[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER HIBIKI VOLUME 10 - "ONI ALIGNED"



"There's a black light glowing
At the center of the world
And I'm losing my sight
There's a black balloon imploding
At the center of the world
Full of nothing tonight"

-Portastatic, "Center Of The World"

I think I see what they were going for in the Asumu storyline?

Asumu lives a pretty sheltered life, notwithstanding being involved in the battle against mythic monsters. (He's a teenaged boy in Tokyo! It's assumed that he'll be involved in some amount of monster battling!) He's loved by his mother, included by his friends, and mentored by Hibiki. Things are pretty smooth for him.

But then there's shoplifters, and anger, and violence, and the world seems to be a much darker place. Monsters are scary, but their terror has a context. People being awful, being cruel... that's just something Asumu can't comprehend. He's suddenly in a world that seems too dark to interact with.

It comes to a head after he tries to escape. He bikes out to a field, and watches a soccer game. The players bicker and fight, letting minor disagreements explode into raised fists. It's everything he feared, confirmed. The world is awful, and the people in it are all capable of cruelty.

But then Hitomi calls. She bikes out to him, bringing him a snack. She's not mad at him for missing the movie. Truthfully, she slept through it. She'll go see it again with Asumu, some time.

It's the flipside of Ichiro's lesson that, yeah, everyone has the capacity for darkness. But they also have the capacity for goodness. The soccer players brawl on the field during the game, but they shake hands and laugh at the end. Some asshole almost punched Asumu in the face, but Hitomi cared enough to bike out and cheer him up. The world is complicated, and so are the people in it.

It's a nice story, honestly. It's very sweet.

It's also bizarrely applied and completely disconnected from the Kamen Rider stuff this episode. (I mean, yeah, the moral of "there are both good and evil in the world" could be applied to the Rider storyline here, but it could also be applied to every Rider storyline on every Rider show forever, so I'm going to fall back on saying it's disconnected.) The Rider stuff here is about Hibiki and Ibuki teaming up to defeat... Gamera, basically, and if there's a theme in there, I'm not really seeing it.

Even for Asumu's story... I'll more or less give it a pass, since it's shot so well. (A whole lot of shooting in ways that box Asumu in! It's a very cool motif!) There's a sequence of Asumu racing away on his bike that's so poignant and beautiful that I'm not sure I even care if the rest of the story makes sense. And, I'm not sure it really does. Asumu having, like, an existential crisis after witnessing two teenagers shoplift, I don't know. It's a lot. If this plot had stayed on Asumu feeling self-loathing or anger over his inability to stand up for himself and/or call out wrongdoing, I can see where that fits into his character. What's here feels like a storyline for a much younger character, not a 15-year old who I would think has less naivete about man's capacity for evil. (If this teenage boy has never dealt with bullies or jerks at any time in his life, I think he needed to go through this story.) It's a very well-done version of an idea that doesn't feel nuanced enough to be worth two episodes of this show.

The Kamen Rider part, though! God DAMN!

First, they're hitting that nostalgia button hard by having Ibuki and Hibiki meet up outside the decommissioned BOARD base from Blade, before transitioning to what looks like the big bike locale from that early Kuuga episode where Kuuga motorcycles all over a building, and then finishing at Kamen Rider Dam. It's a very cool group of sets, more surprising for being on a show that's largely eschewed old locations.

The team-up itself is a blast. It's fun to dig into the themes and metaphors of these shows, but I am not immune to the charms of two superheroes working together to detonate monsters. I got those interests, too! And this episode doesn't disappoint in that regard, with great teamwork leading to a rousing finale. Ibuki's able to use his ranged attacks to bring down and stun Off-Brand Gamera, giving Hibiki the opportunity to finish it off with Blazing Dance Chain Style. (It's the standard Hibiki finisher, despite the cool name.) There's honestly not a lot to talk about with their team-up, since they immediately start working together and have zero friction, outside of Hibiki forgetting to tell Ibuki that he can drive a bike, but he can't stop a bike. It's a very cute moment! The rest of it is very awesome, though. Simple pleasures, sometimes.

This was maybe not the best two-parter Hibiki's done to date. The Asumu stuff is a long way to go for a plot that needed to be more complicated to be worth its time, while the Rider stuff is competently (occasionally thrillingly) executed action that isn't really saying anything. It's an Asumu plot that needed to be more visceral, and a Rider plot that needed to be more thoughtful. Maybe if they'd bothered to link them up, this wouldn't've been a problem!