Kamen Rider Black Sun: (All Season 1)

November 5, 2022 10:39 AM - Season 1, Episode 1

In conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the franchise, this 10-episode series is a darker reimagining of one of its most popular iterations (especially if you count its international footprint), Kamen Rider Black. (wiki) The series follows a loner named Kotaro Minami against the backdrop of a world where kaijins are fighting for their right to exist. Available worldwide on Amazon Prime.
posted by cendawanita (3 comments total)

I just wanna talk about how much this show aggravated me but still kept me watching (mainly because i was vainly hoping that it eventually would make sense, this worldbuilding route that basically borrowed all the major milestones of the cinematic X-Men lore), so much that when they did their version of the original opening, i was shouting, "this is unearned! UNEARNED!"

So much of the reimagining was unnecessarily complicated in aesthetics* but super vague in details that would matter in a narrative that I couldn't make heads nor tails over the emotional gravitas of key moments. "so what?" was a big question they weren't answering. However goofy the original canon was (due to the length of the show so the episodic nature made the story arc's big bad very silly at times), it's at least coherent.

*I mean, I GET THE IDEA where Nobuhiko is Magneto and Kotaro is Xavier, you don't actually have to literally put him in a wheelchair.
posted by cendawanita at 10:47 AM on November 5, 2022

Having never seen the original, I was more taken by the fact that they went there: the very unsubtle analogy to the Kishi/Abe lineage and their involvement in all sorts of things unsavory, Unit 731, mimicking the style of anti-Korean protests. Probably a bunch of other things I didn't pick up on.

That this was the version they made available worldwide is sort of mind blowing.
posted by LostInUbe at 3:21 AM on November 17, 2022

That angle i very much enjoyed, especially when I contemplated the rl analogues. When watching though, what i was wondering was why didn't they work in the atomic bomb as well as a trigger for more political pointscoring (mind you, that's because at that point I was working on what I thought of the kaijin as an analogue for non-Japanese Japanese minorities especially the Okinawan and Korean ethnicities, so I was thinking they'd do something interesting about 'hidden minorities' instead of a muddled use of kaijins as WMDs). That said, it's like a flip side of the original: that one had some evil politicians but it was Rich Corporate Interests that Gorgom hid behind.
posted by cendawanita at 3:46 AM on November 17, 2022