientist. I still wonder what may happen if Tomoko, by the power of KRC, was able to give Emoto the actual moon rock she found. After all, KRC was what opened Tomoko's eyes by giving her the means to go leaving the Earth, ending up on the moon. But obviously, as someone involved with the founding members of the KRC and Amanogawa, Emoto would be more familiar with the moon already than Tomoko as just a pale successor of Rokuro's legacy.

This seems to be similar to Ryusei beating Kijima's challenge back then, where he made Kijima laugh by his futile attempts to fight him without powers. I rather feel that by this, it's better to just make Meteor lose the golf (albeit it's quite good use of KR powers to use Meteor Storm's ricochet ability to get the ball to sink), if the main aim is to give mind-controlled Meteor as a threat (if there'd be Fourze vs Meteor again). Though I also feel it's jarring for Miu to talk about Ryusei's practice last night while he's playing golf as Meteor, it may expose Ryusei's identity, the KRC should keep Ryusei's secret. And Meteor himself also refers to Fourze as Gentaro later in their fight with Virgo.

I feel about Sugiura against Sayaka, it's a proof about how a just society must hold its enforcers to the same—or higher—standards than everyone else to prevent corruption and maintain legitimacy, as enforcers aren't above biases or having superior judgment where Sugiura is unable to punish the one person he's in love with, when Sayaka acts like the delinquent that goes against what Sugiura stands for. Showing that system stability depends on accountability, questioning authority, and evaluating the legitimacy of the rule, not just the breaking of it or ostracizing any rule breakers as different outsiders who deserves to be mistreated; Sugiura is being pretentious, and his confrontation with Sayaka exposes that. It's a good use though for Sugiura to try to use his Zodiarts power to fight Virgo when he realizes the error of his ways, guess the first time a Zodiart actually tries to beat up the bad guy; where Motoyama was the first Zodiart to accept Gentaro's friendship while being in Zodiart form.

I guess I understand how do you advocate for multiple staff like in writing (other than for instance, Inoue), as it's not only Gotchard, but you're a fan of all the other shows that are viewed similarly to it, like Wizard, Ghost, and Saber. I guess, it may be still subjective regarding if multiple writers will improve or worsen a series, based on which series one likes or not. I can feel, and it seems to also relate to my work (where many may suggest to just take the easy but goes against my point approach to solve a problem), about how an original creator is the only one who approached the work, the world, and/or the characters using a particular execution or tone that isn't replicated by later creators. I dunno if this is positive or negative speaking of Nakamura being ok with Sanjo's take about Yuki when it escalated later, where I'm strongly against a character being made uncharacteristically rude or unlikable (as you noted in her response to Erin), which can happen to create comedy, which you may agree as Inoue fan, but against those who didn't have good opinion of a character/series (not talking about Yuki here only, this happens in many instance), it may make one feel like how you feel to the hero characters who rub you the wrong way.