[GoldenXtreme]

I'm a little late, but I finished Geats. Spoilers incoming obviously.

So, uh, hmm. That was... strange. This is the morning after I finished the show and no matter how much I mull it over my feelings towards it aren't budging from "confused". I don't think it was very good, but it WAS fairly entertaining and had some creative fights. The plot is baffling and honestly felt like 6 different shows stitched together. The characters aren't too great? Man, I dunno. Definitely my least favorite Takahashi show, if nothing else.

I feel like the plot is the first thing I have to address. I think the show started fairly strongly. There was a good sense of intrigue surrounding the nature of the DGP and the Jamato that had me interested. The basic idea behind the characters was ripe for interesting development. However, the longer the show went on, the most obvious it was that not much had been planned in advance. Entire DGP seasons could have been removed with no real impact, especially the one where there was no winner. Then they just keep dumping more characters and plot points that are barely relevant to anything in the mix. Supporters, DGP staff, Ace's past lives, finite amounts of happiness in the world, constant world resets, the tree of knowledge! It was absolute narrative chaos that I can barely even process and didn't come together to make a satisfying whole.

The characters were a mess. I think Neon was maybe the most cohesive character in the show? Her arc generally made sense and was paced decently throughout the show, even if the whole "the kidnapper is back and he's kidnapping a Kurama daughter again" moment was just absurd. Ace was borderline irrelevant large amounts of the time. I genuinely like the CONCEPT behind "Michinaga kills Keiwa's sister, sending Keiwa into a spiral of desperate violence", but the implementation was just SILLY and resolved so suddenly. Tsumuri cried and then Jitto grabbed her magic tear and used it to make EVIL Tsumuri? And then evil Tsumuri possessed her so she shot Ace? What? I can't say I really loved a single character as much as I was vaguely amused by them sometimes. In Ex-Aid and Zero-One I was pretty impressed by Takahashi's character writing, but not so much here unfortunately.

Thematically I think the ideas of continuing to strive towards your desires and giving people second chances are good stuff, even if the writing didn't always do it justice. There are some other tonal issues with the show however. One thing that kept really rubbing me the wrong way is how the show almost seemed like it wanted to make fun of Rider fans, while at the same time not really understanding them. The audience and Kekera in particular felt like a parody of the idea that "Rider fans just want to see people suffer on TV" and more broadly the kinds of people who enjoy these death game stories, without really getting why it is that people want these kinds of things. Generally, fans don't just want to watch a character suffer for the sake of it, characters who suffer are relatable. We want to root for them to overcome their challenges because they seem more real. When they succeed we are reminded that we can do the same, and when they fail we feel their pain. The way Geats approaches it felt like it was talking down to fans when they have very real criticisms like "it feels cheap to constantly revive characters just for a happy ending" and reducing it to all of them being a bunch of sadists. It was almost like the show was smugly looking at the viewer and going "There, isn't the story better this way, where everyone can be happy?" while making an absolute mess. I keep wanting to compare it to Shin Kamen Rider, which had a similar story about human happiness. Shin Kamen Rider was serious and goofy and completely earnest, with a deep love of Kamen Rider and what it was about, while Geats' poor meta commentary towards fans just felt cynical. Ugh, sorry, but this particular aspect just really peeved me.

Ultimately, I think this was about the same quality as Revice. I think Revice was better in terms of characters while Geats was more entertaining, but both had serious issues that bring them down to D tier for me. Two bad shows in a row is nothing new for the series though, so whatever, haha.