Series / Kamen Rider BLACK SUN

Who is evil? What is evil?

Kamen Rider BLACK SUN is a tokusatsu web series from Toei. It is an adult-oriented reboot of the 1987 series Kamen Rider BLACK and premiered on October 28, 2022 for Prime Video.

The series centers around the conflict between Kotaro Minami/Kamen Rider BLACK SUN and Nobuhiko Akizuki/Kamen Rider SHADOWMOON as they fight for their own ideals regarding the coexistence between humans and Kaijin.

First Teaser: here Second Teaser: here

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Recurring Kamen Rider tropes include:

• Badass Biker: Black Sun and Shadow Moon.
• Cool Bike: Battle Hopper and Road Sector. In this series, the latter is Nobuhiko's personal ride.
• Henshin Hero: While Kotaro and Nobuhiko can transform, the former is obviously the more heroic of the two.
• Transformation Trinket: The Century King Driver, which comes in Sun (for Kotaro) and Moon (for Nobuhiko) types. This allows the two leads to transform into their Rider form, in pretty much the same fashion as the original BLACK TV show. Aoi Izumi later gets one when approaching the Creation King.

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Tropes associated with BLACK SUN:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: Aoi Izumi gets a driver in the final episode when she attempts to kill the Creation King-possessed Black Sun.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole:
  • BLACK SUN changes the origin of the kaijins from being members of the Gorgom cult transformed as a reward for their loyal service in the original, to the product of experiments done by Michinosuke Dounami and his science team during World War II. No explanation is given for how they were able to slot the kaijins into society without anyone noticing or getting suspicious, or how they were able to keep the origin of the kaijins covered up, even from the kaijins themselves.
  • Similarly, the Creation King was also created by the experiments done by Imperial Japan, raising the question of why Gorgom and the current Japanese government only have one Creation King as opposed to creating more through the same process, giving them multiple sources of Heat Heaven and making it so they don't have to rely on the Kingstones to choose another when the current Creation King reaches the end of its lifespan.
• Adaptational Context Change: Some aspects of BLACK's original lore is shifted towards a more Doing In the Wizard explanation.
  • The original series portray Gorgom as a cult with a longstanding, shadowy history and massive social, business and political influence. In BLACK SUN, they essentially started out a quasi-hippie minority movement that sought to liberate their kind of Kaijins, before becoming a political party with some cult-like trappings around the Creation King, and who are in bed with the ruling party of the Japanese diet in a kaijin trafficking scheme.
  • The human experimentations that were traditionally the hallmark of evil organizations since the original Kamen Rider is inverted. In this take on Japanese history, the original Creation King was the first of many Kaijin Imperial Japan commissioned during the Pacific Theater of World War II. The fathers of Kotaro and Nobuhiko were not under the employ of Gorgom, they were in essence the "fathers" of the Creation King and Gorgom itself.
  • In the original BLACK, Kaijins were made via vague generic experimentations—with Black Sun and Shadow Moon's being the most technologically-sophisticated (and involving Kingstones). Here, first-generation Kaijins seem to be all transformed via the same kind of operation: the installation of a belt-like device inside the body with generic stones that enables the transformation. Black Sun and Shadow Moon, instead, were granted the two Century Kingstones (in addition to the ones they have in their body), and are expected to fight over it to choose the next Creation King.
  • Related to the above, the Transformation Sequence of Kamen Rider Black (which shows him glowing, transforming into a grasshopper Kaijin before becoming his Kamen Rider form) is made fundamental to a Kaijin's evolutionary biology. The fact that all first-generation Kaijins have belts and stones inside them means that while they turn into Kaijins via automatic bodily suggestion, they can further unlock an empowered state akin to Black Sun and Shadow Moon. Black Sun and Shadow Moon's Rider forms are in fact second stages invoked via the classic "henshin sequence" of Black. This means that Aoi, having been transformed into a first-generation Kaijin, can invoke and turn herself into something like a Rider that can combat Gorgom's Kaijin Red Shirts on more equal footing.
  • The chest symbol of the original Kamen Rider Black (essentially an "s" with a period) was supposed to be the logo of Gorgom itself—a snake swallowing the sun (the metaphorical image of the eclipse that is relevant to the original Gorgom's dark powers). Here, it is replaced with the more mundane infinity symbol, poetically invoked by the deceased Yukari as a Bloody Oath to struggle for Kaijin rights eternally. Later on, Aoi would attempt to draw this same infinity symbol via blood on a comatose Kotaro but would be interrupted—leaving behind the original s-and-circle symbol branded on his healed Rider form. Finally, as a form of Tragic Keepsake, Aoi would take up the symbol in honor of the now-deceased Kotaro as the flag of her rebel movement.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • While he was a ruthless Sinister Minister in the original BLACK, this Darom isn't a villain so much as someone who's had to make some hard bargains in order to do what he believes is best for his people.
  • Zig-zagged with Nobuhiko Akizuki, who in the original BLACK and even in Kamen Rider BLACK RX, has basically lost his personality and memories when he was turned into Shadow Moon. Here, Nobuhiko starts off fairly heroic before being sent over the edge and becoming a deranged fanatic bent on creating a world where Kaijins rule over humans.
  • It could be said this happens to Kaijins as a whole. Instead of murderous transhumanist Nazi monsters bent on the subjugation of the human race, Kaijins are instead an oppressed minority in Japan.
• Adaptational Mundanity: Much like Battle Hopper, the Road Sector, in addition to being assigned to Shadow Moon, isn't an advanced Super Prototype machine and merely a customized BMW R nineT.
• Adaptational Nonsapience: The Battle Hopper in the original TV show was a sentient vehicle created by Gorgom for use by the Century Kings. This version of the Battle Hopper doesn't have any sentience at all and is mostly a customized Honda CB750F Super Sport.
• Adaptational Villainy: While he's no saint in the source material by any means, Bilgenia here is a bigger self-serving psychopath. While unlike his original TV show counterpart he's a genuine believer in the Creation King, this Bilgenia is a lot more sadistic and does things that are far nastier than anything his TV counterpart did, such as tricking Nobuhiko into eating his Love Interest and forcibly turning Aoi into a Kaijin while forcing Aoi's mother to watch, then forcing Aoi to watch as he murders her mom.
• Adaptational Wimp: The Kaijin in the original series, as well as most of the franchise of a whole, tend to be monsters that can't be defeated by normal humans, leaving it up to the Kamen Riders. Here, most Kaijin can be put down with a few bullets, or other methods that normally wouldn't work in the main series. That said, this is also expanded upon in-story:
  • To start, this seems to mostly apply to second- and third-generation Kaijins (i.e. those born from the kaijins made by Gorgom, like Shunsuke), who did not have the extensive bodily modifications like Black Sun, Shadow Moon, or Aoi.
  • Furthermore, Dounami and the Gorgom High Priests acknowledge a noticeable decay in quality even amongst the first-generation Kaijin they still create, such that they have taken to just selling them as curiosities to the moneyed and powerful.
• Adaptation Species Change: The Creation King was a giant, floating heart in the original TV show, though there were implications that he was similar to the Century Kings back when he had his original body. Black Sun turns it into a giant Grasshopper Kaijin instead. Flashbacks shows that he was once normal-sized and fully depicted his Grasshopper Kaijin form. He's also still able to survive as a heart like in the original show. More horrifyingly, even at this weakened form, the Creation King's heart can still assimilate the remaining Century King such as Black Sun and turn them instead into the new Creation King.
• Adapted Out:
  • Kyoko Akizuki and Katsumi Kida are not present in this reboot series, with Aoi Izumi and Yukari Shinjo being their equivalent instead.
  • Bilgenia's personal vehicle, the Hellshooter, is nowhere to be seen in the entire series.
• Aerith and Bob: The Gorgom High Priests (Darom, Baraom, and Bishium) and Bilgenia keep their original names, though given how in this series Gorgom originally started out as a small protest movement in the late 1960s-early 1970s and the eventual revelation that Kaijins were first created during World War II, their names stick out like a sore thumb, especially since most of the other named Kaijin either have normal Japanese names (e.g. Shunsuke) or have indicative names that could double as surnames and thus wouldn't sound too out of place (e.g. Koumori meaning 'Bat', Nomi meaning 'Flea'). It is possible that these are nicknames of some sort - in a flashback, Kotaro and Nobuhiko as children refer to Bilgenia as such, suggesting that he at least was already known by that name in his youth.
• Age Lift: Kotaro and Nobuhiko are much older than they were in the original series, both being men in their 80s (though both are Older Than They Look - Kotaro appearing to be in his 50s while Nobuhiko appears to be in his 30s). Though, ironically, the experiments which turned them into Riders happened much earlier in their lives, happening when they were children instead of young adults.
• Alternate Character Reading: The 1970s iteration of Gorgom spells the name in ateji as 五流護六, which may be roughly rendered as "scatter [the] five [to] protect [the] six."
• Alternate Continuity: Just like previous reboots of Showa Kamen Rider entries before, BLACK SUN takes place in it's own separate continuity, albeit in the style of a socio-political world.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Humans are pretty much this in the series. Most of the humans we see are racist towards kaijins, sometimes violently so. The few prominent token heroic humans who aren't either get killed off or become kaijins later on.
• Ambiguously Evil: Prime Minister Shinichi Dounami claims that Yukari's avowed mission of destroying the Creation King as a compassionate way to allow Kaijin to peacefully die off is a fabrication. She is alleged to be a spy from the government infiltrating the Gorgom Kaijin rights movement to retrieve the Kingstones and return the Creation King to government control. Admittedly, it is Dounami claiming this and is likely using it as a Breaking Speech to disorient Nobuhiko (who is still carrying a torch for her). If he intends to turn Yukari into a Broken Pedestal and destroy Nobuhiko's resistance, it may have backfired, as it instead drives Nobuhiko/Shadow Moon to take over Gorgom, turn it into a Kaijin supremacist shadow group, and turn the Japanese government as its own puppet instead. We are never given a resolution as to the truth of this.
• Arc Words: These two sentences, first uttered in Aoi Izumi's speech in the UN, is revealed to be a generations-spanning sentiment throughout the history of Kaijins struggling for their rights to exist:
  The value of kaijin and human lives outweighs that of the earth. There isn't even one gram of difference in their worth.
• The Bad Guys Are Cops: Japanese police are portrayed very unsympathetically—either for merely allowing the anti-Kaijin gangs to instigate violence while only arresting the pro-Kaijin activists, disrespectfully barging in Shunsuke's funeral and flat-out bringing high-powered weapons to kill Aoi for her expose at the UN, forcing Bilgenia to his Last Stand Heroic Sacrifice. Even the most sympathetic police officer never graduates from Just Following Orders, forcing Bilgenia to bring him down in a Mutual Kill.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: The first thing Nobuhiko does post-Face–Heel Turn is Head Crushing Igaki in retaliation for Shunsaku's death.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Gorgom started out as a qusi-hippie revolutionary group dedicated to liberate Kaijin. By the time of the present-day storyline, however, the majority of the group besides Kotaro and Nobuhiko have become puppets of the very ruling party they once despised, and are if anything even worse in how they've furthered discrimination wholesale.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Downplayed. While it still applies compared to the generally light-hearted (if still dark) 1987 series, Black Sun is relatively light on blood compared to other adult-oriented Kamen Rider entries, instead focusing more on its bleak and politically-driven themes.
• Central Theme:
  • Discrimination can feed animosity, escalating disputes, and continuing violent cycles. Understanding, acceptance, and the significance of overcoming prejudice in order to establish peace and harmony are all factors that can be used to challenge discriminatory views and work toward a more inclusive and equal society.
  • The long-term consequences of Cycle of Hatred extend far beyond the immediate conflict and impact the prospects for better coexistence.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Early on much emphasis is given to the Satan Saber, the sword carried by Bilgenia which is said to have been made to protect the Creation King. It goes off at the climax of both storylines: In the 1972 storyline, it fulfills its stated purpose - Bilgenia uses it to murder Yukari to stop her from assassinating the Creation King. In the 2022 storyline, its real purpose is revealed - It's the only weapon that can kill the Creation King, which is precisely what Aoi does with it in the final episode.
  • The self-defense move Kotaro teaches Aoi returns at the climax when she uses it to kill Kotaro (who had been turned into the new Creation King) with the Satan Saber.
• Clueless Aesop: Trying to do a civil rights allegory with mutant monsters who need to eat a cocktail made from ground-up human beings in order to continue living naturally has some issues. While wanting to kill all Kaijins is a bridge too far, it's entirely rationale to be wary of superpowered beings who are shown to be destructive when provoked. It's also not helped by the fact that being turned into a Kaijin is treated as a terrible fate in and of itself, or that the only practical solution the heroes come up with to end the conflict involves dooming Kaijins to die off as a species, which is not entirely an improvement over anti-kaijin racist Wataru Igaki and his "kaijins should be eradicated" rhetoric.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Two rather jarring examples form key parts of the lore.
  • The Kaijin serum is shown to give human beings superpowers and extend their lifespan as long as they keep ingesting Heat Heaven. It's easy to come up with any number of humanitarian or practical uses it could be used for, but while Michinosuke Dounami could have very easily made a profit selling it publicly to the Japanese people and drastically improved the life expectancy and quality of living in the country he has such Patriotic Fervor for, he instead decided to only to use it to create an underclass for them to oppress For the Evulz and then force them to become weapons for war. Even then, he likely could have found a number of willing Japanese soldiers to become kaijins.
  • His grandson, Shinichi Dounami, is little better. Even though his main motive is greed, he also never thinks to make a profit selling kaijin transformation, even though that would most certainly attract a lot of wealthy people interested in becoming superhumans and make himself and Japan much richer. Doing so would also increase the market for Heat Heaven and allow him to make a hefty profit selling that too. But despite all that, Dounami apparently thinks that trafficking kaijins themselves would be the better option.
• Darker and Edgier: Thanks to being geared towards adult demographic, the series manages to be even darker than the original TV show, with a tone closer to the manga adaptation. It features heavy political themes as well as more visceral fights.
  • Lighter and Softer: At least relative to the previous adult-oriented Kamen Rider entries. Despite the series has a high level of graphic violence and brutal fights as well as a heavy-handed political themes and Fantastic Racism towards the Kaijin, the series is managed to toned down the Bloodier and Gorier aspects of them.
• Deconstruction: The series attempts to do this to the premise of the original Kamen Rider BLACK by deconstructing the real-life events needed for a cult like Gorgom to operate, with mixed results. Because it transplants the original series’ conflict involving kaijins and alters much of the context in order to levy a critique at contemporary Japan today, it results in the original series’ setting and the way it portrays the creators of the kaijins ironically seeming more nuanced and plausible in some respects than Black Sun.
  • Gorgom in the original Black, while promoting mutant supremacy, were intelligent enough as a movement not to antagonize humans and instead used the promise of mutant superpowers to lure influential humans to join their cause. By contrast, the kaijin creators in Black Sun are motivated primarily by greed and are much more comically Stupid Evil. The only application they can find to profit off the mutant procedure is to sell kaijins as weapons (instead of the countless humanitarian purposes mutant superpowers would no doubt provide) and rather than find willing participants to become kaijins they force select people to become kaijins and then engender anti-kaijin racism towards them to foment a pointless racial conflict.
• Decoy Protagonist: Despite being the Title Character and bearing much narrative importance together with Shadow Moon, Kotaro/Black Sun isn't really the character moving the story along—either in proactively uncovering the Gorgom conspiracy or fighting for his fellow Kaijin. Arguably, considering Aoi's transformation into a Kaijin that still seeks to uphold her ideals in a cruel world, the entire series is more her Superhero Origin Story than it is Black Sun's or Shadow Moon's.
• Democracy Is Bad: Black Sun's depiction of Japan's representative democracy can be summed up as "two bigoted humans and a kaijin voting on whether kaijins should have equal rights." The Gorgom Party's attempts to further kaijin rights through working within the Japanese diet results in them having to make comprises with greedy politicians and throw some of their own kind under the bus.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The series is pretty unsubtle in its usage of Japanese postwar and global politics in its portrayal of the Kaijin's racial history:
  • Aoi's role as a young activist subsequently involved in increasingly-polarized global and domestic politics is a pretty big reference to Greta Thunberg.
  • The first version of the Gorgom movement as a student/workers' protest movement is very evocative of the Anpo struggles. The name of the Kaijin union, Zenkaijin, is both a reference to the Zenkyōtō student movements (down to their fashion sense and helmets), and is almost a homonym of Zenroren, the left-leaning Japanese union.
  • The relationship between Gorgom the cult and Dounami's unnamed party is practically a commentary on both a) the relationship Komeito (a political party connected to the religious movement Soka Gakkai) has with the decades-ruling Liberal Democratic Party, as well as b) the more recently-exposed ties of the LDP to the Unification Church. Prime Minister Shinichi Dounami's background (as the grandchild of a war criminal Prime Minister) is a flat-out No Historical Figures Were Harmed unflattering version of Shinzo Abe, himself the grandson of war criminal Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, the one who triggered the Anpo movement. The fact that Dounami is also assassinated in a public setting by the child of one of Gorgom's victims, not unlike the assassin of Abe himself, is borderline Ripped from the Headlines.
  • The anti-Kaijin gang and protesters led by Wataru Igaki are essentially Uyoku dantai, right-wing Yakuza-affiliated gangs. Throughout the story, their talking points are documented Truth in Television hate speech spouted by Japanese Right Wing Militia Fanatics.
  • In that same vein, notice how Kaijin can easily be misread or misheard as gaijin (a derogatory Japanese term for foreigners) and still make sense in context. The epilogue drives the point even further by outright showing Aoi protecting a girl standing up to anti-immigrant protesters.
  • Nobuhiko's building of a militia comprised of young men who he trains personally—who then assaults and fails to take over a government building—is eerily evocative of Yukio Mishima's failed Tatenokai Uprising. There's also how Nobuhiko's Wild Hair in prison made him look initially like another extremist, Shoko Asahara.
  • The imagery of racist violence against youth minority protesters as invoked by Shunsuke's lynching also borrow from other countries, such as the killing of Emmett Till in Civil Rights Movement-era America and the Thammasat University massacre in Thailand.
  • Dounami's allegation that Yukari is a spy sent to destabilize the Gorgom movement, having ascended to be one of its leaders, is very much the tactic the US Government's FBI did to Cold War-era activists via COINTELPRO.
  • The character of Oliver Johnson is practically a Malcolm Xerox that grows up into a Christian pastor that looks like Frederick Douglass.
  • Finally, one of the last scenes of Kaijin discrimination in the finale is a flat-out restaging of Eric Gardner and George Floyd's deaths, which influenced the Black Lives Matter Movement.
• Doing In the Wizard: As one might expect from a modern, “realist” reboot, many of the more fantastical elements of the original Kamen Rider Black story have been altered or removed. Despite that, there are some cases where supernatural events are clearly happening, such as the effects of the solar eclipse in creating the Creation King, Black Sun, and Shadow Moon, as well as the effects of the Kingstones themselves. However, no explanation for them has been given.
• Downer Ending: Kotaro defeats Nobuhiko, only for him to forcefully become the next Creation King as a result and have to be put down by Aoi Izumi, meaning no more kaijins. Shinichi Dounami is killed off, but his right-hand man Isao Nimura takes his place as Prime Minister and continues most of his policies, including ramping up "extreme measures" that target immigrants in addition to kaijins. Aoi meanwhile is driven further into extremism, forming an armed terrorist organization that trains Child Soldiers.
• Easily Forgiven: Aoi forgives Nick rather easily even though he betrayed and lured her into a trap where she was turned into a kaijin and forced to watch her mother die, just so he could become a kaijin and get superpowers.
• Experienced Protagonist: Kotaro and Nobuhiko in this version are much older than the average teenage or young-adult protagonists the Kamen Rider series is known for, being at least in their 70's and having been Black Sun and Shadow Moon for decades.
• Fantastic Drug: Heat Heaven (or simply "Heaven") is a mixture of human flesh and extracts from the Creation King, which Kaijin take to heal and to extend their lifespan.
• Fantastic Racism: Humans live in fear of the Kaijin (mutants that were once ordinary people), with some declaring that Kaijin are not human; while Kaijin live rejected by society. The teaser trailers focus on people engaging in mass anti-Kaijin protests, with one person being revealed to be a Kaijin and is subsequently shot by a police officer.
• Fictional Political Party: Gorgom, once just an Obviously Evil Doomsday Cult in the original show are now the Gorgom Party: part of the reigning coalition in the Japanese diet, presenting themselves as a party for Kaijin rights with Kaijins among their high-ranking members. In reality, they are still a cult behind the scenes and seek to elect the next Creation King.
• Final Solution: Wataru Igaki and his protestors want to see all Kaijins exterminated. Later on, after fully turning evil, Nobuhiko begins plotting to exterminate humans so only Kaijins will be in the world. In contrast, while Kotaro effectively wants to do this in the long term (by killing the Creation King and allowing the remaining Kaijins to live out their lifespans and die peacefully of natural causes), it is technically the least distasteful option. (See The Horseshoe Effect below for details.)
• Flat Character: Wataru Igaki is an anti-kaijin racist whose character can be summed up as "hates kaijins for being kaijins."
• Forced to Watch: Bilgenia does this twofold, first by forcibly turning Aoi in front of her mother, and then by murdering Aoi's mother in front of Aoi.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Both Black Sun and Shadow Moon have two large grasshopper leg-like growths sprouting from their back, which are sharp and hard. They can rip these off and turn them into improvised swords. Notably, however, these do not regrow or heal after. These were only used in key moments:
  • Black Sun rips off his left leg-sword after his first proper henshin in Kamen Rider form, and uses it to chop off Bilgenia's left arm. This, fortuitously, clears off his left chest armor to be branded with the classic "snake-and-sun" symbol the original Kamen Rider Black had later on.
  • Shadow Moon, in Kaijin form, rips off his right leg-sword in his abortive fight against Bishium. This coincidentally turns him and Kotaro into Fashionable Asymmetry Mirror Characters of each other.
  • Finally, they rip off each other's remaining leg-swords and fight each other with them in the finale. While Black Sun would disarm Shadow Moon with his sword, Shadow Moon would telepathically impale his sword on Black Sun during his Rider Kick in an attempted Mutual Kill.
• Head Crushing: Nobuhiko delivers a particularly-satisfying one to Igaki, the leader of the anti-Kaijin hate group after they lynched Shunsuke—and just as Shunsuke's father was about to stab Igaki himself. For extra points, this leads to the hate protesters scuttling away in terror, and serves as the debut of Shadow Moon's Rider form.
• The Hero Dies: Intentional or otherwise, Black Sun's assimilation into becoming the new Creation King forces Aoi to subject him to a Mercy Kill with the fragment of the Satan Saber.
• History Repeats: Heavily implied in the ending, where Aoi forms an anti-Gorgem revolutionary/quasi-terrorist force not dissimilar to what Gorgem itself originally was, indicating the cycle may very well just be repeating itself.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: The Kaijin are shown more sympathetic traits to show that even if they appear to look like monsters, some of them are good-natured. The humans, with some exceptions, have been portrayed as cruel and racist, with Police Brutality occurring against Kaijins and people betting on Kaijin sold as weapons. Wataru Igaki is the most notorious example, leading racist demonstrations against a school which housed Aoi Izumi, who spoke out in support for Kaijins, and beating Shunsuke Komatsu to death simply because he was a Kaijin.
• The Horseshoe Effect: The series' portrayal of the dilemma about how to best address Kaijin rights sees several characters on either sides of the debate arriving at similar extreme conclusions, although some of the motivations are more nuanced after first glance.
  • Wataru Igaki, being the racist jerkass he is who leads a lynch mob, straightforwardly calls on Japanese to eradicate Kaijins and ensure the human-majority status quo. On the other side of the kaijin-human spectrum Nobuhiko/Shadow Moon, after witnessing Shunsuke being murdered by a lynch mob and being given a "The Reason You Suck" Speech by Dounami and casting aspersions on the late Yukari's motivations, instigates a coup within the Gorgom cult, eliminates two of the High Priests, and attempts to usurp the Japanese government where humans are either subjugated or completely eliminated. Kotaro defeats him before he can go any further.
  • Kotaro's objective for ending the conflict is technically more humane and over a longer period. He plans to kill the Creation King, which would prevent new Kaijins from being made and allow (or doom) the remaining Kaijins to live out their natural lifespans. He inherited this ideal from Yukari, who believes this is the most humane way of allowing the currently-living Kaijin to survive and thrive with full human rights, without subjecting any more humans to either mutation as Kaijin or being turned into the Kaijin-sustaining Heat Heaven substance. While this is a practical solution and would keep more humans from being forcibly turned into Kaijins, it does essentially mean Kaijins either die off or grow weaker as they interbreed with the human population (which is already visible with the younger generation of Kaijin like Shunsuke).
  • On the other side of this trope, the accommodation between Kaijin and the Japanese government, as maintained by the High Priests and Dounami, is consistent with the "fish-hook criticism" of this very trope (i.e. that moderate political accommodation with the status quo only makes it complicit to larger net oppression). While they allow "model"/"well-behaved" Kaijin roles in government, Kaijin who are living in less-well-off conditions remain discriminated upon. Japanese social "undesirables" themselves become fodder for farming the Heat Heaven substance that Kaijins feed on to grow stronger, and any new Kaijins are trafficked as human slaves.
• In Name Only: Black Sun borrows names and some design concepts from the original Black, but apart from that it has very little to do with its source material, taking place a very different setting with characters that have little in common with their original versions other than being named the same.
• Irony: Baraom, the largest and the most physically strong of the Gorgom High Priests, is portrayed by Pretty Ohta, an actor with dwarfism.
• Karma Houdini: What contributes to the bleakness of the ending (despite some very key Karmic Deaths) is that there are still people that get away with everything they want.
  • In the final episode, Bishium still gets to keep her elevated position. Even if the "Creation King producing Heaven" scheme was ultimately destroyed by Black Sun's Heroic Sacrifice, she still manages to keep herself onboard with Isao Nimura, the new Prime Minister, whose evil is more along the line of Pragmatic Villainy in militarizing Japan— thus providing an opportunity for Kaijin to become valued Human Weapons again.
  • The entire government under new Prime Minister Nimura also counts, especially since their political hegemony remains unscathed after the killing of Dounami. While they are in no hurry to continue supporting the Kaijin human trafficking industry, they continue fostering easier pickings for discrimination like immigrants and non-Japanese, which are easier to sell to a complicit Japanese population.
• Killer Cop: Anti-Firearms Squad and Security Police officers are working alongside the Gorgom party and the PM, mostly to serve as muscle (and for the AFS, as Elite Mooks) to kill off any witnesses.
  • The first episode has a uniformed officer fire his sidearm at an unarmed (and unruly) demonstrator. His colleagues had to detain him since his actions just riled up some of the other demonstrators.
• Killed to Uphold the Masquerade: Many characters tend to be on the line of this, and very few survive. The conspiracy being hidden is the origin of Kaijins as Imperial Japan's war crime experiments, the fact that remnants of Gorgom's internal split is a risk to its current political power, and the fact that Japanese citizens and Kaijins are victims of the government's own trafficking rings.
  • First, Oliver Johnson, the African-American Gorgom activist who stole the Kingstones, was beat up and killed in front of his son Nick by Bilgenia and Dounami themselves. They only manage to retrieve one as the other was given to Aoi's parents, and left behind to their daughter.
  • Second, Aoi's guardian, Ms. Misaki, was killed by the Anemone Kaijin when she pursues Aoi for her Kingstone.
  • Third, Aoi's parents were kidnapped and tortured by Bilgenia to give up their incriminating intel on Kaijin experiments. Her father is turned into the Crab Kaijin to kill Aoi in turn.
  • Fourth, when this fails, Bilgenia kidnaps Aoi and turns her into a Kaijin herself while killing her mother, pitting her against Black Sun to be killed.
  • Fifth, when Aoi still survives all of this to finally do an expose in the UN, Dounami's government sends heavily-armed police to kill her (ostensibly deluded to believe she is just a dangerous Kaijin). Bilgenia, having undergone a massive change in perspective, chooses to hold the line and slaughter them all to protect Aoi, dying in the process.
  • Finally, as the entire affair has finally become a massive political liability, it is implied Nimura's nonchalance in the murder of Dounami by the Kaijins on the street means he actively plotted to drive Dounami in an obscure place where he is hated, the better to dispose of him with no witnesses. This ensures the political succession in the government isn't as noisy as it would have been otherwise.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: During her speech to the UN via video conference in Episode 9, Aoi addresses the people watching the event's livestream in-universe. Unlike the other shots in the scene, which show either an external view of her talking into her phone, or other people watching it on their own screens, this line is shown directly from the perspective of her camera, making it appear as if she's talking to the person watching the show.
  Aoi: Hey, you. With your bored looks while you watch me talk on your screens. Why aren't you furious?
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: Nearly every major parental/mentor figure in Aoi's life goes out in a bad way.
  • Aoi's parents were missing since the start of the story. Her father is turned into the Crab Kaijin who was unwillingly killed by the Whale Kaijin, and her mother was killed in front of her as she is transformed into the Mantis Kaijin.
  • Her caretaker, who is sickly worried for her and was very supportive of her activism, was killed by the Anemone Kaijin hunting her for her Kingstone.
  • Kotaro/Kamen Rider Black Sun himself eventually takes her under his wing when all her loved ones died on her. Having been assimilated into becoming the new Creation King, he eventually is forced to beg Aoi for a Mercy Kill, which she tragically obliges with.
  • Fortunately averted with the Flea Kaijin and Whale Kaijin who have aided both Aoi and Kotaro late in the series. They remain by Aoi's side after Kotaro's death and support/mentor her fledgling revolutionary cell.
• Morality Chain Beyond the Grave: Yukari Shinjo is this to both Kotaro and Nobuhiko—either ideologically/ethically (for Kotaro) or romantically (for Nobuhiko). Their character choices is as much defined by their beliefs as it is by their memory of her. The fact that her motivations were never fully unpacked after her death also affects how the two Riders turn out.
  • Kotaro is shaken out of his ketamine-induced apathy, to a larger extent, by seeing how Aoi Izumi is essentially living up to the kind of human-Kaijin solidarity he remembers Yukari aspired to—enough that she becomes his Protectorate and becomes her mentor throughout her struggles. Even when he was forcibly assimilated as the Creation King, his memories of Yukari and Aoi last him long enough to help Aoi deal him a Mercy Kill.
  • Nobuhiko clearly never got over her death—coinciding with the collapse/deterioration of Gorgom from Kaijin advocacy to essentially being The Quisling to Japanese government oppression. Everything he does is his attempt to bring down Gorgom and the Creation King the way Yukari wanted. Being given the allegation that Yukari might have been Evil All Along, even if unfounded, is what drives Nobuhiko to pervert his crusade into being a Super Supremacist, as a form of Pay Evil unto Evil.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Despite maintaining the general color scheme of the original Kamen Rider Black and Shadow Moon, this series' version of Kotaro and Nobuhiko's Rider forms owe more to Black's early-Heisei generation mates, Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue (the more organic aesthetic, plus Bloodier and Gorier fighting styles) as well as Kamen Rider ZO and Kamen Rider J (the more pronounced grasshopper-design faceplates and body segmentations).
  • The Theme Song that plays over credits, "Did you see the sunrise?", ends the same way the original opening song's cut does with the singer abruptly whispering "BLACK" to end the verse.
  • Black Sun's Transformation Sequence is almost a one-to-one copy of the original Black's transformation sequence. Similarly faithful is the effect used for his Rider Kick and Rider Punch in the finale. The same sequence and effects, in mirror reverse, is used for Shadow Moon's own transformations.
  • Once again a whale Kaijin saves Kotaro from near death after being defeated by Shadow Moon.
  • The final episode opens with a direct recreation of Kamen Rider BLACK's opening title sequence, complete with theme song. An instrumental of the song also briefly plays when Koumori performs his "Koumori kick" on the Prime Minister.
  • Kotaro becoming the new Creation King is similar to the Bad Future from the manga, except here, he didn't have as much of a choice, and has Aoi stop his reign before it can even begin.
• No Body Left Behind: As the weapon that can kill the Creation King, the Satan Saber has this effect on its body. When Aoi successfully kills the Creation King inhabiting Black Sun's body, the entire body disintegrates into dust and fragments of insect tissue, leaving only the two Kingstones behind.
• No Party Given: The ruling party that Dounami is part of, which implicitly forms a coalition with the Gorgom Party, is unnamed in the show^note In supplemental material it's referred to as "Min no Tou" or "Party of the People", but is an obvious stand-in for the real-life Liberal Democratic Party. The main opposition party to Dounami is similarly unnamed and only vaguely fleshed out.
• Older Than They Look: Most Kaijin who have eaten Heaven, due to the drug halting their aging. Most notably, Kotaro and Nobuhiko were both born in the late 1930s, but Nobuhiko (who has eaten Heaven consistently for 50 years) has the appearance of a man in his 30s, while Kotaro (who used to eat Heaven, but quit) has the appearance of a man in his 50s.
• Orcus on His Throne: Much like the original BLACK, the Creation King doesn't really do much despite being revered by Gorgom and central to all of their atrocities and crimes. The fact that it is old, dying and has mostly been there to produce Heaven further adds on to this. However this is deconstructed and turned into a Monster Sob Story when it is revealed that the Creation King Was Once a Man, kept as a test subject and foisted as a false god to the Kaijin community, and then kept in perpetual slavery for its extracts. Decades of servitude and denial of its will has warped any sense of consciousness beyond survival—such that its last act, turning Kotaro into the new Creation King, isn't arguably its fault anymore.
• Persecution Flip: Kaijins in most Showa Kamen Rider series (including Black) are depicted as Nazi transhumanists or Super Supremacists who threw away their own humanity by becoming kaijins in order to gain monstrous powers and oppress others. Here, kaijins are an oppressed underclass in Japanese society that routinely face discrimination from bigoted humans.
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • In addition to his own Fantastic Racism towards Kaijins, Prime Minister Shinichi Dounami believes poor, homeless, old, infirm and LGBTQ+ people are only good for farming into the Heat Heaven substance).
  • Wataru Igaki leads a violent mob that views all Kaijin as lower than vermin and espouses rhetoric about them that parallels the views of Japan's far-right parties.
• Physical God: The Creation King. A flashback to Kotaro's and Nobuhiko's childhood even shows that it was originally tucked away as an object of worship (go-shintai) in a small Shinto shrine. The elderly Dr. Akizuki's ramblings about "a god" appearing after finding two stones (the Kingstones) seem to suggest this as well. Ultimately subverted with the reveal that the Creation King was originally a prisoner of war subjected to human experimentation, with Dr. Akizuki explicitly saying that the terms 'king' and 'god' were only applied to it for convenience.
• Psychic Strangle: The Creation King has this as one of its powers. It has also taken to relying onto it for defense since it was turned into a Dark Lord on Life Support. Notably, out of the two Century Kings made with its Kingstones, only Shadow Moon seems to have inherited/developed the same power.
• Shout-Out:
  • Bilgenia's Last Stand of protecting Aoi, who's making her revelatory speech at the UN from police with guns and grappling hooks, only later to be revealed to have Died Standing Up, is one to Musashibo Benkei's own successful attempt to delay the enemies of his soon-to-commit-Seppuku master Minamoto no Yoshitsune.
  • Aoi's father (who had been turned into a Kaijin) disintegrates into a pile of suds upon his death a la the Shocker Combatmen from the original Kamen Rider, while the new Creation King (Kotaro) turns to dust after being killed like the Orphnoch.
• Shown Their Work: The abandoned building in the woods where Kotaro, Nobuhiko, Yukari, Oliver, and Bilgenia hide the Creation King is a Hōanden, a small shrine to the Japanese Emperor commonly found in pre-World War II Japan. In a comparative-anthrpopology sense, it would be quite appropriate—considering how Kaijin would likely worship their own version of a God-Emperor the way Imperial Japan deified their Emperor, the Ainu deify their kamuy and the Ryukyuans/Okinawans revere their creation goddess.
• Skeleton Government: Japan's political sphere is depicted very simplistically. The only other political parties besides Gorgom that are shown are Dounami's unnamed party and an unnamed opposition party whose political stance is even more vague.
• Space Whale Aesop: Because the kaijins being a race of animal mutants created in secret experiments done by the Japanese government, they have fantastical elements to their reality and history that diverge. This results in show's conclusion being "racism against kaijins is bad, but if the Creation King is killed no more kaijins will be forcibly made and it won't matter" which makes sense within its own setting, but isn't applicable to real-life struggles for racial equality.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Aoi Izumi. Even though the show is titled "Black Sun", her arc and her involvement in politics takes up much more time than the plotline around Kotaro and Nobuhiko's relationship.
• Stupid Evil: Michinosuke Dounami, Shinichi's grandfather might just take the cake for most pointlessly stupid evil act in the series. He develops a procedure which can give people superpowers by turning them into Kaijins and the "Heat Heaven" cocktail they can take after to keep them from aging (its primary ingredient is humans, but Dounami doesn't care about that since he's a sociopath). If he'd distributed the throughout Japan, he'd have been hailed as his country's greatest hero for transforming his people into an immortal Master Race. What does he do instead? Give it to a select number of people, insert them in society, tar them as being a separate species from humanity and allow anti-Kaijin hate to fester in order to spark a race war for no reason.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Used very selectively in the story, depending on what gives it narrative weight.
  • The nature of Kaijin creation relies as much on the human subject's biochemistry and genetics as much as the experimental tech. Hence, while LEGO Genetics have led to powerful Kaijins (particularly the Century Kings Black Sun and Shadow Moon), most results have tended to become disposable cannon fodder.
  • Even being the Phlebotinum Rebel does not guarantee that one can become a competent warrior (unlike what most Showa-era Kamen Riders were usually expected to be). Black Sun and Shadow Moon's position as the strongest Kaijin were due to their long life and battle experience. Aoi, despite having essentially the same mutation and power potential as the Century Kings, does not have any substantial training, and her survival relied primarily on luck, the support of older Kaijin fighting with her, and facing enemies subjected to Worf Had the Flu like Bilgenia or asking for a Mercy Kill like Kotaro.
  • Kotaro's poor living conditions—not to mention ketamine abuse to bypass his biological problems—is understandably going to affect his fighting capability. This leads to a spottier fight record (and a more thorough defeat by a Heaven-sustained Shadow Moon), and may or may not have contributed to his tragic assimilation into becoming the new Creation King that had to be put down by Aoi.
  • The original Gorgom protest movement's absorption into the ruling party's politics (and shady underground business) is very consistent with how weak political parties tend to become vestigial appendages of their majority coalition partners.
  • The entire assault of Nobuhiko/Shadow Moon's militia of young Kaijin activists ends up about as is realistically expected for the young men. Despite nominally having better stamina and strength, not having any sufficient combat experience or weapons beyond rudimentary training meant they were easy pickings for the heavily-armed Gorgom personnel—who are also supported by Dirty Cops in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. They, and the human prisoners that Gorgom either turn into Kaijin or kill in order to produce Heat Heaven, were slaughtered wholesale. Shunsuke and Aoi only manage to escape out of sheer luck and quick-witted improvisation, and the Sole Survivor of the attack was a cowardly boy who ran away.
  • Despite the scandal of Aoi's expose of Kaijin human experimentation at the UN damaging Dounami's premiership—not to mention his killing by Nick—the long partnership between Gorgom and the ruling politicians simply led to the ascent of another prime minister. The new prime minister just became more subtle in his imposition of discrimination. A weak political opposition remains unable to dislodge them, which understandably drives Aoi's turn to underground radical politics and recruit people like her as Far East Asian Terrorists —in addition to her series-long Break the Cutie.
• This Is Unforgivable!: Returns as Kotaro's Catchphrase. It is notably used in his delivery of a Curb-Stomp Battle against Bilgenia for turning Aoi into the Mantis Kaijin.
• The Unreveal: Little development is given for how the Kingstones function and where they come from, apart from the implication that they're connected to the experiments Michinosuke Dounami and his research team performed to create kaijins.
• Violence Really Is the Answer: Aoi decides this after she exposes the Dounami regime's crimes and yet make little to no sociopolitical headway against Kaijin discrimination—not to mention the new Prime Minister doubling down on discriminating against non-Japanese and immigrants—she forms a youth revolutionary/quasi-terrorist cell of Kaijins and dissatisfied humans to fight oppression with force.
• Voodoo Shark: The origin of the kaijins being that they originated from experiments conducted by Michinosuke's research team during and after World War II raises a lot of questions and implications that aren't addressed. For starters, how was Michinosuke able to convert people into kaijins and then slot them back into society without them or anyone else getting suspicious and figuring out their true origins? If his goal is to use the kaijins as military weapons, why would he even bother inserting them into society instead of raising them in a controlled environment to be Tyke Bombs or offering the kaijin conversion process to already loyal and experienced soldiers? If the experiments also created the Kingstones and Creation King, why hasn't the Japanese government put work into figuring out how to duplicate the chemical combination that created the Creation King in the first, giving them multiple sources of Heat Heaven and the ability to create a new Creation King when the original gets too old instead of needing to find a successor from a very limited pool of people who can handle both Kingstones?
• War for Fun and Profit: Gorgom's ultimate goal, wanting to sell Kaijin to the highest bidder and use them in foreign wars to make Japan rich.
• Was Once a Man: The Creation King was once a war prisoner of the Imperial Japan during World War II who was modified into a grotesque grasshopper man he is today.

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Did you see the sunrise?
Black shining sadness
Tell me, tell me
Why was it born?
Waiting, waiting
Believe in promise
Eventually this body decays
Fall into the "BLACK"

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