Super Sentai and Character Development: Why It Matters

Character development is one important thing you cannot forget in Super Sentai.  They can either be a background story or progressive events or a combination of both.  Here are my reasons why character development is important:


It's always necessary to let a protagonist character who starts out pretty bad to improve to add drama to the show.  As I have learned in my writing flaws, letting a character not improve either for the sake of laughs or just plain lazy writing makes a story boring or redundant.  Take for example compare the development of characters like characters like Gai Yuki.  I just thought it's fun to see them develop.  Not having them develop can result to disasters like Kusaka in Kamen Rider Faiz who remains as a douche throughout the series which is very painful to watch unlike Gai Yuki who becomes a nice guy as the series goes by.


Character development helps make hero vs. villain rivalry interesting than when it started.  Some of them are just standard but some of them really stand out like conflicting philosophies of good vs. evil (Takeru vs. Kiros, Ryu vs. Radiguet, Satoru vs. Ryuon), because the villain messed up the hero real good (Masumi vs. Yaiba, Marvelous vs. Basco), past connections (Jin vs. Kaura), unearthed secrets (Mako vs. Dayu) and whatever.  Giving some character development in villain rivalries help make the rivalry fun to watch.


Giving a villain lots of buildup as the series goes on can be helpful either in the form of background stories that emerge and mysteries that slowly unwrap (ex. Zeba's background in Maskman) to reveal to the heroes either midseason (like Dr. Man's identity) or towards the finale arc that reveals something that can really give some shock value.  I thought Zeba's character development from being an Orcus on the throne and his identity unraveled slowly but surely were one of the best plots by Hirohisa Soda while others that may follow are Bandora's slowly but surely revealed backstory in Zyuranger, Grandienne in GogoV revelation of being minus energy personified and Doctor Man's origins.  Or in another way, villains can develop when the writers give us more reason to love to hate those persons than just because they are evil... like Radiguet's choosing to dump every chance of redemption he gets in Jetman or Long's involvement of messing everybody in Gekiranger.

Overall, I really can use some watching old school and new school Super Sentai.