Lynxara
Nice post!!
I dunno, I really doubt Gaim will end up being a series that can support this kind of scene. It's looking pretty likely that the villains will use the same powers as the heroes, so they'll probably already be aware that you can murder the hell out of everything with the right Lock Seed. Anybody laughing at the heroes' appearance would have to be a passerby or maybe a little kid. And that's honestly straying a bit into Akibaranger territory.
One of the things I find kind of admirable about Gaim so far is that despite being saddled with maybe the dorkiest of all Rider gimmicks, the staff are playing it completely straight and sticking to telling the story. They're shooting the giant oranges and gaudy pineapple flail the same way they'd shoot a more conventional design. It makes the whole thing more tolerable, though I can't say I like it. The fruit motif forces a lot of bad things on the Gaim designs, totally unrelated to whether they're silly or not.
Eh. It seems very presumptuous to me to say that just because all superheroes are at least a little bit ridiculous, they're all equally ridiculous. No, most of the Gaim Riders are just a lot stupider-looking than Spider-Man or Batman, whose costumes tend to be designed by all-time comic book greats.
The Gaim suits were clearly designed by some dude at PLEX, probably with their original bird-based designs sitting at their left, and some whiskey and a revolver containing a single bullet on the right. Hand shaking, the artist attempts to figure out how an unfolded orange can be turned into armor...
I mean plotwise, yeah, Gaim is really no worse than the vast majority of superhero stuff, period. Actually, it's much better than probably 60% of the drek in the genre. But that doesn't change the fact that a hero's costume is effectively his face, and most of the Gaim Riders have faces only a fanboy could love.
It's unfortunate, and I can see why older-school fans drawn to a more sleek, subdued aesthetic might find Gaim's gaudy piles of plastic not to their liking. So, hey, take a break for a year, go watch other shows where the design sense isn't dictated by Bandai's focus groups.
Come back when Rider happens to be doing something you like. You'll be happier that way. Eventually, every franchise you ever loved in your youth will betray you if it's allowed to live long enough. It's not healthy to get too attached to what is, effectively, just corporate IP.
In the original manga, Kamen Rider was a warrior who represented the wrath of nature turning against those who sought to corrupt it for selfish ends. That is why the Shocker monsters are menacing, dangerous animals, which humans find threatening. The hero is a grasshopper because that creature is viewed as a benevolent animal in Japanese culture, one who is a friend to humans and symbol of good luck. There is no other animal whose motif would make more sense for Kamen Rider, given that story's purposes. Kamen Rider is not meant to be threatening or deadly. He is an ally and defender against the true source of evil in the world (which, to Ishinomori, would always be human greed and the military industrial complex).
