[Fish Sandwich]

(Fish Sandwich also watched Kamen Rider Zi-O - EP30)

Zi-O Trinity was my pick for best suit design of 2019 in Switchblade's usual year-end thread, and as much as I'll be happy to tell Die all about Rising Hopper soon enough, I still stand by that decision no question. It's pretty handily my favorite Zi-O form, for sure. The suit itself is cool, and everything around the suit is even cooler, thus further coloring my opinion of the design. I'm even happy it's the suit that killed catalog scans, because Trinity was also the last in a long line of designs that I thought looked horrendously ugly at first based on a single low-resolution drawing, only to immediately see what they were going for once we got to see it properly. I mean, I remember thinking Dangerous Zombie looked bad at first. Dangerous Zombie. I honestly don't miss that part of the news cycle.

But yeah, a lot of my attachment to Trinity indeed stems from how the show used it as much as the actual design. This was a really fun episode, and like I mention in the old post, the idea that I could even say that about a Kamen Rider thing that also wants to give Blade an epilogue speaks volumes. I've talked a few times lately in these threads about how there are certain Rider shows I just feel aren't asking to be followed up on, and Blade was always way up there. I don't know if I've ever put it this way before, but it's not really about trying to "resolve" the story ruining the ending, because that finale will always be great. It's more about how *because* that was such a strong point to leave Blade on, trying to add on to that is liable to come of as tacky, and that's putting an unfortunate weight on whatever new story you're trying to tell.

I don't even have an elaborate explanation of why I ended up feeling this way, but somehow, these episodes didn't come off as tacky at all to me. It did pretty much exactly the thing I explicitly did not want to ever see for years and years, and made me like it, because I guess Zi-O had just won me over that much. The stuff with Blade in them is really enjoyable, and the stuff with Sougo and everyone else is maybe even better.

Oh, and before I forget, we've got the latest evolution of that Toki no Ouja motif here, with Trinity's theme.

It's a track for Zi-O that finally sounds a little more traditionally heroic, which really fits the tone of this part of the show, and what Trinity represents about it perfectly. Oma Zi-O never had friends to combine with, right? The future's looking a lot brighter than expected for a lot of people right now, and hey, maybe that's why I legitimately like the place Kenzaki and Hajime end up in here! It stops mattering how much it fits as part of Blade's story, because it's a fantastic part of Zi-O's before it's anything else.