The main reason I dislike it is that it feels more like a soap opera than a Kamen Rider. I couldn't care less about the characters constantly "falling in love" with each other and causing ridiculous drama. In particular, all the women seem to exist to fall for men and suffer as a result. I've heard people passionately defend this and say "but they tame the guys!" or "but they're strong! they grow and become more powerful through their experiences!" This is, in my opinion, complete bullshit; the writing should not have put them through it in the fist place.
I could see this argument made for Mio and Maya, but Megumi wasn't really focusing on romance, they just had that tension there. I do agree that in
general if she were male, her story would have been drastically different as I said above, but I don't think the romance aspect (save that stupid arc with her brother coming down and saying she should start a family) was a real issue with her to the same extent it was with Maya and Mio, who were basically there to be Wataru and Taiga's mom or their love interest. She just got the **** end of the stick for apparently just being a woman, which I'd almost say feels worse than it being for romance, but I dunno.
Yuri was... well, for one thing, someone from the 80s, so things were different for one thing, but I think she was kind of stuck because she was doomed to go nowhere from the beginning. She had to end up as a mom at some point which, I guess, "meant" they "had" to do something like that with her, and she also couldn't actually kill Rook because Megumi was going to do it later on. I'll be honest, I actually liked Otoya and Yuri's romance and the triangle with Jirou - it didn't seem as heavy handed as Jetman's triangle was (which didn't bother me too terribly in the long run either), and I liked all three characters involved (and the dynamics between each pair individually, including Otoya and Jirou, also added a lot to it). I do think they really screwed it up by having them get together and doing the Maya thing though. If the two of them couldn't end up together for whatever reasons, fine, cool, but I'm sure there was a better way to go about it. I think the real problem was really how we have these supposedly competent women here, yet they only transform once and really don't do much else - I don't think the romance subplot would be that much of a problem if the two of them had gotten IXA more. Why the heck wasn't there a second one by the modern day storyline?
Also, I wouldn't really call Kiva "constantly"
anything though - I think that was part of its problem. It definitely wasn't constant romance - Mio didn't show up for a long time and she kept coming and going for a little while too (like I mentioned, the show's idea of "foreshadowing" was often to introduce something one episode then ignore it for another one or two then come back to it). But seriously - first it was just about Wataru getting confidence, then he got it, then oh wait no he doesn't have it anymore, now he's got it, now it's about a love triangle, now he's not confident anymore, now he's Lelouch, now he's back to normal, wait meanwhile in the past this is happening, Otoya's in love with Yuri, Otoya's possessed by Maya, no wait we're dropping that he's actually in love with her, now Shima's a Fangire, now he's dead, no wait changed our mind he's alive and back to normal, etc. etc. etc. It was really inconsistent and it just feels like a lot of ideas were changed and rewritten as the show went on. That or the plan they had really sucked.
Nago is the most arrogant, smug, unlikeable jerk I have ever seen in a tokusatsu series. He makes Tendou look modest and his bizarre faux-Christianity is actually offensive (then of course Megumi, who had potential, has to marry him like she couldn't have done a million times better.) Otoya is only a shade better and is a sexist asshole to boot. Then we have Mio, who people again defend; I recently read something comparing her to Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones, as someone who has to play the system and fight from within. Well, when Sansa tries to force her boyfriend to kill his own brother, then tries to do it herself, and laughs in his mother's face about it, get back to me. The only characters that don't make me want to put my fist through my screen are Ramon and Wataru; I don't particularly like Wataru, but he's OK.
Have you watched Kiva recently? Because while Nago is definitely like that for a lot of the first half (and they don't even do a good job explaining why), he gets toned down a
lot and is significantly more likeable by the end, I found - in part because Kengo and Taiga shared that role for a while. Whether that's enough to make him the most likeable person in the world will probably vary from person to person, but he's undeniably more humble than the ass he was early on - that guy would not have even considered taking Megumi's help when his sight went after his fight with Bishop, he would have had a temper tantrum, gone to beat up some criminals, and gotten arrested for getting in a fight with a sign post.
As for the Christianity, you have to remember what the motif of the show is there - initially he was playing the role of the holy vampire hunter and all that, and I have to give Kiva respect for at least trying to really go with all of that, even if the execution wasn't perfect. If you compare how he was acting to the stereotypical holy dogooder from a story like that, it's not
that much of a stretch, I think - and it's not like Japanese media doing something off with Christianity is something particularly new either, to be fair. I think two really,
really important things to consider about Kiva is that even though this is definitely an Inoue show through and through, I really felt like they were going for the whole gothic fiction routine on top of it, which I don't think is something a lot of people consider when looking at Kiva.
Personally though, I really did like most of the characters. Maya felt like a vampire queen enough that I could forgive her being a plot device, and Mio was fine in the early part before things got stupid.
I don't know which part of this is canon or not, but I think there is an explanation for that (canon but maybe with a little fanon). In the Kiva official book, they explain that long before the series start, the Fangire launch an invasion toward the other Demon Races to become the ruler of the demon, and the king of the Fangire use the Saga armor for the invasion. So it can be said that Saga and Sagark is an armor made by the Fangire for their king, just like how in Decade the Kiva armor is the armor for king, and it was also said that the language that Sagark speak is the long-forgotten Fangire language. The Fangire defeat most of the other races and they make a contract with the Kivat to make an armor for them, which is what the first Kiva is. The Fangire king then use the Kiva armor to fight the Legendorga, this result with the Legendorga being sealed and the king maybe dead (some says he died because he use the third fuestle which is pretty much a suicide attack). After Kivat leave the Fangire at 1986, the current king, Taiga, is forced to use the old Saga armor. As for Tatsulot, I don't know, maybe he was created to be a limiter to Kiva power or something.
Hey, that's pretty neat. Seems like there was more missed potential for stuff in the show than I thought then.
On that note, bit of a random complaint to add to the pile, but did they ever say why there wasn't a Knight? I was waiting the whole show for a Knight Fangire once they started doing chess pieces but got nothing. :redface2:
