[barnstenchfartface]

Finally got around to rewatching this episode, my opinion surprisingly hasn't changed much. At first maybe I thought the awesome GENM cameo just put me in a good mood, and I guess that could still be the case, but I think it was about as good a finale for this show as I could have expected. At the very least, I enjoyed it a lot more than 48.

Ultimately, I don't think Ghost is necessarily as terrible a show as people make it out to be, but I also don't think it was really very good. I was very excited about it going into it (this being the first Rider show I watched as it aired, and my general affinity for the suits and gear...at least for most of it). and that sort of came and went throughout the first half of the show, and there's generally been at least something throughout the entire show (even if relatively insignificant like the Ganmaizers) that kept my interest, but by and large I just wasn't able to care about much anything in the show since...a while ago.

But this honestly was a solid enough conclusion for the show that it was, and I can't claim to not have enjoyed it. Even sorta made me remember the days when I was more into it. It was a show with a lot of ideas and, dare I say, nearly infinite potential. I don't think it really took advantage of even most of it. But it did leave me with plenty to think about. And in the end it all came together aptly enough for me to be satisfied, I guess.

I have to wonder how different my opinion of the show would be if I'd watched it after it was over. Wizard, another much reviled show, easily and quickly became one of my favorites when I watched it. Would my inability to nitpick and form expectations week-to-week change how I viewed it and its characters? Would the fact that it would have ended up being a highly unpopular/divisive series to begin with set my expectations low enough that it would inevitably surpass them?

Would I still wish Onari didn't exist? There's at least one question I probably know the answer to.

But I really don't know. A surprising number of complaints I see about the show, as Fish Sandwich has commented on, stem from people either apparently not paying too much attention or just forgetting details about the plot or the setting. Now, I don't really share too many of those complaints, because forgetting stuff isn't a problem I have too much with this show. I've watched every episode at least twice, and was interested in a bunch of the lore stuff so I tended to keep tabs on stuff like the Asahi site and whatnot. But then I think, is that the problem then? Do I remember too much of this stuff? Does suffering through all the cliched lines and Onari-level-gags twice make it look worse than it actually is? Is the series actually a really obtuse and unintuitive mess and the only reason I do kinda understand it is because of the whole watching it twice thing?

Did watching the stupid idol episode twice irreparably damage my opinion of this show? Things to think about.

I guess I'll never really know. Watching the show for a third time to try and figure out if that works better for me is not something I'm particularly keen on doing. So I guess all I can do is shrug, sigh, and hope I like Ex-Aid a lot better (part of me wants to wait until ex-aid is over to give it its fair chance, but even that part knows that's not gonna happen. oh well).

In the end, at least, there's one thing I'm rather grateful about regarding Ghost, and that's that my understanding of Japanese has gotten a ton better over the past year. While not the only factor, watching Ghost raw week to week was honestly very educational and helpful. Helps that the ideas and dialogue in the show were both repetitive and relatively simple, but something is something. For...at least a few months now, it got to the point where I pretty much explicitly understood or at least got the gist of virtually everything in the raw, and just watched subs to clarify some lines and compare/contrast how I would word something vs. O-T. It's been pretty fun. I truly believe without first dipping my toes into raws with Ghost I never would have considered the idea of watching other shows that don't have subs, as I have had to do with, like Suite Precure. Which was a show I enjoyed more than Ghost itself (and taught me a fair amount, too) so...there's that. Thanks for that, Ghost.

Anyways, that's my two 2 am cents on Ghost. Presented in easy to digest indigestible ramble format probably...