[DreadBringer]

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Yeah, the more Kamen Rider I watch, the more I feel drawn to the characters over the spectacle. (Which is not to say I dislike the spectacle. I love it when monsters explode! It's my favorite thing about most monsters.) At a point, the suits and monsters and explosions... it's not repetitive, exactly, but it's, like, the language of Kamen Rider, of tokusatsu. How you use that language to say something, to tell a story about people, that's what makes it unique and worth exploring.

To me, the flaw of the beginning of Ghost (and basically all of Wizard) is that the emphasis was so heavy on the Rider elements that it was tough see what they were trying to say about their hero. Without a day job or a hobby or some non-monster-exploding aspect to his character, Takeru didn't feel as fleshed out as, say, Shinnosuke or Emu. The best shows, or at least the ones that've worked best for me, explore more facets of their hero than just When Does He Henshin So Something Can Happen.

Plus, and Ghost was super guilty of this in the beginning, you need those other facets of a character to generate stories. If the only way a story starts is to have a monster attack, that's going to get old in a hurry. You need stories to generate internally as well as externally. Fourze was great at that, where you could have weird Zodiart stuff, but also just have one or two KRC members have a personal problem they need to solve. If a hero is solely reactive, never proactive, it's tough to keep coming up with fun stories to tell.

I remember that someone gets mad over someone/something not related to Riders/monsters being one of the focus on the story in a KR series and had a passionate hatred for it, so I think normally people like it when a toku is even formulaic as long as it's all about Riders/monsters. But nah I can never be like that, instead formulaic toku doesn't interest me. I think it's unfair to hate the non-toku stuff/characters just because they are more mundane.

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It's legit a flaw in Kamen Rider, sure. I think ever show I've watched has a form or two where it's like, the hero worked so hard to get that form and they haven't used it in a dozen episodes. (Agito, like, I don't know if that dude used his Sword Form for anything in the second half of the show. Did he get some new Henshin-Only Retrograde Amnesia?)

Specifically, with the beginning of Ghost, there was such a rush to get new EyeCons that, while a given power was crucial to defeating an episode's monster, it was just One More Collectible after that. It... it didn't feel additive to the story, if that makes sense. I didn't feel like it was an achievement that empowered the hero, so much as it felt like ticking something off a checklist. That's not how I want the character's power levels to work!

Weirdly, I think Ghost eventually did the best job of reincorporating the early EyeCons into something relevant to its protagonist. (The show did a lot of work in its later episodes to redeem some of the terrible, terrible choices of the first dozen episodes.) There's, if memory serves, a whole story devoted to Takeru telling the original EyeCons that they have value. That's a sweet idea, and it's a nice acknowledgement from the show that the incessant power creep of Kamen Rider can minimize accomplishments if left unchecked.

This is also part of the reason why I check the story/character in KR primarily, because many of the fights or form performance (fighting style, finisher, etc.) disappoints me. The many devices collected are actually to sell more things to kids tbh. But I also want for those powers to be used beautifully and maximized.

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Me not liking them, it's all about how the first third-or-so of the show used them, which is to say to drive me insane with rage. Onari was only a fumbling, mugging idiot. Akari was only a stubborn skeptic. The show started to move them out of those roles as the series progressed, evolving them with new shading and some great character pairings. (The Javert stuff is, like, the thesis statement for Why Onari Doesn't Suck.) I feel like any defense of them as characters, any warm feelings folks have about them, that's all from the back-half of the show. At the start, though, Akari and Onari really don't work.

Thanks for letting me think and talk about this show! I hope I made any sense! My memories on this show are not, uh, crystal clear. Still, I do remember enjoying this show eventually, and I hope my criticisms of Ghost and its cast (Takeru, Onari, Akari, Ankh, Miu, and Accel) don't feel unwarranted. Thanks again!

Probably the lesson here is that first part doesn't sum up anything. Especially that many journeys are about developments of people.