people seem to be divided about sexism in kamen rider with some saying build is the lesser of two evils (in comparison to exaid) or just straight up dismiss anything bc of Strong Female Characters; do you have any thoughts on that?
yes i think they’re both incredibly sexist just in different ways lmao
as a general rule i hate “lesser of two evils” comparisons because... sexism is sexism, it can’t be separated into layers, it all interacts and compounds to create a culture of misogyny. so build maybe not having the exact same sexist overtures as ex-aid doesn’t make it any less guilty of the things it does have; by that same token, the places where build fails and ex-aid doesn’t (female riders, for one) doesn’t make ex-aid more feminist because it’s so incredibly more complicated than that.
i think build has interesting female characters, i think it also falls into a lot of tired tropes - the female politician being the weakest one who is manipulated, deposed, and replaced by men, the mother figure who exists to serve her son’s storyline and then disappears (seriously... where is she... isn’t anyone gonna call her and tell her that her son is alive...); sawa gets to do Cool Action Girl stuff from time to time but her character development is noticeably lacking (we’re halfway through the show and aside from the spy reveal, has she changed at all since episode 1?); misora gets to have emotions and development but a female lead should be doing more than emotionally supporting the male leads, she should be able to move the story forward on her own. and of course the fridged girlfriend which has 0 excuses in the year of our lord 2017. there are other ways to motivate your male characters.
however build has yet to have a main character physically abuse a woman so i guess it gets points for that. extremely low bar though. and that doesn’t make up for the fact that in the year 2018 they aired an entire episode where female characters had a combined 5 lines of dialogue in 1 scene. like, toy commercial for little boys or not, thats just incredibly bad.
i also think a lot of the wank and argument over Which Kamen Rider Show Is More Feminist (answer: none of them) comes from people taking it very personally when you tell them a show they love is sexist which... is really the wrong way to loook at it. you can like a show and it can be really good (and i do think build is) and it can still be sexist, it’s not a personal judgment on you. i like a lot of kamen rider seasons and absolutely all of them have huge problems with sexism. just the way it goes.
