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04-09-2021, 12:11 PM | #681 |
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I feel like the difference here is in how infectious Shouko's energy is. The Airimirers are very broad characters, mugging for the camera and playing for the cheap seats. Here, Shouko's energy is more internalized, bubbling over from excitement and happiness. It's not something done for others' benefit, like the way the Airimirers are constantly bugging Airi. Shouko's just a really happy girl, and it's very entertaining to see that.
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04-09-2021, 12:21 PM | #682 |
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I think I should warn you that, given your disdain towards Ozaki and Miura, that there’s a guy with a few similar characteristics to the former as a major character in the next season.
But given next season has Inoue (who’s first major series had a similar character who is considered one of the best things about that series by general audiences) as the head writer and Naomi Takebe (the producer who went on to do OOO and Gaim) as producer, I’m not sure how different your reaction will be. As for the two-parter, I did enjoy it, but I felt erasing Shouko’s memories was a bit of a cruel twist. But luckily, the next two parter is one I’m much less keen on, so that makes this one’s strengths stand out more to me) |
04-09-2021, 12:27 PM | #683 |
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Quote:
I think I should warn you that, given your disdain towards Ozaki and Miura, that there’s a guy with a few similar characteristics to the former as a major character in the next season.
But given next season has Inoue (who’s first major series had a similar character who is considered one of the best things about that series by general audiences) as the head writer and Naomi Takebe (the producer who went on to do OOO and Gaim) as producer, I’m not sure how different your reaction will be. As for the two-parter, I did enjoy it, but I felt erasing Shouko’s memories was a bit of a cruel twist. But luckily, the next two parter is one I’m much less keen on, so that makes this one’s strengths stand out more to me) The Shouko conclusion worked, I thought, because it's giving Yuuto one more thing to be heroically tortured about, which is what gives Ryotaro the push to show Yuuto how deep the memories of him really go. It's sad for a moment, and then hopeful right after.
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04-09-2021, 03:17 PM | #684 |
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I really like this last pair of episodes. Shouko is a great guest character and I really enjoy it when the show starts playing around with the intersection between time and memory (see also: Piano Hobo).
I also want to give some kudos to Yuichi Nakamura. Takeru Satoh gets a lot of suitable praise for playing so many different characters, but Nakamura really does an underappreciated job of playing Deneb in Yuuto's body. The bit where he and Shouko kept apologizing to each other was delightful. |
04-09-2021, 03:22 PM | #685 |
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I also want to give some kudos to Yuichi Nakamura. Takeru Satoh gets a lot of suitable praise for playing so many different characters, but Nakamura really does an underappreciated job of playing Deneb in Yuuto's body. The bit where he and Shouko kept apologizing to each other was delightful.
And I could watch Deneb and Shouko bow to each other forever. Real glad they came back to that gag for the second part.
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04-09-2021, 03:38 PM | #686 |
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04-09-2021, 04:13 PM | #687 |
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KAMEN RIDER DEN-O EPISODE 42 - “MEMORY UPDATE”
Please get along with Yuuto. It’s hard, I know. It’s very, very hard. Yuuto is a character that is relentlessly opaque and aggressively taciturn. He suffers in a way that almost redefines suffering, and yet if you bring that up around him you’ve lost his interest. He longs for connection while refusing to connect. In every way that matters, he is Not Here To Make Friends. And yet. It’s almost impossible not to befriend Yuuto, not to try to improve his emotional state. Like a lot of closed-off characters, he protests way too much. He makes a big point this episode that the reason he’s refusing to make new friends and reconnect with ones who’ve forgotten him isn’t because it’d hurt him to lose those people. No, of course it’s not that; it’s the damage those people would take when they forget Yuuto. So naturally the episode ends with Shouko forgetting Yuuto and then frolicking on a beach in the background while Yuuto talks about how much she’s been harmed by this adventure. He’s so committed to this martyr bit that it is, honestly, adorable. He is willing to sacrifice everything about himself, body and soul, but he’s not willing to say that he regrets it. And he obviously does. His new Zero Form is his anger at how much he’s having to give up, but as a palette swap. He can put on a brave face and pretend like losing Airi doesn’t mean anything to him, but even one day with Shouko exposes that for the lie it is. He’s a sad boy who needs to have people in his life. He needs an outlet for all of this nobility, a reward for everything he’s burned up in the pursuit of justice. He needs it to all be worth something. Quote:
Quote:
As always, it’s Ryotaro who’s the hero of the story, because believing in people and not giving up are totally in his wheelhouse. Yuuto can’t get attached because he sees those attachments burn up like a Zeronos card. But Ryotaro rides a train with the lost and forgotten, and they’re only doing that because there’s a chance they’ll be remembered. Yuuto’s okay destroying himself, or pretending he’s okay with destroying himself, because he doesn’t really believe in himself. But Ryotaro believes in everybody, and he knows that there’s still a chance for Yuuto to be happy and remembered.
Maybe someday Yuuto’ll believe it, too. Quote:
I feel like the difference here is in how infectious Shouko's energy is. The Airimirers are very broad characters, mugging for the camera and playing for the cheap seats. Here, Shouko's energy is more internalized, bubbling over from excitement and happiness. It's not something done for others' benefit, like the way the Airimirers are constantly bugging Airi. Shouko's just a really happy girl, and it's very entertaining to see that.
Quote:
THE BAGGAGE CAR
-Absolutely stellar episode, and a lot of that comes down to Shouko’s actor. She has a gaudy amount of chemistry with Yuuto and/or Deneb, the type of chemistry that I think the show wrongly assumes that Yuuto and Airi have. (They really don’t!) There’s an indelible move Shouko’s actor does in this one, where she’s telling her story about how she motivated herself into appreciating what little time she might have, and she has this moment where she doesn’t think she’s explaining this right. In fairness, it is a bizarre monologue about today becoming the past in the future. But she gets this embarrassed look on her face, like she knows how dumb this all might sound to someone who is not full-time living inside her head, and it’s the cutest goddamn thing. Her enthusiasm never wavered in this episode, never once, and it made her one of my favorite characters on this series. Quote:
-Like last time, not a ton for the DenLiner crew to do in this one, but I laughed pretty hard at the idea of Urataros getting called in to steer Shouko away from Yuuto, and Shouko being completely impervious to his charm. Ura's main thing is winning over women, and he never ever had a chance with Shouko. She just does not see Ryotaro/Urataros as interesting romantically, preferring the Yuuto/Deneb combo. Hilarious.
-Joke of the episode was probably Kin suggesting that Shouko fell in love with Deneb, since that was what was inside Yuuto when they met, and Naomi politely suggesting that it maybe helps more if you look like a goddamn male model. I mean, Deneb’s a fun imagination monster from the end of time to chat with, but have you seen Yuuto. Like, have you seen his face. All of his face. But they're Kamen Riders who won't have humans' brittle body! Car would be nothing to Kamen Riders (even Kuuga Growing who pushes a truck without problem).
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04-09-2021, 04:57 PM | #688 |
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Well, while people will (and ought to) have interest in 1 person to stay loyal to them, I do hope that Shouko doesn't act rudely to people not in her radar like declaring them as worthless and out of her league or something, like seemingly this scene does. Though like before, I would still wonder what would happen if Shouko hasn't had her interest pinned on someone yet and had people acting like Deneb of being charming and helping her in princely way.
Ryotaro is usually pretty banged up after a Den-O fight, though. I can't imagine he could shrug off getting pancaked by a truck.
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04-09-2021, 05:17 PM | #689 |
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KAMEN RIDER DEN-O EPISODE 43 - "SOMETHING MISSING”
Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidn't like. The main problem with doing any time travel story, especially one that takes a year to tell, is that you really need to clarify what's happening. Like, Doctor Who gets ragged on for some dumb companion characters, but you 1000% need someone who can ask what the hell is going on in the story. There's a half-dozen things going on in this series, with singularity points and train lines and paradoxes and rewritten memories and etc and etc, but I more or less can't understand the stakes of just about any of them. Everything is in flux, constantly. There're plenty of solid emotional stakes, so there's still things to invest in on that level. I care about Ryotaro, and Momo, and Yuuto, and all the rest. How they feel about a story can save it more often than not. But the plot stakes are always suspect, always nebulous. The main problem with this story is that not only do I not really have a handle on what the hell is happening, I also don't have a handle on why Ryotaro is behaving the way he is. It makes for a story that I don't get on a plot level, and I don't buy on an emotional level. Like, one of the big things that Owner tries to explain (it is maybe this show's achilles heel that most of the timeline exposition comes from the character least interested in nailing down details) is that there's suspicion regarding Sakurai's importance to the plot. I mostly didn't understand a word of how they were getting at this (god bless the subbing team who had to translate this nonsense), but the end result is that Owner suggests that maybe it's not that Ryotaro is the only one who remembers Sakurai, but that Ryotaro's memories of Sakurai are the fake ones. This is an absolutely preposterous theory. It's impossible to even briefly entertain, because there have been at least two characters besides Ryotaro who remember Sakurai, by name. (Ryotaro's nostalgia-addicted school chum and the evil banker both mention Sakurai's relationship with Airi. It's even a plot point when the school chum forgets it later!) The fact that neither person is immediately brought up to refute this theory is frustrating, because it means the show isn't paying attention to the details, or that they can't explain their dilemma in a clear and concise way. Either they're bad at the plot or bad at explaining the plot, and I'm not thrilled with either of those possibilities. The emotional stakes for this one are way worse, and way more disappointing. Basically, Kai shows up to remind Ryotaro that he's fighting to keep the Imagin's future from existing. Except, his closest friends are four imagination monsters from that future. If Ryotaro defeats Kai, then Momo and all the rest will disappear. There are so many problems with the way this story is told after that. First, we were already told about these stakes from the Imagin weeks ago. Not this specific avenue of their destruction, but the idea that their time was running out is not even close to a new idea. It's new to Ryotaro, but making it a huge turn in this episode weeks after the audience started to deal with it feels like Ryotaro is slow on the uptake. It's asking viewers to be as shocked and as shook as Ryotaro, when he's pretty much the only character who hadn't figured this out. Second, the conundrum Ryotaro has (use the Imagin to destroy their own future or save their future by dooming humanity) is unbelievably cliched and not terribly compelling. Are we expecting Ryotaro to ride a magical time train with his good friends while all of humanity is obliterated by an army of imagination monsters? Is that supposed to be a realistic decision he has to make? I don't want to make a Kobayashi Maru joke here, because it's not just something that crops up in her stories. It's baked into the formula of Kamen Rider. Kamen Rider is, for fifty years now, about using evil to fight for good. That usually necessitates a story where the hero deals with the possibility that defeating evil will leave him with nothing to fight with. It's to this show's credit that it's not power that Ryotaro will lose but friendship, but this is still a disappointingly standard plot point (that it is tough to ever make work) with two startlingly unequal scenarios for the hero to choose from. Third, in typical Impossible Decision fashion, the hero opts to make no choice, and so we get a long-ass fight scene of Ryotaro getting beaten up. He won't fight with the powers of the Imagin, but he can't survive without them. It's a non-solution that's especially bizarre because it's not like Ryotaro stopped fighting, he just stopped fighting with his friends. It doesn't make any sense. It's a decision that's impossible to understand (he's more or less opting for suicide?!) and leads to literally everyone on the show yelling at him to explain himself. It's meant to be frustrating, but it is such prolonged frustration that I wanted to turn the episode off. Finally, after Ryotaro gets beaten up because he won't fight with the Imagin and he won't come up with a way to win without them, we get the big emotional standoff at the end between Momo and Ryotaro. Momo is the voice of the audience, furious at Ryotaro for tanking an easy fight because he wouldn't fight with his friends. Ryotaro's response is We Aren't Friends Anymore, which is probably supposed to be some extra-shocking moment in an episode that's probably supposed to feel filled with shocks. Instead, it felt tone-deaf and out-of-character to a degree I'd've never thought a show forty-three episodes in could manage. It makes Ryotaro the bad guy in what's either a misguided tough-love decision, or a full-on psychotic break. I'd probably be more forgiving of the latter, since we literally just did a story where Ryotaro showed Yuuto the power of connections and the stupidity of pushing away the people you care for. Like, it was the end of the last goddamn episode. So to follow that up with Ryotaro saying that he's Not Here To Make Friends... dumb. Incredibly dumb. And that's pretty much the whole episode for me. Incredibly dumb. I barely understood what was happening in the plot, and I hated what the main character was doing in reaction to that plot. Ryotaro is at his most unlikeable in this episode, and it made this my least-favorite episode of Den-O. Just a massively disappointing experience to watch this one. THE BAGGAGE CAR -So, one of the big reasons I don't speculate on Kamen Rider cliffhangers is so I don't get my heart set on any one theory. As such, I found the reveal of the God Spoons to be a pretty funny subversion. If you went out of last episode expecting some massive info dump or a cool new power-up, you were probably a little less amused! I can only imagine how much more I'd've disliked this episode had that been the case for me. -However. It seems as though the show is hinting that the Pocketwatchman isn't Sakurai from the future, but Ryotaro from the future. Like Kai's reaction, it's an interesting twist, but I don't really know what to make of it. -Even Kai is lame in this one! His whole standoff with Ryotaro is shot in a really mediocre fashion (check how shaky the camera move is as Kai enters the frame), and his taunts are just generic Sneering Villain bullshit. There's no spark to his role in this story. Everything but that one Yuuto/Deneb scene let me down!
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04-09-2021, 05:21 PM | #690 |
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Yeah, I wasn’t totally keen on this two-parter either. Ryotaro just came off as an unnecessary jerk to me.
Our main villain for Den-O, the Albinoleo Imagin (I confused him with the Leo Imagin before) makes his debut here. He’s voiced by Takuya Kuroda, who voiced the Owl Imagin earlier in the series. Check my response to episode… I want to say, 13?… for more on him. But for now, here’s the voice for the briefly seen Armadillo Imagin. Wataru Takagi Notable Anime roles: Bunbee in the Pretty Cure series, Crimson Rubeus in Sailor Moon R, Wataru Takagi in Detective Conan, Jagi in Hellsing Ultimate, The Joker in Batman Ninja, Sparky/Epxeriment 221 in Stitch, Eikichi Onizuka in Great Teacher Onizuka. Notable Tokusatsu roles: Kishiryu DimeVolcano in Kishiryu Sentai Ryusoulger. Notable dubbing roles: Cheetos in Beast Wars, Daffy Duck in Looney Tunes, Flim in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Glen Whitman in Transformers, Ignacio in Nacho Libre, Jetstorm in Transformers Animated, Tip in The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea |
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