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05-14-2021, 05:19 PM | #161 |
I have a problematic type
Join Date: Jan 2012
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So, like, it's not that Inoue hasn't written in someone who can nurture and guide Wataru. If anything, he's introducing a bunch of people who are offering to do that for different reasons (some good, some Nago), and it's Wataru's journey to figure out what he can learn from those people.
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05-14-2021, 05:31 PM | #162 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
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Although... I mean, I don't want to keep walking back Work Mom And Work Dad Are Failing Wataru, but there's honestly some value in even the weird manipulations and ways Wataru's personhood is weaponized. Like, Nago is able to manipulate and isolate Wataru so thoroughly because he knows exactly what's motivating Wataru. Megumi is trying her best to make a connection with Wataru, but Nago instantly gets that this kid has daddy issues he can leverage. He also probably does want to help Wataru? Just in the most selfish, emotionally-dishonest way possible? It's a real Inoue take on these types of issues, because there isn't this clean delineation between Good People and Bad People, or between Helping and Hurting. It's very messy, which... I mean, we're still turning this plot over, and that's not something that might've happened on another show.
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05-14-2021, 08:29 PM | #163 |
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05-14-2021, 08:33 PM | #164 |
Ex-Weather Three leader
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I do respect Wataru's neverending quest to find the perfect varnish though. Admire the work ethic.
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05-14-2021, 09:47 PM | #165 |
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KAMEN RIDER KIVA EPISODE 08 - "SOUL: THE ANGERED DRAGON CASTLE”
I don't know if it's the existential terror and wounded anger of the Rider Subs thread overflowing in my brain, or if it's just this episode, but I found this one pretty hard to concentrate on. My mind wandered a whole bunch here. It's an episode full of red herrings and unexplained occurrences (a Gillagoon is hunting Yuri for some reason? And whatever the Fangire was using to track down his victims after they ingested it was flammable for some reason?) that ends with two previously-uninvolved CGI monstrosities battling it out in the air, none of which feels connected even slightly to last episode's Work Mom And Work Dad Are Tearing Wataru Apart story. This one was all antics and shenanigans, nothing I could really care about. Like, Wataru is active(-ish) in defeating the Fangire, but a passive observer for the rest of the 2008 story. Most of the episode is just him drawing out Nago's backstory, which is legendarily stupid. And I mean that as a compliment! The idea that Nago got his father arrested for a clerical error (and ended up leading to his death!) because All Sins Must Be Punished is... *chef's kiss*. It's that heroic certitude he debuted with, but recast as villainous inflexibility. There's a way to read it as tragic (Nago definitely comes off in the flashback like someone trying to justify a hideous mistake by doubling down on it), but Nago is so insufferable at this point that it's nearly impossible to muster much sympathy for him. As it is, it comes off as riotously funny - a parody of the tortured hero's backstory - which I will gladly accept. Besides Nago's backstory (and this is another story he's completely absent for the second half of! Does this guy only work odd-numbered episodes or something?), the rest of the 2008 part of this story is some cutely funny scenes with Wataru, Shizuka, and Megumi; a brief fight scene on the docks where Kivat's just like I Don't Know Maybe I Should Fight Too; and then the conclusion, where a Dragon Cathedral and a Dragon Rooftop Windmill team up with Kiva to defeat a Resurrected Chandelier. It's all stuff happening, but it wasn't thematically relevant or vital to the characters. Wataru doesn't resolve the tension between Nago and Megumi, because Nago straight-up leaves the story. There's a sense of Wataru feeling a little more confident in his decision-making, but then he's reduced to a prop that Shizuka and Megumi briefly fight over. Like, last episode made itself really dark, and then this one sort of pretended it never happened. I don't know. Didn't feel like the 2008 stuff went anywhere for me. 1986 fared a little better, but not really. It's a lot of plot machinations, maneuvering Zanki to be less of a cool heroic loner and more of a wolf in helpful clothing. He's up to something, and it's not really clear what it is. There's a bit of a cliffhanger here, where Yuri flirts with Zanki, but it feels disingenuous to me. I can't really buy it as Yuri starting to swoon for her feral protector. She's probably letting him think she's falling for him so she can figure out what he's up to. (Yuri is way too smart to take Zanki at face value.) It's not really as shocking as it maybe was supposed to be, her picking Zanki over Otoya. It'd help if Yuri seemed to be anything less than horrified at Otoya, though. Otoya is maybe at his most unhelpful in this episode, vacillating between actively making situations worse and almost killing himself to prove his bravery. His least frustrating moments are only when he's debilitated and pathetic. He's still funny in this episode (him jumping that rando in the park was a stitch; I still love how unsubtle he is in his feud with Zanki), but there's almost no way to look at him as anywhere near the league of a suave, decisive, leather-clad werewolf. If I'm supposed to be invested in Otoya's attempts to win over Yuri (and I was just a few episodes ago), episodes like this are the wrong direction to go in. This whole episode felt wrong to me. Or... not wrong, maybe, but uninspired. It missed out on the complicated emotions of the previous chapter for romantic wackiness and CGI battle scenes. (I don't like CGI battle scenes at the ends of my Kamen Rider episodes!) The Fangire villain (a Prawn?) never really came together, outside of a funny gif. The 2008 stuff gave us Nago's backstory and nothing new for Wataru. The 1986 stuff teased Zanki's duplicity and murderous nature, but mostly shrugged at connecting itself with the other timeline. The whole thing was... adequate. Forgettable, but nothing that made me angry. Not like this Toei fansub news!
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05-14-2021, 09:58 PM | #166 |
The Immortal King Tasty
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Despite the current doom and gloom, and a story that may or may not be a little undercooked and unfocused, this episode is still pretty exciting for me, since it debuts the show's first insert theme, Destiny's Play, which means it's finally time to start talking some TETRA-FANG!
It was mentioned briefly earlier in the thread, but, proving the commitment to the show's musical theming, an entire "limited-time" band was put together solely for the sake of performing songs for the show. Den-O's huge array of character songs were quite popular, and like a lot of things in Kiva, they wanted to mimic that same successful formula. Also like a lot of things in Kiva, they wanted to do something different with those same ideas, so rather than variations on one song sung by a huge number of actors, Kiva has a huge number of unique songs all sung by one actor, Kouji Seto, who of course plays Wataru. I probably don't need to explain the "fang" part of the name, but the "tetra" comes from the band having four members, which includes Shuuhei Naruse as the keyboardist. Naruse started working as a composer on Rider during Den-O and has had an insane level of contribution to the franchise since, not even limited to just theme songs, as he also did the background music for Decade, Double, and Drive alongside Koutarou Nakagawa, and handled Fourze entirely by himself. For Kiva, he composed quite a few songs, including Break the Chain, as well as handling the arrangement on many others. The point I'm attempting to get at here is that TETRA-FANG is awesome, and all of these songs totally slap. Destiny's Play is a particular favorite of mine, even. Sort of a gold standard for Rider insert/character themes in my mind. While it's certainly something that can get you pumped for a fight scene, it's also got a relatively subdued sound compared to a lot of the insert themes Heisei Rider had been using up to that point, which makes it pretty much perfect as a theme song for Wataru at the outset of the series. Shouko Fujibayashi is still handling the lyrics for a huge number of these tracks, and, again, Destiny's Play is a song I'm always thinking of whenever I'm gushing about her work. It really nails that balance of being this optimistic jam about Wataru finding the courage to face an uncertain future while still having the lines kinda tinged by the doubts he's trying to overcome. It effortlessly encapsulates everything you need to know about the character, and I'm speaking from experience there, since, as I mentioned, these songs are how I knew the cast for a good while before watching the show. I felt like I had a pretty good grip on the guy going in.
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05-14-2021, 10:00 PM | #167 |
Filthy SU/FE Trash
Join Date: Jul 2016
Posts: 572
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Quote:
Despite the current doom and gloom, and a story that may or may not be a little undercooked and unfocused, this episode is still pretty exciting for me, since it debuts the show's first insert theme, Destiny's Play, which means it's finally time to start talking some TETRA-FANG!
It was mentioned briefly earlier in the thread, but, proving the commitment to the show's musical theming, an entire "limited-time" band was put together solely for the sake of performing songs for the show. Den-O's huge array of character songs were quite popular, and like a lot of things in Kiva, they wanted to mimic that same successful formula. Also like a lot of things in Kiva, they wanted to do something different with those same ideas, so rather than variations on one song sung by a huge number of actors, Kiva has a huge number of unique songs all sung by one actor, Kouji Seto, who of course plays Wataru. I probably don't need to explain the "fang" part of the name, but the "tetra" comes from the band having four members, which includes Shuuhei Naruse as the keyboardist. Naruse started working as a composer on Rider during Den-O and has had an insane level of contribution to the franchise since, not even limited to just theme songs, as he also did the background music for Decade, Double, and Drive alongside Koutarou Nakagawa, and handled Fourze entirely by himself. For Kiva, he composed quite a few songs, including Break the Chain, as well as handling the arrangement on many others. The point I'm attempting to get at here is that TETRA-FANG is awesome, and all of these songs totally slap. Destiny's Play is a particular favorite of mine, even. Sort of a gold standard for Rider insert/character themes in my mind. While it's certainly something that can get you pumped for a fight scene, it's also got a relatively subdued sound compared to a lot of the insert themes Heisei Rider had been using up to that point, which makes it pretty much perfect as a theme song for Wataru at the outset of the series. Shouko Fujibayashi is still handling the lyrics for a huge number of these tracks, and, again, Destiny's Play is a song I'm always thinking of whenever I'm gushing about her work. It really nails that balance of being this optimistic jam about Wataru finding the courage to face an uncertain future while still having the lines kinda tinged by the doubts he's trying to overcome. It effortlessly encapsulates everything you need to know about the character, and I'm speaking from experience there, since, as I mentioned, these songs are how I knew the cast for a good while before watching the show. I felt like I had a pretty good grip on the guy going in. |
05-15-2021, 01:35 AM | #168 |
I have a problematic type
Join Date: Jan 2012
Posts: 10,407
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I'm not sure if that counts as a spoiler. If so, my apologies. This is what Kiva does, though. It just throws things into the show and then never bothers to explain anything about them. It is easily the most consistently frustrating aspect of the show for me. |
05-15-2021, 01:46 AM | #169 |
Kamen Ride Or Die
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This is the scene I was talking about earlier that I consider to basically be Kiva in a nutshell. I've mentioned a few times now, in this thread and others, that Kiva is a show that refuses to explain things and this episodes climax has what is, to me, to the ultimate example. This is the episode where Shoodoran shows up. Shoodoran is a smaller version of Castle Doran that has a windmill on top of it and can mount on to the full size version. It just shows up suddenly out of nowhere with absolutely no explanation of what it is or where it came from and after this it is never seen again. Not in the series. Not in the movie. Not in the HBV. Never.
I'm not sure if that counts as a spoiler. If so, my apologies. This is what Kiva does, though. It just throws things into the show and then never bothers to explain anything about them. It is easily the most consistently frustrating aspect of the show for me. The conclusion, with the five butlers (or whatever) turning into a Resurrected Chandelier that only another CGI monstrosity can defeat... it's just, like, everything that bugged me about this episode. It's a conclusion that's on the backs (literally?) of two monsters who were not even present in the story before that moment. It'd be like if the 2008 Sentai Zord showed up to save the day. It might look cool (I assume that Zord looked cool), but it relegates to the background Wataru and every thematic thing the previous episode had been building towards. It feels like a failure of storytelling.
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05-15-2021, 02:36 AM | #170 |
Veteran Member
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I’ll let you decide.
That said, the thing I remember most about this episode isn’t the debut of the Six Pillars Sabbath (the giant chandelier monster), or the sole appearance of ShooDoran, but Megumi dressed in Lolita clothing. I don’t know why, but that just stick out more than anything else. Last edited by Androzani84; 05-15-2021 at 02:40 AM.. |
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