#kamen rider shrike | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

norihisahyuga-archived · 7 years ago

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you know i have watched quite a few kamen rider series so far. i only have season 2 of kamen rider amazons before i have completed the neo-heisei era. some of these series have been excellent, some have been horrible. but all of them feature some pretty interesting depictions of villains, bordering from seemingly simplistic to downright complex. an example of simple are the phantoms, who spawn from a person’s despair and seek to create more of their own under guidance of their leader wiseman. an example of complex are both the greeed and roidmude, who never asked to be what they are today, who hate humans for their own different yet complex reasons.

so there’s a lot of grey morality in kamen rider, whether it be the greeed who only prey on humans to infuse their fractured bodies with what they need to survive, who were turned into medals and then ripped apart for another man’s gain of power. there’s the roidmudes, who were infused with human emotions and whose center, heart, was tortured and abused by a human man, both of which served to fill the roidmudes with hatred for humans. and there are the bugsters, who were created to be video game villains and who achieve their perfected forms from the death of a human being via stress.

and in those shows, grey morality has been handled somewhat well. ankh, though antagonistic toward humans to begin with, does not make yummys from human desire until his villainous arc toward the end of the show and even begins to understand the value of being human. roidmude 072 was willing to live peacefully with kyu for the rest of his life because he had found happiness with him and did not try to injure humans. burgmon only wants to remain with the human who created him and be happy with him and only terrorizes people because he thinks tsukuru will be cured of his game disease if burgmon is killed.

i feel like amazons completely misses the mark of establishing that some amazons are indeed safe to live with humans. the amazons they try to use to illustrate that amazons can be good people too... are not good at all. the shrike amazon from the episodes with the serial killer ends up killing people when his hunger goes out of control. the patrons of the amazon restaurant are shown to be eating human steaks with the thought that it might quell their transformation-- which they do not have any proof off in canon. even mamoru, the gentlest amazon of all, cannot be stopped once his hunger rises and he accidentally eats human eat. he attacks misaki, who adored him.

that’s why this show doesn’t work for me as far as the writing goes. the characters are interesting and complex, but the fact of the matter is that what jin does-- hunting down the still-human amazons and brutally killing them-- should be barbaric and instead the narrative of amazons paints it as the only right thing to do. because the amazons who awaken have all been shown in canon to start consuming human flesh, and those who have not awakened have still crossed the line to kill people. so unless you can reconcile the deaths of innocent humans with the lives of amazons, it’s difficult to say that the amazons should not be killed even if they did not ask for what happened to them or ask to be made into these super soldier killing machines.

like, i absolutely have empathy for them. i feel awful that they were created and raised into literal monsters and they have no control over their fate. all of them are destined to turn-- at least this is what season 1 leads me to believe. and those that do awaken have all lost their humanity and begin preying on people. and a lot of them absolutely do not want to. ryusuke didn’t want to kill jun and begged for his teammates to find him and finish him off. the shrike amazon nearly broke down at the thought of eating people. the patrons wanted to live their lives in peace. but fuck, amazons does not give us a third option here.

i have a lot of problems with how this was handled when it’s been handled in interesting ways in the past. it feels like they absolutely did not even try. the easy and obvious answer would be to have more amazons like haruka, who are hungry but who refuse to eat people no matter what, but instead haruka comes off looking kind of like a fool for believing his kind are capable of living peacefully because the narrative of amazons shows us that this is not true.

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