[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER REVICE HYPER-BATTLE VIDEO: SAY HELLO TO THE SECONDARY RIDER!



I love how nerdy this thing got.

Revice was a show that was ostensibly about the 50-year history of Kamen Rider, but got way less visibly celebratory as the series went on. The early form changes are all History Of Kamen Rider (well, Heisei Rider, mostly), but once we get to Barid Rex, we’re pretty much just doing suits that accentuate and elaborate on Revice’s themes and aesthetic. There’s for sure still elements at play that pay homage to the whole franchise – Androzani’s been doing a heroic job detailing them all – but they’re not really the focal point of the story. Revice grew out of that phase, for better or worse.

So it’s nice to have one last little goof-off HBV special for the anniversary season, where the Igarashi Extended Family spends ten minutes bickering over which of them, if any, is the season’s Secondary.

That is possibly the most specifically nerdy Kamen Rider discussion for a special to ever take part in, and it’s one that everybody in the fandom has fallen prey to at least once. (The biggest offender is probably Blade, but I can imagine that the topic came up occasionally in Geats discussion.) We all have this vocabulary we’ve cobbled together to help organize our thoughts on Kamen Rider, and it sometimes makes us miss the forest for the trees. Trying to decide if Daiji or Kagerou or Hiromi or Vice is the Secondary is maybe a square peg in a round hole. It’s not how these shows are probably made anymore, and the distinction doesn’t affect the story being told. It’s nerd trivia, and it’s not really talking about art.

But, shit, I love indulging in trivia on occasion, so I was super into the baffling logic and surprising evasions of this episode’s dip in the Nerd Waters. The eventual reveal of Ikki being the Secondary to Genta’s Primary is deliciously absurd while still being logical, and god bless Ikki for trying not to seem absolutely crushed by the consensus of the group. I’d maybe’ve clarified that Evil is an antagonist Rider, and Live is his Secondary, but everything else was spot on and probably a real debate that happened on Japanese Twitter.

Beyond that, this thing had the usual gigantic pile of bizarre details I come to HBVs for: The alternate Ikki, Daiji, Sakura, Hiromi, and Vice are, respectively, a Fenix officer, a three-year old, an anaconda, a monk, and a rice cooker; the main villain is werewolf who has already turned 80% of his world into puppies; and the actual editor of TV-Kun shows up to tell Ikki that Revice can’t be the Secondary because they’ve got magazines to sell.

I don’t know that this one ended up saying anything about Secondary Riders, nor was it maybe aiming to. I think they just wanted to have a stupid, circular argument about arbitrary designations, and that’s it. REVICE IS FOR THE FANS!



Note: I was not planning on doing the second HBV tonight, but then I found out that my copies – and, I guess, all copies – of the Revice Anime and first TTFC stage show weren’t subbed. Sorry! Maybe someday someone’ll get around to subbing them, and I can come back and talk about them!