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Kamen Rider Die watches Kamen Rider Zero-One (and builds SO-DO)
Welcome to Kamen Rider Die watches Kamen Rider Zero-One (and builds SO-DO)!
Which, okay, weird title for this Watch Thread! Lemme see if I can break each section down for you. KAMEN RIDER DIE First off, hi, I’m Kamen Rider Die, and this is a thread where I’ll be watching Kamen Rider Zero-One for the first time, and building a bunch of Zero-One SO-DO, and writing about both. If you’ve never read one of these threads before, thank you in advance for reading this one. I’ve done a whole bunch of these threads by now, and I am maybe psychologically incapable of stopping. (If you look through the forums, you can find Watch Threads for Kuuga through Decade, the second-half of Ghost, Build, and Zi-O, plus a couple odds and ends. Caution! The formatting on most of them got screwed-up a few months back, and I still need to update a lot of images. Maybe… maybe wait a bit before checking those out?) There are chemicals that get generated in my brain by Watching Kamen Rider and Writing About Kamen Rider and Talking With Other Fans About Kamen Rider, and I apparently can’t go too long without them. Is it healthy? I don’t know! I do know that I really like Kamen Rider shows, and spending time with all of you. This thread’s going to be me watching all of Zero-One for the first time, and I’m really looking forward to it. WATCHES KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE It’s my first non-anniversary season in a while (like, nine months? More?), and I’m very excited to experience it. Decade and Zi-O were great, but it was always with the proviso that each show needed to act as both its own thing, and a larger celebration of the franchise. Zero-One just needs to be a really good Kamen Rider show, which is something I've missed since Kiva. (Now, I know from looking at the calendar that we’re going to hit some bumps in production due to These Unprecedented Times. I will try to be understanding when those episodes come up. I get that there were headwinds for this production team.) I don’t really know much about Zero-One, really. I heard that an/the Ex-Aid guy was the writer for this season, which is great for me. I came in through Ex-Aid, so that guy has my undivided attention and eternal support. Other than that… robots? CEOs? We Named The Dog Indiana? Some very expensive Figuarts? It’s all a bit of a blank slate to me. Oh! The other thing I know is that the suits look real good. So good that I bought (almost?) all of them as SO-DO. (AND BUILDS SO-DO) When I was first kicking around on the forum, a few kind folks turned me onto SO-DO figures. (Thanks to SPLIT LIP, Fredbob392, and Deepsea!) I wasn’t really crazy about getting into merch, and Figuarts were – at the time – way more money than I wanted to spend. (Cut to 2022, and my 70-odd-and-growing Figuarts collection…) SO-DO were relatively inexpensive, small to store, fun to put together, and super thorough in their line-ups. I started grabbing Build SO-DO, since I’d finished that show, but soon enjoyed the line enough to start preordering Zero-One sets. Couple problems, though. First, I realized pretty quick that it wasn’t super fun to build figures I wasn’t familiar with. Beyond the difficulty of making sure a suit you’ve never seen before looks correct when you’re stickering it, I also didn’t love working on something I didn’t feel a connection to. I loved decorating the Build SO-DO because I knew all of those suits, and appreciated what they added to the story. With Zero-One… I mean, they looked neat, but I didn’t care about them, you know? So I set all of those waves of figures to the side, fully intending to open them all up once I watched Zero-One. Which brings us to the second problem: I sort of fell out of SO-DO collecting. My collection has swung hard towards Figuarts, as well as some CSM stuff, and SO-DO just started to become work. (I think it was Tiger from the Ryuki series that made me just give up altogether. I looked at that sticker sheet and went I Am No Longer The Man Who Bought This.) I like seeing the stuff that gets posted in the SO-DO/SHODO thread, but I’ve completely stopped ordering them. Except, there’s all of this: https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/.../sodoshame.jpg I got waves and waves of Zero-One SO-DO, bought and paid for. I want to get some value out of it. I also wanted to stretch my writing skills, as we launch into Reiwa, and try to shore up some long-running deficiencies. So I had this idea, and it’s a real Two Birds With One Gigantic Project move. KAMEN RIDER DIE WATCHES KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE (AND BUILDS SO-DO) As new suits get introduced on Zero-One, I’ll be putting together the respective SO-DO (assuming I own it) and writing a bit about both the process/figure, and the suit itself, as a little additional entry. It’ll be nice to get rid of this ridiculous backlog, sure. But it’ll also be nice to start thinking more about these suits. I usually joke in the beginning of these threads that I will frequently forget to talk about new suits when they debut. It was funny to me, at first, since I was just being honest about how my brain works. I spend way more time thinking about metaphor and allegory and emotional arcs than I do some neat new superhero suit. But those suits aren’t some waste product of the creative process, some shoe-horned merchandising garbage. In a very real way, they are the genre, and ignoring them is like reviewing opera and forgetting to talk about the songs. Like, spend some time on the parts of the genre that help define it! That does not seem like too big of an ask! So, yeah, this’ll help me get more in the habit of appreciating these suits via language. That, or it’s going to be an utter trainwreck. I can’t see the future anymore! This isn’t Zi-O! This is the Zero-One thread, and I need to drop in a few little notes and reminders to make the next few months a pleasant one for everyone involved. PLEASE ONLY COMMENT ON THE CURRENT EPISODE OR PRIOR: I am watching this show for the first time, so please do not mention anything from upcoming episodes. I like to be as blank-slate as possible, and even little jokes about upcoming developments can affect my enjoyment. Thanks in advance for your consideration! PLEASE DON’T MENTION ANYTHING FROM SABER OR REVICE: Wow, we’re almost caught up to the present! This reminder used to be a list of shows I hadn’t watched yet, and now it’s just two. Crazy! But, yeah, I haven’t watched Saber or Revice yet, so please refrain from discussing those shows in this thread. We’ll get to them soon enough, so please save all of your Buster comments (or whatever) until then. ANYTHING ELSE IS FAIR GAME: Mostly just Heisei shows, because I’ll probably bring a few of them when relevant, but I definitely don’t care if folks want to mention Showa. (So long as I can be left out of that conversation, naturally.) If you are worried about being spoiled on past shows… I mean, I don’t think there’s going to be a ton of discussion on, like, Blade’s twists and turns, but it may happen to a limited degree. Forewarned, I guess. PARTICIPATION IS NOT REQUIRED, BUT IT IS CHERISHED: These threads improve exponentially by your participation, but don’t ever feel like you have to. If you’d rather lurk, that’s cool. But just know that I only continue to do these threads because I love getting to experience these shows with friends like you, and your insight makes me a better fan. My episode posts are the start of a discussion, not the final statement. Please consider sharing your thoughts on Zero-One! CONTINUE TO BE THE EXCELLENT HUMANS YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN: This community is a treasure, so much so that I feel bad even including a reminder to treat each other well. You welcomed me with open arms, despite *gestures to the previous paragraphs*, and I’ve seen you be generous and welcoming to so many other fans. Please keep that same empathy and inquisitiveness as we all take apart this show, and respect everyone’s viewpoints. I know you’ll make me proud! I think that’s it? The schedule for this one… hoo boy. We’re going to aim for six times a week, with no new episode post on Tuesdays, but there’re probably going to be a few random days off. (My scheduling lately has been abysmal. Over committing to everything, everywhere. I ended that last Watch Thread and immediately launched into a different project, and it’s sort of still going on as I start this thread.) Things are definitely cropping up this summer that I’ll try and write ahead for, but I can’t say I’m going to all the time manage it. I’ll always drop a note here if there won’t be a scheduled post, though. Okay! Thank you for sitting through all of that! Let’s go! The Reiwa Era of Rider starts NOW! https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/...e/zeroone0.png |
KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE EPISODE 1 - “I’M PRESIDENT KAMEN RIDER”
https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/.../zeroone1a.png Third time trying to write this first paragraph, which is sort of unusual for me? There’s almost always some main thing I want to talk about from an episode. Premieres, if anything, have even more stuff I’m aching to discuss. The thing that keeps getting in my way is that there’s one major thing I want to discuss, but I keep thinking it’s too minor, or too personal, to start with. But trying to avoid it is frustrating me, like I’m trying to talk about something other than what I really want to talk about. So, let’s just talk about the thing I cannot stop thinking about. This first episode is so reminiscent of the premiere of Ex-Aid, and I love that to death. It really clicks in when the cute lady assistant shows up to deliver a driver to our title character, to better help him defend a group of civilians from a monster attack at a public place. But even beyond that, there’s the way Aruto’s story is so central to this episode; the way the A.I.M.S. team is sketched in without necessarily being drawn into the narrative; the way MetsubouJinrai.Net is clearly Gathering Data, one of the few disappointing hallmarks of early Ex-Aid; the way a young man dedicated to helping people one way, takes a left turn to help people in a different way. That last aspect was my favorite part, and the emphasis on it was what really elevated this episode for me. Ex-Aid had Emu start as a doctor, and become a Kamen Rider, but still work as a doctor. Zero-One has Aruto pursuing his dream of being a(n objectively terrible) comedian, and then says No to him, somewhat definitively. His dream was to make people happy, and now he’s being asked to run a company while defending humanity from a robot death cult -slash- liberation army. (Tokusatsu is written by the winners!) But in doing so, he can give people the safety to be happy. He’s not actively doing the thing he wants, but he’s providing the conditions for it to be done. I like that message, that we can sometimes mistake the path for the destination, or the process for the result. Aruto wants to make people happy; why does it have to be as a comedian? Why define yourself one way? Why stick to one definition? And that seems like it could be a big theme for the season, what with robots overcoming their programming and humanity deciding how much of their society they want to leave up to a new lifeform. Exploring the parameters of freedom and self-sufficiency, trying to figure out how to integrate technology into society without abandoning our humanity, using industry with empathy, that all feels like stuff this show wants to touch on, judging from this first episode. And, like, even beyond thematic reads and fun morals and Ex-Aid structural callbacks, this was just a ton of fun. The action choreography was exceptional, Izu’s got cute chemistry with Aruto, and Aruto’s split-second decision to become Kamen Rider Zero-One (the ferocity of his acceptance was such a great counterpoint to his normal easy-going haplessness) was a glorious Rider debut. You can see the bones of Ex-Aid in there, but the finished product has successes all its own. Fantastic first episode for our first Reiwa Rider! — KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE SO-DO AI 01: KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE RISING HOPPER https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/.../zeroone1b.jpg Fantastic suit, too. It’s a design I’ve always appreciated, even before I saw it in motion. The fluorescent green is absolutely striking, layered on the black undersuit. The green sells the grasshopper motif, but it also has an industrial Safety Hazard look to it, a warning to civilians to stay away. Like, heroic, but dangerous. I like the little grasshopper face in the torso armor, and how the red of the eyes comes back in on the boots. There’s always so many interesting touches on Rider suits, and even a fairly straightforward design like this one manages to weave in some fun details. But the main appeal is in its cleanliness, which is appreciated. Even though I came in through the maximalist VIDEO GAMES design philosophy of Ex-Aid, I tend to lean towards suits like Rising Hopper, where the color choices do a lot of the heavy lifting. Black contrasted with eye-searing yellow/green, punctuated with drops of red and silver. And it works great in motion, this unmistakable Kamen Rider Zero-One blur. It communicates Agility instead of Strength, which helps his fighting style feel utterly fleshed-out after only one fight. It just… man, it just works as a suit? This SO-DO got built a couple years ago, and it maybe shows? A little dusty, that’s for sure. I remember it being a fun build, if also a confusing one. (See previous post: I didn’t know these suits at all!) But they really didn’t skimp on this suit’s details: the silver on the arms and torso straps is painted on, as is the red and black of the mask. For a cheap candy toy, they made sure that the hero suit looked heroic! Anyway, I don’t know if this is making a ton of sense because my internet has been sabotaging this entire writing process, so let me try and sum up this suit and this figure: both great! I like this little guy, and I like his suit on the TV show. What about you? How do you like Rising Hopper? |
Also, special thanks to the reprogrammed Humagears at Xfinity for delaying the start of this thread by a day! I'm glad they were eventually defeated!
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You're starting one of my favorite seasons on my birthday? I'm going to take that as a sign. I don't know what for, but it's definitely a sign.
As for why Zero One is one of my favorite seasons... I'll have to think about that in the morning. Edit: I remember checking the suit's colors in my art program, and it was definately somewhere in the yellows. |
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And I'm officially not going to debate anyone on Rising Hopper's color! Everyone's right! OH! AND! https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/...hdayhibiki.png |
It's absolutely highlighter yellow.
Also Izu is best girl. That is my contributions for Episode 1. |
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Well, my main feature isn’t ready to start yet, so I’ll just share some production stuff.
The guy who played the theme park manager only appears in this episode, but he asked to come back every time he bumped into the producer. (How that happened often enough to be a regular thing, I don’t know) The show begins its obsession with casting actors younger than the characters they play. While Aruto is said to be 22, the actor playing him was actually almost a year younger than the guy who played Sougo (who was playing a character the same age he was, at least from episode 5 through 32). The Comedian Humagear Fukkinhoukai Taro (who’s name I’ll always remember as “F*cking Whore Guy Tarlo”) ended up being unexpectedly popular with the Japanese fandom. The producer was surprised, but it encouraged him to keep going with the jobs/AI theme. As for the episode… it was decent at setting stuff up, but in terms of everything else… I’ve never been keen on the directorial style and it doesn’t particularly feel like the start of a new era, so much as it does a continuation of Heisei. |
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I'm rather fond of Zero-One, too, which is about as clever a bit as I can think of right now. Part of me wants to make some dumb Aruto pun in like, every post I make in this thread, but my creative juices can't live up to a master of comedy like him. Contrarian opinion as ever, I know, but I really liked that kid right away. I'm obviously not ~totally~ serious about the "master of comedy" remark, but I genuinely do have pretty much Aruto's exact dumb sense of humor, which made him a pretty relatable protagonist out of the gate. Like, when I was a really little kid, I even harbored vague notions of becoming a stand-up comedian for a while? So having that much in common with the hero made Zero-One easy to get into, especially with the excellent performance Fumiya Takahashi was giving immediately, and the excellent script and direction only made it even easier. I might go so far as to argue this is one of the strongest Rider premieres ever? Which I think is something Die said about Ex-Aid during the Ryuki thread too, so hey, maybe Yuuya Takahashi just really knows how to land these things. I think you get an excellent feel for the world in those 20 or so minutes, and what I remain most fond of to this day is how strong of a character arc Aruto gets in it, which it was nice to see clicking with Die too. And then there's the direction. https://i.imgur.com/Ux0tfJo.png https://i.imgur.com/Pjxm8Kz.png One of the other things it could said Zero-One has in common with Ex-Aid is that it creates one heck of a visual identity for itself right away. This episode is slick as all heck, and I attribute a lot of that to Teruaki Sugihara being the director, because just like with those Agito episodes in Zi-O, and all those episodes of Lupinranger VS Patranger he did, having him around gets you some real flashy shots. The action at the end stands out, of course, but even beyond that, there are loads of little touches I think add a ton to the episode. The way the camera moves throughout the scene where Aruto takes the Zero-One Driver, for example, it just looks real nice? And speaking of things that look real nice, oh man do I ever love Rising Hopper. I still remember how insanely excited I was just to see another insect motif for the main Rider when it was revealed, and then on top of that, it was a grasshopper, and then on top of *that*, it looks utterly gorgeous. I'm really glad this thread gave you an excuse to make the active effort to appreciate the suits more than usual in these threads, Die, because I might've been actively upset if you didn't see a base suit this amazing as worth talking about. :p It's too good. The brilliant use of a color that stands completely apart from any main Rider. The technological grasshopper design that immediately screams "Rider #1 of the future". The Kabuto sort of way the armor is basically the entire grasshopper draped over his body. How the armor isn't on the arms, drawing all the more attention to the legs. How simple and readable the design is at a glance, while having surprisingly intricate detailing that makes it look great up close without cluttering things up from a distance. The fact that his weapon is literally a briefcase that turns into a glorified triangle... and that *still* somehow looks as cool as the rest of him. I'll stop gushing here, I guess, but only because I have to stop somewhere. Zero-One's suits are indeed quite cool all around, but Rising Hopper in particular made one heck of a first impression, and I quickly grew rather attached to it. Helps that I ended up loving the character under the suit so quickly too. Usually when I first see the design of a new show's main Rider, it either looks "striking" (like Ex-Aid), or "cool" (like Build), and I only later understand the design well enough to realize it's really both (because it always is), but what can I say? Rising Hopper just leaped over that whole process! はい!アルトじゃぁぁぁぁナイけど! Yay, I got to make a dumb joke after all! This is gonna be a fun thread! :D (Oh, and since we're specifically talking about So-Do, I remember being real impressed by how the leg armor on that Rising Hopper figure comes up around the hip joint a bit to look more natural than just a straight cut at the thigh, like they had been doing up to that point. It's little things like that every year that communicate how much the people designing the So-Do stuff are always looking for ways to improve and evolve the line. There's a genuine passion that comes across there, and it's pretty endearing even as someone who's never touched a So-Do figure.) |
New era, new show, new thread! It's Episode 1!
-I'll be rewatching episode by episode again! It's not like Zi-O where I was confused on what my stance after the inital reveal, it's more like.....After I watched Zero One, whenever people'll dicuss it, there's always a bit where I go "Wait, what?!". People really have such a diverse array of Thoughts and Opinions concerning this show that sometimes I jokingly questioned myself if we watched the same show? It's a show that is kinda ripe for analysis on a proper second watch. -Anyway, the first episode! Drops quite a bit on your head, but only enough that you're not totally drowning in like, characters or worldbulding? It all goes down smoothly and is pretty exciting, imo. Even you're not keen on our protag (more later) as of right now, something here is bound to grip your interest for you to continue onto the next episode. -Aruto! He's kinda....a loser? Runs around in his high school jersey with the nametag fraying, chronically unfunny, and lost his job. My interest in Aruto at this episode(and the entire show, ngl?) is not "I like/sympatheize with this character and their motivations, and would like to see them uphold/defend those as a Rider". It's more of "How will being a Rider (and the president too, ig) change this guy's life?" Being a charasmtic protagonist that instantly wins you over from the beginning is one thing, but shoving some weird litle freak into the audience's hands and going "trust me on this one!", isn't that more exciting to see? -Naturally every Rider show has their own unique aesethics, but 01's sticks out to me in particular! The music, the chereo, the finisher cards-all very fun and striking, I love them a lot. Yuya Nawata's preformance as Zero-One has to be one of my all-time favorite Rider preformances, it's just oozes the right amount of spunk for me! (The little spin as he introduces himself, I love it so much!) -On my general feelings on the show itself. I feel like saying "I enjoyed it!" or "I disliked it!", doesn't really fully capture my inital Zero-One experience. It's..... An Interesting Show. No matter if I was feeling X or Y or Z about whatever it was doing atm, it was always sort of intriguing how this show went about things. (For a simpler answer, if given the choice between randomly popping on an episode of one of Takahashi's Rider series, I'd probably pick Zero-One every time. ) |
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*Lands dramatically* "Looks like it's that time again."
Zero-One! The first Reiwa Rider, and the first Rider episode I watched completely raw the first time, and even without subtitles, I followed along very well when the subs came out. Zero-One is a show I'm still uncertain how I'd rate it. It's not great, nor is it bad, but we'll get there when we get there. But I can say for certain, that this debut episode was great! A lot of people were worried Aruto was going to be annoying (it's a mixed bag at the start, but ultimately one that makes sense), but his whole journey is what makes him a pretty solid protagonist. Izu, everyone's favorite Rider girl, that is until a certain current season, is fun to watch, and the justification on Aruto's "training" was rather clever. But boy, does the action not work splendidly! They really embraced the idea of making the Reiwa Era much more bombastic in terms of action, and the finisher screens are my favorite part about Zero-One. Edit: I really love the Zero-One suits. Very simple, very streamlined, and just overall good-looking suits. And Rising Hopper is certainly a great suit, with its neon lighting effect, the emphasis on the leg armor, and just sets a look that just fits "a new era" for Rider. Quote:
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Also, great to see you again! |
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And that's how you know it's Aruto! Quote:
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Finally Die! Zero-One is one of my favorite Rider shows, glad to see you catching up to it, and maybe catch up to some Figuarts? Unfortunately, 2 of the main 5 Riders are the most expensive figures of the line, but I think the rest should be much more manageable!
Speaking of figures, I think you had the great foresight of picking up the So-Dos as they were coming out. I believe the Rising Hopper So-Do is one of the more sought after and hard to come by these days. Last tidbit I wanna share is with this new season, Seiji Takaiwa passed the baton of main suit actor to Yuya Nawata, who previously filled the role of Geiz. I love Nawata in the role and hopefully he becomes Mr. Reiwa Rider down the line |
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Also, real question: Was Aruto not a popular Rider on his debut? I found him instantly compelling, and way easier to understand than Sougo. Did people not like this goofball? Quote:
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Very excited to see you starting Zero-One! I swear I'll actually keep up with the thread past the first few pages this time. You just go so fast! And thank you for the So-Do shout out! Miss seeing you in the candy toy thread, even if I now have my own huge backlog of unopened cases. (Got a cat, and she makes doing delicate things like that difficult)
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(And, boy, SO-DO backlogs! Occupational hazard! I feel like "Unopened SO-DO Boxes" should be a stat available on our ID squares...) |
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https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...43420/arut.jpg But I think you're understating Aruto's main motivation here, if you talk about how he mainly wants to make people happy by defending humanity from robots. Like, fighting Magia is the last resort for Aruto. Aruto wants for humans to also appreciate Humagears (there'd be something relatable by this personally but I'd save it for later) and actually wants for them to co-exist together. MetsubouJinrai.NET also consists of.... Humagears. Quote:
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Yay, it's Zero-One time! This is a show that I have pretty ambivalent feelings towards. There are some aspects of it that I absolutely love and some elements that frustrate me deeply. Looking forward to seeing this thread play out.
Some initial thoughts: - I. Freaking. Love. The Zero-One suit. I love almost all the suits in this, honestly. I do not know off hand who did the suit designs for Zero-One but they absolutely knocked it out of the park. I don't like it when Rider suits get too bulky; that was a big problem I had with both Ex-Aid and Zi-O's approach to power-up armor. Zero-One really nails its more streamlined aesthetic, though. It's not a very complex suit, but it looks so good with just the basic black body and a few pieces of brightly colored armor that visually pop right off of it. Easily one of my favorite default suit designs of all-time. - Aruto, specifically his stand-up comedian aspect, always felt like he was someone that should annoy me, especially given my longstanding and vocal animosity towards loud comic relief characters. I really give the show and the actor credit that I pretty much loved him right out of the gate. One of the things, in particular, that endeared me to him is that the big joke about Aruto as a comedian is that he's not funny and the show doesn't try to pretend that he is. I do not know much about Japanese stand-up; most of what I know about it comes from watching tokusatsu and I imagine that's about as accurate as the American TV version of what the NCIS does. That said, I read a good description of exactly what the deal is with Aruto's comedy and why other characters react to it the way that they do. Basically, it boils down to the fact that Aruto's jokes are based primarily around wordplay and puns (something that made this show very fun for translators). This is a form of stand-up comedy in Japan, but it's a style that's very pass?. The best American equivalent I can think of is it's like if he went up on stage and started doing Henny Youngman-style "Take my wife, please" shtick. - When the show first came out, Toei really played it up as the start of a new era for Kamen Rider. I'll be really curious to see what you think about how well this did or didn't work by the end of the series. Quote:
Kamen Rider fandom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxQEf1JXq-Y |
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I am actually deeply touched by being mentioned as one of the people who got you into SO-DO. That means a lot, thank you Die!
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Gutbuster Taro's abs were a Premium Bandai exclusive. :lolol
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A certain other character's name is certainly going to have an extra letter attached... Quote:
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KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE EPISODE 2 - “ARE A.I.S ENEMIES? ALLIES?”
https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/.../zeroone2a.png Ha ha ha, Fuwa. A lot of other things happen in this episode – MetsubouJinrai.Net is exposed to the public as the perpetrators of the recent Humagear rampages, Aruto struggles with everyone looking to him for answers, his dad was maybe a Humagear (?) – but the big news this episode is the time we spent with the AIMS crew, and Fuwa in particular. Fuwa’s great. He’s great. He’s all rage, and nothing else. He had a formative trauma, and he let it envelope him in unquenchable fury. The rules are irrelevant, if they stand in the way of his mission. The entire world exists to bear witness to his vengeance. He’s an investigator that asks no questions, and shoots every suspect. His Henshin sequence is him breaking open a collectible and shooting himself with a violence that protects him from the world. He reminds me a bit of Nago from Kiva, in how hilariously psychotic he is. The actor plays it entirely straight, which (if anything) makes it even funnier to me. He’s the latest in a line of absolutely bonkers secondaries, the newest lunatic with a grudge that Isn’t Here To Make Friends and considers the title character to be a potential Finisher recipient, and nothing more. And those are all good things! The second and third Riders from Ex-Aid were cut from that cloth, bound up in the ways they’d be wronged by the universe and desperate to pay it back. I like that arc, the guy who slowly finds something to live for other than revenge and regret. Nago, again, got to be one of my favorite characters in Kiva, and had maybe my favorite arc in the final few episodes. (A lot of that was the show leaning into Nago’s continuous failures and unceasing self-regard as a source of comedy relief, but still!) As funny as these one-note psychopaths can be, I do usually end up connecting with their inability to overcome trauma, and the ways recovery and catharsis can seem impossible when you live too long inside your grief. It’s gloriously melodramatic, but occasionally devastating. Along for the ride this episode is Fuwa’s (presumably) long-suffering co-worker Yaiba, and she’s already my favorite character on the show. I’m a sucker for competent women surrounded by abject failures of masculinity, so it follows that I found Yaiba to be a very entertaining foil to Fuwa’s ridiculousness. She’s a cop whose partner thinks he’s a soldier, and you can see on her face that way too much of her job is keeping this dude from trying to eat the face of every robot he sees. As a mismatched buddy cop team for a toku show, they’re amazing. Great episode, across the board. I liked how the story tried (maybe a little too bluntly) to contrast Aruto’s sense of protection with Fuwa’s sense of righteous fury, especially through the by now standard eye-catching fight sequence. The fight through the shipyard used so many cool techniques – some POV shots, some multi-level moves, some slo-mo, and a beautifully staged finisher from Vulcan. This show’s proficiency with fight choreography… I feel like it’s going to be this thread’s I Forgot To Mention The Suits? It’s so good, and I barely feel like I did it justice. Still! Just one more element of a really fun second installment. — KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE SO-DO AI 01: KAMEN RIDER VULCAN - SHOOTING WOLF https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/.../zeroone2b.jpg Speaking of second things! Kamen Rider Vulcan! I like the two Shotriser suits a whole lot. (I also like how the show works the word Rise into so many things? Good branding, and I like the emphasis on things becoming more than what they began as.) Unlike the clean symmetry of the Zero-One suit, Vulcan has a more unfinished asymmetry. It looks less agile, more destructive. Little spikes come off the blue parts, and even the torso looks angry. It’s a great color scheme. I’m not gonna be like All Secondaries Should Be Blue, but I think it’s generally a smart move. It’s got the same red piping, to tie in with Zero-One’s suit, but we’ve got blue over a white undersuit, rather than COLOR over a black undersuit. It nicely casts Vulcan as cool, imposing. Something about that blue and white just says that this dude is not going to save anyone. Another winner of a suit! |
Glad you enjoy both Fuwa and Yua, they make a good first impression honestly! Their whole serious cop, feral cop routine is really great and they make an absolutely solid duo.
Though Fuwa of course became a fan favorite over the course of his run and it's hard not to see why just from this episode alone. But he's got a lot more layers to him, oh boy a lot more layers indeed. |
So excited to see you react to Fuwa. One of the best secondary kd all time. Probably my favorite character in Zero-One besides one I can't mention without major spoilers
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Shooting Wolf was always a design that... never quite hit right with me? It always felt like something was missing. And I definitely don't mean on that big white side because I absolutely love Rushing Cheetah! I think it's something about the helmet; just doesn't come together for me and I love how all his later forms' helmets look too.
Shame when Fuwa's one of my favourite Riders in the whole franchise, but hey, you take and lose some! |
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I'm gonna pop out my zero one sodos actually and start fiddling with them. |
Episode 2!
-Truly, there's nothing more funnier than establishing "Aruto might be wayyyyy over his head with this job" in this episode than the goverment enacting an invesigation literally 5 minutes into his first day! Aruto truly inherited the company, with all its weird secrets included! -We are properly introduced the AIMS duo, more speficially the mad dog Fuwa! Isn't he so fun? The story gives his perspective on Humagears with equal weight (Hiden being up to no good, rotten and secretive, is not only backed up with the Daybreak Incident, but for little incidents like Hiden attempting to shake off the press/Izu telling Aruto that the control system for rampaging Humagears's connection to Hiden must be kept Secret from AIMS, For Some Reason) while also going "Hey! Doesn't this guy have a screw loose?!", it's real neat. Aruto/Fuwa stating their perspective in juxtaposition, it's a simple but super fun move. It's also really cute is the way they decided to humanize this walking ball of rage is that he might be the only person to find Aruto's jokes funny? Literally shaking trying to keep a straight face, lmao.... Anyway, I'm glad he immediately hooked you! (I've found that no matter what a person's opinion on 01 is, they generally agree that Fuwa's real good.) -I did manage to find some of my scattered thoughts on my inital watching, and one of my inital impressions of AIMS was "Watching the AIMS duo banter makes me wish I was watching the G3 Team sections of Agito instead." Now, now past me, AIMS has its own charms yknow? (Though, I wonder what would happen if we locked Hikawa and Fuwa in the same room together...) -Very interesting that AIMS assumed on first glance that 01 was a Humagear, even tho they also have Rider tech. I don't think I caught that the first time I watched. -Not particularly important, I really always enjoyed the Vice President and his goons? They bring a really fun energy to all of the office scenes. |
I realize I dropped the whole English cover bit halfway through the last series, but there's a really good one for Zero One, so I will revive that for what might be the last time, unless I find a cool one for future shows. I do regret not posting the really good Decade one last show, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC6B-B052Jw |
Small thing: Revice and ex-aid's first eps both feature a bicycle, which is weird.
Edit: Also I forgot to mention the red vs green thing aruto has going on. Aruto and Izu are green, while the vice pres is red and stuff. |
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Hikawa and Fuwa locked in a room together? I assume it'd end with Fuwa screaming at Hikawa, and Hikawa agreeing that Fuwa has a point about Hikawa being an oblivious obstacle that doesn't know how to stand up for himself. Quote:
On the topic of Zero-One's theme song... does this show not have an opening sequence? Or just not yet? I've only heard snippets of the theme over fights and final scenes. |
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