[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER KIVA EPISODE 25 - "FANFARE: THE QUEEN'S AWAKENING”



Kamen Rider Kiva is a story about love.

I don't mean to say it's a romance, although that's part of it. It's a series about all types of love, and about what they mean to people. The love for a parent. The love for a child. The love for a sibling. The love for a romantic partner. Why do we love other people? What does it mean to love someone?

The show's gotten at these questions in different ways since the start, and they've been as tentative and oblique as Wataru used to be. It got at the idea of love through art, through the act of expressing yourself through music or craft. It talked about how precious that can be, and how finite a resource it can seem to those who covet it. It's all neatly metaphorical and clever.

Now, though, the show's in a different phase. Much like Emperor Form heralded a Wataru who was unchained and ready to engage with the world in a more open and honest way, we're at a point in the show where it's just coming out and asking its big questions: Why do Fangires love humans? Why do humans love Fangires? Why does anyone love anyone else?

Instantly I'm more dialed-into this show than I was for some of the previous stories. It's like the Shinji/Ryoko story wasn't just some immaculately constructed one-off; it was the template for everything this show wanted to do going forward. We're now at a stage where characters are pairing off and making commitments to one another. The stakes are higher and more personal. It's a version of the show, that, like... it is deploying its cape and turning gold. Everything seems grander and more dazzling.

Which is to say that, yes, this is a Maya/Mio spotlight episode. It's a story that's mostly concerned with the intersection of humanity and the Fangire, and how these two women navigate it.

Maya, always so great. Her main mode in this episode (besides that face) is a kind of Amused Curiosity in Otoya specifically and humanity in general. This should feel like a major Yuri/Otoya episode, what with their very sweet domesticity and newfound emotional honesty, but it's not. The second Maya and Otoya cross paths, Yuri is a runner-up. Maya flirts at Otoya's level, and her playful banter comes across as charmingly condescending, just as much as his does as needlessly protective. It's not the formerly crude come-ons and genuine rage that Otoya and Yuri had, nor is it their current overly enthusiastic dedication that's clearly masking some misgivings and doubt. No, Maya and Otoya are perfect together. Just perfect.

They're so perfect that it's making Maya's overall frustration with the endless amount of human-loving Fangires into something she needs to see for herself. She lets Otoya drag her all over town, lets him "protect” her from Rook, because... shit, maybe there's something to all of this? None of it really makes any sense to her (self-sacrifice?!?!), but she finds Otoya's nonsense exactly as funny as she should (mildly amusing in a clownish way), and there's a very clear sense of romantic adventure to their frequent meet-cutes. Maya's only known Love as a pejorative, as a death sentence, and now she's wondering if it might have other meanings.

The Mio stuff is like the other half to the equation, as her new role as Queen in 2008 is making her feel like she's putting Wataru in danger. (Very funny inversion of the whole Otoya Protects Maya thread.) So she breaks up with him, and it doesn't matter, because her problem is very quickly becoming a Kiva problem. They're entwined together by fate, just like Maya and Otoya are.

It's not as much fun as the Maya/Otoya part of the episode (almost nothing could be), but I liked how it made Mio's fear and confusion more than just an immediate problem for Wataru to solve. I mean, it's definitely going to be that, this is his show, but it gave a little space to let Mio try to dodge the enormity of what's about to land on her. The Maya part of the episode is very curious, while the Mio part is more about avoiding finding out the truth. Maya's exploring new possibilities, while Mio wants things to stay as they were. They make for nice counterpoints, these two stories.

I liked almost every decision this episode made, which was a very pleasant discovery after the last story's conclusion. Jiro's just gone, Wataru's moping in the tub (always means a good episode), Maya and Mio's stories are both about them and their choices, we're talking about love as something worth examining honestly... it's a good episode. I'm not even too mad at the convenient bout of amnesia that Otoya suffers at the end!




P.S. I don't know if anything in this show has made me laugh as hard as this episode remembering Shizuka exists: