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What are you watching (Sentai edition)
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11-03-2021, 08:25 PM
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8969
Fish Sandwich
The Immortal King Tasty
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Every diner you've ever been to.
Posts: 3,833
~Fish's Zenkai Tour!~
epic 34 – Tensou Sentai Goseiger
I feel like it's my destiny to one day be a huge fan of Goseiger. I mean, defending the planet may be an angel's duty, but defending unpopular toku shows is
mine
, and not too long after it ended, Goseiger was without a doubt the Worst Sentai Ever. Flanked to either side by massive fan-favorite seasons, it was like this go-to fandom punching bag back in 2011, when I was getting into all this stuff. Granted, I don't recall the specific complaints ever being anything more harsh than "it was really bland", but from the way people talked about it, you'd swear that was some heinous criminal offence. Of course, people have moved on since, because the whole joke of this running gag is that there's inevitably going to be a new worst thing for people to dogpile on, but even now, that still leaves poor Goseiger without a particularly large vocal fandom. (In my limited experience, as always!)
All of that means that Goseiger is a series I kind of feel this half-connection to already, even though this is the very last show on the tour I haven't seen in full (again, I came in right after this show ended.) Indeed, I hadn't seen
any
of Goseiger proper, beyond crossovers they were in, where they always seemed like cool enough dudes to me. I've come
really really
close to starting the show a few times over the years, actually, but I always seem to end up putting it off, and I legitimately do feel bad about it in this case! I've got every reason to have watched this show already.
The designs and aesthetics have only ever grown on me with time, for one thing. I remember not liking the suits too much at first, before I realized their color balance is basically perfect and also that I just plain like when Sentai suits use lots of white, so now I adore the Goseiger suits. I thought the Tensouder was the most peculiar transformation device imaginable – a head that eats trading cards – but with the benefit of a decade of hindsight, I've realized that's the strength of that concept, because even now, there is nothing else
remotely
like it. The mecha were always pretty neat to me, with Gosei Great being exactly the kind of design I picture when I picture a Sentai robo. In general, Goseiger shoots for this cool fantasy vibe very much in the vein of Zyuranger (right down to having the team name also written in kanji at the bottom of the show's logo to explain what it means), and I tend to be all over that stuff to begin with.
And then there's this one very particular thing that pushed me towards ~almost~ watching Goseiger, which was just seeing the posts for its releases on the fansub group MillionFold Curiosity's website while going to watch some of the other Sentai they subbed. (i.e. Megaranger and Gingaman.) This might seem like an extremely minor anecdote to be bringing up, but this honestly did leave a notable impact on me. The thing about those release posts is that they also included these enthusiastic little blurbs basically just gushing a bit about the show, and something about seeing that done for
Goseiger
– a show that had already been subbed and that nobody liked or cared about – it kinda struck a chord with me, as someone so familiar with liking unpopular toku. Seeing unabashed affection for Goseiger was both refreshing and a little touching, and thanks to their extremely convenient and thorough Goseiger Monster File, I also got to learn all about how every monster in this show is named after and loosely themed around a movie for some inexplicable reason, and like, I just can't hate that kind of weird attention to detail!
So clearly Goseiger is actually pretty cool, right? I think Goseiger is pretty cool. I mean, I haven't seen it, but I think we can all agree – Goseiger is pretty cool.
...Okay, well, if you need more convincing, I can at least make an argument based around the one episode I
have
watched now, which I found to be a textbook well-executed premiere. I mean it, too! Start to finish, everything here felt very purposeful, and on top of that clarity, it's also got heart and excitement. Writing a first episode for a Sentai is always this tricky balancing act of exposition, action, and drama, and Goseiger finds time for all of those in fairly equal measure, all without it feeling cramped or messy.
The very first thing the show does, before the opening even plays, is establish the conflict for the series by way of a proper inciting incident, with a monster blowing up the Tower of Heaven on behalf of the group of alien invaders he's part of, while also getting into a confrontation with Gosei Red, a Gosei Angel who you can probably gather isn't too thrilled about a place called the "Tower of Heaven" being destroyed by monsters. So right away, we've got action, we've got our good guys and our bad guys, we've got a bit of a rivalry going on between two of them, we've got some hints of world-building and mythology for the show's universe... did I mention we're not even quite
two minutes
into this thing yet? It's a heck of a cold open, and the very clearly evil bad guys immediately causing destruction versus a literal angel brandishing a heroic sword and declaring himself a defender of all life on Earth definitely sets up the straightforward style of Goseiger well. They may have consciously avoided having the villains be demons, but the appeal of heroes who are even more unquestionably the good guys than usual is immediately present. This Gosei Red guy just seems like someone you can rely on, you know?
Really, throughout the episode Alata is pretty great. Everything I've ever seen of or heard about his character suggests he's a surprisingly nuanced take on a Red, and the way he's portrayed in the premiere matches up with all that. He's bubbly, youthful, and eager to leap into action, but he's clearly not a totally carefree idiot or anything either. I really enjoyed the little emotional core this episode finds once it picks up after that intro. A hair over a week later, Alata has already formed the Goseigers along with the four other angels in-training who happened to be on Earth when their way back home got blown up, and they've settled into a routine of fighting evil well enough. It's a good underdog setup for the team and everything, and again, the exposition is worked in there without breaking the episode's flow, but the beauty of skipping over that chunk of the origin story is that this episode gets to be about something else. More specifically, Goseiger continues to do Zyuranger proud by centering all its attention on the heroes helping out some kid with their problems.
Alata overhears a kid by the name of Nozomu trying to work up the courage to apologize to some other kids about an argument they got in, and when Nozomu can't quite bring himself to do the right thing, Alata swoops in like a proper angel to be the voice guiding him along the proper path. I know enough about Goseiger to know Nozomu is more than a one-off character, and that "just give it a try" is Alata's whole motto, and that's another way in which this is an extremely efficient debut. Even ignoring that this is all important setup, this works really well as a typical weekly plot, and the whole thing Alata is imparting about how you never even have a chance if you don't make the attempt... I mean, that's just solid life advice? I mean, dang, as if this episode weren't on fire already, they even made space for a moral in there. It's a strong backbone for the story, and I quite liked both how Nozomu gets caught up in the action, and how that so clearly frames the kind of hero Alata is. I'm always going to be in favor of a superhero story where the protagonist helps people beyond simply fighting villains.
The fighting villains part is pretty cool too though! As with everything else, the climax is very straightforward and very classic. It's the whole team all together, transforming for the first time, posing in front of explosions while doing their roll call, and then demonstrating their cool powers. Which might make it sound "bland", but on top of being made way more exciting by how it pays off the plot with Nozomu, you also just can't go wrong with a fight like this? It's a proven structure, with this nice escalation of the team going from their sidearms, to their personal weapons, and then finally bringing those all together to form the obligatory bazooka. The shot of them after landing the finishing blow makes them look cool, and there's still time after that to have Nozomu making that apology, and to bring back that dude Gosei Red was taking on at the start to make for a suspenseful cliffhanger. Again, they really stuffed this thing full!
I'm rather satisfied with this premiere, if that somehow hasn't been made clear enough yet. Again, I'm also pretty sure I'd be satisfied with Goseiger in general if I'd actually sit down and watch it one of these days. After all, I am mildly ashamed I'm not already part of the crowd hailing it as severely underrated (I'm sure they're out there somewhere!), which is probably why I'm basically doing that anyway despite having such a limited frame of reference to go off of. But really, it
is
a pretty cool show, isn't it?
__________________
誰かの笑顔のためだろ?
Last edited by Fish Sandwich; 03-05-2022 at
07:15 PM
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