[Kamen Rider Die]

SERIES WRAP-UP



One of the most amazing things about the Kamen Rider franchise is that it can be about literally anything. Not just in the sense of aesthetics or genre or anything, the surface level It’s A Medical Drama or Time Travel of it all, but on a thematic level. There’re core tenets of Kamen Rider that are always going to be there, topics like empathy and ecology and self-acceptance, but individual shows can talk about nearly anything. This one chose to talk about topics as diverse as how technology fits into our lives; how we overcome racism and intolerance; how to end cycles of hatred; how we learn from people, and how we teach people; how the only way to truly succeed is to be willing to help others succeed. It’s full of intriguing concepts that lack easy answers, and it’s astonishingly willing to follow those ideas to tricky places. It’s one of the smartest Kamen Rider shows I’ve ever watched.

At the same time… I’m not sure it was best served by being a Kamen Rider show.

When you’re telling a story that’s condemning violence as the solution to problems, or that’s digging into topics like how capitalism puts the working class at each other’s throats, it’s hard to do that within the context of a superhero show designed to sell toys to Japanese children. The elements of this show that are required by its genre – the costumes and transformations and monsters and detonations – frequently felt like impositions, especially in the first half of the show. Too many meditations on how therapeutic technology should be before it becomes a crutch ended up veering into pointless battles. So much of the MetsubouJinrai stuff in the first two-thirds of the show felt thin and unconvincing, compared to the depth and nuance of the average Humagear storyline.

My favorite run of the show was the Job War arc, easy. It’s the smartest set of episodes in an already smart show. The switch from pointless MetsubouJinrai punch-em-ups to the individually-motivated Raiders and Humagears turned each week’s storyline into a tense showcase for societal integration and economic anxiety. The fights mattered, all of a sudden. The conflicts helped explore a society that advanced as quickly as it could without figuring out where exactly it was going. They leapt towards a dream, but didn’t know how to land safely. I loved that version of this show.

It’s also the version that seemed to irritate almost everyone else, which maybe gets to my point about how effectively this show served both its themes and its genre. It’s hard to be a superhero fantasy that celebrates physical action AND a cerebral investigation into how societies codify intolerance into economic systems. Like, there’s some overlaps there, and this show was very clever about finding them, but too often it was one or the other. At worst, it was one or the other in the same episode.

I say all that like this show was a noble failure, or too grandiose for its own good. Even with the drag factor of These Unprecedented Times, this show churned out phenomenal action, terrific music, and outstanding suit designs. The cast acquitted themselves well, frequently creating moments of memorable beauty. The configuration of the cast, and the show’s use of them… that’s a little more complex.

I think this show was attentive to every character, which is a huge ask for a cast this large. Every Rider got an arc, and most supporting cast members got some growth over the course of the year. No one was a throwaway character, that I can remember. The problem is more that the show didn’t utilize everyone continuously, in regrettably obvious ways. Take Fuwa, for instance. Fuwa’s arc is a huge part of the show (give or take the Job War) right up to the point where Naki’s taken out of his brain. After that, like, what does the show do with Fuwa? He contributes to plots, but there aren’t really any stories (or even plotlines) about him. He’ll randomly say that he’s going to stop the Ark, but he never even really gets close. His biggest post-Naki moment is in 44, where he’s serving Aruto’s plotline. And this is the show’s secondary Rider. It’s even worse for Naki, and for Ikazuchi, and for Yua, and for Gai, and maybe even for Jin. Folks get their big moment of self-acceptance or enlightenment, and then the show’s like Mission Accomplished, and puts them on the shelf. Horobi is the only non-Aruto character to get some real focus in the final episodes, but he barely got any focus before those episodes, so it’s sort of a wash. There’s very little consistency to how this show uses its cast. Good stories get fired off all the time, but it almost feels like a rotation, rather than any sort of organic progress.

I liked this show, despite sounding like I don’t. I think its bravery in exploring difficult questions, and in deconstructing the emotional turmoil inherent to most tokusatsu finales, is laudable. Its high points were frequent, and its low points ended up being negligible. But the friction between its high-minded themes and its To Sell Toys mandate ended up creating too many discordant formulas (if I never have to watch MetsubouJinrai slap a Zetsumeriser on a Humagear again, I’ll’ve still seen it a hundred times too many), and the agreeable meandering of its exploration worked against the sort of character-based storytelling that keeps every main cast member feeling vital to the narrative. I loved this show trying new things, but I don’t think I’d recommend anyone else try to do it this way again.



…and that’s where we’re going to leave this series for a little bit. I’ve got some stuff coming up in the next few weeks (a vacation, probably/hopefully a move) that are going to make watching anything difficult, and writing up anything virtually impossible. The current plan is to come back sometime in October (depending on the specific timing of the aforementioned probable/hopeful move) to run through the post-show Zero-One content, but I’ll let you all know if that plan has to be adjusted. Definitely going to get this thread fully closed out by the end of the year, promise. In the meantime, please post any and all thoughts you’ve still got about the TV show portion of Zero-One, and I’ll be back for the rest of this story as soon as possible. Thanks!