[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

KAMEN RIDER KABUTO - SERIES WRAP-UP

I already figured out the mystery of why Kabuto didn't stick with me a while back.

It was pretty obvious in retrospect, even. As I subtly foreshadowed with my screencap for episode 45, nearly everything I like and dislike about this show ultimately comes back to Hiyori. I've made it into something of a bit, and I'm sure Die is grinning at the predictability of her being the thing I'm immediately talking about, but having watched the show again, it's so clear to me now how critical her character was to it. She speaks the very first lines of the very first episode. The initial sequence of shots in that gorgeous opening I could talk about all day, it's her drawings draped over Kamen Rider Kabuto – her hanging over the entire series.

Not only was this a character who I deeply empathized with, and loved to watch, but from the outset, it was as much her story as it was Tendou's or Kagami's. I praised that over and over again. The writing gives her feelings and her wants and her needs and everything else as much weight and depth as anyone else. Going back to the opening one more time, the three of them make their entrance as a trio given equal amounts of focus, because that's exactly what they were. There was so much genuinely smart stuff the show was doing with these three, and it was wrapping it all up in utterly glorious action sequences featuring some of the coolest designs in Rider history.

Then Hiyori has to leave for reasons beyond the writers' control, and to be blunt, I think Kabuto loses a ton of footing it never quite gets back.

Honestly, in its own way, I might seriously argue that it's as devastating a blow to the story as Hibiki's infamous production shakeup was, despite never getting the same level of attention from fans, as far as I've seen. Heck, I'm part of the problem, there. This will seem crazy after these past two months of posts, but in all these years on this forum talking about Kamen Rider, I'm not sure I've ever once so much as mentioned Hiyori before this thread. I never stopped liking her; she was always in the back of my mind as one of my favorite things about Kabuto. It's just that, as the memories got more and more distant, I stopped being able to think of why.

One thing I've definitely mentioned on multiple occasions is how important finales are to locking in my long-term feelings on a series. Because it's the last thing you see, and thus the thing that's most fresh in your recollection. Hiyori was never a part of that recollection, because even when she comes back, she's never truly a part of the show again, at least not in the same way.

As soon as she leaves in episode 32, Kabuto tries its best to make her presence felt as part of the plot, to varying degrees of success. Many of the show's best episodes come from this Hiyori-less era, to be sure, but on the whole, the writing becomes noticeably more uneven, clearly racing to adjust to changes it hadn't intended to deal with. The plots lose a lot of the connective tissue they previously had with Hiyori, and combined with what I assume were budget issues meaning the show loses most of what made its action distinctive on top of this, the impact the early show had on me ended up dulled. Instead of all those wonderful, character focused plots, some of my most prominent memories of Kabuto ended up being bored at a fence, and angry at some necklaces. My brain decided to pick out some of the lowest points of the series for preservation, and frankly, that is a shame. Something I'm thrilled I was able to correct thanks to this thread.

Kabuto is a good show. Sometimes it's even a great one, and when it is, it's on fire, something I hopefully conveyed well, and that Die definitely did if I didn't. I've gained an enormous amount of respect for Shouji Yonemura as a writer after this rewatch. I had gotten it into my head this show was nothing but easily agitated weird people fighting over melodramatic grudges and dumb sci-fi plot devices, and while there's certainly a fair bit of that throughout, there's far more genuine heart and thematic purpose to the scripts than I was giving them credit for. My assumption going in was that Kabuto left me cold because it was simply a cold show, give or take an episode about Tsurugi leaving for France I recalled as being rather emotional, but, man, that was so far from the truth. Some of the stories this show tells are as poignant and/or touching as any other Rider show.

This rewatch was worth doing for the (four part, eight episode) Drake Trilogy alone, which comes highly recommended to anyone who wants a nice, relatively manageable chunk of the series to bring back those memories of it firing on all cylinders. It's no surprise Daisuke and Gon also stuck in my head as characters I vaguely remembered loving, when their appearances tend to bring along such enjoyable storytelling with them.

There's a lot to love about Kabuto, despite its many missteps, especially later on. At the very start of the thread, before I even committed to going all out the way I have, I called it my Least Favorite Heisei Rider Show By Default, and here at the end, I have to say I'm considering revising that statement. I certainly have a much greater respect for Hibiki, which even now gives it a bit of an edge, but I rewatched most/all of that show (depending on who you ask) with Die as well, and I don't think I had as much fun with it as I did with Kabuto. Maybe part of that is just how much more surprise and rediscovery was involved here, versus a show like Hibiki that was pretty much exactly how I remembered it, but this really was a good time, even when I hit an episode I wasn't all that fond of.

Die, as always, has summed it up at least as well as I could. It's a lot of strange plotting decisions that end up overshadowed by the much stronger work the show is doing elsewhere. I'd be lying if I said the question of what the Worms even want never popped into my head, but I'd also be lying if I said I cared that much about getting an answer. It was a delight to spend time with all these crazy people once more. I may not have magically turned my opinion around on every aspect of the show I recall disliking, but even though I think that, for example, the Hoppers are still pretty lame, it was nice to see them. To try and appreciate them more all these years later, watching the series with much less apathy and with a greater ability to pick through translation errors where needed.

That's the whole story here, really. I came back to Kabuto hoping I could see it with fresh eyes, and that's exactly what happened. It's not leaping up the ladder of my favorite Rider shows, especially when that list barely exists (it's like Ghost and Wizard followed by a nebulous cloud of deep affection surrounding the franchise), but I've found an appreciation for it that I didn't have before. If you go back through my posts here, you can probably even see how much more enthusiastic I became with each passing episode.

So yeah, in the end, Kagami is happy, Die is happy, and I'm happy too.