Den-O Story Questions [SPOILERS, obviously]

Glamador

Member
So Glamador just finished watching Den-O and Climax Deka and while it was actually a lot more enjoyable that this forum has led me to believe, I do still have some questions. Specifically about the ending.

To break down what Glam DOES understand:

Sakurai-san, in collusion with Airi, decide to use a Zeronos card to erase the memory of Hana-chan's existence from Ryoutaro's mind so that when his ability to remember as a singular point recreates the world it will be one in which Hana does not exist.

The young adult Hana that we have known for most of the series was the Hana from the future in which this did NOT happen, now displaced in time. As time marches ever closer to the point at which the histories diverge, she grows younger. I assume this is because as she draws closer to the point where time "catches up" with hers, she will be the appropriate age.*

Memories erased with the Zeronos cards are shown to be unrecoverable, but at the end just before Sakurai-san disappears completely, Airi is shown to recognize him and references events which she has forgotten.**

Sakurai has been acting as a decoy both as his younger and older self to distract Kai from discovering Hana's importance. But by doing so he erases himself from time using the Zeronos cards...which prevents Hana's very existence from ever coming about.***

By defeating Kai at the time when the junction point connects with the present...he's defeated forever and Hana's memories reconstitute her timeline.****


Okay, that's what I GET. Now for the questions:

* - If the timeline is restored, then why doesn't she become a baby at the end of the series?

** - If Sakurai-san has exhausted all of his memories and disappeared, why can Airi recognize him and why is this not enough to sustain his existence? And furthermore, Ryoutaro is still very much aware of his existence from before he erased his memory of Hana. So again, why is he gone?

*** - Why does Hana not also disappear, given that she was never born in the persisting version of history? Is the assumption that Yuuto will eventually become his older self, since he is sustained by the memories of Zeronos and conceive Hana with Airi? If so then why does he not just slip right into the space left by the now-disappeared Sakurai...basically making it so his older self never left?

**** - If Ryoutaro never regained his memories of Hana's conception then why can her memories restore her time and connect the junction point to that timeline? As far as time is concerned, nothing has changed. Hana is still displaced in time and was never born. So why would her memories affect anything now when they had not for the entire series up to that point?


Time travel plots are confusing and very hard to write consistently. I pride myself on being able to keep up pretty well with complex stories like this, but I can't tell if I'm missing something here or the plot is full of holes. So I thought it best to ask if Glam is in error before passing judgement on the series.
 
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Hana is a singularity point like Ryotaro, so changes in timeline shouldn't affect her existence. Of course, they eventually throw that away due to her actress leaving.



If recall correctly, the excuse for her age changing was that the point where history reconnected to her future was later now (which means she'd be born further in the future than she was originally, effectively making her younger). It's still just an excuse due to real world problems though, considering how her nature as a singularity point should stop timeline divergences from changing her. That's the only reason she still existed after her future was initially erased in the first place.

** - If Sakurai-san has exhausted all of his memories and disappeared, why can Airi recognize him and why is this not enough to sustain his existence?
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Maybe she remembered him from the past, not the present, which is why his present self disappeared? The rules for memories keeping one's existence are rather irregular, like how Ryotaro's own memories of other people sometimes are enough to keep them around (see the Imagins), but other times seem to be utterly useless (See Sakurai, both past and present versions).
 
NeonZ said:
If recall correctly, the excuse for her age changing was that the point where history reconnected to her future was later now (which means she'd be born further in the future than she was originally, effectively making her younger).
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It wasn't that history reconnected at a later date but due to older Sakurai fading, younger Sakurai had to effectively start over the relationship with Airi. As a result the date in which the two *ahem* consummated their engagement was pushed back and resulted in Hana's birth coming later than it originally did.

The swap with Hana isn't actually breaking any of the established rules for how Singularity Points work in the show. They only say that a Singularity Point cannot be completely erased from history so the show can get away with saying changes in the timeline can alter them so long as they still exist.


Maybe she remembered him from the past, not the present, which is why his present self disappeared?
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While bringing in the movies makes the subject a lot murkier in some regards, given her post-series behavior when she shows up and has no indication that she remembers him at all, I think the point of that scene was to call upon an old Time Travel Plot idea. That being if even the memory fades, some instinctive part of her will remember that he was a part of her life and she only remembered his name in that last moment as a final surge of remembrance before it faded away like a candle flaring before it goes out.


The difference in those cases is purely because of the Zeronos System. It effectively makes you an artificial Singularity Point for as long as you're using it but the price of becoming that means that, if you use it for TOO long your erasure from the timeline is so absolute not even the memories of a true Singularity Point can save you.

... Man, talking about it this way makes Den-O sound way darker than it actually is.
 

Okay, this was the crucial point of misunderstanding. That clarifies a lot about Sakurai's disappearance and Hana's new existence. Sakurai being Hana's father also explains a lot about her super-strength (He's fairly strong, ya know...He keeps telling us).

But even so, what catalyzed Kai's defeat? If the idea is that Hana's time is not erased because Yuuto's continuing existence thanks to Zeronos assures (from the timeline's perspective) her birth, then again, why doesn't everything just pop into place automatically?

I suppose it's thanks to Kai being a singular point COMBINED with his strange ability to fly through time via memories. If Kai couldn't time travel, then Hana's continuing existence would just displace him in time and leave him to wander, impotent.

But what made Kai a threat in the first place? They never actually *killed* him. He just faded away after they defeated him at the end of the series. Why couldn't he just keep on attacking? Is it because that particular point in time was the point where the future connected to the past and any efforts past then wouldn't have affected the necessary change? That's the explanation as far as I can figure.

But if that's how the story goes...and Hana's existence is what really matters...but killing her while she is displaced in time will only destroy her from the perspective of the original unaltered timeline and not the present...then the real objective should have been to kill Yuuto and/or Airi before she gave birth. So why did Kai do that giant laser? It had already been shown to be powerless to change anything as long as Ryoutaro is around. He should have been going after Zeronos and Airi to kill them before they conceived Hana.

BUT, Ryoutaro fixed the time around when Kai did his lazor the first time. So if Ryoutaro enough to sustain time all on his own, then isn't Hana just kind of a backup? Shouldn't he have to kill ALL of the singular points that can remember the world as it is? The acting Zeronos, Ryoutaro, AND Hana?

And if that's the case then why in the hell did they think it was a good idea to put 2/3 of their most important assets in direct danger of dying in combat with the enemy!?
 
It's been over two years since I watched Den-O, so this is purely based upon my own, possibly faulty, memories. But IIRC they stated that there were two possible futures: the one Hana comes from, and another one in which the world ends and humanity is destroyed. The show implied that Hana's future was the one that was originally going to happen, but some sort of massive change happened due to time travel, and as a result the Imagin from a possible, alternate future appear and cause mayhem, resulting in their possible future becoming the main one and Hana's future being rendered almost impossible (Hana's own memories being the only "link" stopping it from being lost forever). However, the two Riders start travelling through time, defeating the Imagin before they can destroy their targets and therefore "undoing" the damage that caused the original change. In the final few episodes the destroyed tracks that would lead to Hana's future start to unfurl and re-connect with the present. In other words, the actions of the Riders are getting closer to restoring the original timeline. When we get to the finale, they've finally undone enough damage that the original timeline is restored (hence they win).

As it seems to be a case of one future or the other, this therefore means that the Imagin's timeline would be destroyed (something that the "Taros" feel conflicted about towards the end of the series as they have no idea if destroying the future they come from will kill them). Kai seems to come from this alternate future, which is why he disappears along with all the evil Imagin. The "Taros" Imagin, including Seig, survive due to the DenLiner crew's memories of them, but presumably their entire existance before they met has now been destroyed, meaning their arrival in the present was effectively their births. Kai was only ever acting to ensure his own future happened. I don't think they ever explained in the show what caused the original timeline change (though I always wondered if it was due to some terrible mistake by Sakurai when he discovered time travel existed).
FlashNeko said:
... Man, talking about it this way makes Den-O sound way darker than it actually is.
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There's a lot of things in Den-O that were never spelled out in the show but are actually quite dark if you think them through. At the end of the series Momo and co have no memories of their former lives, their friends and family, or even their own real names, and they will NEVER find out as it was all destroyed along with the future they originally came from.

Look at how the Imagin are formed. They arrive in the present in a non-corporial state and only gain the form we see after bonding with a host. According to Urutaros their memories are wiped when they arrive in the present (it could be a lie, but Momotaros says in one of the first episodes that he can't remember his former life so it seems reasonable to assume this could be true). Ryutaros stated that when he arrived he heard a mysterious voice (Kai) giving him his orders to 'infiltrate' the DenLiner (and an evil Imagin initially asks Momotaros if he has forgotten his orders). So let's think that through. They suddenly find themselves in a place they don't recognise, with no idea who they are or what's happened to them, and nobody can see or hear them. Disorientated and presumably rather panicked, they hear a disembodied voice telling them what to do to save themselves, and by acting on these instructions they get turned into monsters and promptly killed by a Rider. Does nobody else think that sounds a little like they are victims, becoming unwitting pawns in somebody else's game?

IIRC they never say how the world ends in the future they come from. They don't say it's because monsters destroyed everything. It could have been a virus, or an asteroid, or anything. They don't even say there were monsters in the future. So it's possible (though probably not what the writers intended) that all along the Riders have been killing humans that were trying to escape the end of the world by fleeing back in time :sly:
 
NeonZ said:
Hana is a singularity point like Ryotaro, so changes in timeline shouldn't affect her existence. Of course, they eventually throw that away due to her actress leaving.
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To be honest I like the younger actress better. She's warmer towards the supporting cast (despite punching them a lot) and puts a bit more affectation on her sympathetic discussions with Ryoutaro regarding his lost memories and the Taros. I'd like to see some of her work as she gets older....though it has been 6 years now, she might have done some interesting work in the meantime. How old do you think she was in 2007? 10-12?


Yeah, it's definitely a binary choice. The show favors the "self-correcting history" version of time travel it feels like. But my questions and concerns are over the actual mechanics of them 'fixing' it, Sakurai's disappearance, and Hana's necessity.

They repeatedly state that Hana (and by extension her birthmother) is the "key" to the junction point. If it was just a matter of killing enough Imagin then they wouldn't need to worry about Airi or Hana (aside from the obvious 'we don't want them to die').
 

She was 8 during filming, and is now 14. She's done some stuff since then, but not a whole lot. I'd expect more as she gets older.
 
She wasn't bad, though I think that the character's warming to the Taros was already happening before the actress change. Original Hana cried when she thought Urutaros, Kintaros and Ryutaros had been killed after the events of the first film.
In the show, time can't be destroyed as long as someone remembers it. But it seems that the greater the damage, the larger the number of people that need to remember it for it to be completely restored. The future Hana comes from had somehow been completely erased from the memories of everyone alive in the present (including Ryotaro, who as a singularity point should be immune to this kind of thing). Normally this should mean that it's gone forever, and it initially seems so, as the DenLiner can't access that timeline and it's been replaced by the other future that the Imagin come from.

Hana is the anchor stopping that future from being completely lost. The actress change doesn't de-age her mind. She's mentally still a 19 year old. As a singularity point, her memories can't be erased. So as long as she's around and remembers her own childhood, that future is hanging on by a single thread. Plus she's on the DenLiner which means she spends most of her life outside of normal time and is therefore kept relatively safe.

By "undoing" the Imagin attacks the Riders are re-establishing more of those threads, gradually pulling that future back from the brink of destruction. But all those regular folks aren't singularity points. If the Riders were killed, Kai could just send more Imagin to destroy those threads again. Hana's is the only memory that can't be changed, so the only way to ensure the total deletion of that future is to kill her.

As for her mum, well, Airi really only has personal importance. Even if she died, that still won't delete Hana due to her singularity point status. The future they're trying to save isn't actually dependant on Airi or Hana existing in it. It just requires a singularity point (any singularity point) to remember it and Hana happens to be the only one who escaped its' destruction. Kai only targets Airi because she's personally important to Ryotaro, Yuuto and Hana, and therefore useful for flushing them out.


Or, that's my take on it anyway. Time travel shows like this tend to be a shattered mess of plot points. Sorting them out tends to be like trying to reconstruct a document that's already been through a paper shredder :sweat:
 
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No, Kai definitely thought Airi was the key to the junction point and went to lengths to get Yuuto and Ryoutaro out of the way to get at her.

Theoretically, even if he kills Airi in the present, Hana's memory will reconstitute her ensuring Hana's own continued existence. That's just part of her nature as a singular point. If they killed Hana and THEN killed Airi the plan could work. But that doesn't explain why killing Ryoutaro wasn't a priority since his memory alone had already reconstructed a destroyed time.

And when you think about it, the Singular Point's memory doesn't have to be perfect, he just has to remember enough to bring back some of the people, and then their memories will bring back the rest. It has to work that way since Ryoutaro doesn't personally know every person on the planet.
 
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