[Fish Sandwich]

It's been quite a while since I last mentioned it, but I did indeed keep going with that rewatch of Zero-One, and having finally worked my way back to the finale at my own leisurely pace, I've got loads and loads of thoughts on this show I'm just itching to share.

This rewatch *did* start out with the goal of checking the quality of Shout's subs, of course, but uh, I kinda think I said all the stuff I need to about that already? They stayed good! To give you a frame of reference for how good, here's a real example of an actual criticism that legitimately popped into my mind at one point in an episode: "I feel like an em dash would give that line a lot more punch than that colon does." You guys get what I'm saying, right? The accuracy and clarity of the dialogue are things I have the luxury of taking for granted, so instead, I get to critique it *as* a proper localization, spending my time worried about really minor bits of character voice or whatever other nuances. Any problems I have with the job Shout did are so small against the larger picture that they just aren't worth bringing up in this general opinion I'm giving. I won't even tell you what colon I was thinking about! Because just like last time I posted about rewatching Zero-One, that isn't actually what I'm most interested in.

I probably don't need to tell people who were there that Zero-One left me and plenty of others with some heavily mixed feelings after that initial arc, so by rewatching the show, what I was really hoping for was to see how my opinion on it had grown and changed since it ended. With how bitter a taste so many aspects of this show left in my mouth at the time, was there any chance of me moving past those feelings? Or would going back through it just remind me all over again why the show rubbed me the wrong way so often? Maybe learning to see the good in even the things I didn't like about it was downright impossible.




Yeah, needless to say, I probably wouldn't come in here if I were planning to say exactly the same kind of stuff I already said back in 2020. I feel like, having the context of the series as a whole now, as well as all the various movies and such that are a part of that, I've gained a much deeper appreciation for everything that gives Zero-One its unique identity as a Rider show. It's a bit hard to know where to start digging into all those new thoughts I've had, between watching the episodes, reading back all my old posts from the time, and making it a point to do some extra Learning by reading all the production blog thingies since I only started doing that with Saber. I've been giving Zero-One an immense amount of thought over the past few months, so I'm just going to pick a place to begin and go from there.

And the place I picked is an episode I found myself particularly impressed with on that second viewing -- episode 36. It was the first proper episode after the show came back from its unexpected hiatus, and marked the start of a big climactic storyline surrounding Ark-Zero. So like, with the debut of a powerful and evil new Rider, you'd think the plot for that one kinda writes itself, you know? Plenty of Rider shows have done this exact dance before. You just need to have Ark show up, say and do menacing things, and have the heroes be completely helpless against him. Rinse and repeat for around a month and a half. All of that happens in episode 36 of Zero-One... but it's not really at the core of the story, as I see it. So what does the story decide to focus on, then?




On the other side of the scenes involving Ark, a huge amount of time is spent on Fuwa's very charmingly petty emotional distress. While events are happening that could plunge the entire world into melodramatic, action-paced chaos, Zero-One decided it was at least as important to show its resident edgy rival Rider pondering his life path and ultimately finding comfort in the knowledge that he's still allowed to be an ordinary mundane person if he ever wants to be. It's weirdly gentle for an episode so late in the game, and I couldn't help but fall in love with that a bit. I need to stress here: this episode isn't like, "the calm before the storm", or anything like that. It wouldn't be unusual for a show to have one last breather right before things get heavier, which is why I think it's maybe remarkable that Zero-One has all this happening *during* the storm. Those screencaps up above, with Fuwa's little moment of clarity and relief? That scene happens right at the end of the episode, immediately prior to him and Aruto confronting Ark-Zero for the first time. So let me ask you -- which one of those scenes is the climax? That's the trick here. What I thought might be a sort of key to the entire show's writing style, and thus why I'm branching out the rest of this post with this as the starting point.

I'm praising episode 36 for putting mundane down-to-earth drama above actual superheroic action and adventure, but if that's what makes an episode of Zero-One great... why was I ever so hard on the competition arc?




Well, I mean, I know exactly why, and looking back through what I had to say at the time, I don't think I said anything that was too off the mark. But what I think is important that, in retrospect, I wasn't paying enough attention to, is not what isn't in those episodes, but what is. The funny thing is, the episodes of the show I consider to be the absolute least "essential", 19 and 20? They're also among my favorite episodes of the entire series, and what's even more hilarious is that 2020 me probably would've said the same thing. Yeah sure, the structure is repetitive to the point both parts have basically the same ending, and there are all the usual issues with old forms only showing up to look pathetic and weak while Thouser steals their powers, which... well, I could go on a whole side-rant about this show's attitude towards old forms, actually. It's another thing that eventually loops back into what this show's priorities are, and why that's not actually a bad thing, so even though I'm complaining for this next bit, it'll become praise again soon enough!

For this one paragraph though, I just want to start by mentioning that Brave Dragon in Saber and Rising Hopper actually have roughly the same number of appearances in their respective shows. That blew my mind the first time I found that out, but that information was key to getting me to more actively understand why exactly Zero-One's early forms feel so forgotten to me. Sure, it's pretty insane that Shooting Wolf disappears for over 20 episodes(!), but there's more to it than that. Going back to what I just said about the Thousand Jacker routine, it's the lack of impressive moments a given suit receives that's the grander issue. Saber went out of its way to use Brave Dragon in plenty of big climactic scenes throughout the series, but scenes like that involving Rising Hopper are much more rare. Lack of screentime in of itself isn't an issue, which is why on the flipside, a form like Orthrus Vulcan still leaves a big impression. But Zero-One, it's heart just isn't really in that kind of stuff? There's a scene in episode 8 where Zero-One, Vulcan, and Valkyrie all transform together for the first time, and only Zero-One is in his base form. I'd be surprised if anyone making the show even understands why I feel it matters what clothes they wore. Heck, maybe you don't care either.

And maybe you'd be right not to! Maybe it's not worth sweating it that much when there's so much else on offer here. The etiquette may not always match up with my expectations, but anyone who's seen the show knows how much effort went into Zero-One's fights. Jun Watanabe breathed so much new life and energy into the show as its action director, and all the various directors of whatever episode sets were making sure to have some properly eye-catching moment or another in there. Heck, Thouser is even one of the best parts of the fight scenes? I honestly adore the Thousand Jacker. It's such a fun thing to watch for every episode and pay attention to which specific powers Gai is using as his arsenal expands with every battle. It's even reflective of his character in a lot of ways too. It's a fighting style that relies on having the intellect to know the right tool for the job, and the way he sucks up the technology of others for his own gain is such a great visual summation of his domineering nature. There's a lot of thought that went into this stuff! I've got plenty of thoughts on all that too, but fighting is secondary right now, because I think it was secondary for the people making the show too.



Why I like 19 and 20 so much, it has very little to do with how much I like the action? There are fun scenes in there, again -- I certainly like the final showdown between Zero-One and the Whale Raider. But the meat of what I remember, a lot of it is wrapped up in the guys under those suits. I love the two-parter for how it puts at the forefront the way Aruto's ideal of running a company always puts the customer first, for better or worse, and for how fantastically realized Arayashiki is as an antagonist. Having two episodes worth of space means you end up with this really fleshed out guest character who is complex enough to be both a smarmy villain and a pitiable man who lost his way in life, that might even deserve a chance at redemption. And that kind of characterization is a thing *all* over the competition arc. The stories are constructed in a way that tends to actively avoid making things totally black and white. Humagears and humans alike have hearts that contain the capacity for both good and evil, and that thematic exploration is deeply relevant to the overall series. I spent so much time being frustrated just because an episode didn't advance the Plot or whatever enough for me that I somehow missed this back when the show was airing. Not all of those episodes propel the story forward or result in instant, major growth for the main characters, but I think it was pretty shortsighted of me to think that meant they had nothing to contribute to the whole. Especially because the main thing they're contributing is the thing that makes me love Zero-One the most.



Zero-One, it's a show that's meant to get you thinking, you know? I think I've said this before somewhere, but I really do respect the heck out of that. And reading back through those pages on Toei's website for the show, it gave me a new appreciation for how much that meant to Zero-One's chief producer, Takahito Oomori. Week after week, you can tell from the blurbs he wrote that he was always the most enthusiastic about the idea of presenting children with all these different careers, especially. He talks excitedly about working with actual professionals from those fields for anything from advice to big collaborations. When it comes time to hype up episode 38, he only wants to talk about how cool it was to do an episode with an honest-to-goodness AI actor in the form of a robot dog Sony lent them. I have to imagine a lot of this enthusiasm also goes back to being the chief producer on the Rider show about doctors, but either way, I genuinely admire Oomori's passion here.

There's also a thing I believe Oomori said in some discussion or another after the show ended that I've only ever heard secondhand, but the thought has always stuck with me ever since. It was when he admitted how much difficulty they had working in the fight scenes naturally during the competition arc. That was something that drove me insane week after week, but for whatever reason, as soon as I heard the show's own staff say it was an issue, it became the spark for me reevaluating those episodes. Like, if you wrote episodes of Kamen Rider with plots that accidentally failed to truly require fight scenes... isn't that kind of precious?

I mean, one of my all-time favorite Rider shows is Kuuga, the one that always strived to be about more than just violence, and in its own way, Zero-One might be following in those footsteps more than most Riders. It's a series that wants viewers to really consider stuff like the future of technology, how a society functions and all the different parts people can play in it, the ways the experiences we have with others shape who we become, and just... ALL this stuff, and for at least one entire story arc, making sure the kids were wowed by the action ended up having to take a backseat to that. And with how consistently well considered and engaging Zero-One's themes are, I feel kinda bad about asking for more than that!

What's more is that the weird way fights ended up working in Zero-One actually directly connects to why the show's finale was as great as it was. It was only because this show created this odd set of rules where Riders can beat on each other in a way that's sort of disconnected from the stakes of the narrative that we got a final battle where the visual spectacle of two guys fighting represented them reconciling their differences. In *any* other show, that would sound completely unintuitive. But here it makes perfect sense. You've got a beautiful final storyline where the hero is his own final boss, and his ultimate triumph is in realizing that him and the villain need each other to save themselves from their own worst impulses. As much as we all questioned Oomori's overzealous claim that it would be different from any other Rider ending before it... it actually is pretty dang one-of-a-kind? Like, even Ghost still needed a monster to blow up after that hug, so I'm kind of astounded by what Zero-One managed to pull off with its last arc. Of course, if I start digging into how brilliant those four episodes are, this post is only going to get even longer.



When I chose this line to end off my original post about the finale, there was a deeper significance to it than I elaborated on. Like I said, I was pretty bitter about Zero-One at the time. It had become a very frustrating series for me over time, and even after actively trying to appreciate that I even got to watch it at all once it came back from that hiatus, it was hard to let go of that negativity. I was adoring the last few episodes, thankfully, but I didn't really know if I'd ever be able to forgive everything that happened in the middle... right up until I got to this very scene. To this day, I can think of few instances where I've felt more in-sync with the emotions of characters on-screen. It was a little profound, watching Aruto and Horobi realizing all they ever had to do with all that malice was throw it away, at the exact moment I realized the same thing. I felt the weight coming off their shoulders because I felt it coming off of my own. The negativity just evaporated. All that stuff in the past was finally *in* the past, and I could move forward, the same way they could.

Which I guess brings me back to now, where Zero-One is somewhat inexplicably the first show released by Shout I've actually made it a point to watch in full. I just really like Zero-One, apparently. Considering my outright obsession with the show that followed it, it's extra impressive it's stayed with me the way it has. As long as this post has gone on, it's still 1000% insufficient for me to describe how much I enjoy this world, these characters, and those stories. Like, there are even some entire mini-raves I planned to put in here about some stuff that I didn't end up fitting in at all. In retrospect, I probably should've just been posting regularly as I was going through the show. I guess there's always next time. And hey, I've actually still got some movies to go back through, so I've got that chance coming right up, at the very least. But for now, I definitely wanted to get some updated broad opinions on the series out there. Zero-One's a cool show, and I'm still really happy to see it get an official release over here so soon after it aired. I don't know if Shout's work has actively been attracting that many new fans or not, but if people end up finding Rider as a whole through Zero-One, well then, that's just one more reason for me to like it.