[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER KIVA EPISODE 28 - "REQUEST: TIME-ALTERING BATTLE”



It's late! I'm tired! My day was very long! I might have to get up early tomorrow for a work thing! Let's see how this goes!

(One minor note. This was originally going to be the night where I watched the Kiva Net Movies, in preparation for the Kiva movie. Except, when I went to watch the first one, it turns out there were no subtitles on it. I'll try and track down another option in a little bit, but with sub stuff being what it is right now, I'm kind of doubtful I can scrounge something up. Just FYI.)

I thought this was okay. It's got a firm focus on Nago, and it says some interesting things about whether or not Otoya is fulfilled as IXA, but there are a few things that just didn't quite work for me.

I 100% do not get Nago's fascination with Maya. I mean, yes, that face, but Nago really loses himself over Maya to a very disturbing degree. She slaps him, chides him for interfering with art (a thing Nago does not value), and then he just starts stalking her? Maya (and her actor) try to give it some sense of reality by kind of gently coaxing an emotional response out of Nago, but I basically never bought Nago's reaction. I can sort of see it in a weird Nago gut instinct thing, where he's so used to following whatever hunch that comes into his brain that he's unable to figure out that he's lusting after some strange woman, at least until she points it out to him. But I just... it all feels really underexplained.

Like, the whole gimmick here is that Nago has fallen into a version of the show where love is the ultimate power, and that renders him powerless. So you've got Otoya telling him he's too inflexible and joyless to succeed, and you've got Maya asking him to stop extinguishing his passion, and those are nice scenes. At the end, Nago changes history so Tanahashi never was injured, and he's back in the present fighting Fangires, and he's able to win because he found his playful side? I don't really get it, and I don't really think it lands. It's the show telling us that Nago went on a huge, emotional journey, but I didn't feel it. At all.

I'll tell you what did work for me, though. It's the Maya/Otoya/Yuri stuff. That was goddamn electric, and it got at some real murky questions about relationships.

See, Otoya was an artist, but he fell in love with a warrior. To feel worthy of her love, and to earn her respect, Otoya became a warrior. In a lot of ways, he's a better man. It's to his credit that he's able to improve himself in the name of love. It's the power of love, transforming him into a hero.

To Maya, it's a tragedy. Otoya is an artist. To see him squandering his time on fighting... it's shameful. He's abandoned his true worth to placate Yuri. Otoya acting as a warrior is like Tanahashi abandoning art for revenge. It's hollow, and pointless. It's the power of love, blinding him to his diminished state.

I think the dilemma there is really clever. Who's right, Maya or Yuri? Is it better for Otoya to become someone more like Yuri? Or should he be with Maya, a woman who sees the worth of his artistry? Should we change for the people we love, or should the people we love not need us to change?

There's no real answer in this one, but you can see how it's going to be a bigger issue for the three of them down the line. It's a wedge in Otoya and Yuri's relationship that isn't really about Kamen Riders or Fangires, and that's why it's so fascinating to me. Is Otoya a warrior with the soul of an artist, or an artist who thinks he should be a warrior? Is he making himself happy, or just making Yuri happy? Real clever problem for these three.

Besides that, it was fine. The action sequences were fun (the Kengo/Wataru training scene was a funny diversion), and the additional clues in the mystery of Maya are sure to pay dividends (Taiga, the fact that Wataru's mother gave him the button Nago gave to Maya in 1986), but I didn't end up loving a lot of this episode. Everything with Maya was great, but I mostly didn't buy into Nago's arc over this story. When he does his little dance as Rising IXA at the end, I couldn't figure out how the episode thought it'd earned that. It's a story that clearly thinks its saying something profound about Nago, but it really just felt like a plot that went from A to A.

Weird to say this about an episode whose main plot didn't click with me, but this wasn't so bad. The non-Nago parts were all great, more than enough to offset the Nago story not connecting with me. It was fine.