Under the Shiny, Green Skin

[talktooloose]

Occassionally, totally bizarre things leave a deep impression on me. One of these was a terrible live-action Japanese sci-fi TV movie called Kamen Rider Agito: Project G4 that I watched on a Japan airlines flight a few years ago. Apparently this tale is part of a 30-year old complex universe of Kamen Rider TV shows. The heroes are cyborgs in preposterous bug suits who ride on special magic motorcycles and do action moves against other cyborgs in ugly suits. But then there were these weird, dark plotlines. There was a video game distributed to the population on their cell phones with a puzzle that could only be solved by a small number of kids who had special psychic abilities. The game was released as part of an effort to track these people down for good or evil (it wasn't clear) and some were already in a special school. But here's the kicker: every time these special abilities were manifested, a door was opened into another dimension from which unstoppable and terrifying demons would emerge to slaughter whomever they met. There was a sense of the inevitability of tragedy to the whole show that shook me. A sense that being special necessarily lead to doom and, though our heroes were valiantly fighting the evil, they could not prevail. Death and loss were very close to the surface for a kids show. This sense of doom is one of the interesting features of Japanese entertainment. From Godzilla to 'X' (a terrific anime series I'm watching now), the endless striving -- kids taking their oh-so-serious exams to qualify for the salaryman's life -- is all happening in a quiet car of a runaway train heading down the tracks towards apocolypse. Is this the world that North Americans are starting to relate to? Is the underlying sense of doom replacing the traditional American triumph as the core myth for many youth?

Comments

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's kind of why I called her on psychoanalyzing me which seemed not only presumptuous for a stranger but also an unfair challenge to my finely honed analytical skills!

But then I just acted presumptuous myself. I called someone a homophobe for a rating they gave their fanfic story without taking the time to understand her context. God I hate being all blustery and then having to say "never mind."