Kamen Rider Zero-One Episode 19- "She Is A Humagear Who Sells Houses!" Discussion
 

The second stage of the ZAIA/Hiden contest is announced: Real Estate! But someone working behind the scenes has other plans...

Well, you certainly can’t accuse this show of having obtusely metaphorical episode titles.

Zero One's titles seem to land somewhere in between typical Rider ep titles and those awful anime two-sentence long titles that tell you everything that's going to happen like
"Goku Unleashes His Greatest Attack! Krillin Dies Again!?"
Thank god they didn't go that far.

Yeah, as someone who cares an unusually large amount about episode titles, this show has really been trying my patience. It feels like there's supposed to be some kind of shtick, like Rider often does. Like, they pretty much all folllow a format of "This thing is/does thing". But I can't figure out the point for the life of me, and even if I did, the last show by this writer had crazy unique, striking bilingual titles that gave us gems like "Who's 黒い仮面ライダー?".

Would it have been too much to ask to have every episode named after a programming concept or something?

If anything, the titles remind me of the progrise keys' microsoft sam phrases lol

Setting aside titles...

I definitely like how this Raider speaks and is consciously messing up Aruto's schtick unlike the previous Raider. Kinda kinda reminds of the Gurongi in Kuuga.

Next week seems like Aruto beating said Raider to a pulp. I sincerely hope we get a version of Kuuga's beatdown in Aruto.

I feel like it's probably something to do with the overall naming themes across some of the characters (SOREo, KOREnosuke, Is, Was, That, There...some people go on to say that "Fuwa" and "Yua" are meant to be like, "Who Are" and "You Are"). Every title has some pronouns or indicative words, but only ever in katakana, which I guess are supposed to be the connecting thread. Still doesn't betray what the point of it all is, but eh.

Nothing on the MioMio page but a blank. Link non-existent...

not a bad episode. I have my fun when watching it.

But I'm starting to get bored at the formula of this arc. It was kinda okay the first time for the human to cheat vs the humagear, and also seeing the kind of interactions Gai and Aruto have during their first face off.
But 2 episodes later we're at the same point. The human feels insecure about his win, he cheats, but we see his past and we must feel sorry for him. Then someone goes berserk and we get Thouser/Zero-one/Motw fight. Same arguments being thrown at each other, same "don't destroy the humagear, i'm the president i'll take care of it", same Aruto not really fighting again VS Thouser.

Really hoping the 3 other face-offs won't be the same.

I hope Aruto develops pattern recognition because its twice now that he has seen a human provoke a humagear into going berserk, and that if the next episode shows the property agent turning into a monster of the week, its pretty obvious this competition is a set up.

Plus, if Gai is warning against underhanded tactics, then isn't he underhanded as well when he is fully aware that the Ark is turning negative singularity humagear into Magia?

Yua didn't realize what an utter hypocrit Gai is? Her credibility drops with each of Gai's successful attempt at pulling off this shenanigan.

Yeah that was a weird moment.
messing with the floral arrangement was a no-no.
becoming a raider and destroying house is a no-no.
But pushing his candidate to mess with humagear functions so that it goes berserk ? no problem.

I kinda get the logic. Being underhanded in a way that makes ZAIA look like cheaters is not good to him, while if it's a humagear going berserk, that's Hiden who's going to have the bad image.


But still. At this point Gai is like that kid in art class who is doing a shitty painting, and when he sees the painting of his genius classmate, he throws paint at it to ruin it and say to everyone : "hey look how bad is his painting boo boo".

Humagears are good at the core. But this guy messed with the Ark and still continues via his human friends enhanced with ZAIA Spec. Basically he wants everyone to see humagears are bad by making them bad himself.

I don't dislike this arc but surely there's no way the show is going to actually do five of these competitions before something comes in and throws a serious wrench into it all.

So I guess all ZAIA representatives are gonna be jerks with sad back stories then huh?

And Gai is a piece of trash really. He knows exactly what he's doing while claiming to want a fair contest.

And Horobi telling Fuwa to follow the raiders made me think "So, Las Vegas then?"

Yeah, I hope something happens to shake up the "job battle" formula soon. It is a neat way to introduce the Raiders and Gai's role as an antagonist, but this episode was very much a repeat of the previous two. I'm glad we still have Fuwa's investigation advancing the bigger plot, hopefully soon that will bring new developments to light and Aruto will realize he needs to change his approach if he wants to keep this from happening again.

On the positive side, I felt the suit actors for the monsters did a particularly good job this episode, they really sold the Whale Raider's arrogance and the Neohi Magia's panic.

Late to the party as always, but I guess I'll throw in my two cents as well.
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First off, I really like the design of the Whale Raider, or more specifially I really like the "face":
The red compound eyes, the angry eyebrows, the jagged "teeth" curved into a disturbed smile, honestly the whole thing looks terrifyingly amazing.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/...20200119004811

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Based on what I've interpreted from the subs (specifically GemnCorp's subs), Gai's primary belief is:

AI's sole purpose is meant to help advance humanity, not to replace it, not to live along side it, not to even be humanity's peers. "AI is nothing more than a stepping stone in human evolution." Humans are always better, and will always triumph over AI in any scenario.

By following this logic, I think Gai expects the ZAIA representatives to always beat their HumaGear opponents "fair and square" because cheating would imply the HumaGear would've won, which further implies the HumaGear was better than the Human in some regard. Meaning for him, the TOB will end the moment Hiden wins a single time because the Humagear was able to outmatch a human, and the idea of that happening is what Gai considers truly unacceptable. Thus, in Gai's perspective, pressuring his human rep into a corner forces them to draw out their "best" to overcome their HumaGear obstacle, so it's perfectly fine.

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Lastly, yeah I too am not the biggest fan of this formula, I get 2-parters are a staple in KR, but spending a 2-parter on each round of this 5 round event equals 10 episodes, meaning we're going to spend around a 1/5th of the series run time solely for this. The best I can hope for is the next round is a crushing landslide for Hiden resulting in Gai stopping the T.O.B early due to his beliefs and going into the next arc immediately.

feels very formula at the moment, it's just a repeat of the flower girl arc, only now it's real estate agent arc.

Getting bored seeing "Our Hero" getting his butt kicked repeatedly too.





...Izu is still Best Girl though.

This one... was not good.

Don't get me wrong, it's a relative thing, and a matter of context. If this was your first ever episode of Kamen Rider, you know, it hits all the beats. I actually really appreciate some of Hidenori Ishida flourishes on the direction here, like Izu giving exposition directly to the camera like a pseudo fourth wall-breaking "freeze frame", which are pretty fresh.

But as a fan of the series, I just watched this exact episode two weeks ago, and I see I'm not the only one who made that observation. Considering so much of my respect for Yuuya Takahashi as a writer is how perfect I feel the structure and pacing of Ex-Aid was, I have to wonder what the heck happened here.

I already have an idea. It's likely the back half of this plot actually will be different than the florist one, and this episode of setup was "necessary" to get us there, but that's not a satisfactory explanation. If that was going to happen, change something about the setup. Start us in medias res, or something. Have the personalities switched around, where maybe it's a more hotheaded Humagear going up against ZAIA this time. Do something!

As it is, this episode accomplished nothing but spinning the wheels, and it keeps up a trend that's starting to bug me about Zero-One where it feels weirdly averse to having too much drama. The plot to a Kamen Rider episode probably shouldn't start with two characters sitting down for tea and politely saying "hey, we should progress the current story arc". If the nature of Assault Wolf is still building to something, show Fuwa coughing a bit even after a brief transformation to remind us of the ongoing danger.

It also feels like the show is building up to some point about humans being the real monsters, now that they're literally becoming the monsters, which is rich in thematic potential, and I don't see why you wouldn't want to get a head start on that ASAP. Maybe have Horobi and Fuwa talk about that, instead of a repeat of the same conversation where Fuwa asks Horobi about his friends, and Horobi says he has friends.

Like, this one really rubbed me the wrong way, guys. I'm not exactly angry about it, and Zi-O had a bit of a dip with the Quiz arc at this same point between some great episodes, so I'm not too worried, but I expect better from this show, and bringing back Rising Hopper is not enough to placate me in this scenario.

I did really like seeing Rising Hopper though.

yeah I thought that too when he henshin'd right into wolf form. Like, "So is this his base form now? I thought it practically killed him to use this form?"

Wait, even Fish Sandwich didn’t like this one?

Well, now really is the time to step up and say: I liked this week’s episode just fine :lol

Seriously, I don’t think this one is too similar to the last competition. Of course the skeleton is still the same: Competition between human and machine, human cheats, machine goes mad, contest restarts, human transforms into a bad guy.

But I don’t find the overall structure noticeably similar. This time the human gets his Raid Riser early and actively uses it to sabotage the ongoing competition instead of cheating during a contest and transforming out of despair later. I found this episode highly enjoyable and didn’t think it was all that similar to the last two-part story.

Also, this episode I realized that the way they have Aruto transform into different Zero-One forms so that Thouser has new powers to steal every week is actually done rather clever: The HumaGear that go berserk transform into Magia that Zero-One previously defeated with an effective countermeasure form, so instead of busting out Shining (Assault) Hopper every time he transforms into the form he knows is best suited for the job instead.

For some reason, even though it was repetitive this episode felt really-fast paced to me, and I think I finally realized why: It's not just a repeat of episode 17 like everyone is saying. It's episode 17 and 18 crammed into one. We've got the setup of the contest, the introduction of both competitors, the human getting desperate to beat the Humagear, their malice provoking the Humagear to go Magia, and Gai destroying the Magia over Aruto's objections. That's all from episode 17.

BUT the revelation that the human cheated, the hooded woman making an appearance, the human turning into a Raider and fighting Zero-One, and the human openly attacking the Humagear? Last time around, that didn't happen until episode 18. So yes, it is a slightly rearranged repeat of the previous arc, but they went through all the beats except the ending in the first episode, so there's still a lot of room for twists in the second.

I think the writer is hurrying to set up a pattern and make us think we know what to expect so he can subvert it.

I don't like the current ark. It just drags for me. I don't really care about the whole "who is the better company" stuff and seeing Aruto so completely useless is no fun either. I mean why did he not realize that something was wrong with real estate guy.

He knows that people transform in the Raiders so if one attacks the building he tried to sell he could have at least suspected the real estate guy. And if Aruto was to stupid at least Izu could have thought about it. I really hope this ark picks up soon. The last 3 episodes overall were not much fun for me.

I still have hope for the series but I'm watching it for Izu and the fight scenes at the moment.

Aruto 'out of costume' still hasn't grown on me yet. He's not annoying, but I do find him irritating at times. Which I usually don't have happen with a Rider.

I dont' find myself really invested in or drawn to any of the characters like I was with Grease in Build (for example), the writing seems a bit 'going through the motions' right now. Honestly none of the characters except maybe Izu are interesting to me. They just.... are there.

Which is a shame because the fights and suit designs are absolutely fantastic.

The Cheetah-Rider I think has potential to have an interesting character arc if it's written for her.

It is true that this episode isn't literally identical to 17, but I find the beats they pulled from 18 don't do a lot to alter the basic structure.

Both episodes can be summarized way too similarly for my liking. They both start with Aruto and Gai chatting at that same exact table. They both have most of their runtime devoted to introducing us to the two players for the contest, a polite, gentle Humagear, and an arrogant human, and they both end with said Humagear turning into a Magia, and Zero-One awkwardly flailing around trying to protect/fight them while Thouser smacks him around, steals his powers, and then beats it himself.

I know you can make a lot of things sound similar if you oversimplify them enough, so that doesn't necessarily prove anything, but I'd have a way harder time doing that with the show's episodes from last year. Even trying to give this episode a chance by ignoring early plots like "the heroes explore the site of the tragedy that forms the show's backstory", and "Jin tries to figure out what a family is", the ones that boil down to "Aruto tries to do business stuff but a Magia ends up attacking" feel way different. Episode 3 was about a guy who refused to believe Humagears could do a job as well as a human. Episode 5 was about a guy who believed Humagears could do his job so much better than he could, he turned into a lazy slave-driver. Plus, the action always felt different too, with all the new forms and Riders constantly showing up.

This show was doing great with standalone episodes, and this sudden shift into more traditional two-parters doesn't seem to be contributing anything positive at the moment.

Again, I want to stress that this isn't a bad episode in its own right, and that I'm not too worried about the show's future or anything, but this one just felt really lacking in substance compared to what we've been getting, and I don't see why it needed to be.

I do not agree with what people are saying about Gai being underhanded. I do not think that is what is going on at all.

My understanding is that he genuinely believes that sapient AI is inherently dangerous and that sooner or later it will turn against humanity and destroy it. That talk about humanity going extinct is what he actually believes.

He's not trying to throw the contest but pushing the Humagears to turn into Maggia through his own people. Winning the contest is not his primary goal. It's just a means to an end. His primary goal is proving that Humagears are dangerous and must be destroyed and getting them to turn into Maggia, then destroying them before they can hurt anyone is just his way of trying to expose the danger.

The contest is just his way of taking over Hidden so he can shut down Humagear production, but it's just one means to his end. The contest just happens to provide two ways of getting at this at once and he's going to take full advantage of both. It's probably never even occurred to him that messing with the Humagear this way could be considered cheating, because he things that it's just natural for them to turn bad anyway.

He already admitted that HE is the one who decided to make the Ark bad by flooding it with "human makes war" and that kind of things.

So, his main objective would be to prove that : "Humans are better than AIs/Humagears"
But because he thinks AI are dangerous, and to prove his point, he would show the Ark that humans ARE BAD to make the (not yet bad) humagears bad themselves.

There is something wrong in the logic here.

From his perspective, he’s simply speeding up a natural process and getting them to an inevitable conclusion sooner. Flawed, perhaps, but not incomprehensible.