[Kamen Rider Die]

SSSS.DYNAZENON EPISODE 8 - “WHAT IS THIS WAVERING EMOTION?”



There’s so much vacillation and uncertainty in Dynazenon generally – it’s a cast of introverted teens, aimless adults, and several literal Millennials who are team-building their way to property damage – but maybe never more so than in this episode. There’s a failed kaiju who just basically exists, and a cast of characters who need to figure out how far they’ll go for each other.

(First, to get this out of the way: I love how Sizumu gets the K.E. out of the way for this one? He’s all about people challenging their limits, and the K.E. can’t do anything with this episode’s kaiju, so he creates a Eugenicists’ Day Out subplot to keep his teammates occupied so that Yomogi can go on a little emotional journey. Sizumu cares about plots that illuminate our heroes!)

It’s a rambling, elliptical story, and if it’s a gear down from the last two-parter’s all-in look at the team’s bonds, it at least puts Yomogi more in the driver’s seat than some previous episodes. Here, he’s finding an emotional connection with a kaiju at exactly the point where he can’t seem to make an emotional connection with Yume, and that allows him a little bit of distance from the normal arc of these things, where an indifferent creature worthy of observation becomes a rampaging creature worthy of elimination. There’s no one really propelling this story – again, the K.E. are bowling, which is amazing – so there’s nothing putting too much pressure on the plot to steer away from Yomogi’s hilarious lack of affect, and his relentlessly open-ended sentences.

I joke about Yomogi being kind of comedically opaque, which can for sure not work for every viewer, but I like how minor and sweet his little plot is with Yume and the kaiju here. Yomogi can’t really talk to Yume in a way that anyone outside of 10th Grade would recognize as “communication”, but he can choose to push past his uncertainty in order to protect her, and that’s maybe more valuable than things like heartwarming speeches, or direct sentences, or verbally communicating your thoughts to a person outside of your own head. (I kid! But he’s kind of Peak Yomogi here, for better or worse.) There’s a tragedy to the destruction of the kaiju, making for a nicely melancholy denouement, but it means that Yomogi’s actions were decisive and considered, which is a kind of character growth for the kid. It wasn’t an easy choice, but he made it for Yume, and he’ll have to carry the weight of it from now on.

All of that said, this was still a goofy-ass episode of Dynazenon, with its now-standard balance of ridiculous nonsense (the kaiju capture scene, completely dumb in the best way) and well-observed mumblecore drama. It leaves itself open to interpretation, which I appreciate, even if this lingering question is driving me insane: why were Yomogi and Yume wearing their school backpacks on a Sunday?!