[barnstenchfartface]

I still have 10 episodes of Dragon Knight left to watch, but I decided to start Shushutto's release of Hibiki since they finally released the third quarter of the show. Watched the first three episodes.

So, right off the bat, it's really nice to see Hibiki with subtitles by people who actually give a shit. Had fun rewatching these. Unfortunately, where one problem ends another one starts. I only really have time to watch Rider on my phone during my commute and breaks these days. Problem is, my phone is a real piece of shit, and it's having trouble with the HD version of Hibiki. It'll play normally most of the time, but once or twice an episode VLC will just have a tiny aneurysm and freeze/lag for a little bit. Or a large bit. It depends. It hasn't bothered me too much since I had already seen these episodes before, but I don't want that interfering with my watching of the other episodes. So I guess I'm gonna have to re-download the Bunny Hat raws. Which is fine. I've tried and compared it already, it's not a huge difference. Still, it is a difference. Sucks that I can't just enjoy the series with the best video possible. Need to get a better phone.

(also the seeding for the BHR is infernally slow)

Anyway, that's just my very uninteresting adventures with technical problems.

While I'm at it, may as well comment on these last 27 episodes of Dragon Knight.

It's decent? It's fine. It's alright. It's like....just shy of being a pretty good show, I feel. If only the acting was a little better. If only the script was a little tighter. If only it used a lot less cliches (I don't think a single character exists in this show that isn't a walking superficial archetype). The show is well structured and has solid ideas, but the execution is just schlocky enough to hurt it. Like, not a lot, but enough. In particular I feel like some of the actors have trouble selling their lines--Maya in particular comes to mind.

There's also enough problems with consistency (why is everyone (especially the government people) able to see/record Mirror shit in the second half of the show when the beginning established only people involved with Ventara or who had gone through a mirror could see them?) and anticlimactic resolution to mysteries to be distracting.

Also, man, Venting is dumb. It's that perfect "we can't kill people so we accidentally came up with a fate worse than death as an alternative!" kind of thing. The show of course still just treats it as dying. But what bothers me about it is how confused the show's treatment of it is, specifically in relation to Kit Venting Spear. I have no idea what my takeaway from that incident was supposed to be. If you were going to have the protagonist (essentially) kill someone off in a show like this, there's only two real routes I can see it being pulled off. Either you dehumanize the enemy as a villain enough for it to feel justified, or you make it trigger a moral dilemma in the hero (cough cough). I don't think the show really does either of those things, let alone well.

I mean, sure, Albert was a shitter, but the way he went out was pretty rough. Killing an enemy while he's down is kind of a weaselly, dishonorable way to go about it, and that's exactly the way Kit went about it. Albert was just groggily and weakly staggering back up when Kit Vented him. It wasn't a very heroic moment. And then his final moments he's just sprawled out on the floor, trying to reach out to his brother? With said brother also panicking and pained, trying to reach him from the other side? Worse still, the show spends the next few episodes not letting you forget that ultimately Albert was also just a person who had people that cared about him. Even if that person was his brother Danny, who is also a shitter.

And I mean, if that sort of tragic turn of events was what they were going for, well done. But I'm unconvinced they were actually aiming for this at all, because the show doesn't appear to care at all about the Cho brothers. I'm not saying the show glorifies Venting or Kit doing it--Len regrets it, it takes time and Chris getting Vented (with help of the Cho's, admittedly) for Kit to be ready to do it, and after he does it he's sad for a little bit. But he gets over it quick, Danny gets banished to the shadow realm soon afterwards and they are never spoken of again. So again, the whole thing feels confused and confusing. What is the big takeaway here? Am I supposed to feel bad for the Cho's? Feel good for the revenge they got for their part in Chris's Venting? Am I supposed to think Kit is cool, or what? It's especially troubling because around the same time Danny gets done in Kit learns that whole lesson about how "the ends never justify the means," which I thought maybe they'd tie into it and maybe have some more regret come his way, but nope. I'd think the big takeaway was nothing and just take the whole sort of morally gray situation at face value, as if it was intentional, but I don't really feel like giving the show the benefit of the doubt on this one. At the end of the day, Kit is still treated as the hero, and he doesn't really learn anything from it.

...and I guess it turns out I had more to say on that subject than I thought!

I'm sure at the end of the show everyone who was Vented is going to be brought back, thus absolving everyone from any repercussions for their actions, anyway.

Don't take those complaints and blocks of text too seriously though. It may just be me overthinking or nitpicking. The show is still decent, and I think it's a shame it was so unsuccessful. It would have been interesting to see the crew behind it take a swing at another Rider.

And for what it's worth, the action is very good. There is a lot of original action footage, and it's pretty damn good. That Emmy was well deserved.