SSSS.Gridman

I mean, I figured that there would be something along the lines of "Yuta is Gridman". There had to be some reason he had amnesia, and it's not like the show was providing any other options.

Hasn't that been the entire point of the show thus far? Showing how Akane, a very mentally damaged girl once safe in her little psychotic bubble, has been driven to the point of desperation after Gridman showed up and forced her to deal with the "reality" of things? You could even argue she's the main character, as she's the one who's gotten the most development out of everyone.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Dec 15th 2018 at 10:48:32 AM

Hypothetically, if anyone made a Kamen Rider anime of some kind, would you want it to be a new Rider, based on the original show, or on another of the many series that have been made?

But the problem is that she isn't developed. Her character has no depth or nuance. She's just It's All About Me personified - she wants to be loved by everyone but has none for them in return. She wants everything to just go her way all the time. She's just completely rotten person who's been given the power to lord over her own small world and freaks the hell out when her rule is challenged in any way.

Edited by Shlugo_the_great on Dec 15th 2018 at 2:02:51 PM

Not sure. I haven't watched enough Showa (I've only seen Black and RX, both of which have a few Heisei nods (in fact, RX might be the Unbuilt Trope for Multiform Balance that would so thoroughly define later riders), and they are very different from Heisei (no evil organizations for one thing).

...Perhaps something that takes the best parts of both, with Rider representing all aspects of how you become a Rider (unwillingly turned into a Cyborg; Powered Armour; becoming like the monsters they fight; is a monster, or uses more mystical means.

Edited by HandsomeRob on Dec 15th 2018 at 7:04:41 AM

I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike Akane, but I do think that the show has characterized her enough to at least sell why she is the way she is. She's constantly losing, her safe space has become a nightmare she can't escape, she knows for a fact that Rikka's attempts to reach out to her don't actually mean anything because she was literally designed to like Akane, and she finally took action herself in trying to kill Yuta which lead her to feeling actual physical guilt for the first time probably in her life. Granted I think it would have helped if we got some kind of glimpse by now of what she was running away from, or at least some greater context as to what's going on in her head.

Kamen Rider Spirits is right there. Just adapt that.

Spirits is good, if you don't believe in god...

But that would be pretty Showa focused. We're just seeing the end of the Heisei era, so they need representation as well

Honestly, whatever you gave them would work. The Trigger that did this could do Mystic Knights and I would be counting the days.

You asked for this:

...this was a damned catchy tune.

Tell me the people that made Gridman couldn’t make it work.

Granted the princess would probably be an internet meme with a big butt but still...

Think they could make Teenage Tattooed Fighters work?

Trigger was offered Andro Melos, the show that was allegedly originally supposed to take footage from before Tsuburaya realized the intent to divorce it from the Ultra mythos and said no. So...maybe?

Finally broke down and watched this; not really a fan of either toku or Trigger but the combination is pretty good.

One thing I noticed that I didn't see brought up in my skim of the thread is that everyone appears to have color coded eyes; the heroes and their class have blue eyes, the villains have red eyes and Gridman!Yuta and Rikka's mom have gold eyes.

Alright, episode 11:

Tbh, I'm still unsure how to feel on Akane anymore. While I do think the last moments about Rikka and Akane's interaction feel like a combination of Heartwarming and Tearjerker at the same time and this is where the point when Akane lost all the humanity and got manipulated by Alexis... Yeah, I'm not sure on how to feel on Akane's character anymore. Other than that, the episode was decent and it seems to warm up for the Grand Finale when Akane becomes a final kaiju so yeah...

Big reveal with Yuuta... that's not terribly clear, doesn't really add meaning to anything, and still fails to make him compelling as a protagonist. Lovely

Last episode's big cliffhanger mostly doesn't matter

Mostly just filling time until we hit this episode's big cliffhanger

I kinda want to say that this show feels stretched out, but I feel like it could work a lot better if it spread out the reveals more. It's looking like most everything is going to get explained in episodes 6 and 12, and that's having repercussions on the rest of the show

I think last week's cliffhanger was mostly a means to an end so we could get the big reveal in this one... as well as damn Akane in our three heroes' eyes.

That said, while I agree that the reveal fails to make Yuuta any more of a compelling protagonist, I've been getting the feeling that the real protagonist of this show is actually Akane. She's had the most development, she's been the focus this entire time, everything revolves around her and most of the time, she's the one who has any agency in this story. We've followed her around almost as much, if not more, than the three heroes, and the entire point of the show seems to be saving Akane. Gridman feels a lot less like a protagonist than she does at this point.

The first part, definitely, but the second kinda failed to happen? Like, Rikka declared it unforgivable... and then chased down Akane to insist that they're friends

Akane's certainly the main character in that the story is about her, but a protagonist is defined as the person the story is following, and Yuuta is definitely that

Yeah, Yuuta's reveal is a big letdown. Like he's Gridman all along... uh, okay? How is that interesting?

But the show doesn't tell us why she's the way she is, it just introduces her that way and keeps rolling with it. As far as the show tells us, she's just an anti-social shut in, who's been given her own little world to rule over and uses it to makes herself the most popular and enact petty vengeance for minor infractions.

Now, the way she acts through the season is very consistent with her characterization, it's just not very sympathetic or compelling. Akane's character arc through the season is like someone who decides to blow up a school because a vending machine eat their quarter and the just breaks down completely when someone keeps defusing their bombs. That's not a tragedy, that's a farce.

You know, all of this makes me think about something. How long do you think Akane's been in the virtual world? Because, imagine if she's been there for months or so. It might explain a bit.

I dunno, we've accompanied Akane for quite a while now. Sure, we didn't follow her from where you traditionally would a protagonist, but so far, this has been mostly her story, with Gridman being just a part of it. In fact, the last four or five episodes have been mostly about following her. I'd say they at least share the title of protagonist.

I think you're missing the point of her character. A lot of what you're describing about Akane are the symptoms to her issues, the stuff the show drops on her surface, but that hints at some more under that, like her depression and other issues. Her behaviour is that of someone with severe psychological problems, real world-like, not fictional. She's impaired in several fields: she can't properly connect cause to consequence sometimes, she has something of a victim complex, she fears any interaction she doesn't have full control over. Akane is more like a disfunctional abuse victim or depressive person, one who has, for some reason, been given access to a program that makes her akin to a godess and encouraged to use it in progressively worse ways, and when that got in her way, she started to break down mentally, as we've seen the past two or three episodes. She wants things to go well, but is psychologically incapable of processing what it takes to do that.

You can see what she's really like in the episode where she gets everyone to dream of her. She's nice, friendly, nerdy, a bit socially awkward. And only as she loses her grip on them does she retreat into her more psychotic persona, but out of desperation, because she doesn't comprehend why they're leaving. In a way, Akane is a representation of Evil Cannot Comprehend Good by means of real-world psychological issues. And she might not even be actually evil.

Huh. Rikka's mom has the same golden eyes as Gridman-as-Yuta does. I'm sure that will not be significant.

Other than that, holy cow, this show just keeps getting better.

There's a thin line between writing a person with mental problems and a twisted madman, and Akane is definitely on the letter said of it. Especially since all the depressive abuse victim stuff is speculation at best, as show doesn't deign to explore Akane motivation beyond the "surface stuff" very much. Akane most defining feature is her Lack of Empathy - the reason she can't form a functional relationship with other humans is because she dosen't really see them as people.

Okay, that's just plain not true. That'ss not how Akane really is, that's just how she presented herself to make the fantasy more appealing - it's no more true than her friendly persona at school.

We've spent the entire show inside Akane's head, with only Gridman's posse and (probably) Alexis as true outsiders. It has been extremely obvious what her mindset is and why she's doing this stuff, it's just that it's told through metaphor and visual storytelling rather than through someone speaking directly to the screen, and requires a basic, passing familiarity with clinical depression (or at least prior media about depression, especially NGE). Our only remaining question is what Alexis's precise deal is and what the trauma is that caused Akane to go on this particularly apocalyptic downward spiral.

For the record, the earlier suggestion that this was the first time Akane felt guilt kind of has the wrong end of the stick. Her entire existence is defined by titanic self-loathing. She lives in a literal palace of decay, slowly physically deteriorates over the course of the story, and can't even make her own creations like her. Constant, crushing guilt, the feeling that she is a terrible person who deserves nothing good, is her default state of being, and all of her attempts to make a fantasy-world where she has a stress-free life and everyone loves her are born out of an obsessive desire to forget that.

That's why she lashes out so hard at the Gridman therapy team - they're making her remember what an awful state she's in, and therefore (from her perspective) what an awful person she is. Nothing is just bad luck for a depressed person - it is judgement being passed on them personally. Similarly, the idea that this isn't normal, that this can be different, is horrifying, because what does it say about you that you can't be as good and well-adjusted as everyone else? It's also why stabbing Yuta rocked her so hard - it wasn't the first time she felt guilt, but it was probably one of the first times one of her attempts to drive away her constant guilt just left her feeling more guilty and less capable of forgetting her situation.

That guilt complex is also why thinking of Akane as, say, a school shooter is deeply misguided. Most of her violence in this show has been inward, at her own creations and her own world. It's psychological self-torment from someone who has severe difficulty seeing herself as human. When she personally uses lethal force against another human being, her pent-up guilt all comes out at once and she totally shuts down. Akane might bring a gun to school, but she'd probably either fire it at a window, run off, and jump off a bridge, or just turn it on herself. She lashes out when people try to stop her from hurting herself - it's a bit different from, say, narcissistic rage, which is much more outwardly-directed.

You know, maybe Alexis isn't an exterior force. We've been thinking for a while that Rikka might be a good side of Akane made into a person. What if Alexis is the bad side of Akane? As in, a manifestation of everything she sees herself as, or maybe a manifestation of self-harm? He makes the monsters real. He is a fake friend who only cares for what Akane can give him. He hurt Anti when Akane was angry at him. He eventually makes her into a monster when she's no longer useful to him. His appearance in this last episode midway through Akane's talk with Rikka can even be interpreted as one last refusal by her to accept change, letting her worst side turn her into a literal monster.

Alexis might be a literalization of Akane's more destructive and negative behaviours.