Kamen Rider My-Th 05

Watch Analysis

The video and audio above contain the full unfiltered analysis. What follows is the razor focused version of the strongest point(s) I had to make.

Kamen Rider My-Th 05 Shows How Confident This Storytelling Has Become

Kamen Rider My-Th 05 really surprised me because I did not expect Yuna’s dependence on the Seed Eggz to be explored this seriously, this deeply, this early.

Because of my familiarity with Kamen Rider, I immediately thought about Koyomi in Kamen Rider Wizard and her dependence on Haruto’s mana. Yuna has something similar going on, except she isn’t getting what she needs directly from Sora.

And she’s definitely not doing it in an awkward way. Wizard, you know what you did.

What I really like, though, is how naturally My-Th has revealed all of this.

Yuna’s Seed Eggz Dependency Was Hiding in Plain Sight

Back in the first episode, we saw a Seed Egg cracked into Yuna’s food. At the time, it seemed weird enough that I noticed it, but it could have simply been a strange quirk.

Someone commenting on one of my reviews pointed out that there was probably more going on, and I realized they were right. She must be dependent on these things somehow.

Now we’re seeing the consequences.

Yuna looks tired at school. Later, she says she doesn’t feel well. Her condition gradually worsens.

There isn’t a giant exposition dump explaining exactly what she is and precisely why she needs the Seed Eggz. We’re simply watching the consequences of her not having them.

That first-episode food scene wasn’t just a weird little detail. It mattered.

And I love that it was played naturally enough that it could have been nothing.

That suggests a real confidence in the storytelling. The show doesn’t have to point at something and yell, “THIS IS IMPORTANT.” It can put information in front of us, let it exist as part of these characters’ lives, and then reveal its significance later.

Sora and Yuna Are Starting to Feel Like Parent and Kid

There is also a small character beat between Sora and Yuna that I really enjoyed.

Yuna has been working hard fixing up the club room, and Sora basically chides her for overdoing it. He’s genuinely worried about her.

It has this very familiar parent-and-kid energy: Hey, kid, don’t do that. It isn’t good for you. You’re going to get yourself into trouble.

And then the kid does it anyway.

As a parent, that interaction really worked for me.

It also makes what happens afterward feel more grounded. Yuna seems okay for a while, but she has been exerting herself while apparently being deprived of something her body actually needs. Her worsening condition doesn’t arrive like a sudden plot twist. It feels like a consequence.

What I’m not sure about yet is how much Yuna herself understands.

She asks what’s wrong with her, which makes me wonder whether she actually knows how dependent she is on the Seed Eggz.

Maybe she does. Maybe she doesn’t.

I’m hoping we learn more soon.

Vanken Changes How I See the Zodiac Alliance

That same understated approach is making the Zodiac Alliance much more interesting to me.

We already had the revelation that My-Th can apparently destroy a Fukashigi and save the person it consumed. That seems to be unusual enough to catch the Alliance’s attention.

Episode 05 reinforces that by showing us Vanken deal with another Fukashigi attack. He defeats the creature and saves the people he can, but someone is already gone.

There’s this sad little moment where a woman is left holding a shoe, and Vanken has to tell her that the person she lost could not be saved.

Then we have My-Th doing something the Zodiac Alliance apparently could not do before.

That contrast feels important.

But what struck me even more was Vanken himself.

He’s noble. He cares whether these people are okay. He seems sincerely sorry that he couldn’t save the person who was taken.

There’s almost a hard-boiled detective quality to him, although some of that presentation was a little overdone for my taste.

Still, I liked him.

And that changes the Zodiac Alliance for me, because I’m starting to see much more clearly that this isn’t simply a uniform group of antagonistic Riders.

Vanken and Jyao Are Very Different Kinds of Riders

Jyao makes that especially obvious.

He feels completely different from Vanken.

He is sinister, aggressive, and seemingly much more disposed toward killing Sora if that is what accomplishing his goal requires.

Vanken doesn’t give me that impression at all.

Then we get a small moment with Muton cautioning Vanken before he heads off, and once again I find myself paying attention to the relationships inside this organization.

They aren’t interchangeable.

They have different personalities, different priorities, different attitudes toward their mission, and seemingly different ideas about how far they should go.

That makes the Zodiac Alliance much more interesting than it would be if everyone simply represented the same opposing force.

The Zodiac Alliance Is Starting to Look Wrong

And all of this is making me more suspicious of Kamuri.

I keep coming back to the basic Zodiac setup.

According to the familiar Chinese Zodiac legend, the mouse belongs there and the cat doesn’t. The cat is the outsider.

My-Th has inverted that situation.

Here, the cat sits at the top of the Zodiac Alliance while the mouse is outside it.

Initially, I wondered why the series would do that. Why not make the cat the obvious outsider and preserve the traditional relationship?

But I think the inversion is becoming more interesting precisely because it feels wrong.

The mouse should be inside.

The cat should not.

So why is Kamuri leading this organization?

That question makes me automatically suspicious of him.

Why Are There Two Cat Riders?

There’s another detail making that suspicion worse.

Kamuri can become his own red cat Rider, but he was also able to provide Asao with what amounts to another cat-based transformation, allowing him to become a black cat Rider.

So why are there multiple cat powers available at all?

The cat isn’t one of the twelve animals.

Yet the organization not only has a cat at its head, it apparently has enough cat-based power for another Rider.

Maybe there’s a perfectly innocent explanation for all of this.

I just don’t believe that yet.

Kamuri’s behavior isn’t helping either.

Even something as small as the way he praises Vanken feels a little strange to me. He goes from something like “you didn’t do badly” to more openly acknowledging that Vanken did a good job, and there’s something about the performance that makes me feel like I’m supposed to notice it.

Is Kamuri a faker? A manipulator?

I don’t know.

But I’m watching him.

My-Th Keeps Giving Me Reasons to Ask the Next Question

This is what I’m appreciating most about Kamen Rider My-Th right now.

It had a weaker first episode for me. It certainly didn’t grab me immediately in the way Kamen Rider Zeztz did.

But its storytelling feels restrained, subdued, and almost naturalistic.

Questions emerge. We receive part of an answer. That answer creates another question.

Yuna’s strange food turns out to matter.

My-Th’s ability to rescue Fukashigi victims raises questions about what the Zodiac Alliance has actually been capable of doing.

Vanken complicates my perception of that organization.

Jyao complicates it again.

And the more I learn about the Zodiac Alliance, the more peculiar Kamuri’s position at the center of it seems.

The show isn’t rushing.

I don’t know that I would say it feels exactly like Kamen Rider Kuuga, despite the connection through writer Naruhisa Arakawa. But it does feel like a mature, confident story that trusts itself enough to let these things develop.

And five episodes in, that confidence is becoming one of the things I enjoy most about Kamen Rider My-Th.

Dive Deeper

Absolutely. For Pass 2, I’m treating this as subtractive editing: mostly cutting filler, false starts, duplicated phrasing, and places where you were verbally searching for the sentence. I’m not trying to rewrite you into my prose. The goal is your words, as you meant to say them the first time.

Jyao, the Snake of the Zodiac Alliance

The first image is the big entrance of Jyao, the snake Kamen Rider of the Zodiac Alliance. I froze it as he’s walking past some broken glass, which is actually a pretty cool shot, and announcing himself to Kamen Rider My-Th as the Snake of the Jūnishi Dōmei, or the Zodiac Alliance.

This reminded me very explicitly of something from Rurouni Kenshin, which was kind of a foundational anime for me, where Hajime Saitō is known as the Wolf of the Shinsengumi. Earlier, I accidentally said “Snake of the Shinsengumi” just because I’m so used to that phrase.

I don’t even really know what the Shinsengumi was historically, and I don’t particularly care, because all I knew from Kenshin was that Saitō was part of them, they were enemies with Kenshin, and he was one of their big guys.

It also reminds me of CODE Agent 5 from Kamen Rider Zeztz, who calls himself CODE’s watchdog or guard dog, something along those lines. It’s a marker of his loyalty to the organization while also defining his relationship to it.

A dog is loyal. It protects you and attacks your enemies for you. A wolf is a powerful, wild animal that makes a great ally if it’s on your side.

Those things are easy enough to understand, even if I’m potentially missing some larger cultural idea from Japanese history or social structures behind this whole “I’m the this of that group” concept.

I get the gist of it, as Decade would say.

But I am a little confused about what exactly “the Snake of the Jūnishi Dōmei” is supposed to mean for Jyao.

Regardless, I thought it was a really cool moment, and it reminded me very affectionately of Saitō from Kenshin and his identity as the Wolf of the Shinsengumi.

Why Do Both Groups Have the Same Egg Holders?

The next image is Vanken presenting four Eggz to Kamuri.

The most interesting thing to me is that the Egg holders he’s presenting to Kamuri are identical to the ones Sora has, including the ones Sora and Yuna’s caretaker mailed to them at the Mizuno house.

We’ve seen Sora in possession of these Egg holders, and now Vanken has the exact same style.

They might literally be the same props. Maybe production only has a couple of them and moves them around between scenes, which would totally make sense from a tokusatsu and film-production budget perspective.

But seeing both groups with the same kind of item still makes me curious.

Is it simply a production thing, or is there something deeper in the lore?

Is there some sort of supplier? Are these things being manufactured somewhere? Is there some common point between the Inexplicable Investigation Society and the Zodiac Alliance?

Are both groups being provided items and materials by the same source?

Is somebody potentially playing both sides?

I’m very curious about what exactly is going on here and what the implications might be.

Could the Zodiac Alliance Start Saving People?

The third image is Asao talking to Tigre.

Their conversation about the possibility of saving people who had been eaten or taken by Fukashigi really makes me wonder how many members of the Zodiac Alliance might eventually pursue a different path.

Vanken’s actions earlier showed him to be noble and caring about the victims and other people, not just his pride or the organization. He seems to genuinely care about the individuals who are harmed.

If Vanken knew of a way to help the victims who had been turned into monsters and turn them back into humans, I think he would definitely do it.

Tigre might.

And I think Asao would, especially with his continuing exposure to Sora and Yuna. I think he would look at it and say, “This is the best definition of saving people’s lives, so let’s actually do that. Let’s actually save people instead of just destroying the monsters.”

Something about the tone and the contrasts in this episode makes me wonder if they’re setting up the possibility of defectors.

Or maybe the Zodiac Alliance itself will learn how to save people.

That could make the conflict between them and My-Th even richer, because then they could say, “We don’t need this guy anymore. We can do what he’s doing, and we can save more people. This is what we were always about, and now we’re finally doing it.”

They could still oppose My-Th, try to bring him into the organization, or decide he shouldn’t be operating independently at all.

There would still be plenty of room for conflict, which I think is interesting.

Vanken Is Exactly My Kind of Rider

The fourth picture is a close-up of Vanken when he’s with Jyao after the destruction of the building.

Vanken’s suit design is super cool.

He has this loose collar around his neck because he’s a dog, and he has something like a targeting reticle over one eye. He uses a gun as his main weapon, so of course he’s got a targeting element built into the design.

It looks cool. It’s on-theme, and I think it’s a lot of fun.

The way his ears are so high and pointed, along with the bronze or brown color contrasted against the black, makes him feel like he’s supposed to be a Doberman Pinscher.

Dobermon from Digimon Tamers also has that iron-gray spiked collar, which is kind of reminiscent of this. I’m not saying it’s a direct pull or anything like that. It’s just a strong, striking image for a Doberman-type dog, so it makes sense that both designs would go there.

I even think Vanken’s collar has a little leash-like lead hanging off it, although I didn’t get a very good look at his back.

Doberman Pinschers also typically have docked tails, so if Vanken has no tail or a very short one, that would push the design even further into Doberman territory.

And if he does have something like a lead hanging from the collar, I can see why they’d want that. These suits seem to like having some extra element hanging off the back. Jyao, for example, has that big long tail because, well, he’s a snake.

But anyway, Vanken gets to be super cool because he not only seems like a solid, stand-up guy, he also has an awesome suit.

A cool-looking guy who’s also a good guy, a noble guy, that’s the sweet spot for me.

I mean, that’s why Kamen Rider works. That’s why Super Sentai works. That’s why Ultraman works.

You have these great heroic guys who also get to be in fantastic suits, and the two things just reinforce each other.