Watch Analysis

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Kamen Rider My-Th 04 – The Transformation Is Part of a Much Bigger Mystery

Kamen Rider My-Th 04 was interesting. I enjoyed it, especially because the mysteries surrounding Sora and Yuna are starting to feel increasingly connected.

The episode gives us a fun Fukashigi mystery on its own, but I’m much more interested in what we’re learning about Sora and Yuna’s past, their families, and the mechanics behind My-Th himself. These don’t seem like separate pieces of lore anymore. The emotional story of these characters is directly connected to the mechanical, heroic side of the show, and that’s making both sides more interesting.

One Monster in Two Places

I really liked the mystery surrounding the Eye Fukashigi.

Sora is trying to figure out how something they already destroyed could inexplicably come back, and the answer is built into the monster’s design. One half has a left eye and the other has a right eye. They’re essentially two parts of a single Fukashigi, capable of maintaining their existence across a distance.

That’s a fun concept on its own, but I also liked how the episode built the solution into Shiori’s story. Her father is an electrical worker, and what initially seems like a little personal story about Shiori getting a lamp for his birthday ultimately feeds back into solving the case.

That’s good dramatic construction. The character material isn’t simply sitting alongside the monster mystery. The episode uses one to develop the other.

We also learn something important about Fukashigi biology. Destroying the body apparently isn’t necessarily enough. If the heart survives, the Fukashigi itself can survive.

That’s interesting lore, but I’m much more intrigued by what the episode reveals about Sora and Yuna.

What Really Happened to Sora and Yuna?

Last episode, I noticed the significance of Yuna’s childhood promise to her parents. She was supposed to practice until she became good enough to play with her father.

I still think making your kid earn the privilege of playing music with you sounds a little mean, but I think it’s supposed to be sweet. He’s encouraging her to pursue excellence, with the promise that they’ll eventually play together.

What I love is that the direction last episode was subtle enough for me to clock that detail before I knew how important it was going to become.

Now it comes back.

We see Yuna fall asleep with that reminder of her childhood nearby, and we get these deliberately incomplete flashes of what happened to their families in the past.

Something attacked them. Yuna’s parents died. Sora’s father appears to have been involved. And the episode is clearly concealing enough of the event that I don’t think we’re supposed to understand exactly what happened yet.

The strange part is what appears to happen with Sora.

It almost looks like Sora was able to transform into My-Th as a child.

There’s also that odd POV shot from whatever attacked them. The claws looked very catlike to me, enough that I wondered whether Mao could somehow have been involved, although there’s nowhere near enough information yet to say that confidently.

Then there’s the older man arriving afterward and telling Sora that he did a good job. Combined with Sora apparently holding the transformation belt, that certainly makes it look to me as though young Sora transformed and fought whatever attacked them.

But if that’s true, it creates an even bigger question.

How was Sora able to become My-Th back then?

Why Does My-Th Need Yuna?

This episode emphasizes something I’ve been increasingly curious about: Sora can’t simply become My-Th on his own.

Yuna has to participate.

That becomes especially funny at the end of the episode when Yuna falls asleep in My-Th’s arms while he’s still transformed in Wolf Frame. Sora can’t just turn himself back. He’s basically telling her to wake up because he needs her to let him out of the transformation.

She authorizes him to transform, and apparently she has to authorize him to de-transform as well.

That’s a funny gag, but mechanically it’s fascinating.

During the flashback, there’s also a strange purple haze that appears around the time Yuna’s parents die. That made me wonder whether Yuna’s mother might somehow have possessed the same ability Yuna has now.

Could she have been partnered with Sora’s father? Could Sora’s father have been My-Th before him? And when Yuna’s mother died, could whatever allowed that partnership to function somehow have passed to Yuna?

That’s a lot of speculation. I don’t know.

But I do think there’s an intrinsic link here.

The Family Mystery and the My-Th Mystery May Be the Same Thing

The Mizuki family is already connected to the organization dealing with the Fukashigi. That makes me wonder how far back this relationship actually goes.

What was their connection to the original My-Th from 100 years ago?

Maybe the original My-Th worked with the Mizuki family. Maybe he helped found the organization. Maybe he was related to them. Maybe he was part of the family himself.

Again, I don’t know.

But the more we learn about how Sora and Yuna have to cooperate to become My-Th, the more I suspect the answers about My-Th’s transformation aren’t going to be found solely in the belt or whatever other transformation mechanics the show establishes.

They’re going to be found in these families.

That’s what I’m enjoying so much about the mystery right now. I want to know more about Yuna’s parents. I want to know what happened when they died. I want to know how Sora became My-Th, whether his father was My-Th before him, and how the transformation worked when Sora was a child.

And all of those questions are connected.

The emotional story is advancing the mechanical story at the same time.

The show isn’t stopping its superhero story so we can spend time dealing with relationships, family history, grief, or childhood trauma. All of that personal material matters to and impacts the heroic stuff, the toku stuff.

That makes the emotional story more potent because none of it feels like wasted time. Learning about these people also means learning how this superhero mythology works.

Wolf Frame Has Elbow Blades, So Use Them

There was one thing in Kamen Rider My-Th 04 that I absolutely did not appreciate.

Wolf Frame has elbow blades.

This is good.

Wolf Frame also gives My-Th purple eyes. Wolves and purple are a good combination for me. I’m on board.

But then My-Th barely uses those beautiful elbow blades before pulling out his sword.

No.

If you’ve got elbow blades, you’ve got to use the elbow blades. You can’t use non-elbow blades.

I understand that swinging a sword gives you considerably more freedom of movement than trying to slash somebody with a blade attached to your elbow. I don’t care. I think it should be illegal for Wolf Frame to use the sword.

This is the same problem I had with Kamen Rider OOO. Whenever OOO was in TaToBa Combo and used his sword instead of his Tora Claws, it drove me nuts.

It’s wrong.

It shouldn’t be done.

It’s perverse.

I’m also not entirely sure why Wolf Frame has elbow blades in the first place. Maybe they’re effectively supposed to represent fangs, because Wolf Frame’s actual mouth is initially locked.

Then the full moon appears and unlocks the muzzle, allowing My-Th to bite.

And I didn’t like that either.

Having a combat ability dependent on an environmental condition seems incredibly impractical. What if you’re fighting during the day? What if it’s nighttime but the moon isn’t visible? What if there are clouds?

I was sitting there thinking about how stupid this was…

…and then I remembered Kamen Rider Kiva.

Every time Kiva did his Rider Kick, it became night. The full moon appeared. Kiva flew dramatically in front of it and then descended for his kick.

And I forgive that because it’s Kiva, and Kiva is perfect.

So apparently my objection isn’t particularly consistent.

My-Th’s Biggest Mystery Keeps Getting Better

What excites me most about Kamen Rider My-Th 04 isn’t any single answer we received. It’s how many of the show’s questions are beginning to converge.

Sora and Yuna’s childhoods, the deaths of their parents, Sora’s father, the original My-Th, the Mizuki family’s history, and the strange requirement that Sora and Yuna cooperate to transform all appear to be moving toward the same larger mystery.

I don’t know exactly how these pieces fit together yet.

But I increasingly believe they do.

And if My-Th continues making its emotional character story inseparable from the mechanics and mythology of being Kamen Rider My-Th, I’m very interested in seeing what happened to these families and why Sora and Yuna need each other to transform.

Dive Deeper

Why Does This School Have an Official Fukashigi Investigation Club?

What in the world is going on in the world of Kamen Rider My-Th that there’s a school with an official school club for investigating the Fukashigi? How is that possible? How deeply infiltrated into the world are these things? How much does everybody know about them? And how is that normal?

Isn’t that such a bizarre detail? You actually have an official school club for this sort of thing. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I find it so bizarre, and I think it’s weird. I don’t understand it at all, and I think it’s kind of a dumb move unless there’s a really good explanation for it.

Honestly, I think it needs to be addressed pretty soon, because it’s just preposterous that you would have these literally inexplicable things happening, and then there’s a school club that allows kids to investigate them somehow. What is the scope of these investigations?

And how is Asao, who doesn’t work for the school, able to get the position of being the official liaison, advisor, or whatever his position actually is? I don’t know exactly how these clubs work, but I would think it would need to be pretty darn official, and I would say he’s anything but official.

It’s very strange. It doesn’t make sense on multiple levels based on what we know about the world right now. Maybe we’ll get some explanation that makes it all work, but I’m a little dubious about that. At minimum, it is definitely a weird detail.

Why Is Mao Giving Asao a Score?

When Mao receives Asao’s report, he thanks him for it and then proceeds to rank or judge him based on his performance, which I found really interesting. He gives him 40 points, I think because he didn’t destroy the Fukashigi.

But what does 40 points mean? Is that out of 100? Is it out of more than that? Less than that? Is there any practical consequence to Mao ranking Asao like this?

Can Asao earn privileges as a Zodiac Alliance member? Are the belts distributed based on the amount of points you have? If you have enough points and therefore a high enough rank, are you allowed to hold onto your belt all the time? We know they’re limited, although I don’t even know how many belts there are right now. But that would be an interesting wrinkle.

And if this isn’t an official part of the organization or the way the Zodiac Alliance does things, then it’s just an interesting character detail that Mao is somebody who openly judges people like that.

We don’t know enough to say either way yet. I just flagged it because it seemed really weird to me that Mao ranked him at all. I’m wondering exactly what it means, and we’ll have to wait to find out.

Why Does the Wolf Frame Have a Muzzle?

I find a couple of things strange about the Wolf Frame, but right now I want to focus on the fact that it has a muzzle that apparently is broken off or manipulated by the presence of the full moon. Or maybe it’s any amount of moonlight. I’m not exactly sure yet.

But it seems strange to me that somebody using this power would purposely put that into the suit or the power set. If they did, there must be a reason for it.

But maybe the real reason that design constraint is there is because the humans interacting with these things and utilizing them aren’t the only ones involved. Maybe they’re not the only ones with power, and they’re not the only ones who have a say in how these things work. Maybe they actually have less say and less power than you would think.

It’s possible that these power sets are tapped into or derived from some other source, and that third party, that outside source, puts constraints on the powers as it wills.

Again, we don’t have enough context yet to know what’s going on. But I think that’s a really interesting possibility.