Oh yeah, I'm watching Kabuto...

Episode whatever-I-was-at-last-time-10: That old TheBee guy was cool. Kagami is cool. Tendou is a bore. His sister is annoying. That mopey girl is pointless.

WHAT? His sister is Awesome! With the exception of maybe five times, all she does is eat
"mmm GUUUD!"
If she's missing during something important, don't worry, she's off stuffing her face somewhere.
"mmm GUUUD!"
They probably filmed all of her scenes in one day.

Mopey girl has a point, trust me.

Okay, I'll admit Faiz has gotten considerably more watchable since Takumi has been revealed as an Orphnoch.

Dunno how long this will last, but it's nice to feel engaged with the show at long last!

Is it a spoiler to say, Everyone will just be okay with it after a couple episodes and only Kusaka will mention it.

At least he's consistent. Nago in Kiva goes from "KIVAAAA I'LL KILLLL YOUUU!!" to "Oh, Wataru is Kiva. No biggie" at which point he becomes absurdist comic relief.

V3 is all finished, and it was quite fun. I frankly enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, although I keep going back and forth on whether I like Amazon or V3 more. On one hand I liked that V3 had a decent sense of continuity to it and was less cheesy than Amazon. On the other hand, I thought the concepts in Amazon were really unique, the short length worked in its favor, and it was SO CHEESY. I think I lean sliiiightly more towards Amazon in the end.

I was a little amused that Riderman died at the end of V3, since I thought he was going to die at the end of his OWN series. Unless he dies at the end of that one too, I dunno. The final battle was insanely anticlimatic, with V3 just smashing... a spooky skeleton.

I'll round this off with The First and The Next.

I think V3 is probably the best version of conventional Kamen Rider - like a really, really good vanilla ice cream cone. It's very standard, almost generic, but excellent at it. Most of the other shows have something more unique or dynamic, but aside from the Riderman arc V3 is just a more refined and polished version of the structure set up in the original series.

And Riderman didn't die at the end of his own series because he doesn't have his own series. The next show after this is X (my favorite of the classic 70s Showa era). If you're curious as to when he comes back, it happens sometime off-screen before the X movie; never gets explained on-screen, but Spirits does tell a version of how it happened.

Read Spirits in general. It's some really, really great stuff.

Kamen Rider W for like the 5th time.