#making spaghetti

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Ok so I wanna hear your thoughts on the final fight specifically. I really adored how after all this hyping up of Ultimate Kuuga’s destructive power, rather than it being something flashy and explosive, it was… down to earth. Brutal. Just two dudes punching the shit out of each other in a way that was Difficult To Watch.

The final battle of Shin Rider felt like a callback to this, honestly. Just heartwrenching impact after heartwrenching impact. It’s not big or extravagant, but instead it shows that having to fight… sucks.

Sorry, I think about this particular fight A LOT.

YEAH YEAH i completely get what you mean. your buffer worked - i didn't see this at all until i had already finished the show and compared it to that one part in black (you know, The One). i think, as i chew through everything that happened in this show, that there's more i have to say about kuuga on the whole than i've managed to render right now, mostly about how it feels like they did really manage to distill a lot of the core feelings i've gotten from showa rider into something new and interesting and fun that they could do now that it's in vogue and possible to have the episodes a little more interconnected than they were able to get away with (sans a couple areas, like the 4-episode demon world stretch in black rx) previously.

the setup to the fight really worked for me. i think it was the right choice to watch the last 3 episodes on the same night so that we could start with ichijou, just some guy, just some human guy being the one to kill... that rose lady. you know the one. the one who has been around as a boss from the start of the show and who had a couple faceoffs before with him? you know, the one who, with her dying breaths, told ichijou that she realized humans could be equals to them, capable of the same destruction that they were? that she wished she could have faced off with ichijou again? that lady.

they had been setting the grongi and at least godai up as equals for a while there - there's the obvious stuff with the back and forth "i need to get stronger!" moments but the one in specific that stood out to me was when tsubaki was doing autopsies on the bodies that they were able to recover and he was like oh shit... these guys look just like kuuga on the inside?

kamen rider has this feeling running through it, this essence of "that could have been me, but it wouldn't have been me, couldn't have been me, because i love humanity too much, but i can only say that because after experiencing this, i'm still me," which is an odd feeling to put into words, but i think it's one that many people are familiar with. to come out of something on the other side feeling worn down and miserable but victorious and look back and see other people who have been through the same or similar things to you and for whatever reason, came out the other end differently.

hongo escaping being borged before they were able to complete his brainwashing, yuki being the one picked as a scapegoat and therefore realizing that what was going on around him was wrong, shigeru just straight up being confident enough to manage to trick people into borging him, nobuhiko being chosen as the favorite son just because he was the one who stuck around for a while leaving kotaro able to make his own decisions about what is right and wrong. these are all things that each of the riders did have an active say in, but they're also a bit dependent on luck to fully and correctly pull off. and i think godai also kind of picked up on that vibe. he's both reassuring people that everything is going to be okay because he believes in himself and his love for the people around him, and he does, but he still plans for the off chance that things can go wrong by telling ichijou how to kill him should things really go to shit.

that's it think the thing i took away most from this fight. the visuals are great, the whole thing just feels raw and uncomfortable to watch, which it should! this is the reality of everything that's been going on here behind the suits. we should feel glad that kamen rider doesn't have to fight anymore once this is over. kuuga flirts with this level of reality through the show and they completely full on commit to it at the end. but i think everything leading up to it and the context of the fight really helped me to put my finger this feeling that i've been feeling through the entirety of the show.

("humanity" is an oversimplification - a lot of the times when you're discussing robots you're talking about them in the context of a sci-fi story which some of the time can have robots living in largely non-human societies (for an easy silly example off the top of my head think BMO who lives with exactly one human for most of his life) but even then we're contending with the gender dynamics of the organic beings around them that make up the society they're based in. not to mention that we ourselves as humans view and create everything from a human-centric point of view that's kind of inescapable imo. for the sake of getting through this with any kind of coherency i'm going to use the term "humanity")

the closest thing that i can imagine to be what i would consider a “cisgender robot” would be a robot that was created by robots in a world where humans don’t have an influence. this can’t really be the case – robots being inorganic have to be created by some outside being and therefore will always be formed in the image of the societal opinions of their makers. you’re working with a blank slate here; you don’t have to be bogged down by what evolution might just decide on its own. sure, they can in turn create their own robots that may be influenced by other factors and get further and further removed from their original designs, but that begs the question of whether it’s possible to dilute the original influence far enough to where it’s no longer a factor. personally, i don’t think so? 

so, we can agree: every robot has the influences of humanity in them but is still distinctly different, creating the humanity axis. there’s a place that they each physically on there depending on how they were constructed; there’s also a choice each of them must make as to how much they want to adhere to their assigned spot. to fully be human is not an option, as they would have to not know they’re a robot, and to be fully robot isn’t an option either, as they were made by humans. i suppose you could be happy with your assigned place on the humanity axis but you could never truly be viewed by the organic society around you as anything but “other” unless you tried to fully pass as human. then we can bring in characters who never had to consider the humanity axis until, well, circumstances changed (things like cyborgs or mind backups or a good ol’ brain in a jar) and now they have to learn that they actually experienced a kind of privilege that they weren’t even really aware of until they had to question their relationship to their humanity. they don’t even have to view it as a bad thing – it’s not a bad thing. you can be very confident and happy with who you are and your status outside the traditional human framing of whatever society you’re in. being othered isn’t always a bad thing and some can take solace in the fact that they’re able to dictate who they are without having to technically abide by whatever norms biology has been divided into. it lends itself easily to exploring beyond what’s been set out for you from the start. not always, not every robot wants that or cares to explore it, but it can. 

shigeru loves the aesthetic. he's married to it. i think he'd be the most into making sure that his insides looked all sleek and nice and organized. he takes pride in his borg body. personally i'm torn between him color coordinating his wires to match his whole rose theme (he could use green wires like the plants are growing out of him...) or the fact that the stronger suit is kind of the default color of most wires (so he could probably just use what was put in him originally) but he'd absolutely make sure that his insides looked as clean as possible.

kazuya would have to have his insides really organized kind of by necessity. it wouldn't be an aesthetic thing for him i don't think but considering he's gotta use that repair machine (since he has no boys to fix him) and that needs to be able to target a specific part of his mechanics completely autonomously to be able to repair it, things have to be tied up tight in there so that they don't shift when he's moving around. also, super-1 is canonically beautiful, and they REALLY like showing off his borg blueprints so i think they tried to make him look nice and clean in there.

kazami was NOT clean at all when they made him (look, they were racing against time in there) but yuki absolutely went in and reworked him afterwards. having a scientist boyfriend has some perks! i think it would be a matter of pride for yuki but also i think a way for him to redeem his destron time a little bit. he can use his skills that he got there to make kazami even better.

speaking of yuki his arm was fixed up by a bunch of scientists that liked him and cared about him. i think that they did their best to make the connection as easy and as natural as possible. there probably was some nerve damage from the acid and everything and i have my own headcanons about his range of feeling in the arm and how everything works there but i think they would have done their best to save as much as they could and make it comfortable for him.

hongo is the messiest out of all of them on the inside because he wouldn't want to open himself up and do routine maintenance i don't think. he's fine with all the human things like brushing his teeth and showering but having to open himself up and blow the dust off of his parts and worrying about how all the wires in him are connected is something that he doesn't want to do and doesn't trust a lot of other people to do. hayato and taki can clean him up but if he's on his own for a while away from the two of them he just won't and he'll get all dirty inside and hayato will have to open him up and wipe his parts off when they see each other again. i think he's prone to overheating because of this <3