Gai's first scene in the series was of him playing poker in some dark nightclub with a woman -- IMO, the "cooler" and more "mature" gambling scene than the one where he's playing Grey in order to win some Jetman soft-vinyls
laugh
, which...I guess I'd describe as cartoony-cool. (I'm thinking of the right episode, right -- the roulette one?)
Quite right! I skipped the first couple eps on my last rewatch because I'd already seen them a zillion times, so shame on me for forgetting about that. Now, to be honest, I do find that sequence pretty cartoony... honestly, Jetman in general I would characterize as fairly cartoony. Everything about it is really melodramatic and exaggerated, the way 70s anime often was. Makes sense for a Gatchaman homage, I guess.
I've read people say that Jetman main producer Takeyuki Suzuki often had heated arguments with Inoue about where he'd take the show. You don't think there could have been something like Suzuki wanting Gai to be shown being put in his place so they didn't always glorify the outlaw?
I can see Suzuki and Inoue disagreeing on how Gai is to be written, but I don't think you need to raise the specter of toning things down for the kiddies to get to that point. Inoue's not stupid and he'd know what he could get away with by then. If Suzuki and Inoue argued about what to do in Jetman, it was probably over what they thought would make the show better. That's the sort of thing collaborators always argue about. Also, Suzuki doesn't
need to be worried about content to argue that Gai should be a flawed character who fails at things.
One, if Gai is just always cool and always right, he's an objectively shittier character than if he's wrong at least
sometimes. Anyone who wanted to make a good show and tell a good story would argue for a fallible Gai over an infallible Gai. It's a simple rule of basic good fiction that any story which can be validly interpreted in
more than one way is just better than one that can only be interpreted in
one way. If Gai is cool, but in an imperfect way that causes complications, there's going to be at least two ways to interpret his actions. Viewers can debate what's really going on in with him, and his actions become more compelling. What I've seen of Suzuki's work is very good about remembering to work in complications and ambiguous story beats, which lends nuance to his shows. So I think if Suzuki argued against an Inoue who wanted Gai to be more didactic, he doesn't need to be worried about kids. He can argue from the basic principles of the craft and be completely right.
Two, Suzuki could have a really good argument for Gai needing feet of clay, just by genre rules. Sentai is driven in large part, story-wise, by the primacy of Red. Whatever the show is about, Red is best at doing it. Jetman is about being a soldier, so Ryu is the best at being a soldier. If Gai's rule of cool in Jetman was allowed to trump everything, including Red's primacy, it would've essentially broken the Sentai aspects of Jetman's story structure. The show would cease to make sense as a genre piece. Creating a storyline where Gai is instead in conflict with a Red who retains his primacy, so that the two must reconcile with each other, keeps Sentai's story structure intact. Red is still strongest, and Black's rebellious streak becomes a great story about the character coming to terms with his role in the team. I can see Suzuki being more conscious of a genre's rules and the necessity of respecting them than Inoue, who has always delighted in breaking genre rules just to see if he can get away with it (and piss off hidebound fans). And after Inoue spent a couple decades doing that, he ended up writing Kamen Rider The Next.
(How frigging out of character is Gai in that terrible caveman episode Arakawa wrote?)
Y'know, I think we can all agree that basically everything about that episode was super-terrible? I think Arakawa demonstrates a decent understanding of the cast's basic concepts in other episodes, though his take is usually far more one-dimensional than Inoue's. The caveman episode is just sheer incompetence from beginning to end. Part of me wonders if it was written as a stock script.
To me, Gai's fleeing after knocking that dude out and returning to save Ryu in the series seems like an even bigger attempt at softening the character to show him be more heroic.
Or just to make his inclusion as a main cast member make basic sense. If Gai doesn't go back to save Ryu there, then he's either a coward or a psychopath. Either way, his planned character arc in the show would seem totally absurd if he started off so completely self-absorbed. He needs to show a flicker of some better nature for that to work.
Overall, the Gai you describe from the novels sounds basically like a rough draft for Kusaka: a hardened, egotistical thug who's strong enough to get **** done, but is himself dangerously fucked up and unstable. I imagine the novel's version of Gai would've been about as well-liked as Kusaka had he appeared in the TV show, and made about as much sense.
Screw those books for being rare and expensive, because I think they show the definitive version of what Inoue wanted.
I dunno. You make the Jetman novels sound a lot like Gundam novels, some of which I've actually gotten to read in translation.
Nobody takes those things seriously, because they're so loaded with mindless fanservice. The Gundam novels mostly exist to pander to superfans of the original show who want to see more sexual and/or violent versions of the original characters/events, or ideas discarded from production for various reasons.
If Inoue wrote the novels after the show, when Gai was firmly established as the most popular character, then I'd suspect he was just responding to that. Playing up things fans like, even to the point of absurdity, is the entire point of that type of spinoff novel. I seriously doubt the novels reflect some Platonic ideal of the Jetman story in Inoue's head before Suzuki and Amemiya "diluted" it.
Gai thinks Ryu's the phony, so...how do you like that!?
That comes up in the TV series, actually, and I liked it quite a lot there! It reflects on the main flaw in Ryu's character and it's a very good scene. It's logical that Gai would be canny enough to spot Ryu's feet of clay when no other character can, and brazen enough to comment on it openly when no one else dares to question Ryu. I don't remember who Gai says this to offhand (it might be Ryu, actually), but I remember him telling someone over a drink that (paraphrased) it's dishonest to pretend like you can turn off your emotions, and instead you should embrace your strongest feelings.
I don't see what's inconsistent in Gai feeling like this, and genuinely disliking Ryu somewhat (since he clearly does for the show's first three quarters), but still feeling pretty jealous of Ryu's tremendous competency (and ability to attract Kaori without trying). The ability to have more than one feeling at a time is the mark of a complex character, and the ability to have several contradictory layers is the mark of a complex relationship. Gai and Ryu I think have the relationship that defines Jetman, two guys who don't like each other coming to terms with that.
(Who knows, maybe it was also a metaphor for Inoue and Suzuki coming to terms on what the show would be like, too.)
You know what Odagiri thinks to herself about Gai after he's turned them down again and again to be on the team? "Perhaps he's the only one of them with sense."
That sounds like an ironic, resigned sort of line to me. You know, like, "God, maybe
that asshole's the one I'll have to rely on." Maybe it comes off differently in context? But to me it pretty much reads like something TV Odagiri would say in the right circumstances.
Now, I do think it's kind of weird to make Odagiri openly cognizant of Ryu's main weakness from the story's beginning. In the show, Ryu is her go-to guy, and I recall only a few hints that she might know he's in far worse shape than he's letting on. Only Gai is willing to plainly state Ryu's damage, and Gai is by far the character who suffers the most over Ryu's late-series failures.
Why would a fanservice novel strip the show's most popular character of one of his triumphs? It's impossible to say, really. Maybe the third novel does something with it, or maybe Inoue just wanted to troll everyone who thought novel Gai might be a basically decent person like TV Gai.
