[Fish Sandwich]

Wow, Kurona, you went as all out as I do on that one. Kudos!

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Originally Posted by Kurona

It's kind of wild seeing other people have such similar experiences to me; there's something kind of nice about it?

If the stuff I'm saying about Kuuga is in any way doing a good job representing what other fans like about it, I'm very happy to hear that. I'm just speaking from the heart, so like, for you to tell me you had a similar experience, that's kind of nice for me too.

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Often when there's some sort of all-forms-upgrade thing like with Wizard's Dragon Styles or Build's Hazard Forms, it's the main form that gets the treatment first (here, Flame and Rabbit/Tank). And I get why of course because it's the most effective way to show an upgrade, but the Rising forms making such a clearly big deal of Rising Mighty in building it up not just makes it exciting to get to what's obviously the most important one, but also makes it feel like a much bigger event -- and one that might have a few secrets waiting in store.

I'm not sure if I really stressed enough just how much I love that part. Kuuga basically gets to have that big new form impact twice because of the way it decided to dole them out, and even if you argue Rising Titan's episodes were underbaked, it becomes a simple matter of "well, that wasn't the main event anyway". I don't think it needs to be applied to every show (episode 9 of Wizard is one of my favorites for a reason!), but for Kuuga, at least, I just can't imagine it being as satisfying any other way.

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So, why is that? ... because the vast majority of romances me and him were coming across in fiction were ones that were incredibly forced.

Tacked-on romance subplots can be a real problem! I don't want to pretend I'm good at giving writing advice, but I think the more and more my tastes have developed over time, the more I realize I think building relationships between characters is like, the absolute most important part of most stories. Regardless of what kind of relationship it is. Friends, enemies, lovers, whatever, that kind of stuff is what drives conflict, and if you fail to establish identifiable motivations for your characters, you end up with things like buddy cop style stories about people who are best friends for no reason, or, indeed, minimal effort, last-second romance plotlines put in to give the illusion of some added emotion.

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There's no "two characters set up to be a couple", or "two characters set up to be friends". There's just two characters.

And this! This is just one of the best summations of why Kuuga works I've ever heard.

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Are you sure there's nothing you'd still want to post from that abandoned project? It'd be really interesting for me to see, especially if compared to Shout's work!

The "compared to Shout's work" thing is actually part of why, if I did want to do that, I'd sort of want to rework it into something more extensive. Like, literally just bring this thread back to life at some point way off in the future when I rewatch Kuuga in its entirety again with the new subs (and that is definitely going to happen at some point). Probably not something to count on, though. As it is, I feel like there's only so much point to saying what I was going to now, but since you asked, I can give some digest highlights:

- So, first of all, extra context for that "over a hundred" statement. The exact number of errors was 123, and that's actually only from 13-24. For the Blu-Ray releases, MCS had completely brand new translations done by one of the people from Over-Time for 1-12, and as a result, those were pretty beautiful in their own right. And while I'm at praising what MCS was doing right with their newest versions, I honestly think the cypher for the Grongi language is the ideal way to handle it. That way it's mysterious without just looking unfinished, but also, for some reason, I feel like doing that would be considered "unprofessional" or something and I kind of get why Shout didn't go that route.

- One of the errors I was going to single out, from episode 22, was the most upset I got at a single mistake. It's Enokida's mom talking to her over the phone about her broken promise to Sayuru. Enokida was supposed to help him make a little papercraft project thingy that came with some book. These are known as furoku in Japan, which loosely basically means a bonus thing included, but more literally means "appendix". Despite it being shown on screen right after, and the word itself referring very specifically to the appendices of things like books, and not the body part, MCS had this line as "He said you'd take him to get his appendix checked", which is both a weirdly mature thing for a small child to worry about, and also makes Enokida look ABSURDLY neglectful. Not to mention it goes on to be a plot point in its own right, with Jean buying that book, so screwing it up has long-term consequences. Shout's subs have the line in question as "You promised him you'd help him put together his little project", which more than adequately gets the point across, especially with furoku being a hard word to find a 1:1 equivalent for.

- The runner up is from episode 26, where Sugita explains to Ichijou that they found objects resembling an owl's pellets in the victims got mangled by what I presume was the team at MCS not knowing what "pellet" meant in this context. Or at least I didn't know. Which is why it's helpful that Ichijou's response is a common trick for exposition on a term, where he gives the definition in the form of a question, asking if Sugita means the indigestible parts of food birds cough up. MCS just ran wild with that exchange, with Sugita saying nonsense about finding feathers in the victims (despite Buuro using a blowgun), and Ichijou asking if that's like when cholesterol clogs your arteries, which is just... ???

- The cop scenes in general were prone to errors like that due to the highly technical nature of the dialogue, which is one of the things I tried to stress in that post. When I single out moments like this, it probably makes it look like MCS was just awful at what they did, but on top of the huge chunks of episodes that are fine, I think Kuuga's dialogue is WAY more complex than the average tokusatsu series, so I also really feel for how much trouble it must've been. The thing to remember while I say all this from my armchair is that I'm a total amateur myself. Heck, I've literally never even studied Japanese in any formal manner, which is why I always feel super guilty picking on translations as though I have any authority on the subject. It takes a lot of dedication to try bringing a series to your fellow fans like that. In 20 years, they were literally the only group who stepped up to do Kuuga in its entirety, and as glad as I am we have something better now, they do deserve credit for that.

I think that actually covers pretty much everything of value I would've said? There were like a half dozen other random errors I would've talked about, but it was mostly just poking fun at how dumb the police end up looking in their investigations, and that doesn't paint much more of a picture than I already have. Basically all the mistakes are the result of one problem, which is making assumptions. I'm mostly just still super happy none of this is worth worrying about anymore.