#jumpscare warning for me writing with proper capitalization

[bugtransport]

Kamen Rider V3 Finished: January 14, 2023

warning: this is over 3700 words and has pictures so buckle up. you cannot and will not get me to proofread this any more than i already have

Kamen Rider V3 is the show of all time. In case you didn’t know I’ve just decided that I’m going to watch all Showa Kamen Rider in order because when I started watching Kamen Rider I made some kind of joke like “oh, wouldn’t it be funny if I just went back and started from the very beginning?” except I have also never made a joke in my life so had to then proceed to do that and then by the time I finished KR 1971 I was so violently in love with Hongo and entirely charmed by the cheesy 70s kids tv of it all that I just had to keep going. That’s where I’m at mentally. That’s what was in my mind going into the show. A lot happened and a lot changed through the run so I think honestly we’ve gotta be true to the series and talk about it in 3 sections. 

PART 1: V3 is invincible!  This is the part where all the time we spent with 1971 Rider pays off. 

Pictured: a guy about to get his shit rocked

God, what a way to start off. Bringing back the two guys from the previous season and then blowing them up with a nuke in the 2nd episode. It was so special and so charming to have them build the new protagonist themselves? I spent a good 2 months running through 1971 and I was really sad at the thought of having to say goodbye to the boys… but I didn’t have to because they lived on through V3. They also lived on somewhere else. They were fine post-nuke. Good for them! 

I had no idea what this show was going to be like going into it. 1971 was so episodic that when they introduced the whole two monsters, two episodes, 26 secrets over the course of 52 episodes hook I was like oh hell yeah, it’s gonna be like the last one but even cooler. They ended up only sticking with that format for the first part but you know what? I liked what I saw while it was happening. I genuinely wouldn’t have been mad if they had just kept going with it. I’m glad they didn’t, but it was a cute little premise. I liked thinking about what special features Hongo and Hayato thought fit to put in him and what could have possibly prompted them to come up with them – because they had to have thought about this before borging Kazami, right? There’s no way they came up with that all on the fly. Not necessarily that they were planning on changing someone else (Hayato may have thought about it in passing, Hongo would be so staunchly opposed that imagining it would probably send him doomspiraling again) but… they could have been planning on making upgrades to themselves. They’re already borged. They’ve gotten themselves into situations before where they did get out of it, but they could have come out of it thinking “wow, this would have been a lot easier if I could, for instance, overclock my body, even at the expense of not being able to transform for 3 hours following,” and then gone and given that power to Kazami when they had the opportunity to. It’s an incredibly sweet concept; it’s like hearing the meaning behind the names parents give their kids, the good traits that they want to pass down to them. It gets me right in the heart. I love thinking about it. I love that V3 is so cute and squishy. I love imagining that Hayato was the one to take the lead on that (he’s a photographer, he’s artistic) while Hongo handled all the more technical stuff. He has both the powers and the dreams of Kamen Riders 1 and 2. It makes me mushy… I had such a good time with ‘71 Rider. 

Pictured: proper surgical procedures

Pictured: two guys who had no idea how the shit that ended up working out either

For as cute as V3 is both as a suit and as a concept Kazami is fucking nuts from the get go. He got borged, popped right up off the operating table, pinned a guy to the wall by his throat, and basically went “yeah, I have no idea how strong I am right now, wanna find out together?” He almost let a dude drown. The guy convinced Tachibana to beat him up with a wrecking ball for training purposes. He’s just unhinged in a really fun way especially coming straight off of Hongo, who has maybe the world’s worst case of anxiety. Kazami has really none of that and despite having his family killed in front of him he’s shockingly… well adjusted? Maybe he’s just stuck in the first stage of grief. We’ll touch on this later.

Pictured: your weird uncle who's just down for anything

This section of the show was pure fun. High adrenaline explosions and fights and new abilities and goofy monsters and explosions and Kazami hanging off the side of his motorcycle speeding through the streets while being shot at and uh did I mention explosions? It’s so fucking good. ‘71 Rider was them trying to figure out how to do this show (which was relentlessly charming – I loved seeing them try new things and new effects and get into the groove with the pacing and characterizations and feel of everything going on and by the end of the show you can tell that everyone working on it felt much more confident than they did in the beginning) and the time that they spent getting into that groove made carrying on in a similar fashion pretty seamless. The jank is charming. Tachibana whips as usual. Shigeru was cute; all the kids were, they’re kids and they all seemed to be having a blast being in Kamen Rider. It warms my heart every time I see them. Junko was… there. They did try and introduce what I think was supposed to be a Taki-type character in the Interpol guy (whose name I can’t even remember, sorry king, you were such a non-player in this show) but Kazami is just such a force of nature that he mainly ended up seeming scared and confused and really ended up just in the background kinda standing there awkwardly when anything was going on.

Pictured: world's worst first dates

That’s I think the biggest difference between 1971 and V3 here: because Hongo and Hayato had each other and Taki all as sort of equals and balancers in 1971, when you did get your monster-of-the-week type character building they have each other to bounce off of (i.e. Taki trying to lick poison and Hongo stopping him, the scene when Hongo and Hayato are splitting up after a Double Riders episode on the boat and they both have internal monologues about where they’re at emotionally being borgs) but Kazami doesn’t have anyone to bounce off of and contrast him. He does pretty much everything alone. All the decisions he makes, no matter how off the fucking wall, are his sole responsibility. This begins to compound as time goes on and leads us to… 

PART 2: DSM-5 speedrun This is the part where things start to sink in.

Hongo and Hayato come back for a couple episodes! This rules. This is so fun. We get some Double Rider action (I’ve missed this so much; Kazami rules but it’s so fun to see people fighting side by side as equals and it not just being like, Tachibana clubbing a few goons on the nog while Kazami wrecks a monster) and the two boys get to see how Kazami’s doing in action to both check up on him and their handiwork. Kazami seems really happy to have them back fighting with him! Hongo looks phenomenal as usual. Hayato has heels on which is very important to note, thank you. We get a little game of psychic marco polo when Hayato and Hongo get kidnapped and it’s up to Hayato to come find them and rescue them, just like in the last episode of 1971 Rider. It’s so fun. They kick Destron ass together and they laugh and Hongo gets to reconnect with Tachibana and the new rider kids a little. Then they leave, as we always knew they would. And Kazami is left alone again.

Pictured: they are fucking standing

Hongo and Hayato reappearing and leaving again also marks where the cracks in Kazami really start to show. 

I mean yeah alright he’s always been a little nuts but at one point I stopped around two thirds of the way through one of the episodes with Hongo and Hayato in them and decided to catalog everything that Kazami had done so far that day. He:

Got exploded in a car crash

Impersonated a man

Got exploded in a car crash again

Transformed upside down

Somehow called his bike down into the Destron surgery chamber

Decided to do donuts in said surgery chamber, terrorizing all the scientists in there (side note: do you think that a certain scientist was in there too?)

This is now a normal day for Kazami. I love this interpretation of why the shift happened but personally I like to think of the tipping point as being when Kazami realized that he was having way more fun fighting alongside two people who were like him now that he was acclimated to being a cyborg – much different than the fighting he did at the start of the series with Hongo and Hayato where he was basically a newborn and just learning the ropes – and so, when they left again, he felt their absence much more acutely than he did the first time, and maybe because the wound has been opened again when he’s not bowled-over-busy figuring out his new borg life, he at this point actually starts grieving his family. Like I mentioned before: Tachibana is maybe the closest thing Kazami has through the series to having someone to fight with, and he’s just some fucking guy. Which is nuts! Kamen Rider is at its peak when it’s about two boys. I stand by that. When we have two boys they can share the trauma of what’s going on around them and support each other. When we only have one boy, that boy has to carry the weight of the whole world alone. Tachibana can try all he can but at the end of the day he’s still just a guy. He can only try and understand all these tortured boys he takes under his wing from the outside. 

Pictured: he's trying his best to understand kids these days

Pretty much every single episode post Hongo Hayato return involves at least one kid with no family. Kazami obviously begins to see himself in them - this becomes so heavy handed by the end of the series that he sees a parentless kid playing a harmonica, takes the harmonica from the kid, plays a song of his own, and reminisces about playing the same song for his sister back when she was alive. It’s in no way subtle. That’s not at all a bad thing! If you’re complaining about something being a bit too heavy handed in what is after all a kids show I don’t really know what to tell you. Also, what can I say, I’m a documented slut for repetition as a narrative device. I think it whips. I love time loops. I love callbacks to things earlier in the series. I don’t know if half this shit is intentional but I’m having fun with it. With how hard they hit the Dead Family Connection between Kazami and these kids I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and say yeah? Sure, why not. For this example specifically I think it really serves to show just how often this is now on Kazami’s mind. It’s something he can’t really get away from in the same way he was at the beginning of the series. I think that’s also why I didn’t at all mind the episodes that were kinda early-Hongo 1971 rehashes before the Riderman eps… Kazami wanted to be borged in the beginning and didn’t really have issues regarding his new life until around this point. It was in my opinion a nice little way to bring his newfound borg issues into play. I personally just like the early Hongo episodes too so I’m biased, and aware of that fact. 

Pictured: the world's most emotional harmonica solo

Back to Kazami though: if you want a really good example of how he’s coping, here’s a video of him kidnapping a Destron goon and threatening to torture them for information. He’s really not doing well. He’s beginning to get a little black and white in his ways of thinking while the narrative is trying to bring in some gray areas by bringing in a couple one-off characters who start to shed a little light on Destron’s recruitment tactics and why, theoretically, someone might join up with them, which is something I thought really interesting and something that I wanted to see more of after the Ambassador Hell waffling in 1971 Rider. I’m glad that we did get to see that! Kazami again gets to have his shit rocked a little when someone that he thought he knew gets sucked into working for Destron. I honestly don’t think that Tachibana is any help here at all, the man comes across as kind of old school and again, pretty black and white thinking. But actually wait… I mentioned Riderman earlier, right? I think to further think about Kazami and what’s going on with him we gotta take this fucking post to… 

PART 3: Riderman… what, do you ride men or something? This is the part where I talk about the ending of the show. 

Pictured: two boys, twice

Kamen Rider is a show that works best when it’s about two boys. Yuki Joji is a Destron scientist (incorrectly) accused of being a traitor which leads to him losing his arm in a vat of acid and getting rescued by several other Destron scientists who end up attaching a borg arm to Yuki to save him, which turns him into Riderman. Now. This on its own is a departure from how Kamen Rider has treated Shocker/Destron scientists that you’re supposed to be sympathetic to in the past. Before we’ve really only gotten the whole “oh yeah, these dudes were kidnapped and forced to borg people against their will” song and dance which, sure, that’s fine, I think there’s a lot more to unpack about the morality of science than we care to get into in this show (thinking about you, guy in 1971 Rider who made a ray that just turned people into skeletons (??) like why the hell were you doing that. How were you planning on spinning that as being a good and moral thing to do in the first place. How on earth were you at all surprised when Shocker was like “oh actually we could totally use that for evil.”) but you know I’ll take this for what it is. Now you’re coming out of the gate swinging with a guy being saved by people who are clearly more loyal to him than they are to Destron but – all of them still work for Destron, that’s not a question. They all seem to see this as some kind of weird mistake, but not indicative of the organization as a whole. They still believe in the mission that they’re doing there. While Yuki is out for revenge on the people directly responsible for taking his arm and forcing him to get borged, he’s still openly fine with Destron. He doesn’t want to work with Kamen Rider. Kazami, who has gotten through the whole series pretty much through sheer hardheadedness alone, is finally matched with someone just as willful as he is, and oh my fucking god does he enjoy this. 

Pictured: yeah you're one to talk

Yuki is stuck in the middle of a bunch of stuff. He’s neither really allied with Destron nor with Kamen Rider. He’s neither fully cyborg nor fully human. His little helmet – it only half covers his face. He’s helping his enemy to save kids. He’s getting pulled in every single direction all at once. Kazami, maybe thinking about all the stuff he’s heard about Hongo and Hayato and their time fighting together (because he has to have heard this, right, he’s got to know their stories) is relentless in pursuing him (“I thought you were different from other Destron members!”). And it works – Yuki realizes that Destron is evil and that Kamen Rider is in fact his (actual quote) angelic savior but it doesn’t even stop there, because he throws himself in front of V3 at one point (sort of similar to Kazami throwing himself in front of Hongo and Hayato in the first ep, come to think of it) to take a blow for the Destron leader because it’s at this point it’s revealed that he was raised and essentially groomed into their organization and while he’s trying his best to unlearn all the stuff he was raised believing, it’s still hard and that tears him apart internally even more because at this point he has joined V3 and is helping him and has renounced Destron but even if you are starting to unlearn things that you have seen firsthand proof of being incorrect… what about those guys that saved him from the acid vat. What about small little happy moments he might have had growing up that kept him going this long even when he was apparently suicidal (yes that is in the show) that weren’t directly Destron things but involved people around him there. What about the accomplishments he made while working for them. These are all tied up in something horrific and the recontextualization of all of these memories that he’s had over the years has got to be incredibly rough to go through. It’s rough to go through on a smaller scale! It is insane to look at the fact that this arc started on episode 43 of a 52 episode show. The burn is instant; the boys go up like a pack of matches, they are from the start so intertwined, such challenges to each other physically and mentally that it doesn’t seem rushed because of course they would be drawn to each other this way. 

Pictured: what, do you ride men or someth

I feel like sometimes characters who take this role can be written in a way that comes across as a little too angsty and I don’t always connect with that but I don’t get that from Yuki. All of his reactions really come across as understandable for being in the situation that he’s in. He’s been hurt by something that he trusted and after stepping back from that learned some really terrible things about them. Of course he’s gonna be conflicted. He’s a stuffy little nerd. I really, really like the way they played him. I’m not going to bring my personal experiences in here, but believe me when I say: I get it! And I’m so incredibly impossibly proud of him for changing. 

Pictured: things are starting to add up

They go even harder into the Destron/borg issues now – we have episode 49 where literally everything that could possibly happen happens: Kazami gets hacked and loses the ability to control his borg strength, there’s a girl who gets tricked into working for Destron without realizing that they’re bad, Yuki has to take the two of them and break back into his old Destron lab stomping grounds to be able to fix Kazami up… it’s nuts! How fucking fun is this?! Boys with so many issues but like, they have each other, you know? I’m breaking through the walls. I’m tearing them down. I’m renovating. Yuki’s all in now, that I think was maybe one of the most loyal things he could have possibly done for Kazami. Revisiting this place that brought you so much pain and using your skills to fix someone up and do good for them. 

For as much as I’ve been talking up until now I don’t really know how to talk about the last two episodes. Kazami and Yuki get split up and have to infiltrate a Destron base separately because they’re on a pretty strict time limit and can’t really waste time meeting back up with each other. Yuki overhears a conversation where the Destron leader calls him a coward – after everything that he’s done, and he decides to go take control of the rocket that’s about to blast off and fly into Tokyo and detonate it elsewhere with himself inside it. In the second to last episode. 

Pictured: a guy about to get his shit rocked

Now. Remember when I told you about how I love how repetition is used as a narrative device? Kazami’s story is bookended with people blowing themselves up to both save humanity and also to help him out. To contrast Hongo and Hayato though, Yuki’s… mostly human. I think Kazami makes a fair enough assumption at this point. Same one as you or I would probably make if our boyfriend blew up in front of us. This shit hits nuts for me. What a weird way to wrap back around and bring this thing full circle, giving us a man who has now once more lost someone who was very, very important to him, really one of the very few people who he has who can understand certain things about him, who was willing to give his life to help Kazami accomplish what was originally meant to be revenge for the family he lost at the start. This isn’t a happy ending to the show, this isn’t Taki flying back to the US with an emotional goodbye at the airport, this is Kazami just up and leaving and riding off into the distance. Not checking in with Tachibana or anyone, just going. You can’t really fault him. After everything that’s happened I’d need a moment of quiet and a little bit of time to think too. 

From the beginning Kazami was warned about becoming a cyborg and wanted to do it anyway and got himself into a situation where he had to become one. Honestly I’m inclined to believe that he did expect being borged to be the end result of essentially sacrificing himself or at least for Hongo to be more sympathetic to his desire after he helped them out of that jam they found themselves in, but who’s to say… regardless, it’s a really fun show about a compounding tragedy and loss and challenging your views and a guy working through one hell of a lot. 

Pictured: say the gender line, king

YEAH FUCK YEAH I RECOMMEND THIS ONE but maybe watch 1971 rider first i think you’ll get more out of it that way lol

BONUS CAPS FOR EVERYONE WHO MADE IT THIS FAR:

incredible special effects

they're doing it standing up

you know exactly what i'm getting at with these two

this one's just real good

>:|

okay that's all for real. BYE

[kanyniablue]

-watched The VVitch. that's how you spell it right.  I liked the atmosphere & I never was like "this is too stupid" but it also seemed like it was an entire movie of setting up a story, and then it ended.  I can't completely explain this, because it does have a beginning, middle and end with a complete story, but it just felt...like a pilot episode, sort of.  Apparently critics loved it more than audiences & yeah, it seems like the sort of movie critics would love more than audiences.  There's nothing scary in it unless you're scared of blood/gore, and there are no jumpscares I remember.  There's some weird gross sexual things as part of the horror if you need a warning for that, and bad things happen to the dog.  Also I kept nitpicking about things like "why do you have metal buttons" "how did you build your house so fast" "what kind of Puritans have silver chalices" "is that an American rabbit because it doesn't look like one" but that doesn't really affect the story.  I don't even know if they're really Puritan.

-watched the first few episodes of that Netflix series about the hunt for the Unabomber, and although I went in expecting more of a documentary than a crime drama, it's...alright.  A lot of it seems to hit the same beats as every crime show ever.  "You were the best at the academy but you have no real experience & are completely out of your league!"  "We called you in especially but we're not going to listen to a thing you say no matter how often it's proven true because we're used to Cold Hard Police Work, not this namby-pamby psychoanalysis bullshit!"  "I have a wife and kids but this case consumes my whole life and my wife says I never talk to her anymore!"  Every episode seems to go 1.  Breakthrough from last episode 2. Tense rush to get The Guys Upstairs to believe it but they don't 3.  Finally they do & it's proven valuable 4.  Investigation hits a brick wall & Main Character Guy doesn't have the answers so The Guys Upstairs disrespect him 5.  All Hope is Lost 6.  Sudden Breakthrough, end the episode on a cliffhanger

I'm not sure whether I like the whole 2 timelines at once thing.  On the one hand you get to see how the main character has changed so radically from when we first meet him so we can see how this case has affected him, even though we haven't yet seen HOW it's affected him, so it's setting up big things & making it tense and serious.  On the other hand, clearly his work all works out and they catch Kaczynski and he's in jail and blah blah blah.  Like I knew that anyway because that's how it happened in real life, but in-story, the tension isn't as strong when they constantly go "do we finally have the right guy???? I think his name is Joe Schmoe" and then switch back to Ted Kaczynski.

Also the subtitles capitalized 'Goddamn' and 'Kamikaze' but didn't capitalize 'weather underground' & that bothered me.  The Weather Underground was an organization, it's a proper noun.  Goddamn and kamikaze can be capitalized or not in English.

Also also, at least they start off saying "look every profiler has come up with something different and some of them are clearly just guessing."  But they have the one skeptical guy who's like "it's not fOrEnSiCs~" yes it is Bob anything you can enter into court counts as forensics; this is a science.  It's a very inexact and experimental science, but it's still a forensic science.

The other thing was all the forensic linguistics stuff, which I understand is a hard sell especially to Skeptic Stevie over here, but like...this is the same problem that I kept yelling at the screen in whatever that movie is where Bendydick Cucumbersnatch plays Alan Turing trying to break codes.  Words aren't random why is this news I mean it's not quite the same randomness they're talking about but they put all that emphasis on the guy talking with a bluecollar Philly accent and like...yeah, accent, dialogue, spelling choice, word choice, why would anyone think this COULDN'T tell you about the guy who's writing like an academic but also bombing colleges????  (or how goddamn FREUD knew that mistakes were letting you know something about what someone was really thinking that's why they're called FREUDIAN SLIPS) (or how about how all his papers are TYPED on a TYPEWRITER which had to be manufactured & maintained & BOUGHT SOMEWHERE by SOMEONE and--)  He had to learn a language somewhere in order to write in that language, he has to choose the words he puts down on paper, there's clear thought put into this just as much as how he's building bombs, I'm just...I don't do well when I already know the answers I guess (& DON'T get me started on how they're like "oh no there were no fingerprints on the bomb, which we happen to have all the pieces of and can reconstruct perfectly, so there's no fOrEnSiCs~~~"  please tell me that's for the dramatized tv show and not the real case please tell me the fbi was not that incompetent)