[DreamSword]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

I definitely don't get the context, if they're supposed to be dressed as specific characters, but this seems pretty innocuous to me? Unless it's how smart Rikka looks in that uniform!

All I'll say is that crossdressing is a very popular thing in anime circles and leave it at that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

You could say it was thanks to Power Rangers, but I would personally argue Power Rangers should be thanking DaiZyuJin at least as much in return.

And both should be thanking GoLion/Voltron, as that robot design ended up being iconic enough to inspire the Daizyujin/Megazord in the first place.

[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamSword

And both should be thanking GoLion/Voltron, as that robot design ended up being iconic enough to inspire the Daizyujin/Megazord in the first place.

Absolutely true! They're both total all-timer robots.

[Androzani84]

So now we come to two Toku traditions being incorporated that OG Gridman was guilty of.

First is the reused monster, which is something Tsuburaya is more prone to than Toei (they even reuse monsters across series), and something the OG Gridman did out of necessity, since their budget only stretched to 19 suits, 5 of which were given over to hero suits and 1 to the main villain. So after 13 episodes, there’s quite a lot of slapped on armour parts to make “Mecha” variants, before moving on to cannibalising the suits for the final third.

And then there’s the big mecha combination. OG Gridman had two, and given the specific homages at play here, this is a homage to the first of those two, Combined Superman Thunder Gridman. No I have no idea where they got “Full Power” for the name of this one (it’s not a Syber Squad reference, since the combination there was called “Phorno”, for reasons I am equally unclear of).

Also, Borr’s drills finally do something.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Androzani84

(it?s not a Syber Squad reference, since the combination there was called ?Phorno?, for reasons I am equally unclear of.)

I mean, I didn't watch that show, but I can see some American writer trying to come up with a sci-fi term for what happens when you add four components to the main suit and feeling reasonably proud of themselves.

[Kamen Rider Die]

SSSS.GRIDMAN EPISODE 9 - “REVERIE”



I pretty much only ever want to watch toku shows about how to be a toku fan.

This whole episode was, suitably, a dream for me. It’s an episode that elides the specificity of something like Episode 6’s exposition (for a very Episode 6 value of “specificity”) in favor of something more haunting yet illuminative, and that’s an episode-length exploration of how Akane’s toku fandom has curdled from supportive into suffocating.

It’s that duality that powers this episode – how toku is something that should be additive to your ability to engage with the world, not a substitute for it, but how easily those two things can change places when we’d rather escape into fiction than deal with the messiness of the world. Akane’s interactions with Yuta, Utsumi, and Rikka are all bright and upbeat, but they aren’t real, and they aren’t about the person she’s with. They have the shape of connection – replacing Rikka’s meet-cute with Yuta; geeking out over kaiju with Utsumi; spending time with Rikka – but they’re all just things to flatter Akane. They’re a story she gets to tell herself using them, a story where she’s the girlfriend, the crush, the bestie. It’s a world that exists for her benefit, following the rhythm of a story she knows by heart.

But that’s horrifying, you know? A world flattened of individuality, left to tropes and contrivance. (Akane’s face when Rikka accidentally calls out how coincidental it is that they live next door to each other! Shots fired at Akane’s friend-fiction!) Escaping into stories to a degree that you resent the world for refusing to follow the rules of fiction is the worst-case scenario for fans of anything, and it’s even more terrifying if that person is capable of punishing a world with kaiju.

But it’s reductive to say that toku fandom, or any fandom, is mere escapism. If Akane’s story is here to introduce the depths of loneliness that can come with loving a fictional world too much, the Gridman Alliance’s stories are here to offer an alternative to that reading by letting toku be a way of coping with the world, and using its lessons to more humanely approach our shared existence. Gridman isn’t there to save them, or punish their enemies, he’s there to be a part of their lives when they need to better understand themselves, and the world around them. None of the kids turn on Akane, or berate her for trapping them in her dreams while telling them it’s what they want. Yuta’s dedication to protecting people is something he’s doing for people like Akane, and you can tell how sad he is that she feels like this escapism is what’s best. Utsumi admits that he really does have feelings for Akane, but they can’t be the only thing in his life, even if she’s okay letting them be the only thing in hers. Rikka reaches the end of her patience with Akane, clearly frustrated by Akane’s treatment of friendship as nothing more than a fan club she can express false humility around. All three of these kids know that Akane has tried to dupe and divide them, but that plan says more about how isolated and afraid Akane is, than any vulnerability within them. It’s a plan about how alone Akane is, and that’s the saddest thing.

Any episode that wants to spend this much time not only humanizing its central sociopath, but using her psychology as a way to talk about how easily hardcore fandom (she knows every kaiju name!) can shift from being a bridge to connect with other people, to becoming a barrier to dealing with other people – that is going to be my favorite episode of a series.

[DreamSword]

This is the only episode of S4 Gridman that I out and out dislike.



So rather than go on and on about that, I'll instead note that, adding onto the various Robots being designed after DX Toys, Powered Zenon here doesn't have elbow joints. It's a neat little detail I suppose.

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamSword

This is the only episode of S4 Gridman that I out and out dislike.

I am not at all surprised. Sorry it didn't work for you!

[Androzani84]

Honestly, Powered Zenon is so funny, given it has a pair of obvious arms forming legs and vice versa. Not to mention the sword becoming an axe.

Also, we’ve debuted every aspect of the toyline, so here’s the entire set.

Also our kaiju’s vocabulary this week is “Don’t leave me!”, which says a lot about Akane’s current psyche.

Side note: Zenon is probably the only thing to have the same name across all three versions (the only major difference is that both Gridman’s added a suffix, with the LA version having “God” as said suffix)

[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Androzani84

Honestly, Powered Zenon is so funny, given it has a pair of obvious arms forming legs and vice versa. Not to mention the sword becoming an axe.

Also, we?ve debuted every aspect of the toyline, so here?s the entire set.

Also our kaiju?s vocabulary this week is ?Don?t leave me!?, which says a lot about Akane?s current psyche.

Side note: Zenon is probably the only thing to have the same name across all three versions (the only major difference is that both Gridman?s added a suffix, with the LA version having ?God? as said suffix)

Neat! Thanks!

[Fish Sandwich]

One of the things that makes the anime Gridman stuff so fascinating is all the ways it finds to do new riffs on familiar concepts. The direct references to its source material are a given, and before he even started the thread, Die was already familiar with the homages to other things the creators happened to be inspired by, but it's also notable how often SSSS Gridman and its followups quote themselves. Specific lines of dialogue and and visuals sometimes as specific as entire shots are frequently repeated and recreated, given new meaning through new context, even in situations where not much else is altered. The purpose of it all, of course, being how drawing those explicit connections between moments can help get the viewer thinking about the story in a certain way, and hopefully making the experience that much richer.

I bring this up now because episode 9 as a whole is one big example of this going on that's just about impossible to miss. I'm kind of a sucker for when shows are able create warped and twisted versions of their own premieres for whatever purpose, and I think here, the way the entire show is unnaturally looping back on itself adds to that sense that the world Akane is choosing is inherently a world of stagnation, where she can't move forward, and thus nothing else really can either. The sense of atmosphere throughout this one is a standout of the whole show, but that particular element of it, I think is kind of at the core of why.

Oh, and speaking of poetic repetition!

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamSword

So rather than go on and on about that, I'll instead note that, adding onto the various Robots being designed after DX Toys, Powered Zenon here doesn't have elbow joints.

If I'm remembering right, I think sharing this anecdote in DreamSword's own thread when he got to this episode was actually the thing that motivated me to finally speak up in there for the first time, after merely lurking for the previous 8 episodes? I forget exactly why I felt fired up enough to mention it, but the factoid itself is sort of particularly precious to me, because learning it for myself back when I still had mixed feelings on this series played a huge part in pushing my overall outlook more towards genuine appreciation and respect.

It's such an insanely specific choice for the series to make, that you can't possibly be doing the job half-heartedly and even conceive of it. To even notice it, you'd have to be a greater robot nerd than I. Which means I had to learn it from someone first too. So while we're on the subject of how people and the things they create are a reflection of their influences, I'm going to go ahead and give a ultra niche shout-out to Channel CUBE, who mentioned it when doing a 2+ hour long multi-part review of the Actibuilder Full Power Gridman. As you can maybe infer from the previous sentence, Cube-san's toy reviews are kind of a whole dimension apart from the typical standard of "describing plainly what the viewer can see themselves." His videos are actually heavily edited to avoid any dead air, but they tend to run long anyway because he likes to enrich the experience by bringing up relevant anecdotes about related media (like the elbow thing!), as well as just offering observations about the design and engineering of a transforming figure that are often staggeringly thoughtful and intelligent. Dude respects the art of transforming toys like nobody else I've ever seen, and while he sadly hasn't uploaded anything new in years at this point, during the period he was active, he was a constant inspiration to me. Part of that is just that he talks so fast it hugely motivated me to improve my Japanese listening skills (!), but I'm pretty sure all the weird long-winded galaxy-brain retrospective stuff I occasionally do on this site is carrying that whole spirit more than I even consciously realize. If nothing else, his enjoyment of this show absolutely started to rub off on me at a time when I wasn't yet convinced of its quality.

Oh, and I almost forgot one other thing, while we're talking about transforming robot toys and references! The references to Transformers in this series may be a particular obsession of the director and character designer, but the original Gridman actually *did* set something of a precedent for that with Powered Zenon's inspiration, God Zenon, who looked suspiciously like some kind of bootleg Optimus Prime. (Worth noting the original toyline for Gridman was made by Takara?)