[Kurona]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

On one hand, I can't look at Aruto's history of flipping out when he sees HumaGears being destroyed throughout the series and even for a moment think him wanting revenge against the person who killed the most important HumaGear in his life is in any way "uncharacteristic", but, on the other hand...

See, I don’t think it’s uncharacteristic that he’d want revenge on Horobi. I don’t think that he’d see Horobi kill the most important person in his life (shallow as their relationship was) and not want to kill him.

I just don’t think he’d have that mindset for more than an hour.

Every single thing we’ve been shown of Aruto portrays him as someone that’s surprisingly well put together and beyond a natural moment of rage is not someone who’s going to think things through and come to the conclusion that he had to kill someone even out of necessity, never mind selfish revenge — this isn’t early Fuwa we’re talking about, or Jin. This is the guy that’s always able to power through it all with a smile on his face, and if there was truly something under there that while time that implied it was a facade? There sure as heck wasn’t any hint of it. Instead this stretch would have you believe his beliefs and ideals are so weak that he’d sacrifice all of them just to kill Horobi, and that doesn’t sound a single thing like the man we’ve been following.

Heck, this is something the writers agree with me on as it wasn’t remotely the direction his character was going to go in until apparently last minute board meetings and decisions forced their hand! I try not to bring development into these discussions as the show should speak for itself, but when this is the case I really can’t help but think on it. This was only a thing they had to do because they needed to rush things along, and otherwise Aruto wouldn’t have been characterised like this — because it’s completely out of character for him.


But even that aside, that wasn’t quite my main point — whether it made sense for his character or not, it’s just not a satisfying way to see the series end. It frankly was rarely about Aruto and him going on a revenge plot is the least interesting thing I can think of for the show to focus on. I mean, aside from the Ark becoming a Kamen Rider, superseding the actually interesting thematically appropriate villain and forcing him to get a half assed parody of a redemption episode. This last stretch is just filled with unearned and downright forced character drama that doesn’t in any way fit into what the show was, and despite some lovely looking fight scenes, despite my desperately wanting to get into it and wanting to believe this ending was a satisfying resolution... it failed spectacularly on every thematic level to me, from humagears being brushed to the side to development being sidelined to Aruto’s actual compelling development of finding his own path in Hiden Manufacturing and 02 being superseded by his ghost dad handing him a driver. Everything in this episode should work, but only if you ignore the entire years worth of episodes that preceded it.