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12-31-2020, 09:34 AM | #401 |
Warrior of Delusions!
Join Date: Jun 2012
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Toku Resolutions
- Finish Masked Rider X. I am 18 episodes in, and I've done my usual stalling out. Need to fix that. - Come up with coherant thoughts for Den-O so I can provide meaningful commentary when you get there and not just "Deneb best Imagin" - Uuuuhhhh I have a vague plan to watch Kiramager. I've heard good things, and I could do with a fun show to just binge in these Tier IV evenings.
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12-31-2020, 12:17 PM | #402 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Chicago, IL
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Quote:
The OG Roder reference goes beyond the year. The date the project started on, April 3rd, is the date he original episode of Kamen Rider aired on (it was also the day the Spirits Manga started in 2001, the day of the 1000th episode in 2011 and the day that Ghost episode that began with a retrospective of all the past riders aired on in 2016).
And our new worm, Rena, is played by Hitomi Miwa, who was previously the big good of Ninpuu Sentai Hurricaneger. Quote:
I'd've been great if this episode had really grappled with Hiyori not finding an easy solution to her problems. That's pretty normal! The idea of Hiyori wandering into the Shibuya ruins and finding one crucial piece of evidence that resolves all of her misgivings and heals her emotional wounds... that is not a reasonable expectation! Her whole mission is poorly conceived and almost guaranteed to fail! But, like, the episode not only doesn't do that, it doesn't give Tendou or Kagami any interest in that story. (I do like your read on what Tendou's going through as he continually stonewalls Hiyori, but it feels so disconnected from the main plot of what's going on that I was frustrated by the tease.) The show needed to more gently lead out of Hiyori's primary role in the storyline, but they abruptly changed direction. Yeah, god, not gonna be one of my favorite things in 2020, that episode.
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12-31-2020, 12:18 PM | #403 |
Standing By
Join Date: Feb 2020
Location: USA
Posts: 2,080
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Quote:
KAMEN RIDER KABUTO - EPISODE 25
The show had set up a massive cliffhanger with the last episode, and the payoff… it’s a pivot they go for, and while I can see why they did it, I really wish they hadn’t done it. Our heroes opened a weird door in the ruins of Shibuya, looking for answers about Hiyori’s past, and what’s inside is… basically nothing helpful for Hiyori, but way more questions for Tendou and Kagami. It becomes a story that’s less about providing information to help with healing, and more about getting across to the superheroes that they are pawns in a massive conspiracy. It’s a pivot away from a story with clear emotional stakes, into something that’s a lot more Superhero Plotting, and, yeah, didn’t love it! The story more or less abandons Hiyori. She’s gotten nothing helpful from all of this frustration, and Tendou has changed up his attitude towards her from condescendingly withholding to sympathetically withholding, which is not a great look. When the most relatable character on the show (YMMV) outright tells the hero that her troubles are because he’s being so withholding, and the hero just, likes, commiserates with her? What even is that! It’s like they went into that basement as three people who cared about each other, and came out as two superheroes trying to solve a mystery about their origins. It treats Hiyori’s story as, like, a booster rocket, something that can be discarded now that the real story is taking place. Tendo seems to care about Hiyori and Jyuka the most, so considering how he acts slightly more emotional than usual when Hiyori insists on going to Area X, it's possible that he knew she would be disappointed by her search for truth and only tagged along with them so he could console her. He clearly knows more about her past than he's willing for her to find out and he actually cares what another human being thinks about him, a rarity for sure. Even though I don't really think he's directly responsible for her parents' deaths. He's still a good guy after all. Quote:
That alone would be enough to set up a more direct conflict with ZECT’s leadership, but the show drops a weird-ass bombshell by putting Kagami’s identity as Gatack’s operator in the Masked Rider #1 journal from 1971. (And, yes, I got the reference, no need to call it out. I laughed at it immediately.) It’s something that could be easily (“easily”) explained away by having Kagami’s dad create a prophecy he could eventually have his son fulfill, but that’s still pretty crazy. Almost as crazy as the raging, chained-up lunatic that’s locked behind a door in the basement of a vault. That’s someone who is going to be a problem!
Quote:
A QUESTION
And now I gotta live with being mad at this show for a couple days, because I’m changing up the scheduling for New Year’s. The 31st is going to be a special piece, something I’m already 20% done with. The 1st is going to be Episode 26, the 2nd is going to be the movie, and with the 3rd we’re back to normal scheduling with Episode 27. But none of that’s a question! With New Year’s nearly here, it’s time to make some resolutions. Do you have a tokusatsu resolution for 2021? Something toku-related you’d like to accomplish? My next few years are pretty well charted out, Rider-wise, but there’s something I’ve got in mind for Decade that I really hope I’m able to make happen. What about you? My resolution is to watch Blade and finally finish the Heisei Rider Era before you reach the Day of Oma. Maybe I'll start Turboranger as well if the subs ever get completed. Hey, you're right, that's Kagura! I never recognized her actress in Kabuto before even though Kagura was one of my favorite characters in Hurricanger.
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12-31-2020, 12:24 PM | #404 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Chicago, IL
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Sure, but, like, if you're Kagami's dad, Kagami Outrageous, you could totally write down "Kagami Arata is going to be Gatack", and then just name your kid Kagami Arata and BAM fulfilled prophecy. I just can't tell if we're supposed to view Kagami's role as Gatack as something Outrageous fully conceived of (no pun intended), or just something he's maneuvered into fruition. It's a cool detail, though, for sure!
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12-31-2020, 01:41 PM | #405 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Chicago, IL
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So, Switchblade’s yearly Best Of thread rolled out last week. It’s the second one I’ve seen, having started on the boards late in 2019. And, for the second time, it’s one I haven’t participated in.
I really want to, someday. The problem is, I don’t watch any currently-running shows, and I probably won’t for a while. (Like, my schedule clears up around late-2022, at my current pace of getting through shows.) All of those categories, they’re pretty much all about the current shows. I don’t really feel like I can contribute to that discussion, what with me living within early-2000s toku for the last year. Not super relevant to the discourse, you know? The other problem is that my memory is nowhere, and I don’t do much in the way of behind-the-scenes trivia. I couldn’t give a Best Of nearly anything, since I regularly forget the plots of shows I watched a month ago. I routinely need to look up names of characters from shows I spent months watching. (There was a point in the last few days that Fish Sandwich mentioned “Shinji”, and it took me a few seconds to realize that was the title character from Kamen Rider Ryuki, a series I watched in its entirety.) Not only do I not watch current shows, I can’t remember anything from the shows I did watch. But, it’s the end of the year, and I’d like to do something that… I mean, not “celebrates” it, eff this hell year, but maybe something that acknowledges the fun I’ve had on the TokuNation boards in 2020. So, here’s some brand-new thoughts on the shows I’ve watched this year, in a little piece I’m calling: KAMEN RIDER DIE TALKS ABOUT THE FIRST THING HE REMEMBERS FROM THE KAMEN RIDER SHOWS HE WATCHED THIS YEAR --- First off, let’s talk stats. Not counting responses on the boards, I wrote 525 pages this year on Kamen Rider shows. (There was a Build V-Cinema I covered, but that was only three pages so I’m not going to mention it other than right here.) That is 245,650 words, or the length of a shorter Fish Sandwich post about Kuuga. I kid! I kid. My only hope in writing so much is that I’ll eventually hone my sloppiness into something approaching Fish’s precision. --- AGITO (53 pages, 25833 words) Maybe it’s because I just posted that picture recently, of Hikawa being terrified at having to talk to Shouichi, once he knows Shouichi is Agito, but I do love that plotline. It’s sort of got it all, for me and Agito? There’s some really funny Houjou stuff, some great Ozawa stuff, some charming Shouichi stuff (he’s trying so hard to not make it weird for Hikawa!), and a whole runner of Hikawa being incredibly weird about things. It took me a while to warm up to Hikawa. I wrote him off as Ichijou #2, or Nijou, for a good stretch of episodes. But as the show went on, Hikawa’s story wasn’t Ichijou’s at all. He wasn’t a squared-jawed hero that was Dedicated To Justice. He was a stressed-out ball of neuroses, desperate to prove himself and failing due to his desperation. He was so insistent on What A Hero Is that he not only disbelieved Shouichi’s identity in this storyline, but he took forever to see his own heroism in this series. So much of Agito ended up being about making peace with yourself, accepting your shortcomings and celebrating your strengths, and Hikawa’s story is key to that theme. Also, man, this scene kills me: --- RYUKI (86 pages, 42941 words) I have thought about this shot of Reiko straightening cutlery probably once a week since I stopped watching Ryuki. It’s heartbreaking, her performing this invisible act of kindness for a man who’s already dead, but it’s something that becomes more and more definitively Ryuki as I keep remembering it. Reiko at the restaurant… she hated Kitaoka to start with, and he earned every bit of her hatred. But over time, she paid attention to him, considered his viewpoint, watched him change, saw him grow, and decided he was worth giving a shot. As she’s waiting for him at the restaurant, unaware that he’s never going to arrive, she sees that his silverware is slightly askew. She knows that he’d hate that, that the first thing he’d do is straighten it and make some crack about the subpar service… so she adjusts it for him, saves him that little inconvenience. It’s a gesture that Kitaoka’d never even be aware of, never knew she did it for him, but she does it anyway. She knows him enough to do this for him. And, like, that’s what the whole show is about? It’s a show that crams in more Riders than any show had before, specifically to explore how difficult it is to understand people, how impossible it can feel to empathize with their motivations, what kind of heroism it would take to sacrifice your happiness (or life) for someone else’s sake. (There’s a reason that we spend so much time with journalists on this show!) Every character in the show wants something specific. Spending time listening to them, trying to hear what they’re saying… it’s work. It can take months, if ever, to see things through someone else’s eyes. But the results can be meaningful, enlightening. And there’s a little scene of a woman straightening the cutlery of a man she used to hate that illustrates that beautifully. --- FAIZ (134 pages, 58362 words) --1-- There are literally too many things I loved about Faiz, too many things I still laugh at, to narrow it down to just one thing. Faiz is… Faiz is a show that’s taken up permanent space in my brain. It’s almost definitely going to end up being my favorite Phase 1 show. Some of that is because of the insane character work, like that shot of Takumi walking through the fence, from the final episode. It’s him liberating himself from all of the shame he used to feel, all of the judgment he put on himself. Here, he’s done with that, and he won’t let Yuuji drag him down. He steps through the fence as Yuuji rages against a world that’s wronged him, that’s lived down to all of his fears and suspicions. Meanwhile, there’s Takumi: boldly striding into a future he’ll face head-on, clear-eyed. --2-- Or there’s the rich thematic work done with the Orphnochs. Faiz was a show about coexistence, about how a marginalized group expresses its needs, how a dominant group examines its biases and restrictions. It’s about what happens when a story isn’t concerned with survival, but with day-to-day living. All of those scenes of three monsters, living together, circling around ideas like integration and identity, ideas about how much of yourself you should give up to fit in… it’s a series that’s doing so much under the hood, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched its surface. --3-- Or there’s Kaixa, the memes that generated a man. If there’s any character in Rider history that deserves his own holiday, it’s Kusaka. There were points where I was convinced he’d crossed a line, convinced he’d transgressed in a way I could never find him funny again. (Hitting Mari is a tough thing to watch.) But that performance. It’s indelible, iconic. There’s just an unceasing barrage of fantastic deliveries, facial expressions that defy musculature, and unexpected twists on Antagonism that create something truly special. --4-- Or there’s the Faiz Gear, a collection of toyetic trinkets that activated the dormant chemicals Ex-Aid left in my brain. Phones that become guns, bike handles that become swords, and bikes that become asshole robots… the mechanics of Faiz were so endlessly fun. --5-- Or there’s the Faiz HBV, which is the one indisputable piece of greatness in the Kamen Rider canon. Lives are forever changed by its majesty, and it was to my utmost joy that it wasn’t even in the top four things I thought of when I thought about Faiz. --- BLADE (109 pages, 51355 words) It’s that bench. It was never going to be anything other than that bench. I’m not even going to talk about why. If you haven’t seen Blade, I wouldn’t dream of ruining it for you. If you have seen Blade, you can’t even read these words through your tears. --- HIBIKI (86 pages, 39508 words) “Mouth sounds, blood hounds, look what we've found Some meaning on a scrap of tape Are you burrowing through to some glowing core Or shuffled off and side-tracked along the way Breathing layers of paydirt and banner wavers The clutter that is everyday” -Superchunk, “Tiny Bombs” It feels a little cruel, to say that everything after a premiere episode’s opening scene is a step down, but that’s just how good the introduction is to Asumu. The musicality of his existence, the rhythm of his routine, and the pure ecstasy of life… yeah, god, Hibiki does that in its first scene. There’re plenty of ups and downs as the show progresses. Some thrilling moments of grace and beauty, and some tone-deaf moments of frustration and disappointment. But that opening is flawless enough to buy a rude amount of forgiveness. One of the best openings of any Rider show, ever. --- KABUTO (halfway done, 54 pages, 26424 words) I think I recently said that the end of Episode 4 was something I don’t think Kabuto will ever top, and I still feel that way now. (A whole few days later. I know! What a resolute determination of quality.) It’s the episode that locks in so many things: Tendou’s tough love; Kagami’s Very Big Feelings; how the two of them try to navigate a friendship; and what Clock Up can do to render a normal fight iconic, evocative. I don’t really need to rehash my feelings about it. It was only a few weeks ago, and you can just tab back a few pages. Suffice it to say, this one still looms large over the series for me. A series high-point, and one I’m hopeful can be surpassed. --- That’s it! (Except for the Grease movie!) That’s what I can remember from the Kamen Rider shows I’ve watched in 2020. Looking ahead to 2021, the provisional schedule is: January-February: Kabuto February-May: Den-O (I think there’s a lot of movies and extra stuff?) June-August: Kiva September-December: Decade Only four shows in 2021, as opposed to 2020’s five and a half, but Decade is a thing. I can’t believe that I’m already charting out all of 2021. It’s you guys’ fault, just so you know. You’ve taken what was some weird lark, as I was midway through Ghost (it was a punishing first half!), and nurtured it with your kindness and generosity. Now I’m planning the second straight year of constant watching and writing. It’s insane. You guys are nuts for enabling this. I love every single one of you, though. Thank you for helping me get through 2020, and I very much look forward to spending 2021 with you. (INOUE FOREVER.)
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12-31-2020, 02:00 PM | #406 |
Standing By
Join Date: Feb 2020
Location: USA
Posts: 2,080
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Quote:
--1--
There are literally too many things I loved about Faiz, too many things I still laugh at, to narrow it down to just one thing. Faiz is… Faiz is a show that’s taken up permanent space in my brain. It’s almost definitely going to end up being my favorite Phase 1 show. Since Decade is literally the shortest Heisei Rider show, I'm curious to find out what you have planned that could make it such a big project for you.
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12-31-2020, 02:01 PM | #407 |
Veteran Member
Join Date: Jan 2020
Posts: 1,290
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Quote:
KAMEN RIDER KABUTO - EPISODE 25
Our heroes opened a weird door in the ruins of Shibuya, looking for answers about Hiyori’s past, and what’s inside is… basically nothing helpful for Hiyori, but way more questions for Tendou and Kagami. It becomes a story that’s less about providing information to help with healing, and more about getting across to the superheroes that they are pawns in a massive conspiracy. Quote:
And that real story… honestly, it’s not bad. There’s an exciting sense of the boys being tired of having ZECT out there, manipulating them from the shadows. (Literally! And also with Shadow!) Now that they know that ZECT’s been working on the Masked Rider program from as far back as the Showa era, and the boys clearly do not truck with Showa, it’s evident that ZECT has greater plans than just protecting Tokyo.
Quote:
That alone would be enough to set up a more direct conflict with ZECT’s leadership, but the show drops a weird-ass bombshell by putting Kagami’s identity as Gatack’s operator in the Masked Rider #1 journal from 1971. (And, yes, I got the reference, no need to call it out. I laughed at it immediately.) It’s something that could be easily (“easily”) explained away by having Kagami’s dad create a prophecy he could eventually have his son fulfill, but that’s still pretty crazy. Almost as crazy as the raging, chained-up lunatic that’s locked behind a door in the basement of a vault. That’s someone who is going to be a problem!
(Throwing this out there: it’s the original Tendou, not the Worm that’s been Tendou for the last seven years.) Quote:
The rest of the episode has a lot of things happening, mostly fun to watch (Tendou quickly climbing the ranks of the police makes me wonder why he needed ZECT’s help to work in one hospital for one day), but, man, not into this pivot away from Hiyori’s story! I honestly wanted the second half of this post to be a little room to praise the tension of the Misaki/Kagami raid on ZECT HQ, or all of Tendou’s charm offensive (his smile is so fake!), or Tsurugi’s brief appearance so he can Win At Diving, or how nice it is to see Daisuke return to grumpily save TheWorst, but no. I don’t really want to do any of that, because the show followed up a story where Tendou and Kagami put Hiyori’s needs ahead of their own, by having them both toss her to the side when a cooler story came along. She specifically tells Tendou that she is still hurting, that nothing got better, and he’s just like Sometimes There Are Mysteries. I don’t think the show wants me to be as mad at Tendou as I am right now! (Kagami is not winning any prizes, but he also isn’t hiding things that’d probably make Hiyori feel better.) Moving the story off of Hiyori without giving Hiyori any reason to feel better… it sucks! I don’t love it as a story choice!
Diving is a sport field, so Tsurugi's motivation on that correlates to the other parts like soccer, fencing, etc. There's an appearence of the first executive leader Worm in Rena Mamiya, a Worm that won't be a MOTW. Daisuke's actor Kazuki Kato focuses on his musician career, so he'd have rarer appearence, but he's not a one-shot character. Worm's disguise shows its deadly capabilities again here where WorMisaki visits Bistro La Salle to ask one of the people who knew Tendou family. With Misaki being trusted comrade of Kagami's, Kagami is nothing to blame here for unwittingly sent Juka to her doom, it'd be hard to deceive her here (and her evil grin was done outsight of Kagami's view). Quote:
A QUESTION
And now I gotta live with being mad at this show for a couple days, because I’m changing up the scheduling for New Year’s. The 31st is going to be a special piece, something I’m already 20% done with. The 1st is going to be Episode 26, the 2nd is going to be the movie, and with the 3rd we’re back to normal scheduling with Episode 27. But none of that’s a question! With New Year’s nearly here, it’s time to make some resolutions. Do you have a tokusatsu resolution for 2021? Something toku-related you’d like to accomplish? My next few years are pretty well charted out, Rider-wise, but there’s something I’ve got in mind for Decade that I really hope I’m able to make happen. What about you?
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12-31-2020, 02:01 PM | #408 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Chicago, IL
Posts: 6,158
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You'll all find out during the Kiva thread, since it's also going to require some prepwork.
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12-31-2020, 02:05 PM | #409 |
Some guy. I'm alright.
Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: Michigan
Posts: 4,388
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I still love that no matter all the varying opinions that nearly every Rider show has, one thing remains resolute about anyone who's watched Blade.
Bench.
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12-31-2020, 02:25 PM | #410 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Chicago, IL
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Quote:
My problem is that the show more or less abandons Hiyori's story for the Tendou/Kagami story, and it does it in an incredibly clumsy way. Like, imagine you're at a restaurant, and you ordered a piece of cake for dessert. Instead of cake, the server brings out a whole pie... and then hits you in the face with it. Even if you liked pie, you probably wouldn't like it served to you in that way.
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