DNF: Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider (episode 13)
Tanzaburo Tojima was inspired as a child by Kamen Rider to become a Kamen Rider, but Shocker, the evil organization from the show, does not exist in the real world. Even with training from hell that puts you into peak fighting condition, there's not much use for it in the real world beyond being a great construction worker. So on the day he turns 40, Tojima sells his Kamen Rider merch and vows to become an actual adult, yet still unable to give up on his dreams even as he knows they cannot be fulfilled. Until, that is, some common thugs wearing Shocker masks show up at a local festival, and he finally has a chance to live out his fantasy, to his utter joy. But he's not the only one who wants to be a Kamen Rider, and (spoilers for episode 2) it turns out Shocker is actually real, after all!
There was a lot going for this show from the first episode, and that episode might actually be the best standalone watching experience for this show. It's the purest form of love of a thing pushing you to act in ways you wouldn't normally, in Tojima's case to act as a hero, and his counterpart Nakao to act as a monster of Shocker. After watching that episode, I was filled with a great, childlike whimsy and desire to go out and do something similar myself; there's no Green Lantern corps, but if I were to do this, would I wear a tool belt in green and help those who need it? I could almost imagine writing a story based on just that alone, and I was primed to continue watching the show with that theme in mind.
Episode 2 was where I started to see the cracks, though. We get introduced to our second Kamen Rider wannabe, Yuriko Okada, who was inspired by Tackle in Kamen Rider Stronger to become Tackle II, named to honor the ill-fated female fighter. Ostensibly, her arc is about being so traumatized by Tackle's death that she trained to be the strongest and make sure Tackle would never die again. But she's also the show's revelation that it cannot take female characters seriously. (not to mention everything with Masao Asano, who is this show's Mineta and who I will loath to my grave).
There are (off the top of my head) eight or so female characters introduced at the spot I stopped, the end of episode 13. Six of them have big boobs and are used for fanservice, Yuriko and Yukarisu (the other main female character) most of all. Of the remaining two, one of them is Futaba, the sister of two of the other main characters (both men) and Futaba's grandmother. Futaba has a fairly normal body type as these things go, but Granny Shimamura was a giant of a woman whose footsteps caused the earth to tremble, as broad as a house and taller than doors. For all that I was amused and delighted by this character design, it still annoyed my greatly that all the others were thin and busty. There is a later character I didn't get to who eschews this body type, and these characters tend to have diverse personalities, but they tend to bounce and were distracting. In almost every instance, while they tried to take themselves seriously, the show does not.
But I can get used to some anime bullshit, right? I've read all of One Piece, I can get used to some jiggle physics. What's the fightin' like?
For the first half of what I saw, the fightin' is pretty good. The gradual reveal of the enemies our heroes have to face means that stakes escalate quickly into seriousness, but not quite so quickly as to be unbelievable. There's a good on-boarding process to what a real Shocker should be like, including the monsters, and in a world where Kamen Rider is not real but Shocker is, normal humans have to do a lot of work to get on a level with them.
But the second half of what I saw is where it started to go downhill. After a bad fight our heroes set up a mini tournament arc, not something I'm particularly thrilled by under normal circumstances (I'm a shounen heathen, sue me) where the show started to lose me. The first real fight in the tournament arc is between brothers, and while I didn't love the way it was playing out, it ended well. The fight between Yuriko and Tojima is also excellent, and then the final fight between Yuriko and Mitsuba is... there. Anticlimactic. And it knocks Ichiyo out of alignment and gives him a crush on Yuriko I found highly embarrassing and unnecessary. We already had a couple where they were cheesy and in love and that was the gag; I didn't need to see the same thing play out except it was played straight.
And we come back to Futaba. In the show, she's an embarrassed middle child who had to grow up with two brothers who had seen Shocker kill their grandparents and didn't believe them. She's got a lot of depth available as a character; introduced as angry with her brothers, and why wouldn't she be? Her grandparents were murdered and her brothers are talking about Kamen Rider. Of course she'd find them cringe and annoying. But that anger is the only emotion she's shown to feel, and it flattens what would otherwise be an interesting reveal into just... a fight.
I should get into that. There's a lot of fighting in this show; notably, Nakao, a Yakuza member and a fan of villains in tokusatsu shows, shows up a few times to fight our heroes, and in some of his own fights. In a better show, it would be interesting to watch the bad guys have their own arcs and adventures, like the Phantom Troupe in Hunter x Hunter. But because the cast is so tightly focused he doesn't really get to do much, and the sprawling story feels cramped and small. 13 episodes in, we've met two monsters in Shocker and two named Combatants (their lowliest soldiers). Expand this to the rest of the show, and the same people fight multiple times. The emotional stakes which were there at first fade away into meaningless punches and bruises. Things just don't happen.
And I almost didn't write this review because something did start happening! Spider Man (not that guy) is coming around to kill Futaba's martial arts master, the Tiger Master. I almost watched the next episode just to see what happens, but I checked the Wikipedia page to find out the fight ends inconclusively again. Just when we're about to get somewhere, we get another fight that doesn't mean anything.
And when I say it doesn't mean anything: a fight in fiction is meant to do one of three things: imperil (when a character needs something and this is endangered by an enemy), promote character development (show us, through the fight, what's going on with them internally) or demonstrate prowess, or the Cool Factor. Having recently watched Ballerina I am spoiled for all three, but with even one I could be persuaded to tag along. But the prowess isn't here, I'm not afraid for the characters' lives or goals, and the character development just isn't there. You can look up people punching each other in YouTube videos, and that's even excluding fiction!
And now we get into the portion where I'm just going to complain. I'm not a fan of Kamen Rider, which is to say, I haven't watched any. I don't hate it, but it's unimportant in the face of the show, because I can see Tojima likes it and that pushes him to act. I think it's a little self-indulgent to have this be an official Kamen Rider project, but I can stand with it if something interesting is done.
At first, having Shocker be real was a turn for this more interesting angle. The power difference between four normal-ish humans and Shocker, organization of monsters and combatants, seems like a frightening thing to introduce. But as the episodes go on, we only get brief glimpses into the organization, and while some of it is interesting (Thunder Raiko is an enforcer who kills Combatants who snap out of the brainwashing) it's not shown. Shocker is, on the whole, an unknown entity, even as we get to see the POV of monsters and Combatants alike. How big are they? How much of a threat? We know one of their members was killing folks decades ago to hide the conspiracy, but that guy is someone our heroes fight in the present, as well. It's something like twenty or thirty people we see in total, and that's including members added over the course of the show. Why is Shocker real? If Shocker is real, why is Kamen Rider a show? You would think this is the obvious question to answer but no! we must have a shot of the character breasting boobily as she kicks someone in the face! Vital to the story, you see!
I hesitate to be so negative about a show that's ultimately just stupid wish fulfillment fun, but it's a show that managed to lose any goodwill I retained from the first episode by the middle of the season. Any faith I had in what this series would be about died away from an examination of heroism based on fiction to a middling battle shounen (technically seinen, but shut up) with no power system. I read a lot of middling comic books, though, and I was emotionally invested in this one enough to keep pushing despite misgivings, but at this point, it's undeniable: I hate this show. It's a show that had such potential and turned into utter mediocrity. I hate it for hooking me and wasting my time. Maybe you'll have fun, but I will not recommend it under any circumstances.
