Thread by @KrisAtLarge

we've said it before but we really like the #KamenRider Build theme: "Be the One", by Pandora.



🎵 be the light / be the light
we'll take darkness into brightness, yeah
leading you into the light
be the light
oh, you'll be alive
be the one / be the one 🎵

#KamenRider Build and its overflowing heroic anguish served as emotional counterpoint to some of the most painful months of our lives—working in the slippery and dangerous biodiesel factory, then having to drop everything to go to San Diego and be with our dying father.

~Chara

Evolt was gearing up yet another diabolical plan (he had so many of them!) about the time that we were watching our father expire.

a lot of #KamenRider (and #SuperSentai) has chanced to line up with our life's worst moments—tokusatsu is woven into the fabric of our life.

~Chara

we inhabit desperate times of disintegration and collapse. amid the chaos people crave heroism and heroes; we aren't immune from that.

we may not be foolish enough to imagine that cops or @mtaibbi or @elonmusk are real-life heroes—but we get why people would *want* that.

~Chara

all Western institutions seem like they're hopelessly corroded and corrupt. all official persons seem like they're out of touch with the reality of human suffering—@mtaibbi and @elonmusk may be liars themselves but they're not exactly *wrong* about @JoeBiden, who's awful.

~Chara

it's genuinely unclear that Biden wants more out of the Presidency other than four years of grinning at the people, telling rehearsed stories that always seem like the work of a pack of "image consultants" just out of sight—but @RonaldReagan was a fraud of that sort, too.

~Chara

every single person of importance and power in Western society, anyone who winds up on the news, anyone who's the talk of the Internet, is a rehearsed fraud of the @RonaldReagan / @JoeBiden sort. @elonmusk is a public-relations fraud. @mtaibbi is a public-relations fraud.

~Chara

this is the society we've been forced to inhabit. #capitalism and #marketing have given us a Western culture saturated with advertising—saturated with *falsity*.

what are the people to do when—even if they don't know the *details*—they know they're always being lied to?

~Chara

they look for miracles, is what they do. they look for some miracle-worker to burst out of the wings and tear everything down at a stroke. they wait for some great prophet or powerful leader to save them—Western popular entertainment is overflowing with such iconography.

~Chara

they look for *heroes*. I've wanted heroes myself. I wouldn't be such a tokusatsu fan if I didn't like to see heroes doing their thing.

but maybe...simply waiting for heroes to show up and save us isn't working out for us. it's too easy for rogues to exploit the craving.

~Chara

consider @realDonaldTrump or @elonmusk (or even, heaven help us, @mtaibbi)—thoroughly *unheroic* people, as fake and fraudulent as the politicians they selectively attack according to an obvious right-wing political agenda...and yet, they're able to *imitate* heroism.

~Chara

the Western craving for heroism is *that bad*. collectively we're so desperate for some one person to materialize from nowhere and fix all our problems at a stroke, it's cause people to convince themselves that a disastrous corporate executive like @elonmusk is *heroic*.

~Chara

I'm not saying that we should discard heroism as a noble ideal or goal—even if it's an unattainable one. the best goals are the unattainable ones.

instead I suggest to the long-suffering peoples of the West that they should stop *waiting* for heroes to be handed to them.

~Chara

maybe, just maybe, the best way to honor heroism is to *be heroic*.

not to *wait* for heroism—not to sit at home, nursing one's resentments and daydreaming of the moment when a Great Man will materialize from nowhere and bring his heroism to the long-suffering masses.

~Chara

if you want heroes of justice...

...instead of *waiting* for them, why not try to _become_ one?

it's not special elitists who are the greatest heroes—it's absolute nobodies, coming from nowhere. not @elonmusk, but Midoriya Izuku and Miles Morales, are the true heroes.

~Chara

I will close this meandering thread with another heroic theme song. well, sort of: it's the full-length 1st season theme for the Super Sentai parody show "Akibaranger".



~Chara of Pnictogen