[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER ZI-O EPISODE 35 - “2008 - FIRST LOVE, WAKE UP!”



We’re now in our third straight story based on an Inoue series, but this is the first one he’s written for the Zi-O series proper. With Inoue himself at the helm for this Kiva celebration, you can count on a few things:

-We are immediately going to be talking about how systems inherently fail the individual.
-We are also going to be talking about how people let down by systems invariably end up designing similarly-unhelpful replacement systems that reflect their own biases, rather than dreaming of something better.
-It’s going to be horny.

And, boy, three for three! Add in a final act that has absolutely nothing to do with our main story (the antagonist literally watches for a while and then walks off!) and you’ve got a thrillingly nonsensical episode that everyone but me probably hated.

Dunno where the next episode goes, but it’s looking like Jirou’s all we’re going to get for the Legend appearance in this story, give or take the Arms Monster suits. (Very cool to see them all again!) Even Mal d’Amour got redecorated, which made for a funny scene. But it means that we’re really doing a Kiva-influenced tribute, instead of Zi-O’s more straightforward Celebrity Guest-Star arcs.

With that in mind, I thought this episode was pretty much in the Kiva wheelhouse? Yuko’s 100% the kind of character Wataru would become smitten with, especially if he could fondly reminisce about a formative crush. Kiva was always about love as a Big Feeling, and it makes sense to honor that by having Sougo get suddenly and irrevocably horny. Just turned on from the jump, with his loathed-by-Geiz flashback crush and his tacky pie-as-sexual-awakening metaphor.

Yuko’s an interesting foil for Sougo in this one, because it sort of interrogates the usual Daddy Issues orphan-angle stuff of Kamen Rider by having Sougo crush on a woman ten years older than him. There’s something seriously Oedipal in Sougo’s attraction to Yuko – his flashback story is all about her maternally caring for him, soothing his fear, etc. It’s… I don’t want to say It’s Weird, because sexual attraction as a teenager can be a messy web to disentangle, and it’s not helpful to shame a fictional character for trying to understand how his psychology informs his sexuality. But it’s a little weird!

Besides the Mommy Issues aspect, Yuko’s also a woman who wants to be a queen, so we’ve got that obvious opposition to deal with. She’s significantly less conflicted about her power than Sougo is about his; she looks at Ora as merely the delivery-person for her power, not anyone to thank or respect. She’s sort of the product of an unjust system (maybe?), but she’s also someone who assumes that the universe isn’t just until it operates according to her sense of justice. It’s not Sougo’s sense of fair play, where everyone should get to feel like they’ve got a shot at happiness. It’s just selfishness, where the world working for Yuko means the world must work for everyone.

(Nowhere for it but this parenthetical: I love Yuko’s whole Evil Ace Attorney thing, where she goes YOU’RE GUILTY and does that Phoenix Wright sideways finger-gun pose. It’s shot so perfectly.)

Geiz is suitably annoyed at Sougo’s lusty confidence in an escaped convict’s string of attacks on the same legal profession he was all I Salute Your Service about earlier, which shows that this episode understands the swing it’s taking. The Time Orphans in particular are a good audience surrogate in this one, rolling their eyes at how Sougo’s empathy now seems to generate exclusively from his Ziku Driver Area. But Inoue’s all about big swings, and I’m interested in how he’s going to square up the obvious pitfalls of this premise.

Also, the entire story stops dead so Kamen Rider Ginga can appear in Kamen Rider Quarry, kick three Riders worth of crap out of Zi-O Trinity, and then go to a cliffhanger. I don’t– I don’t really feel like talking about this part? The direction was super fun, but even for Inoue this was some tonal incoherence. We’re in the middle of a story about Sougo falling for a femme fatale, and then suddenly Team Zi-O, Heure, and Ora are watching some flying saucer-themed Rider (nice Saga reference; I see you, Inoue!) walk out of a meteor and start blowing everything up? What? Why was this happening at all, let alone in the last four minutes of a Kiva tribute?

But, man, even that didn’t keep me from enjoying this episode. It’s overheated, and light on Legends, and heavy on incongruent superheroics, but I still thought it was a total blast. Just a delight to watch.

Inoue Forever!