[Fish Sandwich]

I don't usually like posting screencaps in these threads because I think it sort of overpowers the modestly sized ones Die uses, but, man, I gotta make an exception here to add on to just how beautiful that conversation between Hibiki and Asumu really is:



Like, you gotta understand, this whole episode is almost nothing but more stuff that was going to get Takatera booted off the show later. Look at how perfectly positioned the sun is on the horizon there! You can't cheat that! They had to go to the shore at the exact right time of day, at the exact right spot, to get the exact right shot, and they did. All for the sake of making the episode look prettier. To let it breathe in the majesty of mother nature so that the show could better establish that unique identity. Utterly fantastic work, even if I have to agree with Die that I definitely would've fired these guys too.

As for the music aspect of the show, yeah, that's obviously a pretty central theme. I don't know if I need to explain this to anyone or not, but Hibiki's name is even a sort of pun, reflected in the title of the first episode, which is "hibiku oni" in Japanese. I'm going to do a terrible job elaborating here, so forgive me for trying to sound smart, but basically, hibiki (響き) is a totally ordinary word that, broadly speaking, means "sound". The "ki" is written in hiragana, entirely phonetic characters that are used as suffixes to kanji to dictate their inflection; hibiku (響く) is a verb, for example. Kamen Rider Hibiki instead uses the kanji for oni at the end, which is read as "ki" in compound words, resulting in 響鬼, which is pronounced identically, but now literally means "sound demon", which definitely tells you everything you need to know about the series. Other Riders in the show (spoilers?) will be following this same trend.

Or something like that! Hopefully that explanation was easy enough to follow and also not too frustrating for people who know languages way better than me. The point is, sound is baked so deeply into this show, it's in the very name. Plus, whenever I get to talk about why Toshihiko Sahashi is my favorite Rider composer, I get to mention that he's the guy they went to for the show literally about music, which is always fun!