[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER REVICE EPISODE 19 - “DEMONS ON WARNING, HIROMI SURROUNDED!?”



I wonder what it would be like if one of these big military organizations in a Kamen Rider show wasn’t secretly villainous. (Or, y’know, not so secretly villainous: when your big boss wears black gloves to the office and has a Resting Sinister Smirk Face, it’s fair to say we’re past the point of wondering if Fenix can be trusted.) I wonder what it would be like for the corporate/military version of Rintaro’s not-suspicious introduction off of Saber, where benevolence was the first, last, and only mode of the troopers entrusted with the world’s safety.

There’s a nice consistency to it, if nothing else. A skepticism of authority is sort of baked into the franchise, where a lone hero battles for the soul of humanity, society’s expectations be damned. The things a Kamen Rider protects are self-determination, individuality, peace; those are all sort of antithetical to gigantic organizations in general, and military organizations in particular. There’s an incongruity to a Kamen Rider existing within a formal command structure, so it makes more sense to disassociate the hero from the structure at some point.

But there’s a banality to this type of story, where OF COURSE Fenix is up to something, and every Fenix storyline to date is just figuring out who the newest traitor is and why. Hell, the only way we ever seem to meet new Fenix soldiers is if they’re either a traitor or suspected of being a traitor, which makes me feel like the recruiting office is just signing up every scheming asshole and trusting patsy they can find to fill out the quotas. There’s never a point where Fenix seems competent, or useful. They were falling apart when we met them, and their slow-motion collapse is the main attribute of these parts of the show.

This episode’s version is getting introduced to Hiromi’s Fenix boot camp chums, and figuring out which of them is a traitor, and which is just a hilariously bad friend. Let’s look at our suspects!

Chigusa’s our traitor, which is only mostly obvious. I think the actor did a fairly good job of making her Devoted Friend cover story feel natural and trustworthy. It’s never cloying or helpless, it’s just her being a good soldier who’s trying to support her friend… because her friend is Hiromi, a guy who would give his life to protect an ice cube in summer. He’s especially hopeless at maintaining his ability to stand upright and move blood through his body in the episode, so her concern comes across as attentive and critical. She’s a good friend …and, naturally, she’s the traitor, for reasons that have yet to be fully established. The switch is from Worried Comrade to Pro-Ice Killer, and it’s a swing that’s a little farther than I’d’ve liked. It definitely feels like she wishes she’d put a bullet in Hiromi’s head years ago, so I’m curious what Terrible Secret that Fenix is hiding that’d validate her full-on disdain of her former comrades.

Comrades like Tatsuhiko, who isn’t a traitor, but is somehow a worse friend than the woman who is trying to kill both him and Hiromi. He’s worried about Hiromi’s health – the absolute worst-kept secret in all of Fenix; did George post on TikTok that Hiromi has the body of an 80-year old man for laughs? – and he’s aware that the Demons Driver is the culprit. (Not sure how much this is supposed to come across as a surprise? Tatsuhiko treats it like something that isn’t common knowledge, but there was never any other reasonable explanation for Hiromi’s rapidly deteriorating health than You Used Mysterious Technology To Simulate Demonic Power You Numbskull.) So far, so good. But he opts to show his concern by first humiliating Hiromi, then disrespecting him, and finally almost getting both of them killed. It’s… not a great way to show your friend that you care about him? Sort of bad, actually!

But all three of these deranged soldiers were trained by Wakabayashi in his pre-Commander Chameleon days, so it sort of tracks that they’re all hilariously broken and incapable of functioning in ways you or I might recognize as emotionally coherent. Their training was all Push Past Your Weakness And Be A Hero, to a degree that even Daiji (who was so catastrophically ruined by feelings of inadequacy that he manifested those feelings as a heavily made-up duplicate whose main fandoms were My Chemical Romance and Fratricide) recognizes this manly dedication to heroism as troubling, if not full-on suicidal. None of these three Fenix troops managed to survive their own training with their heads in a good place, and they’re probably considered the successes!

Which just gets back to my original point: what if one of these organizations was good? Good as a concept, and good at their jobs. What if there was anyone in Fenix that wasn’t a traitor, or a weird creep that you assume is a traitor, or clearly just doing mad science because they’re a sociopath, or whatever is up with that probably-sadistic new boss that’s haunting the skybase. What if one of these stories wasn’t overly concerned with the least surprising twists in tokusatsu, and let these background guys just be background guys?

I long for the day!