Lynxara
Nice post!!
I think you're confusing "like" with "not hate." Glancing at it and going, "That's cool" is a whole different bag than looking at the thing every week for a year, or buying a toy of it, or buying all the toys of it. That's the test that Kamen Rider design work has to pass-- will you like it just as much or more after a year? Two years? Five years?
And for the show's purposes: will the design make for a cool suit, or one that begins rapidly falling apart as the weeks pass, because the kibble just can't withstand the pressures of shooting? Will there be stuff worked into the suit design that looked okay on 2D, but looks like hot garbage in front of the camera because the materials to realize the artist's concept just don't exist yet? Does it unreasonably restrict the suit actor's movements? Will it be so heavy or unbalanced it has to be quickly removed in favor of something easier to do stunts in?
I think the fruit thing is fatuous Bandai focus group nonsense, but the fruit isn't why there's some real stinkers in the designs. It's that since Bandai dictated the motif, the design work put toy gimmicks first and the actual suits second. And this leads to stuff like Pineapple Arms in all its awful glory, but especially its super-laughable dangling shoulder armor. I'd be willing to start a betting pool on how many more times they let the Pineapple Arms suit in front of the camera. It's just so, so bad, from the poorly-balanced helmet topper to the poor texturing of the pineapple armor pieces.
And not because it's a pineapple, who the **** cares, but because it's obvious no thought went into how to make the design's shapes work as a real suit with a real Seiji Takaiwa moving around in it. So even though Toei employs some of the best suit builders in the work, you give them this design and they can't do jack with it on their budget. Even though it's the second suit you see in the show.
And what are these suits going to look like after half a year, or a year? The bright colors will make it really hard to cover up wear and tear on the suits, and the number of spares will probably be limited given the huge glut of Riders. Gaim is probably pretty okay since he's the mascot, and not coincidentally, Orange Arms is probably the best single design we've seen so far from this line.
But remember the huge nasty glue seams that showed through so easily on Decade toward the end of his TV run? Are you ready for a repeat of that, times... every Rider in the show who's not Gaim? Maybe the show will be a huge hit and they'll have budget to replace things rapidly, or they'll figure out ways to cover it up. Or maybe not, and the show's finale will feature the Gaim equivalent of the ratty hot glue Mages.
This is true of a novel, or a book where the pictures are mere decoration. But to say this of any visual medium? Nonsense. In a visual medium, the visuals should be telling just as much, if not more, of the story than the words the actors are saying. Any visual element that does not reinforce and progress the narrative, or that harms or hinders the narrative, is simply bad storytelling. And when I say a design is bad, that is what I mean: that I don't think it tells the story, that it actually does harm to the idea it's supposed to represent.
Now, I can't say that's the case with all of the Gaim designs yet, it's just too early and the design mix is too uneven. But I did notice that I felt utterly indifferent to episode 2's action scene because the Pineapple Arms suit is just not fun to look at. And while I love Kaito's character, I've got serious qualms about what the Baron suit's gonna end up looking like in front of the camera. Will I really be able to care about what Kaito does in battle if he does it wearing that suit? I honestly don't know. If I can't, and it really is just the suit, then that suit is a bad design that's hurting the story in my view. And I don't see how blaming the suit is inappropriate or wrong. Is it also wrong to blame anything on bad direction, bad stunt coordination, a bad call by the FX team? I just don't think so.
There's no "probably" to it. Gaim producer Naomi Takebe explicitly stated that this is the case in a Hyper Hobby interview. It is simply a matter of fact that Gaim wasn't planned to be about fruit. It was planned to be about samurai, maybe with bird or bug motifs to differentiate the designs. By the time Urobuchi was on board, fruit was locked in place, so he was able to build the narrative around it. And, as far as that goes, I think his work is commendable. A lot of lesser writers simply could not have pulled it off. But the fact remains that in Gaim, Urobuchi is straining to accommodate Bandai when it comes to the fruit stuff. He didn't come to Rider with some grand high concept that required fruit-themed powers for the characters.
