#kamen rider gaim

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.