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not sure if we should tweet this but if it saves a life it's worth it: Kamen Rider Ryuuki is the most potent antipsychotic of a tv series we've ever seen, an incredibly wise friend of ours recommended it to us and it has very literally kept us sane to an unbelievable degree
if your brain is undergoing what we hypothesise to be an “excitatory crisis” where it sees the wrong patterns everywhere and gets more and more unbalanced about this, spending even just half an hour forcing yourself to watch a show that's this I Love Not Thinking is really good
everything about the cinematography, pacing, and writing makes it not only very very good for fixing your brain's pattern recognition and getting it to calm down, it also makes it very very good for a state where you can quite literally Not Think. and to top it all off, it's peak
it is a show for people who want to not have to think at all while watching, one could say “for children” but it suits adults just as well, and when you are in psychosis you can quite literally not think, it's so absolutely perfect for this, please… remember the name at least
we said it's peak already, but like, it really is incredibly good, absolutely perfect tokusatsu æsthetically, as much fun to watch when you're lucid and sober as when your brain is downright completely nonfunctional, highly recommended
just look at the opening it will sell you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZGVS623lFw
(and if not, the first episode probably will, we hope)
oh and to be clear while in principle any sufficiently normal-brained anime or film or whatever could do this antipsychotic thing, we now know from visceral experience that not all can; Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is an example that's much, much worse at this!
being a programmer do be like this sometimes
this is your brain on psychosis
wish we were more literate in like, most kinds of cinematographic decisions, because this show's shot composition and staging and so on always fascinate us, and we have no real idea why, except for this insight: it's a bit more like a stage play than it is like a normal TV drama?
it's both a wonderful and a very unfortunate thing that we first got to experience this show during a period of, you know, our brain not working properly, but even at the worst of this it's been clear to us it's really something quite special; we know we love it, just not why
ah yeah, one other thing that can be said: you can tell it was made for TV back when TV was a real thing: 60Hz, standard definition, expected to be watched on a small box; everything's super legible, but it's also so beautiful that it's actually fun to watch on a 1080p monitor
one thing about this show is that, because it's a little bit goofy, because everything is exaggerated, they're able to just do cool-ass shit to set the atmosphere of scenes all the time without it feeling too much; there's so much lighting and prop bullshit going on constantly
the last scene here may be a good example: a character shows up out of nowhere to talk to another character, and suddenly the lighting in the scene changes in an incredibly obvious, obnoxious way, with no diegetic justification whatsoever, but it looks cool and sets the mood!
It's your girl, Momoka, and we're hopping back on the Kamen Rider Ryuuki train because this show is still peak and we're missing it, though thankfully we're no longer insane.
Here, have a substantial clip of the OP from the first episode of Kamen Rider Ryuuki, plus a bit of what happens before and after it. I think this sells the show better than any amount of words could.