The big warning sign for me, when I tried to figure out if I liked Kiva, was thinking about what my favorite moment was. It wasn't difficult. It was episodes 23 and 24. It was Shinji and Ryoko.

I'm going to remember those two probably forever. Those two episodes might be the best work Inoue and Ishida ever created together. It's beautiful, and sad, and joyous, and it's about love. It's about love as a power, love as an anchor, love as a cage, love as a key. It's literally everything this show wants to talk about, in just two episodes. That story alone validates Inoue's storytelling here.

It's also, y'know, not really a story about anyone in the regular cast of Kamen Rider Kiva. It's tremendously assured storytelling, drilling into complicated, important themes... but it's not an episode that is doing a lot with Wataru, Otoya, Yuri, Megumi, or Nago. It actually, uh, features the worst Yuri/Jiro/Otoya moment of the entire series? It's an episode that soars on wings of guest stars, of side stories, of self-contained interludes.

Realizing that, man, it really made me wonder if I liked the idea of Kiva more than I liked Kiva. It's not that I didn't like this show! It was fun to watch! But I was left grappling with whether the stories being told about our main characters leveraged all of the tools this show (and its themes) had to offer. I'm sort of still grappling with it?

I hated the Jiro stuff in 24, but that Brotherly Love Brawl might the most indefensible thing in this series. Shockingly tone-deaf.

I think the difference is in the tone? The Home Alone stuff is cartoon violence; wacky hijinks. What Wataru's doing to Taiga is driving him out of his mind, and the entire episode is devoted to all of Wataru's closest companions thinking he's turned evil. It's got different levels to it?

If I liked eating oranges, and I saw you buying up all of the oranges in town, I don't think I'd care a whole lot if you said you were doing it for my benefit.

Taiga's story for a while has been that he thought Wataru was a threat to his rule. Either because he wouldn't tow the line, or because he was going to take Mio away, or now because he was declaring himself king. The idea that Taiga would suddenly be okay with that because a man he hated said that it was for Taiga's own good... I don't think that's how emotions like jealousy work?

Mostly just tired of fighting it. It's Episode 48 of this show, man. I'm pissing against the tide, here.

Also, I think it's how integral Megumi is to the process, and how it's a real partnership? It's not just her propping up Nago like last time. It's them collaborating to achieve victory, and that's pretty new!

oh my god this was so amazing

this was worth a couple months of writing about kiva

oh man

oh you guys

how did we all get so lucky to be on the boards when fish was on the boards

holy hell

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kiva/kiva24b.png

EPISODE 42: Oh my god, what would possess Maya to leave one of her sons in the care of a terrible guardian like Shima? All he does is aggressively undermine people's sense of self-worth until they're willing to blindly follow his orders, no matter the danger they're placed in! He seems to delight in people sacrificing themselves to please him?

EPISODE 48: ...never mind.

So you don't like the show?

I don't think I'm really in a binary Like/Dislike place with Kiva. It's more that I think it was a show I very much enjoyed watching - the whole experience: the show itself, where I was at in my life at the time, everyone in this thread - without finding a ton of respect for it in the aftermath. It's a very watchable show, but one I think still let itself down in ways small and large.

I am not describing this great!

Here, I'll sum it up.

"It's a solid show. Nothing great, but enjoyable."

Man, that's the thing: I feel like the last thing I'd call it is "a solid show". It's all peaks and valleys. Dizzying highs and infuriating lows. Moments of beauty and moments of ugliness. Thematically rich and dramatically thin.

I don't know! Very complicated feelings about Kiva!

Yeah, sometimes you can't really sum things up that easily? I feel similar things about 01; it's not easy to box it into one or two sentences

Yeah, there are some shows that I love, except for two or three things, and there are shows I dislike, except for two or three things. Kiva's a show where there are ideas I love and execution I dislike; or execution I love about non-ideas. It's an appropriately messy show, considering the auteur behind it.

"Mixed feelings" then. No need to overthink it, really.

https://i.gifer.com/N4dx.gif

I don't think I can stop overthinking things! I mean, it's been a couple years of this, and I'm only getting weirder about these shows!

KAMEN RIDER KIVA - THREAD WRAP-UP

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And that's a wrap on Kamen Rider Die Watches Kamen Rider Kiva!

Obviously, this thread will hang around for as long as folks want to talk about Kiva, but my day-to-day contributions are all done. I even opened my Kiva figure to celebrate:

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/kiva/kivafig.JPG

(Neat sculpt, but BOY do those Fuestle holders like to pop off if you even think about them. Getting them to stay on while posing Kiva was an exercise in frustration. It was making me hate that suit to an almost Takaiwa level.)

Also! The commemorative Kamen Rider Die Makes A Word-Art for Kiva!

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/...ivawordart.png

This is drawn from the 106-page Google Doc I wrote all of my episode posts in. Hopefully some relevant combinations in there? (I'm fond of "Maya Megumi Good Things”, personally.)

Special thanks to Androzani84 and Fish Sandwich for their continuing encyclopedic knowledge, as well as their enthusiasm for the source material. As someone who isn't that keyed into the history of the medium, or the expanded details these shows accrue from interviews and articles, it's nice to get so much info and analysis about these series. Thank you both!

And, as always, thanks to everyone who took the time to participate in this thread. It was so gratifying to see lively and clever debate that never devolved into... well, all the things I was afraid a Kiva thread would devolve into. I hoped we could all be friendly in our disagreements - never letting an opposing viewpoint obscure our shared love of Kamen Rider - and you people really came through for me. You should all be proud of yourselves for continuing to make TokuNation one of the best places online. Give yourselves a round of applause, because you are the genius commenters of the millennium.

For me, I think this was an alright attempt at analyzing Kiva. B-, C+ work. Some episodes and stories I really got ahold of (feel good about 23/24, maybe a couple others), a bunch that I felt I was adequate at conveying something, and the rest that at least used a respectable amount of letters. This was always fun, even when I was the one least responsible for that fun.

The next few weeks are going to be bumpy! I really need to get my head out of a Kamen Rider space for at least a couple of weeks, because I've let some personal-life stuff slip in the last little while. Need to get back to a good place with all that, first thing. Then I'll head back over to the Den-O thread for a week or so, hit the last Ryotaro movie and probably the Cho Den-O three-parter. Probably take another couple weeks off after that, then start up the Decade thread. Somewhere in all that will be the behind-the-scenes work to get the Decade thread prepped. Busy summer, you guys! Busy summer.

In the meantime, thanks again for letting me experience a Kamen Rider series in your company. It's such a gift to get to do these threads, and I'm eternally grateful for your indulgence and for your friendship. You are all the best.

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