#translators note

The first thing to mention is that I finally got my episode links page to work correctly. The links now go to the chronological sorting of the post for each episode instead of giving an error message.

Second, one of my earliest posts said that I was planning to liveblog the Dragon Prince starting on the 14th and Doctor Who when the new episodes of that begin airing. Now, I still plan to liveblog the Dragon Prince. That show has lots of promise for liveblogging if it’s even half as good as Airbender and Kora.

Doctor Who on the other hand, I love the show and look forward to seeing the first woman to play the Doctor I am forced to admit that when it’s taking me 4-6 hours to liveblog a twenty minute show liveblogging Doctor Who would involve me breaking each episode up into multiple days and I don’t want to do that.

This leaves me in need of new material to blog about much sooner than earlier expected, nine weeks max until I finish the Dragon Prince once it drops possibly sooner. So I’m looking to my currently small audience for suggestions. Shows should be a half hour max and as I’ve said I’m open to blogging about story heavy games or visual novels (but not equipped to livestream). Games or visual novels however need to be something I can afford (free is a good price range) and something that will run on a linux computer with the graphical processing capacity and ram of your average potato.

Things I have already seen or played include RWBY, Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Madoka, Steven Universe, Camp Camp, Nomad of Nowhere, Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni (watched and played, and read the manga), Umineko no Naku Koro Ni (half way through the visual novel), the Phoenix Wright games, Life is Strange (all currently released), Butterfly Soup, Gravity Falls, Ducktales, Voltron, and so many things I’m forgetting to mention. I would love to blog Life is Strange season 2 but even if I could afford it and my system is buff enough to run it (it ran season 1 before my Windows 10 decided to explode and I decided that was a sign to start using an OS that spies on me less) the Linux release is likely going to be delayed so long I’ll be hopelessly spoiled by watching multiple youtubers play it.  

I’m still not sure why it’s spelled Mazine but from what I’ve read online it sounds like they’re aiming for a pun based on the fact that Majin the Japanese word for devil sounds similar to the English word machine. So they’re riding around in Time Devils.

As for why he’s called Oma Zi-O in the future I’ve read that the official Japanese name for Woz’ copy of Twilight is “Oumagatoki” a Japanese word “which carries connotations of twilight, calamity, and the moment that monsters appear” and it’s thought that Oma derives from the first couple syllables of that.  

I saw this on http://kamenrider.wikia.com/wiki/Kamen_Rider_Zi-O.

“In the fall of 2018, a time machine appears before a hero born in the year 2000. The hero has always dreamed of becoming a king. A mysterious girl appears from the time machine, telling the hero “I come from the year 2068, a world without hope where the king of demons reigns supreme.” The girl has come from the future in a desperate effort to change her own time. The girl then gives the hero an ominous warning “You will become Kamen Rider Zi-O, King of Time, the demon destined to rule the world.” Can this really be the hero’s fate? This is the story of a Kamen Rider who would be king, who will fight to save the past, present, and future, encountering the various Heisei Kamen Riders throughout space-time.“

So, I guess I know who wrote this season. 

The fact that the season is hitting the ground running at that point instead of building up to it is one of the reasons I decided to start my blog focusing on it. From past seasons I’ve seen I know that Kamen Rider usually builds from their starting point (last season we had an amnesiac genius physicist fighting a villainous group engaged in human experimentation and trying to prove an escaped convict was innocent of the murder he’d been accused of) to something much larger and more dramatic. At the mid point of last season the previously mentioned characters wound up embroiled in a war. Later it was revealed that an alien who had destroyed Mars and wanted to destroy Earth had been manipulating all three sides of the war. If Zi-O is starting at the point the plot summary describes I can’t wait to see how it goes even further.

I also know that this is the last Kamen Rider series of the Heisei era (Translator’s note: The Heisei era began in 1989 with the death of Emperor Hirohito who was posthumously renamed Emperor Shōwa.) I understand that this season is supposed to be something of a retrospective on the Kamen Rider shows of the era with Zi-O using the powers of the Riders that came before him. 

I meant to have these out a lot sooner but it’s been a hell of a couple weeks. So those of you who aren’t familiar with the main subject of this blog might be asking yourselves, “Self, what is Kamen Rider?” Today I’m answering that question in this post and then making a second post about what I know about the current season.

Kamen Rider is a long running Tokusatsu series in Japan. (Translators note: Tokusatsu means “special filming” and refers to a live action movie or series that uses a lot of special effects. Some of the most well known in the West are the various monster movies of Toho Studio - the most famous of those is probably Godzilla - and Power Rangers. Or more accurately the Japanese show that Power Rangers takes all it’s fight scenes from and writes a whole new script around.) It airs in a block of television called “Super Hero Time” along with Super Sentai (the show that gets cut apart and turned into Power Rangers) and the animated Magical Girl series Pretty Cure.

Kamen Rider is about a hero who uses an elaborate belt (that children can beg their parents to purchase a replica of in toy stores) along with a number of trinkets that fit into the belt (which are purchased separately from the same toy stores after the children beg their parents enough) to change from a normal man to a man in an elaborate costume. Usually with a strange looking weapon. The costume itself would be to expensive to sell in most toy stores, but toy replicas of the weapons are of course for sale. Purchased separately from the belt and the transformation trinkets obviously. And of course each transformation usually has it’s own weapon. The hero uses his powers to fight monsters created by an evil organization and save the world. There is usually at least one other person who is capable of a similar transformation and sometimes many more. Some seasons the various Riders cooperate to save the world, sometimes they fight each other. A lot of the time in the fine tradition of Shonen manga and anime they fight each other before teaming up against a greater threat. 

Each season brings a new setting, a new hero and new monsters made by a new evil organization for him to fight. The main hero is always male but some seasons one or two women are also given the ability to transform and fight. Kamen Rider is a show written by Japanese men intended for an audience of Japanese boys though so the focus is on young men being badass. For girls being surprisingly badass check out Pretty Cure where the young heroines punch monsters right in the face. With the power of love, friendship, and punching really really hard. 

Hello and welcome, I am Kamen Blogger (Translators note: Kamen means mask and blogger means a person who regularly writes material for a blog.) and I will be your blogger for this liveblogging experience. The main focus of this blog, for approximately the next year at least, will be liveblogging the upcoming season of Kamen Rider, Kamen Rider Zi-O. For those not familiar with the Kamen Rider franchise I will be discussing what that is in the next post. This post is a more general overview of the blog itself and my plans for it.  

Since I am liveblogging Kamen Rider Zi-O as it airs there will be at most one episode per week for me to blog about, even realizing how long liveblogging an episode is likely to take me I think that I’m probably going to be able to liveblog about at least one additional subject. I have already chosen my next two. 

As a fan of Avatar the Last Airbender and the Legend of Kora I am looking forward to The Dragon Prince and that will be part of my lineup when it drops on September 14th. I will be trying to get through that as fast as I can mostly because if my eight year old nephew decides to watch it nothing on earth will prevent him from dropping ALL of the spoilers on me. 

Another reason I’m going to try to get through the Dragon Prince quickly is because the next season of Doctor Who feels like an excellent jumping on point to start a liveblog. A new Doctor with new companions and a new showrunner make it more like starting a brand new show than starting to liveblog a show in the middle of it’s run.

After I finish the Dragon Prince and Doctor Who (or in the middle of the inevitable mid season hiatus Doctor Who is prone to) I am open to suggestions of what to blog about. In addition to TV shows and anime I’m open to blogging about visual novels or story heavy games, as long as they’re something that I can afford and that will run on a Linux machine with the approximate processing power and graphics ability of a potato.