[Kamen Rider Die]

Hey, everybody. I know this is normally my day off (and I'm actually writing all of this late Monday night), but I wanted to do a quick post for my 3rd Riderversary.

Three years ago, on March 16th of 2018, I watched my first Kamen Rider episodes. I actually did the first eight episodes of Ex-Aid, which is a pace that seems gratuitous and wasteful to me now. (I've matured...?) Last year, my first Riderversary on the TokuNation boards, I celebrated by rewatching the first episode of Ex-Aid. Unfortunately, that was a rewatch of a show about heroic doctors trying to save innocent people from a rampaging plague, which felt weird to watch at the start of a global pandemic. Well, said pandemic is still going on, so I'd rather not tempt fate by watching anything that could trigger another real-world disaster. Also, day off. So! Here's a look at what three years of being a Kamen Rider fan looks like when you have something broken inside of you that you're now too old to fix so it's really more about mitigating disaster:

843 episodes
46 movies
probably a billion HBVs, Net Movies, commercials, music videos, and ephemera

Rough guess, we're looking at over 300 hours of Kamen Rider, or nearly two full weeks. It's a lot! Even spread across three years, that is a lot of Kamen Rider. I don't regret it, though. How could I? Setting aside the enjoyment these shows have brought me (even the ones with Shunpei/Jean/Hiiro's dad in them), which is a considerable amount of joy, it introduced me to a fandom that is more rewarding than any 50-year franchise ever could be. Kamen Rider's great, but Kamen Rider fans are the best.

Here's to many more Riderversaries!

--

So, I wrote all that, and it's midnight, and it's officially my day off, but I'm like Man I Need To Write More. I don't know why! None of this is that interesting, and it's needlessly indulgent. But, I don't know. Felt like writing more.

I wanted to spend a little time shouting out an article here on TokuNation that was... I mean, I don't think it was the first thing I ever looked at for Kamen Rider (I want to say I'd heard about the Dark Knight Returns-esque Ichigo from the Ghost movie), but it was the thing that pushed me into finally watching these shows.

I've mentioned my toku origin story before, but to recap: Transformers fan, went to TFW2005 to lurk, tabbed over to TokuNation, eventually started watching shows. The specifics, though... I don't know if I've talked about them?

The one post I can remember being so bizarre, so inexplicable, that I was like I Gotta See What This Show Is, it was this review for S.H. Figuarts Kamen Rider Snipe Simulation Gamer Level 50. That's the one I can recall as the final push I needed to investigate Kamen Rider Ex-Aid.



The joke to me now is how random that gallery should be, considering a) Snipe ain't my guy from that show, and b) that suit is terrible. It is, aesthetically, the opposite of what I like in suit designs. It's cumbersome and ridiculous and garish even for Ex-Aid. It's a neon yellow man wearing half a boat. It's a stupid design.

But, shit, it is memorably stupid. It is the kind of stupid that stops traffic. It is a design that has you asking a million questions, about the world it comes from and the kind of man who'd wear half a boat. It is wrong in every conceivable way something can be wrong, and that's maybe better than being just a little right. It is the ship that launched a thousand hours of me watching Kamen Rider.

It's not a great meet-cute, maybe. It's not a story where I saw something sublime and followed it to happiness. It's not a story with smart decision-making or taste. But it's, I think, a very Kamen Rider origin story. It's this design that shouldn't work, that's laughable in its More Is More aesthetic (like all Ex-Aid), but it somehow triumphs through its mediocrity. It is earnest, playful, genuine. It is asking you to meet it on its own terms, and rewarding you by letting you enter a world of misfits and mistakes; a world of electric pink superheroes and megalomaniacal villains and helpful nurses who are also colorful mascots and sentient diseases that need love and three men with messiah complexes who sometimes remember to stop fighting each other long enough to save the world.

It... I wanted to make a dumb Simpsons joke, a quote by a temporarily non-evil Mr Burns:



But, god, maybe that's the point of this dope wearing half a boat. I've made friends because of this hideous design. I've discovered a fanbase that is earnest, playful, genuine. It's not a great suit, but it's worth a damn to me, thanks to these friendships.

Happy Riderversary, everybody.