[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER BLADE 20TH ANNIVERSARY STAGE

This time on Kamen Rider Blade: It’s the Kamen Rider version of that Titanic meme, as our older Riders return to action after TWENTY YEARS with weaponized nostalgia in order to interrogate and defeat… nostalgia?!



If Kamen Rider Blade was a series about how to move on after failure, then the simplistic gravity of nostalgia makes for a potent foe when you need to design an anniversary stage show. King exists to be sort of an uncomplicated villain, one who isn’t interested in becoming more than he is, and loudly dismisses the attempts of the Riders to hold onto the difficult lessons they learned in 2005. He smugly berates them for thinking they could be anything more than combatants in a fight that never ends, and his answer to every brief interrogation is to just throw more suits at the heroes. He wants everything to be like it was, and bristles at the idea of people growing beyond what worked in the past.

Which is both a great concept for a show about change, and also sort of darkly funny for a stage show that exists to mine nostalgia in the most dull and repetitive ways possible.

I liked where this thing’s head was, if nothing else. The Riders all learned hard lessons about themselves over the course of their TV show, and gained the resolve to break out of their routines and self-sabotage to become something that could not only save the world, but also save themselves. Forcing them to refight the Battle Fight is a slap in the face to everyone who believed in them, because it forces them back into the traumas they overcame. Nostalgia’s easy, and straightforward, like King: just fight a bunch of mooks, give in, whatever, it’s what everyone wants. Finding a way through that to hold onto a better version of yourself is what Blade was all about, and a story that examines that struggle is going to make this all feel more like Blade than any number of suits.

But that’s honestly just me trying to find some cleverness in this story, because while I firmly believe that all of that last paragraph is not only true, but also the intention of the creative team, the reality is that this stage show spent 45 minutes trotting out every suit under the sun and forcing the characters to replay their greatest hits in order to please a crowd. It’s not really subverting or critiquing the ways we long for our pasts if you’re just, y’know, giving tons of fan service. I love the idea of these characters answering King’s flippant dismissals and the Another Blade’s (?) nihilism with the firm resolve of personal growth, but they sort of just did a standard stage show? Where an underwritten villain makes the heroes Play The Hits?

There are contours to this show that I feel like could’ve worked better, if I could sort of figure out who the audience was supposed to be. I don’t mean that in the usual pejorative way, like Who Could Ever Want This, but genuinely – I just assumed that this was for people in their late-20s to early-30s who grew up on Blade, and wanted something that pitched to them, like a stage play version of that Faiz 20th movie. (I never watched it, but didn’t Zangetsu get a play?) To be confronted by a fairly straightforward kids’ production that barely hints at adult concerns like looking backwards or longing for simpler times or literally anything that leans into the age of this cast, I kind of… what is this nostalgia for, if not to let adults connect with these characters again but with the added benefit of intervening decades that challenge the ability to grow? Is this just for those adult fans to bring their own kids to, like a tour of some old neighborhood that the parents left before the kids were ever born? Without the connection to the original, I don’t get what’s here… but with that connection, this all feels like its for children. Its tone is just King’s argument, unquestioned.

This was weirdly frustrating to watch? It’s like the Kamen Rider version of that scene from Barbie where she talks about mortality in the middle of a dance party – I don’t know if this crowd is right for where this thing needs to go, so it just doesn’t go there, and it leaves us stranded in the very same nostalgia and recidivism that the story is explicitly critiquing. (Multiple characters beg the Riders to remember that they’re better than their actions in this story!) I liked thinking about what it almost said, rather than liking what it was actually moment-to-moment saying.

Maybe I’ll get that better version on the 40th anniversary?



Next time on Kamen Rider Watches: I don’t know! Maybe something for December, if the mood hits. Otherwise, Fourze in January. Happy Thanksgiving, boards! And BOARDs, I guess, if Tachibana or Mutsuki are reading this...