It's sweet that Sophia's still looking out for Kento despite him no longer being affiliated with SOL and trying to remind him that his life actually matters to people and that Hayato wouldn't want him to sacrifice himself for his mission. Even though he's Calibur now, Sophia still calls him Espada, since she can see that deep down, he's still the same Kento under all that despair, who wants the same thing that everybody else does.

We also get the full confession from Yuri, that he was totally prepared to sacrifice Touma from the start, but now he believes wholeheartedly that Touma will decide the ending of that story. A future not yet written that's invisible to Kurayami, but illuminated by hope.

I hate Solomon for the same reason I hate Yuuki. Seriously, they decapitated my bad*ss Jaou Dragon to make this? Kind of makes me want to see Solomon get destroyed just for the sake of it. I would've preferred it if Isaac became a Megid or pseudo-Rider instead.

Weird talking head dudes declaring their evil intentions to humanity is a pretty common Tokusatsu trope, so I imagine a lot of civilians are probably used to it happening every few years at this point.

This isn't even the first time the word Strash has appeared in KR. The briefcase weapons and Progrise Hopper Blade in Zero One said it as well. I believe it's supposed to be a pun on strike and slash, but probably sounded a lot less eyeroll-inducing in Toei's head.

You didn't even mention Grease using two Twin Breakers, that's got to be the laziest one. Personally, I thought the GanGun Catcher was pretty cool! Sometimes, a new weapon can be just as intimidating as a new form, a good example being the Perfect Zecter.

I feel we are moving towards a time when kaijins become more popular than riders because of their rarity. I wonder in how many years the main character of the show will be a good kaijin fighting against an organization of evil guys with belts?

Case in point, there is no way most of the fandom would have noticed that Solomon's body is a re-use of that servant robot guy from Zi-O if it hadn't been pointed out! The Jaou Dragon helmet sticks out like a sore thumb, though; especially since I'm pretty sure it had just been a single episode since we last saw that suit anyway?? Talking of recent parts re-use, downright hilarious to me that this re-uses the tattered cape from Bravo's new upgrade.

I say all that but I'm actually a big fan of the suit! I think it looks appropriately menacing, most of the parts re-use is smart and I like the colour scheme a bunch

Thanks! It's very Isaac to just assume that everyone's going to fall in because he said so, instead of, y'know, actually doing anything to motivate people. He doesn't even resurrect the dead or disappear a city block! He's just like TATAKAE, and waiting for people to jump to it, which is perfect nepo baby reasoning

Everyone wants to kill this dude! It's exactly the right energy for a series-long villain's in-costume debut.

An omnibus is almost exactly what he has? It's a word for a book made of other books, which is what Isaac's new collectible is!

I do like this (Isaac is a guy who doesn't bother putting in the work, for the most part), and I don't think it's intentional (sometimes suits are just kitbashed for time/resource reasons), but I love that this is yet another in a series of Fish Sandwich Explains Why Crummy Thing Is Actually Extra Good For Its Crumminess. It is my not-so-secret joy. Any time we can get a post that's not just a defense of something that's hardly worth defending, not just a justification for that approach by a creative team, but a celebration of that random thing and the disappointing execution of it... boy, there's really nothing else like it in the fandom. Thanks for starting my day off right!

Yeah, the suit itself wasn't the big deal for me, but I thought reusing the King of Arthur sword so blatantly was a little lame. At least let the guy have a new/old/better sword!

Hey, buddy. I'm happy to talk about non-Saber stuff via PMs, but I'd really like to keep the focus of this thread on Saber and its story. Thanks for understanding!

Yeah, I like that Sophia seems to have a more motherly relationship with characters like Kento and Rintaro, since she watched them grow up. It's hopefully something the show'll delve into more in the next episode. I like when these shows can try and address maternal guardianship?

You'd think Isaac would at least be concerned about how regal his appearance was, right? He's some privileged rich asshole that has been coddled his entire life! Those guys don't usually dress sloppy!

So you've obeyed the Master Logos' command to discard that title and thus you too goes by his real name Isaac. About him inheriting the position he never wanted, well the Solomon name in his Kamen Rider form is a reference to how Solomon was a good king who turned into wicked later, which'd be how Isaac previously followed his duties as SoL before he became bored. So I'd think perhaps, Isaac genuinely wanted to protect humanity before but not for actual noble reasons of living beings being worth protecting but to oversee their evolution, but particularly to see them evolve in power-hungry way, for his own entertainment, but when he didn't get that from humans, he turned on them. It'd mean his reason of protecting humans was something similar to Daguva. Man, I'd wish that by this we'd see a villain who actually does the protecting for this before instead of just sparing their enemies.

Desast's antics go further in this episode with him hanging upside-down to pester Ren, though obviously it's no problem with his power. And it's a reveal for the audience that Ren got his social darwinistic beliefs from his mentor, of which it's a case when a mentor's teaching backfires on him to instead create a rather psychotic member of the SoL, though he didn't do evil unlike the Shindai siblings or especially Isaac. And that Ren only respects Kento's strength, but views everyone else as a threat or stepping stone. Yuri's advice kinda reveals something dark about him at least in the past, in contrast to the reveal that he'd not sacrifice the humans that turned into Megid, to be prepared to sacrifice Touma, though at least he seems to be only going for 1 person instead of anyone he can.

And we get the "Sophia is Sophia" thing in this episode? With Rintaro still using and Mei going f̶o̶r̶ ̶l̶e̶s̶b̶i̶a̶n̶ ̶e̶n̶e̶r̶g̶y̶ holding hands together with her. And yeah, despite Saber's lighthearted tone, Isaac is one of the most irredeemable villains in the whole franchise, thus he can have even other questionable characters get disgusted with him. Though for Bacht, evil characters displaying their standards can be something that happened in a handful of stories. Ryoga and Reika finally defects from SoL, particularly from Isaac's exact words that he's no longer Master Logos, and it's shown that Ryoga still has his standoffish nature by rejecting Touma's help, though he quickly relents here.

Other than him being in the main villain position to wipe the floor with literally everyone, Solomon also has a human form that can fight 2 Kamen Riders at once untransformed, displaying his skills or just his powerful nature to help him doing so. About his power use here of swinging King of Arthur sword, gotta wait for later explanation of it, should turn around the not screaming important new villain part. I know there are handful of Kamen Rider villains already, but I'd wish that Isaac didn't turn into Kamen Rider, moreso due to the magical nature of this series and perhaps the potential ambiguous human status of him that can easily have him turn into Megid boss-level or something.

So even you have a limit about Saber, in it making a depraved villain Kamen Rider (or if it's just the Rider design here).

There's Inoue's series with Takumi as a Wolf Orphnoch and Wataru as a half-Fangire, the former also had him fighting Smart Brain. Though there's also the ones that happened in the endgame like Yuusuke turning into more like Grongis, Kenzaki turning into Joker, Kouta turning into Overlord.

It's something this show gets at a lot, where characters can't see individuals, only groups, and how that makes it easier for them to lose empathy. Isaac probably hasn't ever interacted with any normal people, so he thought of humanity as a duty, then a burden, and now as a source of amusement. He doesn't care about people because he doesn't see individuals, he just sees some nameless mass.

(I laughed pretty hard at Isaac going on this diatribe about how terrible humanity is, only for Yuri to counter with a Yeah But You Still Were Supposed To Protect Them. The "yeah, but" is so mean! It's so dismissive of humanity! Yuri! In-character maybe, but dude!)

KAMEN RIDER SABER EPISODE 37 - “THE FUTURE SHALL BE WRITTEN, BUT BY WHO?”

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/saber/saber37a.png

I love Mei, and I love that she’s Yuri’s hand-picked representative to demonstrate how humanity’s improved over the last thousand years, but it’s pretty farcical for her pitch to be We Communicate Better With Our Friends in an episode with so much Kento melodrama. I know she knows him!

If there’s a weak point in this episode, it’s Kento’s herculean intransigence. Honestly, I like that he’s not going to just abandon his martyrdom because of anything Touma says or does, because there’s no drama in that. Touma shows a flash of awareness by having patience with Ren’s soul-searching, but otherwise massively doubles down on his normal hot-headed badgering for other people to just see his big picture already. He tells Ryoga, a guy whose main personality trait is that he hates traitors and loves service, to just forget all that traitor stuff because Isaac was a villain, and abandon what’s left of the Sword of Logos to pitch in with his team and save the world – like Touma completely blanked on how long it took Rintaro to get over his own sense of loyalty and duty. (And Rintaro LIKED Touma!) With Kento, he’s still like WE CAN WORK TOGETHER to a guy who literally told him that working together is what gets Touma and everyone else killed. Pushing back on Touma’s genuinely terrible pitches is generally fine with me.

But then we’ve got Sophia, who can’t convince Kento with a brief and forgettable intervention. (I seriously can’t remember what she talked to him about.) And Rintaro, whose idea is fairly clever, also gets nowhere: if Kento won’t join his friends, his friends will just join Kento. It’s an adorably Rintaro way of undercutting Kento’s gruff brooding, and it manages to last for about three-quarters of a fight. It’s a failure, like every other attempt to sway Kento over the last however many episodes.

I think I’m sick of it? It’s reached a point where I can’t imagine what’s going to change Kento’s mind, and I’m not sure if anything would even feel organic at this point. If that dude somehow, some way changes his mind about being all alone and sacrificing his life… I don’t even think I’d buy it at this stage? And in the meantime, I’m almost sick of his friends trying.

There’s a… you can’t save everyone. You can’t, especially if they don't want to be saved. I don’t like to say that kind of stuff about a kids show, because it’s a terrible thing to tell children. These shows are powered by boundless empathy, and the unwritten rule that everyone can be saved. But Kento… he’s just toxic at this point. He’s a guy that was always looking for a way to give his life for his friends, to atone for misplaced guilt and deep-seated shame. As he’s gained more power, he’s only become a more focused martyr. Like, you can keep reaching your hand out in case he reaches back, but sometimes you gotta go the Ren route and realize that you can’t force an epiphany. Some folks gotta hit rock bottom before they're ready to accept help, and they know where to find you when they’re ready.

And, shit, if that’s where this story goes? A+. I’d love it if Touma learned a lesson about forcing people to believe in you when they don’t yet believe in themselves. I’d be thrilled with a story where Kento has to generate his own self-worth, instead of people beating him over the head with it. But in the meantime, we’re just getting these same moments repeated over too long a timeline, where Touma comes off like a hectoring weirdo (he’s shouting the same stuff at Kento every episode!) and Kento’s martyrdom just looks like slow-motion suicide. It’s very hard to maintain interest in a storyline that keeps hitting the same notes for as long as this one has.

Boy, I’m ready for this Touma/Kento story to find a different gear.

—

SMARTER HEARTS

https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/...esasterful.png

catching up expect a LOT Of repaints for the remainder of the show TOEI basically gave Saber half a budget due to COVID and even if it's not as obvious this part of the show was filmed during a pandemic there are still noticable budget cuts/shortcuts you wouldn't see in any other rider show (Also at this point they were focusing their budget for the following rider show)

Yeah I can see how it can get a bit grating at this point with Kento. We're very much 10 Episodes into Kento re-emerging into the plot and there is no real clue of when it'll end on his side.

Anyway not much to say this episode other than my favorite part was absolutely Mei trying to appeal to Bahato. Like, it's just such a great comedic scene and you can see Mei trying her best! And that's all that really matters.

Also I liked Ren's duel? There's something about Ren challenging Touma... and basically getting nothing out of it in his mind.

Even if the Sword of Logos members weren't all evil, man were some just problematic. Like that dude who we see that's Ren's trainer... like... dude, you are the reason this kid is like this.

Granted who am I to say whether Ren is bad the way he is huh? He's been mostly staying out of trouble if I'm being honest. Cause even his assault against Touma wasn't that pressing of one compared to the one back during the King Megid Arc. I feel like being with Desast is doing something with Ren...

Speaking of, "Where's my pin?" stellar twitter conversation. I was wondering if you were going to bring that style back. Though speaking on Desast taking forever to update...

Sadly no Desast Walk updates as of the moment (partially because I'm skipping a few because reasons). But they will return soon!

Flying bikes aren't cheap!

It's sort of hysterical to me that Touma's like You Gotta Believe In Something and Ren's like NO I DON'T EVER HAVE TO and Touma's like Uh Good Luck With That... when Touma 10000% will not leave Kento alone with his weird martyr complex and self-loathing. Touma's cool with Ren figuring himself out on his own schedule, but turns every conversation with Kento towards the one thing that Kento explicitly told him was off the table. I guess it's because Touma just doesn't like Ren that much?

Thanks! I like thinking that Desast and Mei have an emotionally-supportive online friendship. It's my favorite made-up part of this series.