[Fish Sandwich]

Oh, s***, does everybody else find Evolt kinda boring, too? I haven't been in any of the Build threads for like a month now because... well, let's see, how do I put this?

It's like... I'm still enjoying the show as much as ever, and I'm also starting to get a bit tired of it? It's insanely hard to describe but what it comes to is the narrative is maybe getting a bit too crazy for my tastes. I long for the simplicity of Build just being a vigilante hero who fought monsters while solving mysteries on the side. Even though the directions the story has gone in since then have been interesting and the characters always hold it together, the current arc going on right now has been hard for me to enjoy because it's seriously called my attention to how repetitive the last few years of Rider have been in a lot of ways.

We've had the collectibles used as Dragonball-esque plot devices (see also: Ex-Aid, Ghost), additional Riders who start off as really tough bad guys before becoming way less tough good guys (see also: Ex-Aid, Ghost, Drive), the one irredeemably evil jerk Rider who shows up in the back half of the show to act as the "final boss" and thus has somewhat flat characterization (see also: Ex-Aid, Drive), some kind of vaguely apocalyptic change in the status quo that totally prevents the characters from doing anything remotely extraneous to the central plot (see also: Ex-Aid, Gaim), and so on.

I must stress that none of these story beats are inherently bad (and indeed, part of the reason they keep using them is because they work), but now that we have almost as many "Neo-Heisei" shows as we do just Heisei ones, and with Build technically being the last Heisei Rider (or is that the next guy?), I'm starting to get to a point where I want to see another huge shakeup in Kamen Rider's style on the level of Double.

I don't know how much that qualifies as a controversial opinion, or what this bold new era would look like, but that thought's been nagging at me for a while now.