[Fish Sandwich]

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Originally Posted by Kurona

On one hand, I love that I'm yet again finding more good things to say about Ryuki. On the other hand, man, this is gonna be a long month or two of Fish basically taunting me with the same message over and over, huh?

Well it won't be if you ruin the fun by calling me out on it! No. Bad. Do less of that.

In all seriousness, though, I just sincerely hope this thread continues to have the effect of getting you to realize you like Ryuki more than you thought, because you've said before Kobayashi shows have had a tendency to become your favorites only after some distance.

And the thing is, I totally get that. Not only did it take me way too long to realize just how special OOO is, but reading your post after you finished Ryuki about how maybe she just hadn't figured out her style yet, which I instinctively disagreed with, got me thinking back on her first head writer credit, Gingaman, a show that left me underwhelmed enough when I had finished watching it, I think I called it my least favorite Sentai.

Having that occasion to think back on the kinds of characters in that show, and the way their flaws and conflicts were constructed, made me realize just how much of that identity was there right away. The thing that I think most defines Kobayashi's tokusatsu work, besides the humanity anyway (that was there too though), is how she loves to subvert normal aspects of the genre, without necessarily being overly critical or deconstructive, but still asking the viewer to consider things they might not have thought of. And Gingaman, I realize now, was a Showa throwback that had plots that occasionally played out in ways almost antithetical to how a Showa series would handle them.

So everything that makes her a great writer, I mean, I still haven't seen Timeranger, but I'm pretty sure even by Ryuki, she knew the kind of stories she wanted to write.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

My compliments to the director!

I won't blame you if you don't internalize this information right away (I didn't start remembering director names myself until only like a year ago), but for the record, 13 and 14 were by Ryuuta Tasaki, an insanely prolific director for almost the entire Heisei era. You have seen/are seeing/will see his work a ton. I'm not sure he has a particular "thing" the way some others do, but he's certainly got plenty of talent.

It's worth noting his first work on Rider was Agito's premiere, which prompted you to specifically comment on how much nicer it looked than a lot of Kuuga. That stylish shot of Shouichi and Ryou brushing past each other? That was him.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Other people've mentioned it, but this story really lays out the advantages of the shades of grey the show is painting with, story-wise. Maybe it's just watching society collapse around me in real time whenever I read the news these last few days, but Ryuki's playing the There Are No Good Choices card a lot so far. There's this real sense that show isn't explicitly judging Ren or Kitaoka any more than it's judging Quarter or Shinji. Things like Hope and Survival and Desire and Freedom, these things transcend "good" and "evil". It's more fulfilling, more complex if a show can grapple with competing wants and needs, rather than simplistic morality. There's a lot more stories you can tell if everyone's some degree of screwed.

Hey, how about even more trivia? According to Ryuki's Japanese Wikpedia page (which I'm loosely summarizing here), when the show was in the planning phase, the television station apparently specifically requested a show that had very clearly defined heroes and villains, in an attempt to teach children the true meaning of justice, in response to the 9/11 attacks.

The thing is, producer Shinichirou Shirakura didn't go along with it, realizing that going that direction would basically be saying "the justice you kids believe in is fake, and we know what real justice is", which would just be problematic. He then proceeded to expand on Agito's theme of exploring that everybody has their own idea of what's right, this time tossing in a bunch of extra Riders so that, unlike Agito, viewers couldn't simply come to the conclusion that "Kamen Rider is right".

At least I'm pretty sure I'm reading all that correctly? Someone correct me if I'm wrong. This is all news to me too (I only went and checked because I remember hearing the 9/11 thing once), but it does seemingly confirm what I've suspected forever, that Ryuki was the first Heisei show to call the Riders "Kamen Rider" in-series specifically because it wanted viewers to think about what that meant.