[Kamen Rider Die]

SSSS.DYNAZENON EPISODE 9 - “WHAT ARE THESE OVERLAPPING EMOTIONS?”



I like a show that meets me where my interests are, especially because I often feel like I’m watching these shows… not wrong, exactly, but definitely outside of the intended usage. So to get an episode that not only features Chise so prominently, but to also explicitly state that the point of the team is to look out for each other emotionally first, and to defeat kaiju second? That’s an incredibly kind gesture, and it makes me feel less alone.

Which is sort of the whole thing for this episode! Being grateful for what you have in your group of friends, and letting them be a shield for you when things get tough, or catch you when you fall. (Goldburn makes those last two nicely literal, to drive the point home.) Chise’s been on the outside plenty in her life, and it’s sort of killing her to be the most vestigial and overlooked member of the Dynazenon team. (To the other teammates, not to me. I would never overlook the best character on the show!) To have Yume casually disregard Chise’s intervention as none of Chise’s business, when Chise is both a friend and a teammate, is the last straw for a girl who’s been trying to put a sunny face to her frustration and neglect. Worse, it’s Yume thinking she’s alone and isolated when that couldn’t be further from the truth – Yomogi rushes back to save her when Gauma points out that she might be in real emotional trouble – and it’s frustrating to Chise to have Yume not see the strength she can draw on from her friends, and the ways that her strength has changed people like Yomogi for the better. Chise is the semi-ridiculous voice of the audience, begging Yume to see that she’s got people in her life that will not let her turn out like Kano, and that that sort of end for her isn’t inevitable.

The rest of the episode paves a nice road to get to that Yume/Chise scene, and an exciting battle in the aftermath, but it’s not really where my mind is at. I really loved the Chise/Goldburn stuff, because it’s a goofy Magical Pet story that speaks to Chise’s unaddressed tragic back story, and her need to be seen (that dream sequence!!!) when no one really makes time for her. And I liked the open-ended Futaba interrogation, where he’s clearly avoiding his own culpability because he’d rather view himself in the present than grapple with his actions in the past; the inverse of Yume’s struggle here. I wish I had anything of substance to say about the big new robot configuration, but if you’ve read more than three sentences of anything I’ve ever posted on TokuNation, you know that it just sort of washed over me without much more than basic endorphins being released by an elaborate transformation and the theme song’s mid-episode redeployment.

But that scene in the middle, where the girl who wants to be scene has to save the girl who wants to vanish? That’s the stuff for me, and I’m glad it was the stuff for the production team as well.