[Kurona]

I love Decade. It may not exactly make my top 10 Riders or anything, and there might be a few pretty dumb things in there, but... damn if it isn't great at doing what it set out to do. It's a bit hard to get out there what hasn't been said already in very great detail by both Die and Fish, but as long as we're talking about the series looping around to the beginning; I might as well say what I said at the start of this thread: it's about as perfect a tribute it could be to the type of era Heisei 1 was. Where, like Fish said, every show was being something so incredibly unique and stood out as its own wholly different thing that it would be difficult to cobble together; how Decade respects that and in its final movie, straight up says that a big part of what makes them good is that they are their own stories.

Said movie... oh boy, well. Fittingly for Decade it is a mess, and while I appreciated the gusto of '71 Rider having the first commander of Shocker be a straight up nazi and how that conveyed so straightforwardly what Ishinomori was portraying Shocker - a fascist destroyer of life, autonomy and love - as; it maybe does not work so well in 2009 to have one of the main characters put on his costume! And... man, along with everything else in the Decade portion; that really does make me think of how wild it is that we often recommend W as a good starting point for a lot of people getting into Rider when this movie is practically necessary for it, huh?

BUT ASIDE FROM THAT, y'know, I thought it was really good going back to it! It's impossible to deny how straight up cool it is getting to see the whole squad, girl included henshin for the final battle; Decade's acceptance of his role as the Destroyer of Worlds being something both so tragic yet so fascinating; everything Wataru-but-he's-maybe-god-or-the-author says about the nature of the worlds and stories and how Tsukasa has formed his own and how they all bring him back with... gah, I'm rambling. When Decade hits its emotional and metaphorical points it wants to it's just really really good, and always what I think of looking back on it. Wonderful little show. Wonderful little group of weirdos