[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER SABER EPISODE 37 - “THE FUTURE SHALL BE WRITTEN, BUT BY WHO?”



I love Mei, and I love that she’s Yuri’s hand-picked representative to demonstrate how humanity’s improved over the last thousand years, but it’s pretty farcical for her pitch to be We Communicate Better With Our Friends in an episode with so much Kento melodrama. I know she knows him!

If there’s a weak point in this episode, it’s Kento’s herculean intransigence. Honestly, I like that he’s not going to just abandon his martyrdom because of anything Touma says or does, because there’s no drama in that. Touma shows a flash of awareness by having patience with Ren’s soul-searching, but otherwise massively doubles down on his normal hot-headed badgering for other people to just see his big picture already. He tells Ryoga, a guy whose main personality trait is that he hates traitors and loves service, to just forget all that traitor stuff because Isaac was a villain, and abandon what’s left of the Sword of Logos to pitch in with his team and save the world – like Touma completely blanked on how long it took Rintaro to get over his own sense of loyalty and duty. (And Rintaro LIKED Touma!) With Kento, he’s still like WE CAN WORK TOGETHER to a guy who literally told him that working together is what gets Touma and everyone else killed. Pushing back on Touma’s genuinely terrible pitches is generally fine with me.

But then we’ve got Sophia, who can’t convince Kento with a brief and forgettable intervention. (I seriously can’t remember what she talked to him about.) And Rintaro, whose idea is fairly clever, also gets nowhere: if Kento won’t join his friends, his friends will just join Kento. It’s an adorably Rintaro way of undercutting Kento’s gruff brooding, and it manages to last for about three-quarters of a fight. It’s a failure, like every other attempt to sway Kento over the last however many episodes.

I think I’m sick of it? It’s reached a point where I can’t imagine what’s going to change Kento’s mind, and I’m not sure if anything would even feel organic at this point. If that dude somehow, some way changes his mind about being all alone and sacrificing his life… I don’t even think I’d buy it at this stage? And in the meantime, I’m almost sick of his friends trying.

There’s a… you can’t save everyone. You can’t, especially if they don't want to be saved. I don’t like to say that kind of stuff about a kids show, because it’s a terrible thing to tell children. These shows are powered by boundless empathy, and the unwritten rule that everyone can be saved. But Kento… he’s just toxic at this point. He’s a guy that was always looking for a way to give his life for his friends, to atone for misplaced guilt and deep-seated shame. As he’s gained more power, he’s only become a more focused martyr. Like, you can keep reaching your hand out in case he reaches back, but sometimes you gotta go the Ren route and realize that you can’t force an epiphany. Some folks gotta hit rock bottom before they're ready to accept help, and they know where to find you when they’re ready.

And, shit, if that’s where this story goes? A+. I’d love it if Touma learned a lesson about forcing people to believe in you when they don’t yet believe in themselves. I’d be thrilled with a story where Kento has to generate his own self-worth, instead of people beating him over the head with it. But in the meantime, we’re just getting these same moments repeated over too long a timeline, where Touma comes off like a hectoring weirdo (he’s shouting the same stuff at Kento every episode!) and Kento’s martyrdom just looks like slow-motion suicide. It’s very hard to maintain interest in a storyline that keeps hitting the same notes for as long as this one has.

Boy, I’m ready for this Touma/Kento story to find a different gear.

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SMARTER HEARTS