[dreamcastegirl]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kurona

It wasn't taking the stage of Kamen Rider and using it to tell a random unconnected story that would be as much as out of place in Super Sentai or Ultraman or Metal Heroes as it would here; but instead, Ryuki is very emphatically about Kamen Rider. The inspiration for the show at the time was what the effects of 9/11 had had on society, the deep unsettlement it brought and the way it forced people to view their ideals.

Kurona, I take my imaginary hat off to you. I genuinely knew nothing of this. Thank you so much for framing this in such a thoughtful and interesting manner, I really, really appreciated reading this. Having said that, I still don't necessarily like the show, per se, but I feel more charitable about it, as without context, all I saw it as was 50 episodes of missing the point, and had not realised there was an intent to such an approach. This, I imagine, is the danger of avoiding a show for 19 years because they are not explicit in their intent, and the aftereffects of it attempting to be wedged back into a multipurpose franchise where it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Your post helped me appreciate the context, which I really appreciate, but it also makes me mildly sad in a way that I haven't been able to enjoy the show without that additional context, and I feel as if that says something about both the show and sadly about me. I hark on a lot about Death of the Author whenever it comes to media, possibly because I am all too aware of my "problematic faves" when it comes to music, literature et al., and I absolutely believe that such a thing is super important, that a story should live and die by what is in the "text" of the narrative, but at the same time it's difficult when we begin discussing stuff outside of the time in which it was made, the events that the work was a reaction to, and I think that Ryuki maybe suffers from that. Possibly there is no greater example of Death of the Author than in the way some/many of us, during the early post-internet boom of file-sharing discovered Japanese media as more than just, say, dubbed cartoons from childhood, and fill-in animation studios, and certainly I remember encountering Ryuki absolutely outside of context of everything, and whilst my understanding of what defined a Kamen Rider was still tenuous, the show still felt strongly anachronistic when contrasted with what I knew. I wish now, having read your post, that I had known a little more then, that my Japanese had been more proficient, as I'm really a lot more interested in this context now that I am in the show!

Ugh, anyway, thank you so much for your post, I really enjoyed reading it, and it really helped my consider the show differently, even if it didn't make me feel any warmer towards it.