[Kamen Rider Die]

As I make my way through the dark, foreboding jungles of Showa, it's nice to have a friend at my side. In that spirit, please welcome back SH RANGER as we explore the World of Amazon!

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KAMEN RIDER DECADE EPISODE 28 - "AMAZON, FRIEND”
Amazon lonely. Amazon protect world, but everyone hate Amazon. Then Decade arrives! Decade is new friend for Amazon. Then Diend arrives! Decade stops talking to Amazon as much. Amazon is still happy, though, because Masahiko is a newer friend. Then Masahiko betray Amazon for Dai-Shocker. Now Amazon is all alone forever, and Dai-Shocker have Amazon's Gigi Armlet. Amazon sad!

KAMEN RIDER DECADE EPISODE 29 - "THE STRONG NAKED STRONGMAN”
Amazon not name this episode. Amazon sorry it named that, but Toei not ask Amazon for input. One more problem for Amazon this episode, Amazon guesses. Amazon still sad from last episode, but when Amazon find out that Masahiko is sad about making Amazon sad, Amazon want to help. Amazon glad to see that Masahiko care about Amazon. Makes Amazon want to fight for Masahiko and beat Dai-Shocker! Amazon and Decade become such good friends that Dai-Shocker is defeated, and Decade even talks about Amazon instead of flirting with Diend. Amazon has been all over world, and seen a lot of flirting, but HOO BOY. Anyway, Amazon happy! Amazon have new friends in Masahiko and Ritsuko! Also, Decade and friends are all about to die in Rider War, maybe, but that not Amazon's problem anymore.

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KAMEN RIDER DIE: Look at her! Look at our shiny new Amazon!
Oh, hell, wrong one.



SH RANGER: Tomoko knows how to say A-MA-ZON correctly though!

KAMEN RIDER DIE: It's this guy. He's way worse!

SH RANGER: You don't like him?

KAMEN RIDER DIE: I found him just this side of narcoleptic.
To be fair, Tomoko as Amazon is in my Top 5 Kamen Rider things of all time.

SH RANGER: Tomoko as Amazon is pretty great for sure. The Amazon here though, yeah, he's not that enthusiastic. But the world's kind of a terrible place for him, so I can understand why he'd be a little depressed about everything.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: He's pitched way down, enthusiasm-wise, and I do get why that's the case. It's just, it doesn't modulate a whole lot through the story? Him shouting A-MA-ZON is done at about the same level as him telling Tsukasa that there's nowhere he feels safe. I'm okay with a mopey Amazon (I watched Amazons! Jin Takayama is great, and the other guy is practically comatose!), but this wasn't a story where I felt like the actor was conveying his character's arc very well.

SH RANGER: Haruka and Jin say amazon way too inconsistently though. The guy who says it best is probably the OG Amazon, followed by Tomoko. I suppose he doesn't have a very wide emotional range, but I thought he was pretty sympathetic and otherwise likable character. I liked how his whole problem is a very specific parallel to the problem Tsukasa has about not being accepted. Honestly, I found his simplicity kind of endearing in its own way.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: Yeah, while I don't think this is one of my favorite stories, it's at least straightforward in its approach and relevant to Tsukasa's arc. Amazon has a childlike innocence and faith in people, which is difficult to disregard. Being mad at Amazon is like being mad at a puppy.
Did Amazon's goals work for you here? Him trying to find one person in this godforsaken world that's worth believing in? I never saw the original Amazon series, but my understanding is that Friendship was a big part of it. Do you think this arc delivered on that?

SH RANGER: I mean, all the other Riders are quick to call Decade a devil and try fighting him, but Amazon sees him as a friend pretty much immediately, since they're both outcasts to society who want to save it from the real enemy. It's a refreshing approach to have someone actually decide to befriend him. And if there's anybody in the Showa Era who's all about making new friends, it's Amazon. I definitely think Amazon's goals worked. They started as just traveling the world looking for his own place to belong and then he was unlucky to get caught up in Geddon and their alliance with Dai Shocker. Between this arc and the Fourze HBV, I think this is definitely why I ended up watching Amazon as my first Showa Rider show, due to how much I sympathize with him as a character. Like, he's Showa Decade in this world. That's an easy way to get my interest.
They even have their shows being the shortest of their respective eras in common.
Unless we count ZX.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: He definitely feels like a reaction to Showa's (to my mind) stereotypical Grim Masculinity, where it's all about stoically suffering for justice. This guy just wants to have friends? And give them piggy-back rides? It's a lot more emotionally-accessible than all of my previous interactions with Showa.

SH RANGER: That's how it was in the original show as well. Tachibana Tobei was basically like, "this guy is the new Rider?!" after previously working with genius scientists and doctors, then he had to work with some illiterate rainforest guy. Amazon was a very different Rider for his time and you can see that difference here as well, with how much he contrasts the other Riders who Tsukasa met before.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: Yeah, I mean, Tsukasa just had two different versions of the exact same guy try to immediately murder him, so it's refreshing to not have go through the standard Decade Is The Devil Wait Maybe Not routine, even if we're still not spared a Narutaki cameo.
It's nice to have a nice Rider on this show!

SH RANGER: Of course!

KAMEN RIDER DIE: It's just, the trade-off is a world where everyone else is a villain.



SH RANGER: Yeah, that's pretty unfortunate.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: It's funny as hell, though. We'd eventually come back to Dai-Shocker Took Over The World in a few Phase 2 movies, and I honestly love it as a gimmick. I love the juxtaposition of the mundane and the fantastic, which is what you get when Dai-Shocker has to, like, have an award ceremony for children.

SH RANGER: Shocker always have a bunch of weird ideas for schooling and how to run a society. Dai Shocker using kids to keep tabs on the Riders is pretty much like the opposite of the Rider Scouts. They're desperately trying to stay relevant, even though their era has long been over.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: Yeah, I mean, I could spend an hour digging into the hilarious minutiae of Dai Shocker's society (the ability to get whistles out to all citizens speaks to some solid infrastructure), but I also appreciated how it managed to be more than just a joke or a movie tie-in or a bunch of faceless baddies. There's a point the story is trying to make about how people who can't trust each other invariably put that trust into organizations instead, and that's not healthy for society.
Am I reading too much into this? Did you get that out of this story?

SH RANGER: I think that was exactly the point of the story and I can see a lot of the same themes in SHW GP with how Shocker are able to effectively convince a lot of people through propaganda that Riders are evil and can't be trusted. That their chaotic methods of heroism are unstable and can only bring ruin to the world. It's something a lot of Riders have to deal with, having to fight for people who hate them and see them as the enemy and it's part of what makes being a Rider a lonely mission. But it also takes courage to take a leap of faith like that, to trust in people and think critically, without letting your judgment be clouded.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: It makes for a sweet story, though, where Amazon's indefatigable belief in basic human decency runs up against, like, institutionalized betrayal. I thought Masahiko's story had a nice amount of moves to it, where even after being betrayed by Dai-Shocker, he'd rather give them another shot than admit he was the bad guy in the story.

SH RANGER: Yeah, Masahiko was in denial. It's not easy to admit everything you believed in was a lie, so he chose to hold on to his misplaced trust in Dai Shocker and only saw the error of his ways when they betrayed him a second time.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: I think he'd've probably given them another chance, were it not for the terrifically literal All-Humans-To-Monsters Program.
I adore the stupidity of both the name and the scheme.

SH RANGER: It's very literal. I wonder how happy that random guy was to be turned into a Makamou.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: He seemed into it? I don't want to shame anyone for their dreams.

SH RANGER: Haha, yeah, I guess so.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: It's a very very very Showa scheme, to me. Just, like, let's turn everyone in the world into monsters. It's not even trying for subtext anymore.

SH RANGER: They're all about their Remodified Humans, so why not just get rid of humanity entirely and create a new race of all-kaijins? That's probably what they were thinking.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: It's all about surrounding yourself with people you can trust, even if you're a monster. On that note, let's talk about our hero!



KAMEN RIDER DIE: I wonder how Tsukasa can even tell the difference between the normal loathing and distrust he faces, versus the societal-level loathing and distrust he faces here.

SH RANGER: Good point. He did have an angry mob chasing him in the World of Diend, so it's not like this is his first time.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: I guess it's the whistles.

SH RANGER: But the major difference is those people were driven by fear or brainwashing, while the people here genuinely think he's a bad guy and want him out of their world.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: Fair.
I don't know if this one was a great Tsukasa story? It was one of those arcs where he's around for it, but he doesn't really go on much of a journey during it. Amazon's there to be a parallel character, to help express Tsukasa's concerns, but the status quo for Tsukasa doesn't really change over these episodes. Did you feel differently?

SH RANGER: I felt like this was a better arc for his development than the last one, even if it is just him reaffirming a lot of what he already believes. He still shows some surprised reaction, like to Masahiko supposedly defecting from Dai Shocker and thinks about what it means to believe in something strongly, even if it's wrong. I think he finds someone to relate to in Amazon and becomes stronger by seeing his strength and commitment to what he believes is right.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: I guess? It didn't feel like this story tried to pull anything new out of Tsukasa. It sort of interrogates the difference between running away and continuing your journey, but that's never really been Tsukasa's dilemma. He's looking for a place where he belongs, just like Amazon, but (excluding last story's badly written first act) he was never abandoning anything or anyone to get it. In this story, he's... I don't know, he's shaken a bit, but he isn't refining his worldview or coming to new realizations. I didn't feel like we saw any new facets of Tsukasa or anyone else from Team Decade in this story.

SH RANGER: There's a very specific scene in there that I can't go into detail about until you watch the movie, but other than that, I still think there are some new sides to Tsukasa. Like he's suffering from the consequences of this journey, that he's destined to be hated no matter where he travels and even if he meets a chill Rider like Amazon, the world will have something else to throw at him. And hearing from Amazon who traveled across many continents and still never found what he was looking for, it makes him wonder about the futility of his journey. The fear that he's never going to find where he belongs. Even though running away wasn't really in the foreground before, I think that's a part of Tsukasa, where he's getting tired of the journey and never actually feeling like he's moving anywhere.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: I think it's that... I sort of felt like the end of the Heisei Worlds part of the show was the start of Tsukasa's never-ending journey. We were done with the expectation of reward, and now we were going to have a more open-ended story. Even here, Photo Studio Hayao Miyazaki makes a quick joke about the journey being its own reward, and I never thought that was a joke! I thought that was where the show had positioned itself! So coming back on Tsukasa's sense of isolation and desire to find out where he came from... it just didn't feel like what this show was about anymore? It felt like it grew beyond that.

SH RANGER: But the problem of Tsukasa's missing past wasn't resolved at the end of the 9 worlds. Eijirou's right, the journey is more important than the destination, since it's the important morals learned during the journey that bring Tsukasa closer to his destination. And the destination isn't really so much a physical place as it is a new way of thinking about the world. So what Tsukasa's really looking to find is more important than his world, rather it's his identity as Kamen Rider Decade which he's trying so hard to find and secure. You mentioned before that he already found that in the World of Negatives, but I'm not sure we can close the chapter on that. There's still a lot more that Tsukasa has to find on his journey if he can ever feel content with himself and the when of that might be what's getting to him lately. The open-ended nature of this arc is exactly what's making him question himself so much.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: That's a fair interpretation! I don't know if I'm ever going to love how focused Tsukasa is on discovering his past -- and I think various arcs are pretty ambivalent about it -- but it's definitely the mode this show is in now, as evidenced by this arc.
Anything else from this one you felt like touching on? Onodera gets to Henshin, which feels unusual enough to be worth acknowledging.

SH RANGER: I do have about 4 things I'd like to talk about briefly. Since you brought it up, we'll start with the Kuuga action. And not just any Kuuga, but Titan Kuuga! Sure is nice to see Yuusuke getting into the action in this last third of the show.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: It's maybe the only time we've seen Onodera do a Form Change since his debut?

SH RANGER: Yeah, that's what I thought as well.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: I think the last Kuuga Form Change was a Tsukasa one!

SH RANGER: Pegasus in the World of Kabuto, right?

KAMEN RIDER DIE: That's the last one I can think of, yeah.

SH RANGER: So what did you think of the "powered-up" Diend card that Narutaki was hyping up?

KAMEN RIDER DIE: Not much? I assume it's Diend Complete, but there's so little to go on that I put it out of my head as soon as the scene was over. It's insane to me that Narutaki would try to pay off the ENORMOUSLY UNTRUSTWORTHY Kaitou in order to neutralize Decade, but I'm also well past the point of being surprised at Narutaki's nonsensical schemes.
Oh, was it just Illusion? Was that it?

SH RANGER: No, Diend Complete has its own version of the K-touch. The card Narutaki gave him was just the illusion card which he used to steal the Gaga Armlet, before Decade immediately stole it back. So the card really did end up being pretty useless.

KAMEN RIDER DIE: Yeah, it's a power Decade stopped using seven or eight episodes ago.

SH RANGER: And not even that impressive. Kind of like Grease using two Twin Breakers and calling that a power-up.
There are some aesthetic differences with some of the things in the World of Amazon compared to the original. Like how the Gigi and Gaga Armlets are designed to be used together, that's especially literal in the show, where Amazon wears them both on the same arm by attaching them together. How do you feel about the Gaga Armlet's position?

KAMEN RIDER DIE: Hmm. It worked for me? The Armlets weren't really clearly defined here, other than Get Both If You Can. Like, could Amazon not Henshin without it? That's what I assumed was happening.

SH RANGER: He needed the Gigi Armlet to henshin, since his Condoler is just a utility belt. The Gaga Armlet just makes him stronger and you might consider it the Showa equivalent of getting your Final Form. I originally thought it was strange for the OG Amazon to combine the Armlets after expecting him to wear them on both arms, but then I thought it seemed to fit the Incan motif a little better.
This world's version of Jyumenki is also nowhere as terrifying as the original either. I think the aesthetics of Amazon in general are pretty cool for how different it is, but even his modern SIC design can't get the details the way I'd prefer it to be. Do you like the Amazon suit?

KAMEN RIDER DIE: I do, mostly. My experience with that show's aesthetic is definitely filtered through the Amazons version, since that's the show I watched. The main motifs are great, and I love that helmet. The whole thing works, even if I'm partial to the Amazons redesign.

SH RANGER: I personally love the half organic half tech approach of Amazon Omega. Amazons has some good suits.
Anyway I think that's it!

KAMEN RIDER DIE: I appreciate your help on this Amazon story! You're a good friend! (fumbles to make Amazon's hand-motion for Friend) Next stop for Team Decade: RIDER WAR!*

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*PROGRAMMING NOTE - The characters' next stop may be the Rider War, but this thread has a whole bunch of non-episodic Decade content to get through first! I'll be soloing the Summer Movie And Friends content this weekend, with the following schedule:

-Net Movies on Thursday the 14th
-All-Riders Vs Dai-Shocker on Friday the 15th
-HBV on Saturday the 16th

...and then we'll reconnect with Zatyme for the final two episodes of Decade. I think I'll be doing the Decade/W winter movie, just the Decade part, solo for the final Episode Post of the thread.

That's the next couple weeks all charted out! See you then!