[Kurona]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

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.

Aaaah, you went ahead and spoiled it! I was gonna wait until the end of the series to tell him that

Either way, yeah, that's something I learned recently too and lead me to massively recontextualise everything I felt about Ryuki and everything I thought I knew about it. It's why even though it didn't do much for me, I now have reams of respect for what it was trying to do and how it went about it, and what I said in the post just above is part of that.

And just to connect it to something else in your post: knowing all this now actually made me feel super guilty about what I said about it being a show made before Kobayashi really nailed down her 'touch', and what made her writing special. Like, first of all the general direction and conclusion of the show were not even majorly up to hers, for starters; but second of all the context of the time really does do a lot to show why particular writers wanted to tell a particular type of story.

All the stuff I loved about OOO and Toqger and Shinkenger and Den-O, about knowing what the right thing is but struggling to do that and struggling to live up to an ideal? Of the flaws associated with being a self-sacrificial saint; of falling into darkness when striving for the light; of losing everything important to you despite desperately trying to hold on... but still being able to come through the end of the tunnel just fine, with your altruism and your dedication to your loved ones holding strong against everything that tries to do it in? A lot of that is still present within Ryuki -- and the parts of it that aren't present, the parts that I felt were most important, aren't missing because Kobayashi hadn't figured it out yet; they're missing because they wouldn't be appropriate for this type of story.

It's like... it still hasn't changed my opinion of what Ryuki means to me on a personal level. It's good to know why I feel that way - a story about different ideals of justice clashing and questioning what is truly right works well for a 9/11 fallout and the type of things they want kids to think about, but naturally that means it won't resonate well with me in the type of world I currently live in and the problems the modern day has presented me with. But what it has changed is that I now entirely get where Ryuki was coming from, and it gives me a hell of a lot more respect for it and everyone involved!