Hmm uh yeah I've got nothing tbh in terms of this episode in relation to the points you mentioned. So I'll just really say, the first reveal complaint doesn't really ring much for me since well, it feels more like a clarification. And the second reveal complaint, while I get that it's very sudden, I think you're downplaying things a bit too hard with the "What coworker screwed over his buddy" comment.

Anyway, Rintaro basically decided to go full toy salesman. We get King Lion Daisenki, the Lion Mode, a shit ton of Booster usages, all in all, very fun. Also I do enjoy that the form gives him to cannons to shoot stuff with, very fun.

Also I do enjoy Touma's fight with him sliding up the scale of power before ending in a pretty spectacular fight against Kamijo. The little touch of the cross-slash with Espada's ghost appearing is also nice.

Also the story was nice, always fun to get a bit of Mei introspection.

I can definitely relate to Kamijo's motivation not hitting me at all. I'm a very themes-before-plot person; if the mechanisms of the story or how it's delivered aren't quite working but all of what it actually means is still there I'm very happy to let it off the hook (to a degree I think it's necessary for watching Tokusatsu), but sometimes it's stretched just... a little too thin. It's as you say; it's way too much delivered in such a short space of time to really comprehend it and it needed far more fleshing out than what it got, but it's treated as... maybe not understandable, but they expect you to just take it as a baseline without anything further? It doesn't even begin to work for me.


I kinda dropped my little "saber-suits-are-so-good" corner because I kept forgetting but I'm absolutely gonna revive it for a bit to say Dragon Alangina is one of my favourite things ever? Strong contender for my favourite Saber suit and it's the one golden moment everything in this show came together for me; I haven't seen a Rider show really use the nature of its powers and tools like this purely for character work without it being motivated by a specific new powerup in a long time, and it just hit seeing Touma be powered up by two main Ridebooks like that and change up his entire fighting style to accomodate the sword of his lost beloved friend. Nothing in the Kento story even worked for me! It failed to hit me in the same way the Kamijo stuff did! But this form and everything they did with it was so incredibly good it made me believe in the strength of that story for a whole episode!


oh yeah and Dragonic Knight is really sexy too you really just can't go wrong with that thing

While the Book Club's monologue is a clarification, it still provides crucial details about what precisely they're trying to do, which I can only feel would've been helpful as they were each rolling out of their shadowy library to do the weekly monster plot.

For Kamijo's story, I sort of can't believe the show thought this guy dedicating 15 years of his life -- and almost perpetuating an apocalypse -- to uncover malfeasance didn't deserve a little supporting documentation? I'm not exactly sure what he's even supposed to be accusing some nameless traitor of doing here. He's just like Someone Made My Dude Crazy, and that's all we get. If this show wants me to feel the depths of Kamijo's sadness, and how it's inverted in the strength Touma receives from Kento's memory/ghost, they gotta give me more to go on.

I realized after writing all that up that... like, the biggest problem I'm having with a lot of these plot points is that there's almost no thematic cover I can give them, because so much of this show is weird plot stuff. With a show like Geats, I immediately knew and loved what it was doing, so it was easy to defend certain elements by thinking about how they were supporting or subverting the main thematic topics of the show. With Saber, I honestly feel super adrift? There's some general stuff about storytelling, or promises, or friendship, or teamwork, but almost none of it feels elevated or integral; meanwhile, this show keeps surfacing bizarre plot details that just suck all the oxygen out of the room. If/when I get a better sense of what this show is trying to talk about, I hope I'll be able to find more value in some of these reveals.

The First Annual Kento Memorial Stage Show Extravaganza was a very fun episode and a very cool suit, it's true.

Kamijo's motives will become clearer in the future, it is the information about the traitor that is important now. Because it is she who determines the further course of the story. Let me just say that Kamijo and Fukamiya are indeed the same, and this is the key to the reasons for their actions.
It's funny, by the way, that you fear for the future of the show just before what many consider to be the point where it started to get better.

I like to make people laugh!

As for the rest... I mean, yeah, I sort of assumed Ferreting Out The Traitor -- and getting us to be suspicious of the Sword of Logos -- was pretty much the next phase of this show. That's fine. I don't have a problem with this show suggesting that a secret organization with unknown oversight that's staffed entirely by people that were chosen by magic swords might be less trustworthy than we assumed.

And so, exit Kamijo. And also Desast for a few episodes, due to the suit actor moving over to Sentai.

Not much on this current episode thoughts-wise, besides liking the action. But I do have this to share.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...9/IMG_7957.PNG

Yeah, this one didn’t work that well for me. It feels like the show is trying to build a lot of drama out of revealing that the Sword of Logos may have some internal corruption, but it falls flat because the show hasn’t really established anything about the organization outside of the handful of characters we’ve already seen. Like, we know that they raised Rintaro and that everybody else works for them, but that’s pretty much it. It’s hard to squeeze drama out of upending everything the audience knows when the audience doesn’t know anything.

Agreed. That phrase is flawed as it doesn't consider how some villains like Evolt take pride in their reputation for villainy and would be offended by accusations of heroism or being misguided. Of course, amoral psychopathic types who rely on good publicity will gladly use that phrase to justify their behavior to others, even if they don't believe it. And some antivillains genuinely do believe it, that what they're doing is right even when everyone else says it's wrong, like the greatest kindest demon king Oma Zi-O, Amatsu Gai and Bacht here. In those cases, they're so deep in their ways, or insane, that they become resistant to the idea that they've gone too far.

Evil book gangsters will be evil book gangsters, I guess. The exposition about the Omniscient Tome only takes like half a minute anyway and this is merely the tip of the spear concerning the Megid trio, so probably shouldn't worry too much about their underwhelming transparency right now.

Did you see Zooous' flips though? Man, that guy can move!

When you put it like that, it sounds pretty absurd. However, for not only one, but two Calibur-users to go crazy in pursuit of the same goal, there must be something compelling about this Universal Truth that both Kamijo and Hayato, formerly friends and loyal members of SOL, would throw everything away to obtain it. Even Daishinji who loves Seiken Swords commented that Kurayami is a sword of many mysteries. You also have suspicions about that.

Even if the reveals left you disappointed for now, I still have to talk about that awesome climactic fight scene and intriguing aftermath!

I love how the Swordsmen courageously destroy the pillars, believing that Touma will make it back in time. How Ikazuchi gives Touma the strength of Kento's spirit to return from the darkness, defying Kamijo's expectations and showing how the magic of friendship can pierce through even the deepest despair and transcend the barrier between life and death. It's all profoundly heroic and emotionally moving in the way I've come to expect from Fukuda's writing, making this first arc land strongly for me, firmly establishing what kind of show Kamen Rider Saber wants to be. Touma is the living proof of the ideals Kamijo had lost faith in, where there's resolution, there's always hope and I think Rekka was right to choose him as the successor.

I love how Desast, who had nothing to do with this apocalypse, out of nowhere just shows up inside the giant book world that Touma and Kamijo struggled to reach, to live up to his title as a Swordsman Killer, literally cut short some exposition and retrieve his Alter Book. That guy's a wildcard with his own agenda.

And that's how you know it's Aruto!

Desast getting his curiosity engine in overdrive even before his Twitter career.

Yeah, that certainly was an episode, I didn't exactly have as much distaste as you did for the reveals here (I'm pretty sure Kamijo's reveal was just put in so that they could set up the 2nd arc or something along those lines), but I didn't exactly care for this episode either.

The choreography's good, and I'm perfectly fine with the first reveal, even if it should've been revealed way earlier than this episode, but besides those two things, it's just empty for me. I don't entirely hate this episode, but it wasn't exactly a fun one for me either.

I'm pretty sure that this is the end of the first arc? And the 2nd arc is where I've heard that the show improves, so I hope that rings true for me as well. I don't have much left to say, so I'll just say that this was a mediocre episode for me, I don't have as much hate for it as you seem to have, but it's still not very good compared to the rest of the episodes.

The only real touch of darkness the Sword of Logos has so far is that the Southern Base definitely feels shady, as I think Tassel told some guy on a phone once, non-canonically. Beyond that... like I said, Kamijo gives Touma (and the audience) absolutely to go on in regards to launching an investigation or even cultivating suspicion: suspects, method, goals, etc. Like, Kamijo very much seems like a crazy traitor who has a grudge against an organization that didn't want him to destroy the world in a bid for ultimate power, and that's sort of it?

Oh, for sure, the stuff with Mei and the rest was the high point of the episode. I love her rallying the troops, everyone finding additional reserves of strength, and them collectively getting the job done without Touma. It was a fun strand of this episode!

It very much felt like the end of a chapter, yeah. We've got a final Swordsman Chronicle tonight, a TTFC segment in a couple days, and then it's pretty much 15 or 16 episodes of the next arc. Cautiously optimistic about it!