Henshin Inspection presents Rider Tears!
This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer.
Find all my work at MJMunoz.com.
Prepare yourself for some biting Kamen Rider analysis.
My grandmother said this,
You have to be kind to be strong.
Now, let's go Writer Chat!
So, Kamen Rider GOV, episode 9, sure was a thing that happened.
And I'm reeling from it because I don't really know what to say, where to go.
I thought this was a fun episode.
I noticed that Sachika's involvement in it was very limited.
This is a part of the weird trend for Tokusatsu to have Halloween episodes.
I remember Gokaijer, I think I remember Gokaijer had one.
I don't think Forze, which ran kind of concurrently with Gokaijer,
I don't think Forze had a Halloween episode at all.
Wait, maybe, I can't remember.
They all dressed up at some point as the classic Seven Riders,
but that might have been for other reasons,
they might have been doing a play or something.
So it could have been a play done at Halloween time, I don't know.
I don't think it was Halloween.
But anyway, other than it being kind of funny that this was a Halloween episode,
I thought it was interesting, I thought it kind of broke with what we've seen so far,
or what we've come to understand so far of the lore,
that this lollipop, unless it's something they tell you about his mom
that he doesn't say explicitly in this episode, maybe it'll come out in the next episode,
shouldn't be something that triggers his memory farm
and shouldn't make the little Gochizo for it,
unless we don't fully understand the mechanism behind the Gochizo production.
And I guess for that matter, we don't really understand the mechanism for the minion
or agent production from the stomach family or the stomach ink people,
where those agents come from.
We assume they come from their belts, I think we've seen them come from their belts,
but we don't know what they're eating to produce those guys.
Are they eating fellow Granutes? Are they eating humans?
Are they eating whatever Granute food exists? I don't really know.
It sounded like Shoman and his mother wouldn't eat the standard Granute food,
they eat grass and things like that instead, and that's pretty weird.
You know, most people don't eat grass, it's not the greatest thing to eat.
And anyway, so it's really curious.
I want to say it's kind of like a plot hole,
but it's also something that we just don't know enough about currently
for me to be able to say definitively, oh yeah, this is a problem,
or this is an inaccuracy in the show.
And I don't think it is an inaccuracy, I think it's just something I'm not aware of 100%.
So that was kind of something I was not happy with.
I also kind of wasn't happy with the fact that it seems like Sheetah and Jeeb
were going to be completely cut off from the family,
and now they've been given the second chance,
and I know that's how it can go with family sometimes, with the family business.
But it's a little disappointing because I was hoping they would be cut off from the family,
and then we'd get to see them operating on their own,
or having to develop some story on their own,
or I don't know, I guess they could just go get other jobs somewhere in the granite world.
They wouldn't have to necessarily become more plot relevant.
They could just kind of disappear from the story, and that would be okay.
And I also kind of wonder if they can manifest these agents from their stomachs,
their belts, their bodies, whatever, their gobs, I guess.
That would imply that they have a certain level of power too in them,
and you would think that they'd be able to fight, and they'd be able to transform and fight,
and that isn't happening, and it's kind of funny that it isn't, and we don't quite know why.
So I don't quite get that, and I wonder exactly why they're not doing that.
I wonder if that's something that we'll see as they're fully fired
and not able to be part of the company anymore.
Is that something that they'll do in desperation?
Is that going to open us up to new storytelling possibilities?
Is that going to open us up to new dimensions of their characters to see?
Or will they just fall off and become irrelevant? It's hard to know.
I suppose you could say they're just part of a business, and they're just doing, I mean, not just.
Their business is killing people and turning them into food, which it seems like is illegal in their world.
They're running some sort of shady illegal business, but they could just run off and do something else.
But then again, if they're these craven desperate criminals, they probably wouldn't want to do that,
because they're probably profiting off of this illegal business and don't want to go work.
It's probably not a lot of jobs out there unless you want to work 40 hours a week,
so that could be a problem for them.
See, that was a little weird. I like Honto investigating.
It was a little creepy. It was funny that the little girls pulled the little siren and ran from him,
because they thought he was a kidnapper or something.
He did kind of give off weird vibes.
Then as time went on, he's just hanging out with this little girl.
That was a little weird to me.
I almost thought the other kid that gave the main girl that he was talking to, the main dance girl who's not so great,
I kind of thought the girl who gave her the mandolin was her friend that pulled the cord, actually,
and thought he was the kidnapper and that she was going to say something.
Whether or not it was her, it kind of had made sense for her to say,
who's this adult man you're talking to over here? It's kind of weird.
But yeah, that's kind of strange.
The stomachache joke with her dance teacher was weird.
I did notice that belly band was super conspicuous,
and I can understand why he went after him and why it was a red herring.
I don't really see why the mandolin shop was such a key site.
I'm not sure. I mean, mandolins are good. They're one of my favorite cookies,
but I don't know how that's connected necessarily to the people going into the tunnel and getting taken.
Is it just that the shop is by the tunnel so people are distracted eating it and they feel that adrenaline or dopamine rush
of getting sugar in their bodies, sugar and fat together in a tasty little package?
Is that all it is?
Because that seems like kind of a flimsy thing to be hitching your horse to and saying,
oh yeah, this is a guaranteed surefire way to get people.
I know. I just thought that was kind of odd.
I sound like I'm complaining. I'm pointing out some flaws or some issues that I'm seeing in the episode.
However, I thought it was a lot of fun, and I thought it was very interesting.
I liked kind of, I don't know, the little girl who wants to be the idol,
her saying she's cutting back on sweets because she wants to be an idol, so she doesn't want to be fat,
and then has to struggle with keeping herself in good shape to be ogled by people and whatnot.
Sorry. That's kind of what idols do, right?
Or that's what people do with idols, I guess you could say.
And then her accepting the Madeleine and going in and eating it and saying, oh, I've worked hard. I deserve this.
I thought it was kind of interesting because you shouldn't just eat stuff randomly.
Yaki is the kind of guy, which, where did he go? Where did he go? He hasn't come back.
He was saying, like, yeah, you should have special foods as like a treat,
and it's not like an everyday thing, and you can't run off with that. You need like good, solid nutrition.
And it almost felt kind of like they were saying something similar with the little idol girl,
but then maybe not at the same time. I don't know. It felt kind of weird. I was a little conflicted about it.
But I definitely liked that they ceded that Honto has this relationship with her or whatever,
and he had promised to go see her at the park the next day,
and it sure seems like this granute is going to attack her at the park where he was going to,
which I don't know how he knew to find her at the park.
That park in particular. I don't know if that's something I missed,
if that's something that was not covered in the episode and that we'll see in the next episode,
episode 10 or what, but that is kind of a strange thing.
I don't really know about that, but that's OK. Anyway, I thought it was a good episode overall.
I like Valen getting trounced a little bit, but I like him making it out of the fight.
And well, I guess the other guy ran, but it's because he pulled a good tactic.
He was able to get the upper hand, and that was good.
And I like seeing him like he's a more competent fighter now, but he's still struggling.
And I think it's very good. I think it's very important for him to have that steeper learning curve than Shoma had.
And this wild tank of a form is really interesting with this... it's like Goukan? Gunkan? Gunkan?
I can't remember what it's called, but this hard peppermint candy lollipop thing form is really interesting.
And it's a lot of fun. It's zany. It's crazy.
And I can basically accept it and roll with it, but it's just like, I'm sure it's going to go away,
and it's not going to be important later on, even though it's such a tank now.
And it feels kind of silly to introduce such a powerful thing now,
especially because it probably won't be that big of a deal in the future.
That's kind of one of the things that bothers me about the modern Kamen Rider shows,
is that they have to have these toys and they have to have these things in here.
And it's just, they're so throwaway and disposable, and they're kind of like junk food.
But people go for junk food, so it makes sense that they would do it.
They, Toei Bandai, wants that money, and they're going to get it, no matter how, or any way they can.
Anyway, let me know what you thought about the episode. I'd love to hear your thoughts and your feelings on it,
because I felt like it was a good, solid episode, but it wasn't amaze- I mean, there were amazing things in it,
but it wasn't like, the greatest thing, like a lot of the episodes.
Like, the first eight episodes have been really fantastic. This one was pretty good.
And hopefully the next one's even better.
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Until next time, be well, and do good things.
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