[Fish Sandwich]

Faiz 17-18:

Episode 17 of Faiz is an all-time classic. Everything about it comes together so smoothly. First of all, the direction in this and the last episode feels a lot more dynamic than was standard for Rider at the time. It's still that same rough, early Heisei style, but some of the shot compositions and everything are fairly inspired. All in support of a very climactic story that, by paying off what's been going on with Takumi the past few episodes, touches on a lot of the series' broader themes, and shows where the main characters are at right now.

The way Takumi struggles with the morality of his actions here is something you just can't get anywhere but Faiz. Not even in the episodes of Kiva where Inoue used the same basic idea. The kind of personality Takkun has makes it that much more devastating to see him in this state. There are layers to what you can take from it. It's shocking to see him beaten down like this, but the fact that he's getting so upset about it in the first place is also the biggest proof so far of what a good person he is underneath. This dilemma is positively eating him up, and yet because he's spent his life pushing people away, he has absolutely no idea how to express any of this to his friends, putting him in this self-destructive spiral where they start to get frustrated with his inability to open up, leading to Takumi hating himself that much more.

It's compelling character drama, and a perfect time for Takumi and Yuuji to have their first major interaction, venting to each other about problems they can't actually talk about, since they're each under the impression the other is just an innocent bystander in all the Orphenoch business going on. Dramatic irony at its finest. Eventually Yuuji's problem becomes Takumi's when an Orphenoch the former was dealing with starts tearing up a university. The dominoes start falling into place as a combination of Yuuji's remarks, and seeing the Orphenoch's casualties up close and personal, pushes Takumi to his inevitable rebound, getting him to push aside his own doubts and focus on the lives he knows need to be saved. The resulting fight scene is by far one of the show's most memorably awesome moments. The theme song powerup. The light when Takumi transforms being emphasized, kind of mirroring the first episode. Faiz's confident, almost cocky body language. Two finishers for two monsters, including a good old Rider Kick. It's great. I love it.

Episode 18 is... I mean, you know, it's mostly Keitarou getting taken advantage of by a little girl. Whatever. Look, the show just wanted to relax for a bit after like a month straight of heavy-duty angst, okay? It's fine. Kusaka's even on vacation after almost completely ruining Takumi's life, the jerk. So you don't have to see him, either.

では、今回非常に苦労したファイズ翻訳ミスコーナーです～！今日の翻訳ミスはこれだけど・・・



「普通こんなもん持ってわざわざ来るか？」

I may have went slightly insane trying to pick an error for these two episodes. See, the routine I've settled into for Faiz is to just watch Agony's version, and then when I notice something off, go and check TV-Nihon's version afterwards to see if the mistake originated there. Both of them being wrong is another one of the criteria I'm shooting for, since it means there's no avoiding it. In this case I ended up watching 17 in its entirety twice over, which I told myself was because it was just that awesome, but it quickly became both a revelation and a nightmare. Feel free to glaze over this part if niche discussion of fansubbing isn't your thing, but I seriously need to vent about this.

Judging just by that episode, Agony actually is doing considerable work to fix TV-N's subs, with a ton of genuine errors corrected on top of simply making the lines sound more natural. Much more than I had them pegged for. Although 31 onwards are apparently barely retouched because they wanted the batch out in time for Zi-O? We'll see when I get there. Anyway, that's the revelation. Agony did good work, and despite what I'm about to say next, I'd definitely recommend their version of the show for people looking to watch Faiz for the first time. The nightmare is that in spite of this, they've also introduced a ton of new errors in the vein of what I complained about with episode 5. Which means even though between the both of them, there were loads of mistakes, it was really hard to find one in common.

I've settled on this line, which I've decided is "close enough" because despite being translated in vastly different ways, both are wrong. Agony's translation is right up there to see like usual, and TV-N's version is the immortal "Who carries magazines around while intentionally going?". So you can tell why I think Agony is an improvement. But the thing is, they basically just made up a line of a dialogue that sounded right instead of translating what was being said. Mari came here in the middle of an Orphenoch rampage to show Takumi a magazine article she found about curing nekoji- er, people with sensitive tongues. He's making a surly remark here, which Agony got down perfectly, but the part they either missed, or ignored, is that Takumi is expressing surprise she came all this way at a time like this for his sake. One of the big threads in this arc is the friendship the main trio has built up being tested, and, just in time for the big scene where Takkun gets his groove back, this is meant to be a reminder of how much these people actually do care about each other. So once again, some of the story's subtext is being obscured. Hopefully next time it won't take me three giant paragraphs to explain that, but man, this was not a fun one for me.

W 17-18:



These freakin' episodes, I tell ya'. Keiichi Hasegawa doesn't mess around. Did you see some of the crap that happened in Ultraman Nexus? Because it might actually be less intense than this arc, which somehow involves both making the audience sympathize with a drug dealer, and showing how drugs ruin the lives of innocent youth. AT THE SAME TIME.

I recall this being the first W arc that really deeply resonated with me when I first watched it, and it's no wonder why I was so impressed. These episodes hit hard with everything they do, and it's hard for it not to leave an impact. On the drugs corrupting the youth front, it goes all out on the metaphor, with a Victim/Monster of the Week who picked up a Gaia Memory because she was depressed and wanted to be better at sports, who also ends up passing the thing around with disatrous results in a manner disturbingly reminiscent of needle sharing. Not to mention the withdrawal symptoms that come later. Really, the whole thing is disturbing. It doesn't even go all after-school special on you, either. It knows it did its job portraying all of this well enough you'll get the message without it having to say a thing.

As for the dealer bit, I have to admit I don't think W and Nazca's rivalry had the best build up, between their fight scenes being slightly underwhelming for varying reasons, and the simple fact that, even though it was to the benefit of those stories, Kirihiko wasn't given a ton of screentime when an arc didn't call for it. Still, it was totally serviceable, and the way it all comes together here is crazy memorable. Seriously, as good as FangJoker's debut was, this arc blew my mind then, and it still does now.

It also has my favorite episode titles in the series, on a side note. I love a good naming scheme, and while Double's double titles with double-meaning letters give you maybe a bit too much information to take in at once, to the point where I used to be a bit more iffy on them, it's one of those things I've come to appreciate over the years.