#kamen rider analysis
Warning, slight spoilers for the shows, though I will keep the major ones behind the cut.
One of the strong recurring themes for Kamen Rider shows, is the self-sacrificing hero. After all, that is at the heart of any hero myth, someone sacrificing their own happiness to protect others. One very specific subset of this theme is what I like to call:
Kamen Rider Peacemaker: Ryuki, Blade and Gaim
- This is not just fighting an enemy, this is about putting a stop to the fight between friends.
Ryuki
If you win, you get to wish for anything you want in the world.
This was the first of the peacemaker shows, and is still the one with the clearest message. Shinji Kido ends up a Kamen Rider through mishaps and chance, but once he realizes that he has power to help people he dives in head first. Unfortunately what he dives into is a deadly battle between Riders, where only the winner get their wish granted, and everybody else ends up dead.
Once Shinji starts to realize the stakes, he quickly decides to put a stop to the fighting. They are supposed to protect people from monsters after all, not fight it out amongst themselves. Some Riders might be assholes, like Ren Akiyama, Kamen Rider Knight, but others are people that he likes, and they shouldn’t be fighting. However, as he learns more about the people he is supposed to fight to the death, he realizes that many of them have valid wishes they want granted. In many cases, they might be the only thing keeping them going, and what does he have? Nothing really, he found a deck, he was not given it to fulfill his wishes.
This is the crux the entire show hinges on, there are no right choices there. People will die regardless of what Shinji does. They are pulled in and played and manipulated into both needing and wanting this solution. Even if he manages to stop people from fighting, that only means their wishes won’t come true, and that means that people will die anyway. This is a fight Shinji cannot win, and all he does is muddling the issues for everybody else. When there are no good or bad guys, what are you supposed to do?
Shinji is not sure, but he has an ally in Miyuki Tezuka, a fellow Rider who also believes that peace is the answer.
Blade
If you win, your species will be the ones that reseeds and starts a new world.
In contrast, Kazuma Kenzaki starts out wanting to fight. He has an enemy, the Undead scourge that has been unleashed upon humanity. His job is to fight and seal them, especially the pretender Hajime Aikawa, Kamen Rider Chalice. An undead who pretends to be a human is too dangerous to live, unfortunately, he is also very hard to kill and Kenzaki finds himself enjoying the battle a little too much.
As the battle progresses, the infighting among the Kamen Riders intensifies, and little by little Kenzaki starts to realize that things are not so easy. Trusted colleagues shoot him in the back, people he wants to protect ends up neither wanting or appreciating it, and the creatures that should be enemies are more complex than he was told. Little by little, Kenzaki stops thinking about the fighting as a job, and he starts pondering the morals of what he is doing.
He comes to a decision, he will stop taking things for granted and find out what is really going on. He might want to fight Hajime, but even if he did, that would make his adopted family unhappy. If an undead wants to be human, is that so bad? Why are they fighting at all? For what sake? Is someone pulling their strings?
Kenzaki is not sure, but he has an ally in Noboru Shima, an undead who also prefers peace to endless warring.
Gaim
If you win, you get the golden fruit that grants you the powers of a god.
Kouta Kazuraba is really just a kid trying to become an adult. He wants a job, earn a salary, and be the responsible man that his sister deserves. However, Gaim, the dance troop he left in order to get a job is in trouble, and their leader has disappeared. Little by little he is getting pulled back in with his friends, slowly realizing that there is a lot more going on here than rival dance crews and monster games. As the monsters they have been using to fight rebels, Kouta realizes that there is only one force with the strength and skill to stand against the Inves, and that is the Beat Riders in their armoured suits.
However, rallying a force against the Inves is not easy. The dance crews have been rivals for a long time, and old enmity dies hard. His chief rival, Kaito Kumon, Kamen Rider Baron, is far more interested in fighting Gaim than the monsters. Kouta keeps trying to make the warring factions work together, but it’s not only the dance crews but Yggdrasil, the company that made the Beat Rider suits that stands in his way. And once they realize that some of the invading Inves are capable of both speech and thought, that adds yet another faction into the equation.
Kouta keeps fighting for everyone to get along, but every time he convinces one ally, another stabs him in the back. How is he even supposed to do this?
Kouta is not sure, but luckily he has found an ally in Takatora Kureshima, a project leader working for Yggdrasil who also wants to save humanity.
Be warned, behind the cut are spoilers for the endings of the shows (and predictions for Gaim which is still airing)
An alternative title for this batch of shows was Kamen Rider Martyr, and the reason for that lies with the endings.
Ryuki
In the end, Shinji’s attempts to make peace comes to nothing. His strongest ally, Tezuka, is killed by another rider, and he ends up the lone fighter for his lost cause. He can’t consolidate both the wish to stop the fighting, and the fact that this will mean the death for the people he has come to care about. In the end he ends up getting killed, at least happy that his death means that Ren might get his wish, save his girlfriend, and have a happy life.
Shinji sacrificed his life for the people he loved, and in the end, that was the only answer he could find. His death gives opportunity to make his wish come true.
Blade
In the end, Shima and the other friendlier undead ends up sacrificing their lives to give one of Kenzaki’s friends a chance to save his soul. Now utterly without allies, he attempts to avoid the inevitable fight to the death between him and Hajime. However, since Hajime is now the last surviving Undead, the end of the world has begun, which leaves him with only one option. To sacrifice himself. Kenzaki doesn’t die for the monster that he loves, instead he uses a production error in his Rider suit to transform himself into an undead as well. Since there are now two in the world, the end of the world is postponed as long as Kenzaki and Hajime can avoid fighting to the death. They might still both be alive, but they can never be together.
Kenzaki sacrificed his humanity to give the monster he loved a chance to live the life he had made for himself. He rejects the prize of getting to restart the world.
Gaim
Gaim has not ended yet (currently ep 33), but I will toss my predictions out there anyway.
In the end, Takatora is riddled by guilt over what he has helped create and ends up sacrificing his life to give Kouta the chance to save humanity. Kouta and Kaito finally ends up in a duel for the prize of the golden fruit, but Kouta is betrayed by Micchy and dies in Kaito’s arms. Kaito kills Micchy in retaliation, but then ends up handing the golden fruit to Mai instead, for the first time freely giving up power since he has learned that winning like this is not just worth it. Mai restarts/saves the world.
Or
In the end, Takatora is riddled by guilt over what he has helped create and ends up sacrificing his life to give Kouta the chance to save humanity. Kouta, after having beaten all the other Riders, ends up picking the fruit. However, by now he has realized that using the powers that he’s been given has changed him into something that’s not human anymore. He ends up becoming the ruler of the forest, ejecting all the surviving Riders back to the human world, sealing the cracks so everyone is safe.
Will Kouta end up dying as an example or sacrificing himself? I have a feeling it will be one or the other.
Warning, slight spoilers for the shows, but I will keep the major ones behind the cut.
There are many recurring themes in Kamen Rider shows, and they are each handled quite differently even though they share many common beats. I will go through all the Heisei riders, comparing some of the main themes of the shows. I will start with the theme of dealing with past and present trauma, a trio of shows I like to sum up as:
Kamen Rider PTSD: Kuuga, Wizard and OOO
- Godai is getting there. Haruto is there. Eiji is getting himself out of there.
Kuuga
At the start of Kamen Rider Kuuga, the Godai the show lets us see is a well-adapted young man. Sure, there are the usual background traumas to help us understand why someone would take it upon themselves to become a Kamen Rider, but they are all in the past. His parents might be dead, but he’s got a loving sister and an adoptive uncle, and friends that care about him. He has a teacher he made proud, and while there’s obviously something in him that doesn’t take well to routine since he keeps travelling, people in general trust him. Even Ichijou thaws up eventually, though he thinks that Godai takes fighting spider monsters while transformed into an ancient warrior far too lightly.
So what happens when the pressure keeps piling on? Kuuga is the first of the Heisei Rider shows, and in a way it seems to be created as a comment on Kamen Rider Black. They both have classic heroic protagonists being put through hell to save the world, but while Minami Kotaro clenches his fists and moves on, even when he’s put through horrors like watching his father die and having to fight his brother to the death, Yuusuke Godai has more issues with the role as hero. Oh, as the show progresses he keeps smiling and making his famous thumbs up, but when nobody is watching the mask starts slipping.
The pictures on the top and bottom respectively, were both taken within the same episodes. The ones on the left are Godai’s face when people are watching him, the one on the right when they look away. The smile disappears immediately. He starts getting the 1000 yard stare. Eventually the moments he manages to muster a smile and a happy face becomes so few and false that the other characters starts noticing as well. But they can’t do anything but worry, because in the end, they need him. They need him to fight. Not to be happy. And everybody in the show is aware of that.
Godai will protect everybody’s smiles, even if his own turns false in the process.
Wizard
Haruto Soma on the other hand, had his trauma before Kamen Rider Wizard even begun. His parents died when he was young, but unlike with Godai, we get to see that this really broke something inside him. He is still alive because his parents wanted him to live. It is pointed out many times that he is the hope of his dying parents, and growing up and gaining powers has just meant that he has expanded this to be the hope for other people as well.
As the show progresses we get to peek beneath the surface of the suave Wizard, and we get to see that he’s really just as broken as the people that he saves, he just keeps moving out of duty and stubbornness. He saves people, and they stick around to try to get through and try to help, but deep down his only connection is still Koyomi, who is as broken as he is.
It is what comes after this picture that is so important. His now middle-aged teacher asks the adult Haruto whether he can talk to him now. He would like to help and give some hope to his favourite student. Haruto hesitates, says “thank you, but…” and then the scene is interrupted. The look on Haruto’s face is a sad but resigned one. We never get to hear whether he would be ready to open up now instead of soldiering on alone, but we get the impression that he’s not ready to. Not yet.
In a weird way, the donuts really symbolize the show. Every day he’s tempted by the manager of the donut wagon to try new things, she keeps going out of her way to make donuts that might appeal to the sad but handsome man. And yet, every single time, Haruto picks a plain sugar one. Routine. Simple. Safe. He doesn’t try anything new because there’s nothing that he really wants. Not for a long time. He just goes through the motions because he would disappoint his dead parents otherwise.
Haruto is the last hope for so many people, and yet he lost his own so long ago.
OOO
If Godai is in the process of being broken, and Haruto is living in the middle of it, Eiji Hino is starting to heal. When we meet him at the start of Kamen Rider OOO he’s much like Godai and Haruto, a goofy, charming young man that doesn’t ask much of life. He doesn’t really want anything, he’s traumatized and has flashbacks when he’s reminded of the war that he was involved in.
Eiji’s story is a story about desire, about the fact that wanting nothing is as destructive as wanting everything. Very similar to Godai, once upon a time he was out in the world doing good, but all he did was make things worse. People died, and he is convinced that it was his fault. Far better to never be important ever again, and pretend that life is just there, nothing special to it at all. But he is pulled back in and forced to care. People around him doesn’t let him hide behind that false smile, they pry and dig and force the truth out.
During the show we see Eiji confronting his fears one by one, slowly letting himself hope, letting himself want. He still suffers flashbacks, but he is moving on. Little by little, with the help of his friends, he conquers his trauma and makes himself into a new man. Not the one he was, that innocence is lost forever, but someone new. Someone that can not only pretend to smile, like Godai. Someone that can not only endure for the sake of others, like Haruto. But someone that can live for their own sake, with their own hopes and their own dreams.
Eiji is the one that finally manages to reach out for that hand in the end.
So, in a way, these three shows ties together one personal story. Eiji and Haruto has been where Godai is when Kuuga ends, and one can hope that Godai and Haruto will one day get to move on in the way that Eiji finally manages to do.
BIG Spoilers for the end of all three shows:
Kamen Rider Kuuga was originally planned to end with Godai’s death, but instead he runs away. It’s the only solution for him really, he is too hurt, too dangerous and Tokyo is filled with too many memories. If he stayed, he might become the same kind of monster that he killed. So he flees the country and abandons the people that he loves in the process.
Kamen Rider Wizard ends two times. But regardless of whether it is the ending of the show, or the Wizard x Gaim movie, they all end in stasis. Haruto starts the show on the run from his past and his old friends, and he ends up still on the run (but with new friends). His Underworld (which in Wizard is the symbol of your trauma and the source of your power) has changed from the accident that claimed his parent’s lives, to Koyomi’s death. He has changed, but he is still standing in a similar spot, surrounded by dead loved ones.
Kamen Rider OOO ends with Eiji falling into the arms of his friends. The person that brought him back to feelings and pain and hurt might be gone, but even with Ankh’s medal being broken, he still finds the strength to move on. It is a sad ending, and one filled with pain, but it is a hopeful one. Eiji has finally accepted other people’s help, and in the Movie War Megamax, he seems to be a much happier and well-adjusted person.
