[Kamen Rider Die]

SSSS.DYNAZENON EPISODE 06 - “WHAT IS THIS PAIN?”



Friendship is vulnerability.

It’s the value of friendship that you get to be vulnerable around other people, where you can confess your fears and pain and anger to better exorcise them; if not to fix them, then at least to free yourself from their control by illuminating them. But vulnerability is also the terror of friendship: needing people who can let you down or expose you, and letting them see the parts of you that you’re ashamed of, or guilty about. Making friends introduces a whole system of support and potential for improvement, but also introduces new vectors for you to be hurt by others, and to hurt others.

Tricky episode of Dynazenon, is what I’m getting at, and that’s even before we touch on the possible last second (literally!) arrival of Maybe Gridknight.

This one’s very clearly a multi-part story, never more clear than when we were halfway through and I’m getting a scene of Koyomi and Mujina meet-cuting outside a convenience store, and it felt like we were a million miles away from any sort of kaiju appearance. (We were!) If Episode 5 didn’t feel like it was in any particular rush to segue out of a story of personal-scale dismantling in favor of city-scale combat, the addition of a legitimate cliffhanger indulges the previous installment’s unhurried character drama to a higher, almost distressing, level. We are in Emotions territory, for better or worse.

I’d say better, but your mileage may vary. (I learn that on the boards all the time!) It’s an episode that incrementally adds divisions to the heroes by exacerbating their latent personality defects: Yomogi’s need to be there for Yume without really connecting with her, leading to his jealousy as she finds real connections elsewhere; Koyomi’s assumptions leading to his feelings of manipulation and humiliation, bound up in a sense that’s he’s owed more; Yume’s realizations that she never really knew her sister due to never really trying to know her, and how impossible it is to know anyone while also making herself unknowable; and Chise’s frustration at being overlooked, coddled, and generally treated as an afterthought. It’s all the trope-y parts of their characters blown up into their largest, most depressing resolution, and treated as sincere problems that need to be solved, just when the tools to solve them – their teamwork and camaraderie – are completely inaccessible to them.

Meanwhile, the Kaiju Eugenicists are out here learning all the right lessons, and putting them into action. With the ostensible villains, we’ve got a story about recognizing that every person matters, even if all they bring to a relationship is just being another person, and that we only grow and improve as people by letting each other in. Mujina and Onija have to share control of the kaiju in order to harness it, and they overlap their desires and outlooks in order to do it – you can see Mujina becoming more like Onija as they collaborate. While the heroes collapse into individual misery, the villains rise up through mutual understanding and being vulnerable enough to let each other in.

And then Maybe Gridknight shows up.