#except it's 'when will kirinda himself finally show up to the ondo'

[kirinda-ondo]

This is a ramble that has been long, long overdue. It's actually the first TED talk I ever wrote, but I have been sitting on it for years because I always kept feeling like I had more to say. But at last, I’m finally updating and consolidating it into a post more worthy of my current standards and unleashing it upon you all.

And so we're finally gonna talk about Kirinda, the namesake of the character song that is the namesake of my blog.

But first, we actually need to talk about the show that he comes from, because it's kind of obscure and y’all deserve to know what the hell I’m talking about (unless you've been following my antics long enough to remember me screaming about it into the void on my old blog, which then you all deserve a senior discount and also I love you).

Juuni Senshi Bakuretsu Eto Ranger (12 Warriors Explosive Eto Rangers, or just Eto Ranger for short), is an anime set on the peaceful island country of Mugen (no relation to the fighting game), home to many animal spirits, as well as Princess Aura, the one humanoid goddess who governs it. It is also home to the Novel Pole, a long pole in the center of the island that stretches endlessly into the heavens and keeps the island hanging above the ocean below. The Novel Pole is called such because it contains every story, myth, or legend ever created by humankind, each in their own living dimensions called Novel Worlds.

However, under the direction of a vengeful cat spirit known as Jyarei King Nyanma, the Novel Worlds are frequently under attack by creatures known as Jyarei Monsters, who infiltrate the Novel Worlds, often disguised as a random character in the story, and change it beyond recognition with the goal of destroying the Novel World. If a Novel World is successfully destroyed, then the Novel Pole will break, inevitably sending Mugen and its inhabitants sinking into the sea.

This is where the Eto Rangers come in. They are a group of 12 warriors, each coincidentally matching an animal in the Chinese Zodiac. The team consists of Bakumaru the mouse, Hols the bull, Gaou the tiger, Cream the rabbit (no relation), Drago the dragon, Nyorori the snake, Pakaracchi the horse, Souffle the sheep, Monk the monkey, Tart the chicken, Pochiro the dog, and Urii the boar. Together, they ride in the Space-Time Transmitting Machine, Kirinda, a giant robot unicorn, to different Novel Worlds in order to solve the mystery of the Jyarei Monster, defeat them, and save the day.

At least, that's how it starts. Things get a lot, and I mean a LOT more intense further down the line, and the subject of today's ramble is in fact the center of a lot of major spoilers. If this seems like a show you're interested in checking out first, all 39 episodes are on youtube (albeit with uh, questionable fansubs). Otherwise, this sentence is your last warning as we are going directly to Spoiler Town from here on out.

As has become tradition with nearly all my rambles, I'd like to talk briefly about how we got here. Back when I was a wee little cringeboy in middle school, I randomly decided to look up Cream the Rabbit (the Sonic one). To this day I have no idea why, as she's not even a character I like all that much. Anyway, in my search I found a decently popular picture of a different Cream the Rabbit. I was like "who the heck is this?" and when I clicked on the image, the description explained things, but more importantly, linked to a channel with subtitled episodes. I was hooked immediately, but unfortunately the subs stopped at episode 15. I waited, and waited, but more never came. Eventually I forgot about it until 2014, my senior year of high school, when the urge to search for it again randomly hit me. I didn't find more English subbed episodes, but I did find the rest of the episodes subbed in Chinese (which I happened to be studying at the time). And so, I reacquainted myself with the series.

When I first started watching it again, I didn't really pay Kirinda much mind. He was a fun character, sure, and I enjoyed his presence, but I sort of took him for granted, as Hols was shaping up to be my favorite character at the time. He'd be there in the beginning of episodes to tell the Rangers what sort of Novel World they'd be going to, and then again at the end when it was time to purify the Jyarei Monster, with some bad puns and other shenanigans in between (all in the most hokey, outdated Kansai dialect imaginable, even for 1995.) He was a series constant and a key part of the show's episodic format, but beyond that, he was pretty low on my radar. That is, until something happened.

At the end of episode 20, instead of dealing with the average Jyarei Monster attack, Nyanma sends two of her strongest generals at once. They are brought down to the light form that allows them to be purified by Kirinda, but unlike literally every other Jyarei Monster, they dodge the purification beam. This never happens. And then again, unlike other Jyarei Monsters, while in their light forms, they are able to shoot Kirinda out of the sky. He and the rest of the Rangers are saved at the last minute through a combination of taking manual control of Kirinda, and Princess Aura's intervention, but he's down for the count and it's a race against time to find an artifact to save him before he's turned to stone and dies.

When I first saw this, I was absolutely thrown for a loop, not just from the initial shock, but also due to the fact that I had gotten some spoilers for the end of the series regarding the fates of 75% of the main cast. I knew this was a show that would not hesitate to kill off its characters (even if they do get better in the end), so needless to say I was a little concerned. You know that saying, "you don't know what you have until it's gone?" This was a prime example. I may have been kind of indifferent to him, but I sure as hell didn't want him gone. I was wracking my brain wondering how the hell they were going to fix this in time, or how the show would possibly function without him if they couldn't. Thankfully, I didn't have to worry, as after a very stressful 1 2/3 episodes later (again, these were posted in 3 part segments because Old Anime), Kirinda was back and better than ever. He even had a really pretty new power up that he used from that point onward. With the arc wrapped up and things returning to a slightly more normal pace again, I was able to go back to enjoying his presence, albeit with a much greater appreciation. At least, until things drastically changed again.

At episode 33 of 39, I was starting to get anxious. Things were getting intense and I knew the major character deaths were coming any time now, but the spoilers I saw never stated when. These spoilers also never mentioned something else, something very important: the kirin spirit, Lydia. This much smaller, organic unicorn was introduced with no warning and no name, but the minute I heard his voice and saw that the camera he carried was the same as the eyeball apparatus Kirinda used to communicate with the Rangers inside the ship, I knew something horrible was coming. However, I wouldn't realize the extent of this until episode 34.

As it turns out, Kirinda was once an ordinary newspaper reporter named Lydia, who was so passionate about his job that he completely passed on the opportunity to participate in the race to become an Eto Ranger, believing that he wasn't suited for it, even though he could have allegedly won the whole thing due to his speed and been a good member due to his strong sense of justice. Though he didn't participate, he was there waiting by the finish line to get coverage of the winners, and that was when he saw that the young cat spirit, Chocolat, who had seemingly arrived to the finish line first, had been blatantly disqualified. The next day, he spoke with Princess Aura about the matter. Chocolat had been disqualified for starting the race five minutes early, though she claimed to have received a vision directly from Princess Aura telling her to do so. However, the princess claimed to have done no such thing. With both of them agreeing that something seemed wrong, Aura used her spiritual powers to look for Chocolat, but soon found Chocolat was being approached by an incredibly dark and dangerous force.

As Aura was unable to leave the palace without losing her powers, Lydia opted to find Chocolat himself. He was able to catch up to her, but before he could get her attention, she was approached by the Jyarei God Bagi. He watched in horror as Bagi fed into Chocolat's anger towards Princess Aura and convinced her to accept a deal that would give her the power to destroy Aura and all of Mugen itself. And so, Chocolat was painfully transformed into the Jyarei King Nyanma. As Bagi properly introduced herself, Lydia accidentally blew his cover in shock, and though he tried to salvage the situation by attempting to make casual conversation, Nyanma simply saw fit to test her new powers on him. Despite his best efforts, he was unable to escape being shot in the back and was left for dead. Except, he wasn't dead. Not yet.

He dragged his wounded body literally halfway across Mugen from the forest to Aura Castle in order to warn her of what had just happened. While Princess Aura tried in vain to save his life, Lydia lamented his lack of participation in the race, feeling like he would have been able to do something more if he had. And so, his final request was to have his soul used to help the Eto Rangers save Mugen before he finally died. After Aura spoke to her superior, the Great God Goal, Lydia's body was sent to the base of the Novel Pole where he was resurrected as Kirinda.

This backstory, having been completely unprepared for it, utterly wrecked me emotionally. There was a whole other dimension to this character that wasn't even hinted at beforehand (and some of that I will gladly concede as bad writing on their part but shh I'll get to that later) and it honestly made me appreciate him more and cemented him as my favorite character in the series and one of my favorite characters of all time. And now that you know the what and the how, it's time to elaborate on the why, because there's a lot more to like than just his backstory.

As an aside, from here on, I will be referring to him interchangeably as Lydia or Kirinda based on the form he happened to be in during whatever scene I'm discussing.

First of all, this guy is just really fun to watch. Though it's his job as Kirinda to help take care of the Rangers while traveling, he tends to be really careless and irresponsible about it, subjecting them to whatever whims that happen to cross his mind. At best, this tends to manifest in the form of incredibly corny jokes and puns, or falsely blowing things out of proportion and then having to take back what he said later. At worst, he'll screw with the roulette system used to select which Rangers will be sent out, drop them off somewhere really precarious, or simply send them off too soon before someone can finish saying something important.

The most egregious example of many of these is the episode where he sent all twelve Rangers out at once into the world of Mercury and the Woodsman (the one with the golden, silver, and steel axes) and dropping them off into a lake where all but Bakumaru and Nyorori are turned into wood statues, having to be wheeled around in a wheelbarrow the entire time (and later saved from being used as giant bowling pins). In the end, sending the entire team wasn’t a decision made because of some great threat as the Rangers had been led to believe, it was just because Kirinda wanted to try it once and see what would happen.

His shenanigans continue even after the evil is defeated and he's been restored to his original body, as he wastes no time dedicating a whole front page article to his own resurrection while all the hell the Rangers just went through to defeat Bagi and save Mugen from collapsing merely gets a tiny mention. And worse yet, his response to any complaints he gets about any of it is to either ignore the complainer entirely, or fumble a bit for an excuse before giving up and hiding or running away. Getting him to actually own up to his nonsense is quite frankly next to impossible.

However, that's not the only side to him. Though he's not always the most reliable, he is very passionate about whatever he does. In the past, he passed up the highly regarded position of being an Eto Ranger because he much preferred reporting the news (and goes right back to it with all the same passion he had before once he's no longer Kirinda). However, when being confronted with his own backstory by Gaou, he admits that all things considered, he's actually quite happy to become Kirinda and fight alongside them as the thirteenth Ranger. Even on a meta level, he loves what he does, as in one episode, he straight up cries over the prospect of having less screentime on the show because other people keep telling the Novel World's story for him. And to say nothing of his incredibly stupid, but catchy character song where he spends the whole time rambling about how cool and important he is. He may be irresponsible, and despite whatever he may say about not being suited for it, you can't say that he doesn't love his job(s).

Despite all the grandiose and irresponsible nonsense he gets up to, he's got a wiser, kinder side to him as well. As much as he likes to screw with them, he genuinely does care about the Rangers. While he tends to show this by trying to lighten the mood when things look grim, he will occasionally take the time to be more serious and offer some sage advice to someone who needs it. He also apparently has a tendency to bring people out of their shells, as he's revealed to have been particularly close with both Drago and Princess Aura, who are two of the most quiet, distant characters in the whole series.

However, his kindness towards others doesn't stop at his friends, and it's here we start to see that Aura's comments about him having a strong sense of justice are in fact more than just her blatant favoritism. There's the matter of Chocolat, who he clearly doesn't know personally, but goes above and beyond for, not only cheering her on in the race (unaware she'd disqualified herself), but also trying to uncover the truth of how and why it happened and running to try and save her when he learned she was in danger. You can't help but wonder what could have been had a hurt, rejected Chocolat known someone was out there trying so hard to go to bat for her.

Unfortunately, a lot of things about him wind up being put into a much more depressing light when you consider a very crucial element of his backstory: the fact that when he died and became Kirinda, it was a whole six years before the show's main plot began. When he was transformed, it was in a cave at the base of the Novel Pole that would wind up being closed off until the Eto Rangers could activate the doors to open it. Even throughout the series proper, that cave was where he stayed unless there was trouble in a Novel World somewhere (or one particular instance where he's taking the Rangers on a joy ride over Mugen).

Keep in mind, this man was a newspaper reporter, someone with his finger on the pulse of Mugen to the point that he had the scoop on the love lives of literally everyone in Aura City, even if he didn't publish any of it. I highly doubt someone this social would enjoy being so utterly cut off from the world for so long, with his friends and family having no idea where he was. He's able to receive contact from Aura Castle, but Princess Aura would have likely still been spending much of that time grieving the loss and blaming herself for everything as she bore the weight of keeping his whereabouts secret, which would probably be pretty rough to watch. He personally doesn't make a big deal out of it and seems to have a surprising amount of healthy insight regarding the issue when talking to Gaou, but I can't imagine that had to be the most psychologically fun experience to go through, especially early on.

That said, even if he's gotten the insight to not hold anything that happened to him against anyone, it's clearly left him a much more anxious person than what we see in flashbacks. He can be pretty jumpy in the present and he does not handle confrontation well at all, even in less serious situations, which generally leads him to just hit the bricks and bail when faced with the consequences of his own actions. While this tends to be played for laughs, he also tends to still be prone to a "deer in headlights" kind of reaction in more serious situations the minute things start to go off the usual script.

In the episode where he's shot down, after failing to purify Nyanma's two generals, he literally just kind of floats there awkwardly until Urii, the show's resident crybaby of all people, has to tell him to try again, to which he nervously agrees. A similar thing happens later on in his second run-in with Nyanma's (non-sentient) equivalent giant robot unicorn, Black Kirinda. After taking a bit of a beating, he panics about not being fast enough to dodge, so Bakumaru and the others take over the controls, which only freaks him out more and he just straight up screams, but they do a much better job of handling the situation. He's hardly a coward, given the things he's willingly volunteered to do across this series but he definitely has some flavor of anxiety and I will die on his hill.

And then, to make things worse, unlike Chocolat's disappearance, Lydia's isn't even remotely foreshadowed until episode 33. It isn't until the beginning of episode 34 that anyone even mentions him by name, specifically Drago. Now, on a meta level, this reeks of bad writing. However, on an in-universe level, you could argue that Drago is simply such a generally quiet, closed off character that he wouldn't bring up Lydia's disappearance out of the blue, let alone awkwardly tag along with "yeah, and Lydia too," every time Gaou or someone else wondered about Chocolat's whereabouts.

Unfortunately, it's the reactions of everyone else that really add insult to injury. Urii has no idea who he is, which is understandable given that he's a bit too young to give much of a shit about reading the paper, but everyone else simply sort of just chimes in with "Oh yeah, that kirin guy with the newspaper." They then mention with utmost casualness that he'd planned to do an article about the winners of the race (and then a whole serial about each member!) but then the newspaper suspended publication, leaving them believing that he'd just "left to collect materials" and presumably just... never came back? Nobody aside from Drago apparently even remotely questioned it for six whole years. Lydia died and gave himself up for these people and it's implied almost none of them remembered him or cared that he was gone. I highly doubt the writers intended to leave these gut-punchingly sad implications, but boy howdy they sure left them there.

Lydia, Kirinda, whatever you want to call him, is yet another fun, interesting character that got the short end of the stick from writers and is thus left with horrifying implications about their life as a result if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. Y'all writers need to stop doing this so I can appreciate characters in peace.

I could ramble infinitely more about this fucker, from his thought processes, to his relationships (unpacking whatever the hell he had going on with Princess Aura could easily constitute its own TED talk), or even his stupid fucking design, but I shall spare you lest I end up with the same problem I had with my original draft of this where I just felt like I kept finding more things to say lmao.

...You know what actually? We’re are gonna look at his stupid fucking design. That is how we’re wrapping this up. I cannot in good faith talk about this fucking idiot and not roast his design, I’ve been doing it for years and I refuse to stop now.

Look at this goofy motherfucker. Fuckin ill-fitting pastel ass business suit. Every time they draw him it fits badly in a different way. And his tiny ass eyes. It’s not even a stylized Character With Glasses thing, they're just Like That and it's super fucking weird actually. He looks like he’s never had a thought in his entire life. I had no idea what species this man even was supposed to be (he is erroneously translated as a giraffe despite being very decidedly not a giraffe) and now I know more kirin/qilin facts than you could ever even dream of. I hate this man. I love this man. He ruined my life. I want to roll up one of his newspapers and smack him in the head with it. (affectionate) (derogatory)

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.