Kamen Rider Ryuki (I spoil the entire series, fair warning)

Okay, let's get to this post. I've been putting it off for a while, but all that's accomplishing is keeping me from moving on to the next Rider series. Also, I keep making the main characters henshin pose in front of mirrors, and not just before getting on the bus with my metropass (which is obviously acceptable). That, PLUS I just dreamed I could jump into the mirror world ala this show. So I clearly need to get this out of my system.

Wait, actually, give me a second to review what I've already told you about the show... alright, if and when it fits into this piece I can link back to my earlier post. Moving on. Ah, and a quick disclaimer, some of what I'll write here will surely be stuff I've read on tvtropes.org or wikipedia, so I apologize in advance for any copied sentiments. Man, will I get to it, or what?

The laconic premise behind the show is that it's Kamen Rider meets Highlander. You have a bunch of Riders and they have to kill each other until only one remains.

Up until this point, all Rider shows had the good guy fighting against the clearly defined bad guy (arguably it's a bit murkier for the previous series, Agito, but on the surface anyways it keeps to form)- this series is a HUGE departure. Ah, I've lost the thread. I really need to start at the beginning.

We meet the hero, Kido Shinji, a cub reporter for ORE Journal, as he's helping investigate a series of mysterious, seemingly impossible, disappearances. At the home of one victim he finds a card deck- which is an accurate but misleading way to describe this thing. It's more like a 2x3 inches plastic box containing cards (I don't want you thinking he just pick up a stack of cards off the floor). This box is called the 'Advent Deck' and is the transformation trinket, the henshin device, for the series.

It turns out that all the disappearances are caused by monsters popping out of reflective surfaces, leaping from a mirror world, to feed on humans. By picking up the henshin device, Shinji gains the ability to see into the mirror world, to sense when a mirror monster is on the move (a convenient plot device to get Riders into action when needed), and becomes targeted for destruction by a giant mirror monster dragon called "Dragredder". I don't know how it got a name like that, but whatever.

Two other people, besides the senior ORE Journal reporter, are in the area investigating the disappearances. Except they aren't investigating at all, because they know exactly what's going on: Ren Akiyama- Kamen Rider Knight, and Kanzaki Yui, a girl that can also see into the mirror world despite not being a Rider. They meet Shinji and Yui gets him to use the Advent Deck's contract card to make a pact with the dragon monster so it won't keep trying to eat Shinji. I forget how it worked, what with it being a while since I saw the first episode, but I recall Yui had somehow given Shinji an out, that he could keep one card that would protect him from the monsters, but give up the Advent Deck and thus avoid becoming a Kamen Rider. Regardless of what that out was, Shinji decides to become a Rider to protect people.

Which would be great, if this was a regular Kamen Rider series. But it isn't. What he signed onto instead was for a job where he'd be constantly attacked by other Riders that want to kill him, the mirror monsters might kill him, and to top it all off, if he doesn't participate and at least feed a defeated a mirror monster to his dragon every so often, his dragon will get hungry and pop out of the mirror world to eat him.

Pleasant dreams. "One who does not fight will not survive." is the tagline for each episode, and rightfully so.

Most of the Riders in this series don't happen to luck into these Advent Decks and into this horrible fight to survive. Rather they are handpicked by the shadowy Kanzaki Shirou, Yui's missing brother (her interest in all this is to find him) who is perhaps trapped in the mirror world and has little ability to interact with the real world. Kanzaki promises various desperate individuals with the promise of a wish should they become the last Rider standing. For example, Ren's girlfriend is stuck in a coma, so he wants to wish her back, another Rider is dying of cancer, so wants to cure himself. Shinji is a spanner in the works that doesn't belong in this battle.

It took a long time for me to warm up to Shinji because I couldn't tell if he was supposed to be silly or determined or what. But I get it now: he's a well-meaning, good-hearted idiot specifically in the wrong story, wrong genre. If he were in a Shonen manga or whatever, he'd try hard enough, and ultimately save everyone, and they'd all be happy and friends. He'd even be okay if this were ANY other series of Kamen Rider. But it's not. Instead, he's stuck in a show where YOU CAN'T WIN.

You want to stop the Rider battle (this becomes Shinji's chief goal throughout the series)? That means curtains for Ren's girlfriend, the guy with cancer, and (SPOILERS) Yui. You can sacrifice yourself for the sake of someone else's wish, but that still means 12 other Riders will get killed in the process. There isn't a happy ending here. It's this unreconcilable clash of genres between the idiot hero Shinji and the tragic failure-is-the-only-option setting that leaves Shinji paralyzed with indecision for most of the show. That's why I'm on Shinji's side- I feel horrible for him! In all the Kamen Rider series I've seen so far, no one has it tougher than him.

Let's get into random things about the series.

The Henshin pose that Shinji makes is interesting in that it is far and away the simplest of all the Riders in the show. It's highly imitatable (I can attest to that) while also being a visual cue setting Shinji apart from all the other Riders in the series. In addition, teamed up with Ren's Henshin pose, the two apparently allude to the henshin poses of the original Kamen Rider 1 and 2 (see images below) which is just a cool bit of history:

(Shinji makes his pose)

 (Ren starts his- I couldn't find a picture of him crossing his left arm in front, which is how he ends the move... weird there's no picture, you see it in just about every episode... but you get the idea)

 (Kamen Rider 1 and 2- you see the resemblance?)

 

While I'm posting pictures, let me get this last one out of the way:

Shinji and Ren are the two guys on the far left here. The Ryuki/Shinji design actually still bugs me, you'd think I'd like it after all this time, but no. It's always looked somehow cheap to me, a bit rubbish. Which is perhaps well in character for Shinji, but we are supposed to like his suit. The bits around his shoulders, which of course you can't see in this picture, always looked awkward to me, you'll notice the knee pads on all of them and are a design element that pops up in other places on the suits.. they have less to do with looking cool than with locking on to the weird motorcycle things that transport people through mirror world and are never adequately looked at or explained. It looks like something an action figure would have to accept despite what a designer would want, but here it's celebrated. Finally, I think the red jump suit may just be too jarring to me, as the base for most Rider uniforms is black, as you can see in the above picture.

In contrast, Ren's Kamen Rider Knight suit is very slick, I dig that one a lot. Ryuki gets a powered up form later that I actually like well enough.

Now may be the time for this part, so if you haven't yet, read my previous post on episodes 27 and 28 here: http://stonetextures.blogspot.ca/2013/01/ryuki-episode-27-28-my-8-button-isnt.html

You're back? Great! So with the clip show episode we're introduced to the concept of Kanzaki Shirou having the ability to rewind time. Despite all appearances from what I've written thus far- THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!!!

While most of these series have movies made that don't quite fit into their respective series continuity for one reason or the other, it's specifically the case that the movies are different try's of the Rider Battle, with everything we see in the main series just the latest iteration of the Groundhogs Day Loop that is this series. Here's a quick quote from Kanzaki Shirou that I think illuminates the thinking that went into the creators reasons for making the leap from mirror world monsters to time travel/different timelines: "Mirrors facing each other create an infinite number of worlds. There is more than one fate. The only thing that's the same is desire. All humans desire. That's why they fight. And when that desire becomes so great that it becomes unbearable, people... become Riders. The Rider battle... begins."

I think it's a bit of a stretch, and can't help but think (uh, think followed immediately by think in the same sentence. Bad style!... I almost wrote is as "By style!" before fixing it, but I kind of like that, sort of a "By Lucifer's beard!" outcry. So long as you imagine it as said by Kelsey Grammer) that they wasted two pefectly excellent premises by not committing to either one or the other.

We're introduced to the time travel twist in episode 28, but it doesn't really come back until the very ending of the series, not counting the movies. Something so pivotal should have had a bit of foreshadowing to it. Or rather than say "should", I would have preferred it. I've read it suggested that the reports we hear of Kanzaki dying out in America when he's clearly working in a lab in Japan before the start of the Rider battle is evidence of a fraying time-line, but if so I would have liked that to be addressed... because I need things spoon fed to me, apparently. Maybe I just would have liked way more crazy discrepancies like that to make things clear.

Ultimately we learn the source of the mirror monsters, they were Yui's drawing she made in front of the mirror when she was little, and the whole battle was set up to steal life energy, i.e. the wish, for the sake of granting Yui new life, as she'd died when she was little, and had only continued existing thanks to her mirror self giving up her life/replacing the real Yui, but her borrowed time was just about up... the fact that we don't get more stuff dealing with mirror copies of people (Shinji had a mirror copy of himself in the movie "The 13 Riders" but other than that, the mirror world is completely empty but for the monsters roaming around) is another wasted oppourtunity.

Did Yui create the mirror world? Is Kanzaki Shirou trapped in the mirror world? Maybe he's the mirror version of Kanzaki, and the real version of him died in America, that would actually really make a ton of sense, perhaps the two versions of himself were working on a way to save Yui.

Despite all these questions, the ending is amazing/amazingly sad.

Shinji is still trying to work out what the right thing to do is, to fight or what, to kill or allow to die, when an invasion of mirror world insect monsters run through the real world (tough since the Riders powers seem to be mostly non-existent in the real world... I'm not sure why the monsters don't just fight longer in the real world, though it's likely they can only survive so long in the real world, same as the Riders can only spend so long in the mirror world.). Shinji dives in the way to protect a little girl and gets stabbed in the back by one of the creatures.

The girl runs off, and Shinji is stumbling a bit, and you think he's got hurt in much the same way everyone gets hurt on these shows- undefined ouchies that can be overcome by heroic willpower!- and then a bunch of blood comes out his mouth (!!) and you're like "Woah, this is the real deal!" He struggles up to henshin and go into the mirror world to help Ren wipe these monsters out. That done, he pops back in the real world and slumps down against a car, a streak of blood showing his slide to the ground. Ren, a character that has done his level best to be cold and unattached to any other character in the show, fully expecting to have to kill them eventually, gets choked up and tells Shinji he's supposed to live. It's super sad guys, not even joking in the slightest. That the series got me choked up too earns it major points. Not that I like being sad, but I can't help but be impressed by something that elicits an emotional reaction from me.

Then Shinji dies.

Yup, the hero of the show dies without beating the bad guy (whoever that is), without figuring out what he was supposed to do... but he definitely went out like a hero.

Ren goes on to fight the last Rider, an over powered puppet controlled by Kanzaki named Kamen Rider Odin, Kanzaki's trump card to cheat out the Rider battle and win the wish/life energy for himself to save Yui (who has already died/disappeared by this point). Kanzaki finally decides that Yui will never accept the gift of new life if it means sacrificing all these others (he's tried multiple times before in previous Groundhogs Day attempts), Odin disappears and Ren goes to his girlfriend Ari, who revives just as Ren loses consciousness. Did Ren die from his wounds fighting Odin? Maybe. But that doesn't matter, because Kanzaki makes one final time jump, this time stopping the mirror Yui from taking over for Yui, allowing her to die. We're shown a scene of Yui and Kanzaki, accompanied by their younger selves, drawing happy pictures of their group. Whether this is the afterlife or a moment stretched out in the mirror world, or whatever, it's oddly heartwarming.

In this new timeline without Kanzaki Shirou to create the Rider battle, there's no mirror world attacks, no Riders, the guy with cancer got treatment early enough, Ren's girlfriend didn't fall into a coma (not a surprise, since it was a mirror world monster/Kanzaki's experiments that caused her coma in the first place)... basically everyone is fine, except Yui's aunt is clearly lonely now, and Shinji and Ren don't know each other. Bittersweet, but as good an ending as they could hope for. Not that they know anything had happened.

I'd be interested in a continuation of the series, where some other source of mirror monsters shows up (is the mirror world dependant on the Kanzaki's to come into being, or could it return in some other form?). It'd be a fun fanfic anyways.

The japanese word I learned from this show was "tatakai" ( 戦い <- guess="" i="" it="" kanji="" p="" recongize="" s="" t="" that="" the="" though="" wouldn="">And in that deep voiced way Kanzaki says it, it sounds more like "tat O kai" but I'll trust google on this one. It means struggle, battle, or as I think of it, simply "fight". Kanzaki basically says this every other word:

Why are we doing this?
"Tatakai"
What do you want?
"Tatakai"
Who are you?
"Doesn't matter. Tatakai."

It sounds really cool the way he says it, I've basically spent the last month mimicing it. I took Jordan to the gym and when he was working hard on some last reps I'd go "tatakai", and he'd laugh and have to quit.

I THINK that's everything important about this show. I've already spoiled the ending for you, so that was important to do. I haven't gone into depth on any of the other characters on the show besides Shinji, but there are a million characters and I've already been at this for a while. You see why I kept putting this post off.

I guess now I can start watching Kamen Rider Blade...