[Kurona]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

The parental abuse story elements... I don't want it to sound like there needs to be a strict, logical reason to abuse two children. (The fact that I had to write that sentence at all is not my proudest moment.) That's something that by its nature is inexplicable. It's more that that level of abuse is not the sort of thing you just toss in at the end of a superhero show for children. That is a gigantic premise that is almost insulting to use as thematic mortar. I think they're playing with fire, narratively.

Aaah, now I think I get you better! Yeah, that's fair; that makes sense. It's the whole idea of it being something super significant that they just sort of said and swept to the side... I can get that. Think I agree with you honestly.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

The idea of the reset being a better version of these characters, I can see it a little bit... but then Asakura's there, being a violent asshole? It's like everyone's back, but no one's really better? They'll be safer, for sure (well, again: Asakura), but that's the only real advantage they have. It's mildly optimistic, a second chance for characters who doomed themselves, but that's at best implied, at worst inferred.

And I don't dislike the use of a story reset at the end of a story. I mean, Build! Build used it perfectly! Here, it doesn't really feel grown out of the story they were telling. It feels... incongruent? It feels like an emotional choice that they're struggling to rationalize.

Or maybe that's just me!

See, I think that's to its benefit as well! It's not an overwhelmingly positive new start; there's still terrible things there; and there's no guarantee things will go better.

Which... good. Ryuki's a series that plays with very realistic settings (alongside a guy in a green jumpsuit summoning his robot minotaur of death but, y'know. Relative terms.), realistic stakes, and realistic characters. It's not going to pretend that if The Big Very Bad Thing didn't happen then everything would go all right, and everyone would make the right choices, and that there wouldn't be monsters out there doing very real very terrible things. And to me that gives a few positive outcomes here:-

A) Once again, it asks the viewer what sort of world they want. This isn't a new perfect world made just for you where everything will go well: this is your second chance. This is asking the viewer to do things right, considering all the conflict and circumstances they've just seen in the series and how it relates to the real world.

B) It makes the viewer much more aware of how these people could exist in real life; how real their struggles are and how they exist beyond the realms of how they interact with a fantasy world where they're trying to kill monsters.

C) ... The idea of "Even without catastrophe, the world was never perfect or without its evils to defeat" is. An extremely mature and brave message to put out there for a series that was made as a response to 9/11.




That's basically where I'm at with the ending. It's not trying to say "now that the mirror world stuff is gone, everything is okay!". It's instead saying "now that the mirror world stuff is gone, what have you learned, what else is out there and what can you do to make the world a better place?"

After all, that's kind of what Shinji was all about. While definitely one of the most naive and more foolhardy main Riders, he wasn't exactly thinking that the world was perfect before he ran into his first Mirror Monster. He was a journalist; albeit a rookie and an assistant in his field, but he was still seeing every day what other terrible shit was happening in the world and even if he was doing it one minor step at a time, he was always trying to do what he felt was the best way to help people. He was always a hero trying to do his best in this world; Rider Deck or not.