Return
First, the very basics of Kamen Rider Kabuto’s storyline: Aliens called Worms have invaded Earth. They have the ability to mimic humans, and can move extremely fast. This means the only people who can effectively fight them are Kamen Riders who use insect-shaped Zecters to transform. When transformed, they can Clock Up and move super fast - but spoiler alert, the PMC hiring riders (ZECT) is secretly evil. A lot of the interpersonal conflicts in the show are people fighting over Zecters. It's a little weird narrative-wise because there are effectively two main characters: Kagami, who REALLY REALLY wants to use the Kabuto Zecter; and Tendou, who uses the Kabuto Zecter. Okay, info dump over!
Allow me to set the scene. I am young, naive, innocent. I have recently watched many heisei (early 2000s to late 2010s) Kamen Rider series, and decided to watch all 20-something of them. This entails going into what may be politely called the ‘shitty period’ - 2005 to 2008, when Den-o was the only shining light in a set of back-to-back weak seasons. I wasn’t nearly brave enough yet to face Hibiki, so I settled for the next scariest: Kabuto.
Kamen Rider Kabuto has a mixed reputation amongst tokusatsu fans. Releasing in 2006, it followed the absolute flop Hibiki and is evidently liked by people who watched it in their childhood but doesn’t really stack up today. The main rider, Tendou Souji, has one main trait: he is good at everything, and he always wins. This may sound facetious but I am dead serious; his superiority at everything is a driving force in the narrative. He is very popular amongst a certain kind of person which I am not, and I found him extremely annoying. While watching Kabuto I didn’t think much of the experience, mostly watching it on a small laptop screen while bussing back and forth from university to my parent’s house. I found it a tad ugly with poor music and an underwhelming ending.
Then the mania set in.
I have no idea how or why, but Kabuto just wouldn’t get out of my head. I suspect this is because of the sheer strangeness of the show. The idea of a plot that revolves around a basically perfect human is a weird one, and it’s fascinating how the other characters react to Tendou’s literal infallibility. Kagami is driven to try and be better than Tendou but settles for instead being his quasi-sidekick, while most of the other riders hate his guts and want to soundly beat him. This creates a situation of endless animosity between the show’s characters with as much rider-on-rider violence as there is at the series’ monsters. Anybody foolish enough to challenge Tendou generally ends up punished by the narrative despite generally being at least somewhat sympathetic, another wrinkle that left me obsessed.
So obsessed, in fact, that my friends got tired of me clogging up our discord server with it, and they made me a channel called kabuto-containment. Now archived, the channel has just under 20,000 messages in it. I sent 7,000 of those messages. I may have had a problem.
A lot of this obsession was to do with the Hell Bros, a pair of characters played entirely for laughs which I took far too seriously. Yaguruma and Kageyama are characters introduced quite early into the show, as employees of ZECT. Yaguruma has a thinly veiled power complex and Tendou’s superiority makes him totally lose his cool as a commander, leading to him being kicked out of ZECT by none other than his once adoring subordinate Kageyama. He then literally disappears from the show for about 30 episodes. While he’s off doing god knows what, Kageyama tries desperately to ingratiate himself to Tendou and his superiors at ZECT but is instead constantly humiliated. In the end, this ends in him getting kicked out of ZECT and left for dead. Until, that is, Yaguruma returns to save him. And by save, I actually mean cradle his head erotically and tell him they’re going into the darkness together. They’re both emo now, and wear matching leather jackets. It’s extremely gay. Like, really, really, shockingly gay. They even have matching Zecters, for god's sake.
They spend the rest of the plot being mostly irrelevant and played for laughs.They do help the other riders on occasion, but they always chastise themselves afterwards for ‘reaching for the light’. As the end nears, they decide they’ve had enough of being emo, and plan to leave Tokyo entirely. Soon before they plan to leave, Kageyama finds out ZECT is giving out Worm detection necklaces and grabs two - one for him, one for Yaguruma. Unbeknownst to him, this is a secret plan by ZECT to turn humans into Worms, and he’s getting a double dose.
Kageyama becomes a worm. In an act of mercy, Yaguruma kills him, then sits beside his corpse watching the stars. They are never mentioned again.
Like, what the fuck, right? It was such a shockingly cruel resolution to their story that it left me gobsmacked. They were never ‘good’ people as such, and both did their fair share of damage, but they were more or less harmless by the end of the show. At the brink of eloping on a gay romance, Yaguruma is left alone and mourning the death of the only person who cares about him.
This obviously led to me obsessing over them and getting my neurons absolutely scrambled, but I somehow hadn’t yet had my lethal injection of Hell Bros yet. No, that was coming in the form of the Kamen Rider Zi-O Kabuto episodes.
To clarify, Kamen Rider Zi-O is an anniversary series celebrating 20 years of Kamen Rider since its reboot in the year 2000. It includes mini-stories where the Zi-O characters meet characters from other shows, helping them out and sometimes wrapping up loose threads from the original show (or just making zero sense). For the kabuto episode, the authors clearly wanted to emotionally destroy me, so devised the most evil and cruel two episodes possible.
The Zi-O trio first meet Kagami, our old protagonist who is now a cop (lmao). He suspects the worms are back, and that Yaguruma has something to do with it. As it turns out, a worm has come to Earth and is mimicking Kageyama. Yaguruma is fully aware he’s not the real thing, and he doesn’t care. He just wants Kageyama back, so he’ll defend the worm even if it means the total destruction of Earth.
This is already cruel enough, but the show decided it wasn’t done sucker punching me yet. The Zi-O character Geiz sympathises with Yaguruma, having experienced similar trauma. But there’s nothing he can do - the fake Kageyama must die. Yaguruma desperately tries to save him, but they kill the Worm, and in his dying words, the Worm tells Yaguruma that he never cared about him. Geiz watches sadly as Yaguruma staggers away into the setting sun, and softly apologises.
LIKE, WHAT THE FUCK, RIGHT? HELLO???????????
This BROKE me. I was sobbing at 3am, totally crushed, emotionally destroyed.
I guess I’ll just go fuck myself thanks Kabuto you piece of shit show for making me feel absolutely insane about two gay men who go through the most harrowing trauma in the world for zero reason and the man at the crux of it all, TENDOU STUPID FUCK ASS SOUJI, has everything go right for him and he never has to face the consequences of his endless cruel actions, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
Ahem. So yeah. Kabuto has really stuck with me. I still have a quasi-rivalry with Tendou in my mind. My hatred of him ironically backfired because it drove me to become a better cook than him, which meant I was basically just acting like every other character in Kabuto who tries to challenge him at cooking and inevitably fails. To this day I always post photos of my food with the caption ‘Tendou wishes he was me’. It’s not true, but I pray one day it will be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXozz5Pr18g
If this made you feel as insane as it made me feel, please watch Kabuto. But only if you don’t love yourself. Here’s some fanart I made of me hanging out with the Hell Bros.
