Kamen Rider Zero-One Episode 35- "What Do HumaGears Dream Of?" Discussion
 

The rogue HumaGear Horobi betrays Aruto to retrieve special information, while Fuwa investigates another secret within MetsobuJinrai.net...

This isn't supposed to be Jin?

okay...so I just watched the raws with little to no understanding of Japanese...but looks like Metsubojinrai are pretty chill now with Aruto despite being enemies, except for Ikazuchi though I feel the show will bring back Saburo to soften him up.

Gai is so powerless now with Naki hacking his stuff and him unable to beat anybody. I can seem getting desperate and forcing the Ark to make something Naki cannot hack...like maybe Ark-Zero. Either he transforms or he kidnaps Izu to transform to spite Aruto.

Ark will then discard MBJR as they were just its tools leading to a seven rider team-up maybe? xD

on another note....looks like a clipshow next week...ONORE COVID19!!!

clips shows + monologue for next 3 weeks. Eps0 for sentai.

Feels a little off that last time Horobi pulled out his finisher, it very nearly ended Fuwa's life. Here, it just results in Gai doing his same 'get up and walk away all bruised and mad' routine. I would at least accepted his mooks having to carry away his unconscious body!

It's kind of weird how Horobi goes on about how ZAIA is gonna go extinct. It makes it sound like he was planning on ending Gai on the spot, but I guess Naki having full control of all their technology achieves the same effect...

Every fight scene in this episode was exceptionally great. They clearly had a lot of CG budget to spare, especially for Metal Cluster Hopper's, well, metal clusters.

I just realised that there’s been no updates to the OP since Jin returned. Seems weird, given that half of it is massively outdated at this point.

All that build up on what is in Fuwa's lost memories when it turned out to be he's just a normal everyday boring guy with a weird sense of humor. And Naki outed his sense of humor to Yua. Fuwa's never going to hear the end of it....������

Burning falcon is in the opening for half a sec.

He could literally killed him, but spare him for another day. Typical toku trope. The same metal cluster hopper is pretty much unstoppable . Jin=thouser after all the combined jacking and fuwa is now unambiguous and low power since rage is his advantage. The blank slate fuwa turn him in to the typical second rider gag and shifting focus on the real lead who's literally a gag himself. The writer is falling in to the loop of dragging and repeating the same stories with horobi as a "father figure" without furthering the story much at all. Miss opportunity with naki backstory as well. The momentum still haven't picked up again yet. The story limit itself to company vs company too hard instead of going on a termination riot.

I suppose, Horobi not killing Gai or any of his men is just a bit of extra cruelty. After all, Gai's promise to handle it before the day was done is now invalid. Plus the fact that Naki can just bypass anything Gai sets up. Sometimes humiliation is worse than death and while I'm sure Horobi wants Gai gone, knocking him down further by invalidating all his inventions is something I can get behind.

I do also like Horobi's sort of "modus operandi" when it comes to fighting. With weaker opponents he's fine, stronger opponents are what catch him off guard usually. But there's a noticeable portion where he does a lot better, no matter the opponent, if they're caught off guard. Horobi fighting Thouser for the first time manages to get him to a draw by catching him off guard during his fight with Vulcan. Launching a surprise attack in the previous episode with Aruto allowed him to get the upperhand despite the usage of Shining.

It was also why Fuwa did so terribly in their first confrontation back in Episode 8, Fuwa's mind was too clouded by anger so Horobi was able to control the fight with ease. And thus this helped during the second phase of the fight against Gai once he was so flustered.

Overall though this episode was pretty nice in the other areas, I'm always a fan of more Naki and getting to see Naki and Fuwa interact briefly was great. As was Naki performing a joke in the most stoic manner while also just tossing a perfectly good futon on the ground. Not gonna lie though whenever they had the red eyes I immediately got Naruto flashbacks.

Oh and before I forget! That opening scene with Aruto chasing Jin by using Metal Cluster's nanomachines as platforms was genius! I really loved that they're still willing to get creative with Metal Cluster despite toning it down earlier.

Previously it was Horobi standing in front of Jin, now its the reverse with burning falcon.

Man, this show is getting so good.

Annnnnd it's going on hiatus. Dammit.

But man, what an episode. Horobi kind of accepts being a daddy Humagear. Fuwa's past turned out to be ordinary, and Naki drops an Aruto joke in the flattest way possible. Naki can control Zaia-specs which makes Gai lose his cool. And of course, the showpiece of the episode, Horobi's army of Humagears vs Thouser's army of Raiders, that was a great fight sequence and caps off with one epic finisher (Sting Utopia). And seems like Horobi is chill with Aruto now, which is a cool development.

Everything about this episode was great. Even the guest of the week plot. I thought it had a good message to it.

Finally, Ikazuchi is back. The show is ramping up hard, it'll be difficult waiting 3 (or more) weeks to see what happens next!

Nothing really brought this on, but sometime after watching this episode, I've started to feel like I'm not so pleased with Zero-One as an entire whole? I feel like the show introduces all sorts of cool concepts and plot beats, but only because it would be something interesting for the show to have, while having zero interest in doing anything meaningful with them. This goes all the way to the beginning with the basic concepts like 'robots gaining sentience' and 'multiple factions'.

I was thinking how at the beginning, you have a golden premise right out of the gate. You have one faction of humagears who wants to get rid of humans so that humagears can reign supreme. You've got a faction of humans who either hate humagears or believe they should fully be under the control of them, and in the middle is Aruto who believes the two can coexist. Except Aruto never came into conflict with AIMs during the first stretch in any meaningful way. He, Fuwa and Yaiba essentially all became 'the good guys' side as early as episode 4, and the it's just fighting off Metsubojinrai all the way till the end of the first arc.

When ZAIA came in, he sort of took the role of human antagonist that I had expected AIMs to have. Like Aruto, Gai doesn't differentiate humans and humagear, just that he'll use any of them as he wishes. Unfortunately his motivation being entirely based on profit and not due to any opinion he might have about humagears. When he first appeared, I figured he would serve as an antithesis to Aruto by either hating humagears or believing them to have zero value. I know that was Fuwa's character premise, but they didn't do anything with him there.

Speaking of Fuwa, my feelings about the show introducing plot beats solely to have them instead of doing anything meaningful extends to his entire character. He starts out hating humagears and believing they have no place in the world, but as mentioned, this never leads to any kind of confrontation with Aruto aside from chasing him for five seconds in episodes 2 an 3. Remember back in episode 13, when he very passionately yells out about how all he needs is his rage after all as he transforms into Assault Wolf? That felt like they were doubling down on his agenda against humagears which would inevitably lead to conflict, but uh... that doesn't happen. I was shocked when during the lawyer competition, he casually told Aruto that humagears could be used for both bad and good depending on what you teach them, because it felt like he had reached this massive moment of development completely off-screen and without any influence from the other main characters.

Oh yeah, and then they reveal he has like fake memories in his head, but that literally doesn't matter both in and out of universe. It's just another cool idea that's shoved in for the sake of it.

But at least Fuwa got off better than Yaiba, who got nothing in terms of character exploration in the first stretch of the show, got completely sidelined for months, and then came back to have a bit turnaround where you're meant to pretend it was all worth it somehow. Yaiba's character arc has since concluded at this point of the show, but it never felt like it really started.

Honestly, I'd say the lack of desire to explore any of these concepts and characters extends to Jin too. He was a fun antagonist during the first arc, and just when they were starting to delve into his character... they killed him off. And then he disappeared for two months and inexplicably came back. The 'inexplicable' part especially the problem here. See, the writers clearly wanted Jin to dramatically come back as a changed person, with a new mindset and goals, purely because that's a dramatic thing to happen in the show. They didn't care at all about actually going into how or why that happened, and I'm confident they never will. This is just the new status quo for Jin because the shows says so.

I don't know, I just suddenly felt really down about... everything in Zero-One. There's been big serialised shows like Ex-Aid and Build which would slack on a bunch of finer details, and I never minded that much. With Zero-One, something about it feels exceptionally transparent. I can just feel that there's no message or moral or life lesson that the show actually cares to tell, it's purely a product. I'm not gonna pretend every Kamen Rider season isn't just a product too, of course, but they at least managed to trick me into thinking otherwise! Zero-One kinda hasn't.

This show has really great fight scenes, and it's structure means I'll always be naturally curious about what happens next, but it feels shallow. It has felt exceptionally shallow to me for a while now, and I've only just now realised I've felt that way since the basically the beginning.