[Fish Sandwich]

Yeah, I'd definitely say that's some bitter chocolate!

I probably don't need to explain that the whole reason I tried to take stock of my opinion on Hanto last time was because I expected his big Rider debut might change a lot about his character. Between the episode preview and the way the narrative has been set up, I fully expected to see a very different side to the guy here. What I expected a bit less was just how far they went with it.

That being said, considering everything about the sort of overall story Gavv has been telling so far, I'm not sure in retrospect what part of this I shouldn't have seen coming? Kamen Rider Valen's debut is very much in line with what Gavv has done with Gavv himself. He has an origin story rooted so deeply in classic Rider tropes it almost feels like a retro throwback -- a man with a surgically altered body who shoulders great solitude while fighting an evil organization connected to those origins. It's harder to get more true to the original than that.

The modern part of it is that, as I was hoping for, Hanto is set up as the #2 Rider in the way we generally think of that term nowadays -- a foil who exists to contrast with our main protagonist, the differences serving to emphasize each character's uniquely interesting role in the story.

This is a debut that's placed pretty much perfectly. Those first five episodes seem to have left Shouma in a fairly stable place after a lot of wandering around, so with Gavv firmly settled in as the hero, the show immediately sets to tearing down Hanto's world to make Valen's introduction as unstable as possible.

I loved how the broad strokes are so close, and yet the emphasis of everything is completely different. Chiefly, Hanto doesn't seem to be in this for quite the right reasons. Shouma first became Gavv solely because he wanted to keep other people from losing what he did, and only later realized what he himself stood to gain by fighting. So of course, Valen is the opposite, with Hanto single-mindedly focused on avenging a personal loss before anything else. Gavv represents Shouma finally being able to liberate himself from the cage he spent his life in, but it's made readily apparent that Valen may well turn out to be a cage that Hanto has shortsightedly stepped into, manipulated by people using his sorrow to their gain.

It's pretty freakin' great, and I gotta give major props to action director Satoshi Fujita for cooking up such a wonderfully unique fight scene to cap this one off, because I think a wounded gunman viciously smacking around his foe melee-style in a desperate effort to compensate for his injuries is exactly the kind of memorable visual encapsulation of everything going on in the story that'll keep people always looking back on this episode very fondly in the long run.