Oh no! Pressure!

The thing I'm liking most about the newer love triangle, even beyond the fact that it's got 2-4 really intriguing romantic groupings (who wants to lie and say that Yuri and Maya didn't have some sparks in that beach scene), is that it all feels a lot more grounded and relatable than the previous triangle.

The story could go in a lot of different directions, but it feels like the show's already laying tracks to talk about things like dependability, passion, accountability, trust, chance vs design, and a bunch more. It's already full of things that anyone that's been in a relationship can recognize, from the excitement of figuring out how someone fits into your life (and vice versa) to the weird trepidation that comes with figuring out if you're in love with a person, or with chasing a person.

I wish we didn't have to go through all of that Jiro stuff, but I'm very excited to see what the show wants to do now.

But Nago's learned that it's okay to deceive people in pursuit of his goals! What could possibly go wrong?

...He says, before immediately proving my point. :p

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

Oh, man, it's another one of Inoue's Guys: Truegami from Agito! That terrible human-supremacist cop from Faiz! (And a Worm in Kabuto, I think!)

KAMEN RIDER KIVA EPISODE 27 - "80s: ANGRY RISING BLUE”

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kiva/kiva27a.png

I don't know that I really liked this episode very much, but there's a thing I really respected about its construction: It's a Nago spotlight episode, and that extends to its storytelling. Nago's a dude who does not stand for obfuscation or dissembling or introspection, and so neither does this episode. It's blunt in a way that... yeah, I didn't really like the experience of watching it, but I sort of respected its bizarre principles. Like Nago!

It's an insane episode, though, for how the plot unfurls. Gotta commend it for that, too.

It starts off with Megumi getting arrested for a crime she didn't commit, eliciting a heartfelt and supportive You Probably Did It But I'll Make Certain from Nago. Then Shima gets nabbed for a crime he didn't commit, and Nago's like Ugh Fine There's Maybe A Chance This Is All A Setup But I'm Not Convinced. (I absolutely love how Shima doesn't consider the possibility of someone framing W.A.K.E.U.P. agents until he gets pinched. He is totally okay with Megumi getting sent to jail on bullshit charges!) From there, it's only a quick monster fight until Nago himself is made a target of the police.

The best part of this whole sequence, beyond Kengo's delight at officially becoming Nago's student, is how stock this story is - heroes framed for a crime by a villain! - until you make Nago the protagonist. He's so colossally unsuited to freeing wrongly accused friends, since a) he doesn't even believe in the term "wrongly accused”, and b) he doesn't even believe in the term "friends”. Megumi and Shima might as well be asking Rook to free them. Putting Nago in a position of altruistic heroism is so uncomfortable for him, and it's a really cool starting place for this story.

It's also the best section of this episode, because, uh.

The first thing to go wrong is Rising IXA, which... I mean, what the hell is even going on with Rising IXA. It's got a cellphone that appears out of thin air, like we're watching Faiz or something (it even unlocks with a variation on Kaixa's 9-1-3 code!), and then it's just a mess of a suit. The chest panel is now some red starburst furnace? The helmet is a samurai? There's a heart-shaped choker?! And the color palette, man. Red and blue and white and gold and silver? Crazy. Way too busy. I don't know why I was expecting more from the W.A.K.E.U.P. design team that gave us the Ixcavator, but I suppose I was. I guess some things just peaked in the 80s.

Well, maybe not everything was great in the 80s. After getting rescued from the cops by Tanahashi, a painter who IXA nearly killed back in '86, we finally get the details of this scheme. Tanahashi blames IXA and all of W.A.K.E.U.P. not just for his injuries, but for the mysterious disappearance of his muse: Maya! Since his recovery in the late 80s, Tanahashi has - and I swear to god that this is his explanation - trained to be a cop, spending decades rising through the ranks, all to have the kind of authority that would allow him to frame multiple people for crimes.

Like, what. WHAT.

Even for an Inoue plot, it's completely bonkers. This guy fought crime or pushed papers or whatever, for 22 years, so that one day he could ruin a bunch of lives. I'm not even going to get into the whole So Did You Never Care About Helping People part of him being, I'd assume, a fairly great cop. (He got promoted a ton, so he must've been effective.) He considers what he's doing is justice, I'd guess. I mean, it's just vengeance, nothing special, but it's clear he thinks he's doing the world a favor. It's just... dude was a 30-something painter in 1986. Is that the sort of recruit that's going to fly up the ranks in the police? And, shit, why look at an organization you despise and say The Only Way To Defeat Them Is To Dedicate My Life To Justice And Then Subvert It? Like, it's three people who do all their work out of a cafe! Just open up a competing cafe and you can end their whole group! You could be out of the Vengeance racket in way less time!

But anyway, Tanahashi just straight-up tells Nago all of this in maybe my favorite moment in the episode. It's a ridiculous, laughable scheme, but Tanahashi isn't looking to trick Nago with subterfuge or anything. He wants IXA to know that he's doing all of this so that IXA suffers the most. It's a total supervillain move, giving the game away specifically to taunt the hero. It's theatrical in all of the best ways. It's the exhilarating cherry on top of an idiotic sundae.

It gets worse/better, though. Oh, does it ever.

So, Nago's boxed in. Tanahashi's already taken out 2/3rds of W.A.K.E.U.P., and confiscated the IXA Knuckle to boot. If only IXA hadn't ruined Tanahashi's life 22 years ago, none of them would be in this mess now. If only Nago could go back in time and fix things!

Which, he can? Thanks to a not-trapped Jiro? And a Castle Doran that was underground? And Castle Doran's heretofore-unmentioned Time Door? That sends Nago back to 1986, to interact with Otoya and Yuri?

I'm pretty sure this is the point where I completely checked out of this episode. I admire the goddamn brass balls of Inoue to resolve a complicated problem with Time Door, but, come on. It's such a massive cop-out that I could not have been less interested in what happened next. The entire plot ceased having any appreciable stakes or consequences, because, like, what if there's a Nago Wins door, too. It's phenomenally lazy, even by Inoue standards. Just... Time Door. Man. Whatever.

The rest of the episode is the rest of the episode. Nago is judgmental about Otoya and Yuri moving in together, Maya has that face, and Wataru tells an absolutely out of nowhere story to Shizuka about a friend he had as a child that I find difficult to believe he never once told Shizuka about his literally only ever friend before her. The Taiga stuff would be ham-fisted in any other episode, but in this one it was just another baffling story element that floated along without feeling tied to any story or character logic. (Seriously, this never came up before with Shizuka, but it suddenly does now?)

Not a great episode! Started off pleasant enough, with the sort of head-down, business-first attitude we'd expected from a Nago-driven story. But then Time Door, and it's not really about much. (It's a Nago story! He's not deep enough to support a story about anything! And he prefers it that way!) It's one of those Things Happen tokusatsu stories, where it's not really doing anything fun with allegory or metaphor, but it's all-in on bizarre circumstances and poorly-explained developments. It's fine as a time-waster, but I honestly thought this series had progressed beyond that type of story by now.

Who'd've thought that a story focused on the most aggressively unlikeable Kiva character (2008 Division) would end up being a disappointment? Shocking development!

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kiva/kiva27b.png

...

https://i.imgur.com/bjK0fva.png

Huh.

It's a very weird design!

So this episode and the next set up my favorite personal head canon for Kiva. A corrupt cop goes after the Wonderful Blue Sky Organization and goes after all of its members: Shima, Megumi, and Nago. Just them; nobody else. I don't think there is a WBSO. I think it's legitimately just some weird dude and whoever else he can convince to fight Fangires for him.

Don't worry about it. I'm sure this story is purely just random trivia and not a shortcut to introduce a new character.

Forget it, Kamen Rider Die, it's Kiva.

So here we are at the appearance of my favourite random shot form the series: golden mouthed IXA.

One thing I like is that we get to see the new upgrade in the first fight of the storyline rather than the last (the only other cases of this I can think of are Grand Zi-O and Geiz Majesty). And instead of some personal journey, heroic willpower of friendship, or being invented because the last fight had no conclusion, they’re just “you have a phone now. Use it”. If it had defeated a monster in its first fight, my happiness would’ve been completed.

And since there are not one Fangire, but TWO Fangire (does a Count von Count laugh), here’s this episode’s Fact Fangire-le.

Crab Fangire

True name: The Decoy That Imitated a Sternum and a Dictionary (辞書や胸骨を模した囮 Jisho ya Kyōkotsu o Moshita Otori)

Human identity: N/A

Class: Aqua

Rank: Pawn

Actor: Takayuki Masada (voice)

Cicada Fangire

True name: The Dressing Table Grieving the Half Brother's Strange Attitude (異母兄の衒奇を憂う化粧台 Ibokei no Genki o Ureu Keshōdai)

Human identity: N/A

Class: Insect

Rank: Pawn

Actor: Takeshi Mito

The time door here exists as set up for its much bigger role in the movie.

Deleted scenes this time: Megumi tries to plead her innocence and then tries to break the jail. The key word both times being “tries”

Remember how I said I was going to complain about IXA's final form when it appeared? Now is that time. And you've already brought up a lot of the same reasons why I don't like IXA Rising.

But before that, I will mention that the IXAriser phone comes from his mouthplate, which may be a Showa reference to Kamen Rider X's detachable Perfecter mouthplate, considering that X is the middle letter of IXA and their given names are both Keisuke as well, except with slightly different kanji.

Save and Burst Mode give the impression of a high-tech modern crusader, which is perfect for being exactly what Nago considers himself to be. But Rising just kind of exists as a purely technological upgrade without adding anything to the theme. Honestly, I think all those electronic details make it look more generic and take away from the chivalrous knight design. It looks less Nago, which is the opposite of what it should look like! I mean, it's not quite Beast Hyper levels of lame, but I think it just does everything wrong. Frankly, I'm impressed you were even able to infer a samurai motif from the head, cause with so much going on, I can't tell what I'm looking at.

On one hand, Kiva's concept of time travel is very simple to understand. On the other hand, why is there suddenly time travel in Kiva? :lol

It's totally just a plot device without any explanation and I'm not even going to try and justify its existence, but at least the plot that it facilitates I think is pretty good in this Nago focus arc.

First of all, Nago accepts an offer from one of his arch enemy Kiva's friends. This shows that his development from the previous episode, feigning humility to be deemed worthy of IXA, continues here with him being willing to use the enemy's resource to accomplish a better long-term outcome, even if it makes his soul feel unclean for having to resort to that.

Secondly, Nago's adventure in 1986 allows him to have interaction with Otoya, similar to how Megumi met him in 2008 through Wataru as a medium, so this will be a chance for Otoya to tell Nago how much he sucks and what he needs to do to get better. Nago is here on his quest to fix the past, but again, that's just the story of this arc providing an admittedly lazy plot device to further the overall plot of the show. I think the best we can do here is work with the plot on its own terms and enjoy what happens between the characters. Cause if there's anything that Inoue excels at, it's character interactions.

Not exactly talking about him being disloyal, I said " He'd try to please every women as womanizers do that, but still.". While he did have more meaningful relationship to Yuri, I'd think his flirting to other women is also to entertain them, womanizers who actually value women, opposite to Spider Fangire, (but would be detrimental to non-women) would be an ally and protector to any women.

I'd wanna ask regarding Otoya being viewed as generally decent or even worse... "champion of justice". I thought before it's agreed that it's undebatable that everyone in this thread has pointed out that Otoya is awful, that we're all on the same page there.... and btw, those people who point out Otoya's nasty stuff are generally those who have watched Kiva in its entirety.

Admittedly, the bold, "macho jerk" trait Otoya had to be more aggressive in a relationship (not physically, but like shameless filrting, etc.), to approach girls out without the fear of being seen as intrusive is the one that saves the day here, something that can change Maya's mind regarding humans. I'd think that power or intelligence doesn't necessarily equate to morality but is something that contributes the most for saving the day, and I'd also think power doesn't only come in the form of fighting prowess, which is what I'd say for Otoya's case here, he had the charisma and charm to attract women, as shown in his debut to temporarily take away a women from fiancee. He's doing that all for hedonism and pleasure (along with those getting their lives ruined by Otoya), and at one point also enraged a woman Fangire who Otoya charmed but ditched shortly for Yuri, which is how I talk about it not equating to morality, but for this one, it potentially can make Maya change alignments. Otherwise, would agree that love is power, in contrast to how antagonistic force (not talking about Maya here) usually cites that as weakness.

For the resolve part, this is similar to the Japanese Spirit trope that I talked about earlier regarding Megumi moving with gimped leg. Love is often interchangable with something like friendship, which uses up non-romantic type of love towards their friends, and used as something to give characters resolve to overcome the odds. Either friendship or romantic love, those are the ones already be memed (not in a good way!) by community, as it can feel deus ex machina to some to have someone be reminded of love and suddenly overcomes the obstacle.

This is a clever trick yeah for Megumi, if someone is willing to temporarily put away their pride. Megumi actually submits into Spider Fangire's love to her, until . Actually my opinion for this scene is that this has been commonly used in media to portray men's total weakness being women, and can be used to pain men as being beneath women, which can instead make me pissed seeing it, but for this one, it's satisfying to see a depraved Ryo Itoya getting the just desserts for his lecherous approach. For Nago, this seems to be the opposite for him compared to Kusaka, that he's actually like most secondary Riders, he developed to be better. I don't know if status quo of Nago's nasty trait will apply for next Nago part though, I know little about Kiva.

Would hard agree here yeah, Mio's execution of Spider Fangire is outright genius, and really an ironic way to end the depraved Fangire's life. They beg for Mio to serve her role as a Queen, and had been committing brutality to her, and Spider Fangire is ended exactly because of their begging for Mio to do that, as Spider Fangire has loved a human, like what the Queen forbids, and thus Mio can do good here with her Queen role to save the day instead.

I'd prefer to not paint something as good or bad actually (though I can seem to do either), I meant to use a neutral term to describe the part of love traingle here btw, though I searched it again and "egregious" seems to be a negative term, seems my mistake there. Likely the word I'm looking should be something like "blatant".