[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER HEISEI GENERATIONS FOREVER



Being a fan is a blessing and a curse.

I don’t know if it’s healthy for me to be a grown American adult who cares this much about Kamen Rider. I don’t know if I should be devoting hours each day to scrutinizing a show designed to sell toys to Japanese children. I don’t know if I should be spending possibly thousands of dollars a year on merch. I don’t know if all of this is good for me, psychologically.

I do know that Kamen Rider has been there for me during times of hardship. I do know that being a Kamen Rider fan has connected me with people I’d’ve never encountered otherwise; made friends with people all over the globe. I do know that the last few years have been richer for this community’s place in my life.

Being a fan of something is so complicated. There’s always going to be a push and pull to it. Those times when you find something that speaks to a part of you that you never knew was there, versus the times where you’re let down by some show, some toy, some performer.

The idea of making an entire Kamen Rider movie about the ways the franchise acts as both a respite and an anchor, that’s kind of lovely. There’s an ambivalence to this movie, in its best stretch, that I found really compelling. It’s not the usual Kamen Riders Always Make Things Worse gimmick, like in the Be The One movie, where it's some villain trying to deflect suspicion and blame. It’s more subtle than that. It’s asking if Ataru’s okay.

I think that’s a fair question? He seems happy. He’s well-adjusted, more or less. His amount of Kamen Rider stuff isn’t out of hand. (Especially considering he’s been collecting for 18 years.) But his love for Kamen Rider, the excitement of its worlds, goes hand-in-hand with him preferring the simplicity of tokusatsu to the complexity of life. He was raised by Kamen Rider to be a good person, but a good person who looks to Kamen Rider for the solutions to his problems.

You can’t do a 20-year anniversary film that interrogates the franchise and not come down on Kamen Rider Is Awesome, so the answer’s never really in doubt. Ataru had been looking to Kamen Riders to fix his life, and eventually they did. Their fictional nature doesn’t really matter, because stories are how we make sense of our world; they’re how we process our hardships. Drawing strength from stories about empathy and kindness can be valuable at any age, to any viewer. Well-curated collections are okay to own.

There’s a bunch of plot stuff that didn’t work for me. I think the scene to scene storytelling, especially in the back half, was unnecessarily difficult to follow. Certain elements in the movie felt like they were waiting for a guest appearance that never materialized. (Another Double is nobody, and there’s an awful lot of Kuuga talk for a movie where Kuuga never talks.) If I never see two dozen Riders do finishing moves and pose in Kamen Rider Quarry again, I’ll’ve still seen it too many times in my life.

But that’s all largely irrelevant. It’s not really a movie about plot machinations or ticking off a Legend Rider Return checklist. (Great to see Ryotaro, though.) It’s a movie that wants to talk about what the Kamen Rider franchise means to its fans: the good and the bad. But like the best Kamen Rider stories, it knows that good can come from bad.

We aren’t hiding from reality, or victims of a toy company. We’re people who discovered something that spoke to us – stories of hope and sadness and empathy and loss and humor and fear – and we discovered something else alongside it: a community of fans who wanted to share that discovery with others. The sad version of Ataru’s life is him being a Kamen Rider fan, alone and hoping for a different world than his own. The happy version of Ataru’s life is him and his brother as Kamen Rider fans through the decades; a fandom, instead of a fan.

Kamen Rider will never die, and neither will Kamen Rider fandom.



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SPECIAL RYOTARO-LEVEL SURPRISE BONUS FEATURE!

KAMEN RIDER HEISEI GENERATIONS FOREVER.5 - “LET’S WATCH HEISEI GENERATIONS FOREVER!”



…and what better way is there to celebrate the permanence of Kamen Rider fandom than by reuniting the folks behind the definitely-existed project “TN's first LP! Let's Play Kamen Rider: Memory of Heroez”!

Yep, a whole bunch of us got together to record a horribly digressive and mostly unhelpful commentary track for Heisei Generations Forever! Join me, DreamSword, Androzani84, Enchiladas645, Name, and Kousan for a live recording of thoughts, jokes, and mild analysis of this film. You can grab the mp3 here. Hope you have as much fun listening to it as we did recording it!