[Sh Ranger]

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

KAMEN RIDER DEN-O THE MOVIE - “I’M BORN!”

It was always weird to me how many Riders are orphans, or have a dead parent. I’d joked back in Ghost that All Dads Are Dead, but it’s really prevalent over this franchise. It’s something I’d write off as some weird quirk, an overused trope, but it’s such a deliberate choice that it got me wondering why.

The first reason you’d have a main character with dead parents is to create some unfillable void, some unresolveable wound. It’s not a loss that happened as a result of the character’s actions or inaction, give or take a Blade. It’s not some heroic thing, like you’d get over the course of the series. It’s a tragedy that befell them, and all they can do is live with it. It creates this absence within the character, a pre-show acknowledgement that loss is real and irrevocable. It’s also a way to bake into the hero a motivation to overcome hardship, to make the best out of what you have left. Dead parents… it’s a preexisting condition, a thing that the character can’t ever fix or undo, so they fight to keep other people from having to experience it.

I really like how touching Ryoutarou's backstory is. Like Yuto paraphrasing Owner, even if the past is gone, the memories of that time live on in the present and the future. Ryoutarou's memories give him hope for the future and allow him to make new memories. And that's what allows him to remember Momotaros, by making new memories with him. Koutarou's drawing of his family filling the empty frame is a fitting end to the movie, showing that Ryoutarou doesn't feel like his past is empty anymore.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

It’s probably my favorite Phase 1 Heisei movie so far?

Oh yeah, we agree!

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

There’ve been some fun ideas in earlier films, and a few that were just generally entertaining, but they always felt at least minimally compromised. They needed to cram a season into seventy minutes, or create some goofy new world to explore. Here, it’s like Episodes 27-29 of Den-O, where there’s no time wasted on restating the premise or explaining relationships. (I mean, maybe to a fault? Sieg, a two-episode character, appears basically out of nowhere and everyone acts like he’s a main cast member. A couple lines of recap probably wouldn’t’ve killed Kobayashi!) Literally everything good about Den-O (and bad: Airimirers) gets shown off in this movie. It’s a giant, big-budget celebration of everything the show is about, and it’s not toning that down for newbies.

I like the idea of AUs in theory, but yeah, they can be hit of miss. So for Ore Tanjou to build on the show we already know and love, it's safe and it really works. I'm glad this became the status quo for future summer movies.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

-Gaoh! Great visual, huge villain presence, tons of charisma, absolutely zero character. There’s never a compelling motivation for what he’s doing, he’s already 90% done with his masterplan before the story even starts, and his death is just him going Oh Shit I Died. Kamen Rider Kabuki, he was not.

I guess sometimes a movie villain doesn't need to have much complexity, they just need to make an impression. Gaoh definitely left an impression on me, since he's one of my favorite Movie Riders. There's a lot of questions about him like why does he have an artificial arm and why does he want to destroy the past? I would love to watch a V-Cinema about this guy. Unfortunately, that amazing suit was scrapped to make something else.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

-Really can’t say enough about how great it was to see a story that foregrounds the bond between Momo and Ryotaro. There’s a real pain to Momo when he sees his connection to Ryotaro severed, and the movie treats his loss seriously. There’s this shot of Momo wandering down an alley that is just heartbreaking for how isolated he looks. But, eventually Momo’s reunited with Ryotaro because Memory Beats Tragedy and we get a hell of an exciting climax.

Yeah, Momotaros seems genuinely depressed in that scene, like he's realizing how much he actually appreciated Ryoutarou now that he doesn't remember him anymore.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

This confusion over which Temple Dork a guy played on Ghost is maybe the most brutal indictment of their collective superfluousness. Was he the one who shouted "Takeru!", or the one who shouted "Monster!"? There's no way to know!

Does that mean you were joking when you said "They were integral to the start of at least half of Ghost's plots!"? I mean, they were a convenient way for Takeru to get alerts about the Ganma and a way for Saionji to infiltrate the temple, so they were technically useful to both sides, but they weren't really characters. Akari could have replaced them with a phone app and only two episodes would change.

I think Mizoguchi's talents as Koutarou were wasted on Useless Monk Apprentice #1, just cause a lot of people unfairly compare him to Sato.

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Originally Posted by Androzani84

I’ll mention that Gaoh’s actor once auditioned for the lead role in Kamen Rider Super-1. He didn’t get it , but it’s likely that Super-1 would be more prominent in crossovers if he did (given that the actual actor is currently on the run from the law).

If Watanabe was cast as Super-1, I would have a lot more incentive to watch that show!