[GoldenXtreme]

I watched Kamen Rider Black Sun! This might be the most conflicted I've ever felt over a Kamen Rider show.

This show is depressing, bleak even. The violence is extreme. The delicate social issues tackled with the tact of a wrecking ball. Before I really dig into it I should say that ultimately I came out more impressed than disappointed (at least I think so), though not necessarily by a huge margin. Also, I have a feeling I'll be repeating a lot of opinions that have already been said by others, but I'll say them anyways!

On a basic visual level, the show is striking. Major combatants have cool suits and cool fights, even if they aren't used super heavily. Minor kaijin have basic designs reminiscent of guys in animal masks, which seems intentional to me, as a way to emphasize how barely different they are from normal humans. I'm pretty happy on this front!

This show's narrative and themes are a very mixed bag to say the least. I know everyone has already talked numerous times about how little this show cares for subtlety. Discrimination is bad, and I do feel it is a valid point to drive home just how awful and pervasive it can be. Yet at the same time, it loses so much nuance about what makes discrimination so insidious. Like yes, at times you will see a blatant bigot who makes you wonder what century they crawled out of, but more pervasively it is actually people who act on their prejudices in more minor ways or who hurt others out of ignorance. We see basically none of this in the show, kaiju discrimination is always directly in the viewers face when I think there was plenty of room to show both. Heck, in a show aimed so squarely at adults it feels extra strange they didn't want to explore it more in-depth. The kaiju themselves fall into a strange situation where they have an amalgamation of characteristics of numerous minorities. Some parts play like racial minorities, some more like sexual minorities, and just about anything else you can imagine. I think there is a healthy dose of burakumin social commentary in there even! But the issue is, these different groups have numerous nuances to their persecution that differ from each other and when the show just picks random aspects to play up at different times it doesn't create a cohesive whole. Sometimes kaijin are treated like a visible minority and immediately cast out from a public area even though it is entirely unclear how "normal" humans can tell they are different when untransformed. At other points no one notices them. Lots of stuff like that. Once you add in the further confounding factor that all the kaijin are actually artificially made biological weapons and you just reach a point where the commentary isn't really applicable to anything in real life yet also takes so much from real life that it can't stand on it's own. Even beyond the handling of the kaiju, the plot is odd. The dual time periods is reminiscent of KR Kiva and is similarly disorienting. There is just a general, vaguely inexplicable aura surrounding the whole thing since the show regularly decides to leave important details unexplained for long periods of time and sometimes just doesn't explain things at all.

The ending is particularly infamous it seems, though it actually wasn't quite as bad as I expected. Nothing changes, humans (and kaijin, who are human themselves) are doomed to eternal conflict, as injustice is something that has to be battled forever... Though Aoi indoctrinating a random girl into her child soldiers just like Nobuhiko has previously done to tragic effect was pretty questionable. I get the message they were going for but I don't think this was a great way to do it.

Aoi was pretty great overall, even if the ending bit was questionable. You really gotta admire her drive. There were so many moments where she did something so unconventional for a heroine of the genre, and that made her always fascinating to watch. She's the real protagonist vs Kotaro who does... very little relevant to the actual themes of the story. His relationship with Aoi is kinda cute at least. Which does kind of come back around to the point of "why make this Black related again?" I think the story would have been helped if it didn't have to work around existing Black material. I don't even feel mad that it was a disrespect to the original show or anything like that, I just think the connection was actively to this show's detriment.

I uh... feel like I complained a lot. But the show was weird and gritty and strange in a way that made me ultimately glad I watched it even if I wouldn't call it "good". There were moments that were genuinely haunting, like Shunsuke's horrible yet mundane death at the hands of a lynch mob. I think the show had it's heart in the right place, discrimination sucks and people should be upset about it and fight it instead of giving in to apathy. Faltering and imperfect as it may be, this show is yet another stepping stone in our history, forging towards an unknown future. I genuinely don't think we'll see another one like it, this show is plenty divisive in English but Japan seems to HATE it. Anyways, sorry this review was as meandering as the show's storytelling! (Okay, okay, I'll stop.)