Kamen Rider Kuuga: to fight and to be (in)human

One of the first things I had ever heard about Kamen Rider Kuuga was that it was a show which had a lot to say about violence. That always struck me as a very interesting observation to make about any season of Kamen Rider, and it caused me to approach Kuuga a little hesitantly. After all, Kamen Rider, being a tokusatsu action show, makes violence a central aspect of its storytelling, treating it as a given and as the show’s main attraction. Hell, the first Kamen Rider theme song was literally called “Let’s Go! Rider Kick”, referencing the eponymous technique which Takeshi Hongo would use to defeat the minions and monsters of Shocker in gaudy and often literally explosive fashion - a tradition carried forward by each and every one of his successors, to the point that the Rider Kick is arguably as iconic a combat manoeuvre as Son Goku’s Kamehameha.

So when I started watching Kamen Rider Kuuga, knowing only that it had something to say about violence, it was easy for me to expect that promised message to be one about the moral imperative to break the “cycle of violence”. Instead, I got a shockingly grounded and well-realised examination of how our humanity shapes the violence that the best of us would rather not inflict, and how that same violence shapes our humanity in ways that can be difficult to confront.

What is Kamen Rider?

Kamen Rider is a quintessential heroic figure, and with the place such a figure holds in pop culture comes an inevtiable question that arises as he is interpreted and reinterpreted over countless iterations: what is Kamen Rider? Or, rather, what does it mean to be Kamen Rider? While each season of the show of course has its own unique ideas about the nature of the masked karate bugman, I think each season’s answer to this fundamental question can be boiled down to one of three broad genres.

First, we have shows like Blade and Gaim, which believe that to be Kamen Rider is a curse. With great power comes great responsibility, after all, and taking up that responsibility of fighting to protect the world and human life will necessarily come at great cost to you - it will destroy you or change you beyond recognition; it will alienate you from the very same world and people that you sought to protect. And yet, you must fight. You must bear this curse, or else everything you wish to protect will be doomed to ruin.

By contrast, we have shows like Den-O and Fourze, which unreservedly believe that being Kamen Rider is just the coolest shit ever - being a hero is a responsibility, sure, but it’s not as if fighting to protect the world is something you can’t have some fun with, and the process will often give you new friends, amazing adventures and maybe even some deep personal growth. Being Kamen Rider will not only allow you to save the world, it might just help you become a better person.

And finally, sitting somewhere between those two extremes are shows like Ryuki and OOO, which believe that to be Kamen Rider is… well, it’s complicated. Your fight will often be less about protecting the world and more about just trying to do the right thing with the power that you have, but you may not know exactly what the right thing is or what it looks like. You might not even know the right way to do the right thing, and your attempts at figuring that out will often put yourself and others in harm’s way - but you have to try, because to fight and fail is still better than to have never fought in the first place.

When viewed through this lens, I think Kamen Rider Kuuga presents a really interesting thesis on the nature of Kamen Rider as a heroic figure, because while the show’s incredibly grounded tone and setting make it abundantly clear that being Kamen Rider in Japan at the turn of the millennium is, in fact, very complicated, its more pertinent belief is that Kuuga’s repsonsibility to protect the world is a curse which must be borne no matter how it changes whoever dons the armour - but the curse is not having to be Kamen Rider. The curse is simply having to fight at all.

When the roughly 200 members of the ancient Grongi tribe are inadvertently awakened by a university archaeology team in Nagano, Japan, what is awakened with them is their incredible capacity for violence - the entire archaeology team is slaughtered, thus marking the beginning of a string of increasingly brutal and bizarre serial murders. Thus enters Yusuke Godai, a man of 2000 talents and boundless positivity, who dons an artifact discovered from the scene of the Grongi’s resurrection known as the Arcle, a belt which bonds to his body, allowing him to become the ancient warrior Kuuga, who must combat the threat of the Grongi. Combat is, after all, the duty of a warrior.

Kamen Rider Kuuga believes, above all else, that violence is dehumanising. Indeed, the sheer scale and senselessness of the violence enacted by the Grongi can only be described as inhuman. And we’re inclined to buy into the inhumanity of the Grongi right from the beginning; they frequently take on monstrous forms through which they channel their equally monstrous abilities, taking countless innocent lives in service of what is revealed to be a mere game to them, disguising themselves as humans all the while - fundamentally different from us, and yet completely indistinguishable. Intial attempts at self-defense by the police prove ineffective, and for most of the show, the Grongi can only be defeated, and thus stopped, by Godai as Kuuga. In order to put an end to the abhorrent violence of the Grongi, he must use that violence against them, and much like how the Arcle changes Godai physiologically, it also changes him in much less tangible ways - the carefree spirit of a man who wishes simply to make people smile instead becomes one burdened by his newfound responsibility to fight in order to protect those very smiles he tries to foster.

And yet, as Godai’s fight as Kuuga changes him, both in body and in spirit, we soon learn that these changes are not some alien phenomenon. One of the most central aspects of Kamen Rider as a narrative format is that the source of the hero’s power is born of the evil that hero stands against. Kuuga of course adheres to this central aspect of the Kamen Rider mythos, but in a way that raises questions about the role violence plays in the human condition, reaching a fever pitch in the show’s 35th episode, “Emotion”.