[Locke]

Final thoughts now I have completed Gavv. Sorry if this is a little long, once I get going it is hard to stop!

As I said before, to me, Gavv lacks a clear focus and a driving engine, but you'll love these characters so much and be so engaged within their arcs, that you won't notice at first how static the world is around them. It is only really in the back half of the show, where the world now also needs to shift into gear, arcs need to start culminating and threads need to start paying off that it becomes so obvious the show has kinda been going largely nowhere this whole time.

There are far worse offenders in this regard in other shows, but it almost hurts more here cause I really loved Gavv during the first half, and even during its messiest moments in the back half I still think the show is pretty wonderful, I just wish they gave the writing room a few more draft attempts before shooting.

The first half in a lot of ways is a fairly a-typical Rider show, that once again does the ‘oh we may look silly on the surface, but this is actually a really dark story!’ thing. But thanks to the core cast of loveable characters and the tangible chemistry they share, the show just sings. There is this intangible magic to everything, break it down to its base parts and I am sure you could be critical of plenty, but there is something about the whole here, and how that whole is executed. There is just this energy, this joy, to everything that is hard to define, but you can just feel the love that went into this show radiating out of every part of this.

I loved the show’s primary message about recognising that being who you are should not be seen as something forbidden and happiness is about finding others who will love you for who you really are, flaws, secrets, mistakes and all. This show got me legit tearing up quite a few times, it is so far beyond the sort of shounen cheesy melodrama we see in lesser Rider shows.

In lesser hands, this show’s overriding message may have devolved into a lazy 'traditionalism vs. liberalism' narrative, but this notion is shattered quickly by the fact the cold, corporate Granuto world accepts Jeebh’s fluid approach to gender identity without question.

Identity does not mean value. Like what a crazy, powerful, message that is. And one that the villains believe in as much as anyone else.

In fact, more than anyone, it is one of our heroes in Hanto who has to let go of the most internalised prejudice. Watching his relationship grow with Shouma, and in turn Rakia, it is just so good man. Such special stuff.

The whole show operates in a refreshing grey area when it comes to its themes and conversations. If the show is going to take you somewhere, it is going to have something to say. We aren’t just pointing at problems here.

It tackles all sorts of things like arranged marriage, class divides, the cycle of violence (and maybe more vitally, the cost required to break it), addiction and the need to impress our parents at the expense of our own lives and happiness (which probably hits home harder for Japanese audiences than it does almost anywhere else).

But yeah. The pacing. It doesn't ruin the show but it isn't... good. And again, I have seen much worse in other shows, but I still think it is bad enough here to talk about it. Cause and effect was seemingly not given nearly enough thought during the development phase and it hurts the final leg of this as it seems more focused on trying to land the plane, than really to truly deliver anything all that great.

It is like the back half of the show focuses on all of the wrong things, so many interesting plotlines are set up, and if not fully abandoned, they disappear for massive chunks of the show, so the show can just introduce more and more stuff, constantly delaying paying off the stuff we really care about, until it practically runs out of time and lands on a sort of half ending.

I also think the villains are the biggest weakness of this show, but a big part of this is again a pacing problem. For how important they are to the actual story, and for how personal each member of the Stomach Family is to our core cast, they simply spend far too much of the show in the background doing not a lot, and flame out far too quickly when the show decides to finally utilise them.

This approach is fine if you are some faceless corpo style villain who is doing shadowy things in the background, building to that inevitable showdown down the road, but these villains aren’t strangers to our protagonists, they are core to the story, but aren’t used like they are and I just think it is a waste.

I just wish we could have learnt more about the Stomach Family, and seen them play a more active role in the show, working together. I wish we could have learned really anything about the Granuto world, beyond the vaguest hints. I wish I could understand why the Suga (and Zombie Suga), Bitter Clones and the Hunty body modification arcs existed at all, since they take up a huge amount of the show’s running time, and could practically all be removed and nothing about the show would change. Well in fact, the show would get better if they did this, because then it would give them room to pay off things that actually matter.

But honestly, in the end, all I know is this show brought me such happiness. And now the show is over, I feel a hole in my heart where this show used to be. It fills me with such bittersweet sadness to know I will never get to experience any new stories with these characters again, but I feel so grateful to have ever gotten to spend time with these characters at all.

If that doesn’t show how much I loved this show, I am not sure what else will. And wouldn't it be me betraying the hopeful core message of Gavv to shun it for it's flaws, rather than embrace it in all of it's beautiful messiness?