[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

The direction uses a few killer shots, like that hillside scene in the top screenshot.

So, before I even knew you'd actually bring it up yourself in the text of that post, just from seeing the screenshot before reading anything, I instantly knew I wanted to comment on how much I like that framing against that dialogue? It's fairly basic stuff, but just maximizing the literal physical distance between Gentarou and JK in that moment, that's such a great way to emphasize the difficulty of them making an actual connection. JK's even on the lower ground, because he just can't stop being the lowest of the low!

...Which, yeah, I can understand why every now and then I'll see fans who kinda can't stand the guy. It's one of those things where it's really important to the point of the show that this character exists the way he does and everything, but it's also kinda a show about hanging out with these fun characters you'd want to be around, so...

I feel like JK is meant to give off more of a "oh, that lovable rascal" vibe, at least later on, but obviously the whole audience isn't liable to be as generous as Gentarou.

Heck, even I'm barely sticking up for the guy out of the gate, because I'd much rather talk about something else in this episode! Which is the insert theme that debuts here:

Giant Step might be my actual favorite Rider insert theme ever? I'm both naturally terrible at ranking things and also just plain don't like to, but when I try to think of other Rider inserts that mean this much to me, the ones that immediately come to mind can still be counted on one hand, all these years later? (It's like, Destiny's Play, Just the Beginning... probably some other ones but it's already hard to say definitively...)

On the surface level, I just love the overall sound of it, of course. It's super energetic and has the electronic vibe and everything to make it fit perfectly as something that pumps up the excitement for a fight scene in Fourze specifically. But how well it fits in a scene is only sorta half the equation, because part of the idea of even doing insert themes like this is that fans get to listen to them outside of the show whenever they want to bring that same energy into their own lives, and Giant Step absolutely crushes that part. It's to the point where it's a song that's almost more directly for the audience than the characters?

The title is obviously an allusion to Neil Armstrong's famous quote contrasting how the literal small step he took onto the moon represented an enormous accomplishment for humanity -- something that would've been thought impossible not that long prior to it happening. What the lyrics of the song do is spin that into something more personal in scale, encouraging the listener to keep taking those small steps in life even in the face of frustration and uncertainty, because they'll turn out to be much bigger leaps than you'll realize at first. It definitely loses something when I talk about it like this (as I always insist -- I'm not anywhere near the wordsmith Shouko Fujibayashi is!), but despite not literally just being Gentarou singing about friendship or something, I think it does a brilliant job of representing Fourze as a whole. It's got the space stuff in the sound and language, it's got the high school stuff in the themes of finding your future and all that, it's got the teamwork because it's a duet, it's got the optimism of a show designed to make people smile... what more could you ask for?

Well, actually, in my specific case, I also have to thank Giant Step for introducing me to May'n, but honestly, that's like a whole separate rant at this point, and I've already gone on longer than I expected to. Suffice it to say "got me to watch Macross Frontier" is not something most Rider songs can brag about.