[LeviathanBlossom]

I am late to the party but man, I too have a lot of feelings about Blade, lol

It was the first series I saw, as it aired, in Japan, so my five months of immersion with virtually no pre-existing Japanese language skills Did Not Help. And then there were the TV Nihon boards, where I would immediately go WTF Is Going On This Week, in the dark days before incredibly rapid English subtitles popped up the same day the episode aired. Fun times.

Blade, hilariously, is also where my Japanese listening comprehension actively and drastically improved, because I would literally record the episodes on a VHS tape (hiiiii, 2004) and then listen to lines over and over again trying to pick out the twelve words I knew and discover new ones.

I can absolutely see where the first episode felt like Too Much, and that is definitely a really fair take on how it presented a lot of the exposition; but it pretty much also immediately grabbed my attention and interest as someone who turned on the television wondering what the pretty boys and girls seen through channel surfing the previous week were doing. (TIMING, ok) I definitely agree that it started doing more heavy lifting with the character work in the second episode.

As a mostly-lurker who almost never sees people talk about Blade, the series that flung me down the Kamen Rider rabbit hole, I am 100% here for the (unexpected?) flood of people giving this show love, you guys are all awesome