[Sh Ranger]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

It's possible, is all I'm saying! I am significantly less inclined to provide cover for Hibiki in the modern day calling Asumu by his name, though. That was my first big Uh No for this movie.

Oh yeah, Hibiki referring to Shounen as Asumu just sounds weird. Like, it's his thing! Even the patrons at "Team Hibiki Bar and Grill" agree it's so Hibiki. There's a song named after it!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Of all the problems this movie has, and how thematically it does nothing for the modern-day characters (this is not a small problem!), I never felt like the flashback stuff lacked compelling characters or emotional weight. It's a very Inoue scene, but when Hitomi In The Past asks Asumu In The Past to not watch her die? Big emotions! I cared about this girl who'd already been dead for centuries! It's why I feel like Inoue's the right guy to tell this story. He's able to, very quickly, lay out the (overheated, possibly insane) emotional stakes of a new group of characters.

I don't know. Worked for me!

Inoue is the right guy to tell this story, but I don't think these characters are right for the story. Hibiki has a music motif, right? The story is a melody, it's fine, but the instruments are wrong. I'm being figurative, I'm not talking about the anachronistic instruments used by the past Oni, that's a different kind of problem.

Like did it have to be Akira specifically who gets killed, instead of some random girl we've never seen before? Is there anyone in the audience who can say "Akira is my favorite character from the Hibiki movie!"? That role could've been given to anybody for how little time she has onscreen. By giving demoting a main character to a lesser role, it encourages apathy towards the other main characters by setting a low standard for their importance.

These characters aren't able to stand on their own, cause the movie requires the audience to superimpose their existing opinions of the present characters on to the past characters. It's like you say, this movie isn't a Hibiki story. It's a story that just happens to involve a guy called Hibiki, who looks and acts like Hibiki. I don't feel a strong difference between these two Hibikis other than the latter is more likely to get killed off due to the apparent expendability of everybody in this setting. It breaks the suspense by making the stakes more predictable.

As another comparison, Wizard of Oz does the opposite by adding more depth to the lookalikes than the original characters they're based on. The lookalikes felt more original that way. I didn't get that from the Hibiki movie.

I'm glad it worked for you though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

This requires the same amount of audience buy-in that the premise of There Was A Kid Named Asumu Centuries Ago requires. Could there have also been someone named Todoroki? Sure, maybe!

Asumu is a given name though, not inherited like Oni. I guess it's possible that there was a Todoroki lineage that went extinct and Zanki chose that name for his apprentice to revive it. Without a successor to his name, the Zanki lineage will probably go extinct as well until someone in the future decides to make it their own.