[Fish Sandwich]

As for the actual episode, the thought of Die being so weirdly hard on it also fills me with sadness.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

It felt a little too much in Raising Questions mode, and that’s not a blast for me. We’re starting to dig into Chalice’s situation, the specifics of his weird cards and powers, but it’s mostly just the episode explicitly stating Yes His Cards Are Weird. There are weird things about how he can Henshin into different cards’ forms, and it is weird that he uses a Spirit card to turn into Hajime. There’s no real new information given, just making sure that Kenzaki is aware of all of it.

Now I'm kind of going to be repeating what Switchblade said, too, but this is MAJOR new information given here. It was completely unconfirmed up until these episodes, and especially him using the Float card in his belt, that the way his transformations work is by literally just turning directly into that monster. If you were already assuming that, than I mean, credit to your detective skills, but the info these episodes give is an absolutely massive hint towards Hajime's true nature, and once again, I think it comes at a really clever time, in an episode all about how much he's starting to fit in with humans, and even (mostly) get along with Kenzaki.

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Some of it is Tachibana going into the specifics on the cards that, as much as I love Androzani84 laying it all out on the boards, is not what I want Blade The TV Show to focus on. The minutiae of the magic monster cards that give superpowers to heroic mans… y’know, maybe better left to the imagination? Not that dramatically compelling to me.

Which is why it's great that the show is bringing it up largely to immediately criticize the idea that any of it matters. We need a scene of Tachibana explaining the mechanics of the cards to Mukki so that Mukki can completely miss the point of the lesson, and start acting like this is some merchandise-driven children's show (!), obsessed with increasing his power by increasing his collection. This is exemplified by the moment where Leangle tries to pull a "I guess I'd better try out these new cards", a staple of that kind of story, and immediately gets chewed out by Tachibana for just thoughtlessly swiping those things for the sake of it. It's this really neat subversion that also subtly explains why the other Riders don't actually use the cards that much outside of finishing moves. Like a lot of things in this two-parter, it's a very refined and thoughtful portrayal of the show's world and characters.

Compare this to the first episode, where one of the many, many meme lines I didn't mention is Garren awkwardly saying "a Category 8, huh? Interesting" during the fight at the start to call attention to the Undead's ranks being displayed on their belt buckles when they're about to be defeated, a bit of exposition that you quickly realize is rather sloppy when Tachibana never uses that card, and thus we have no idea what exactly is so interesting about the fact that bat monster was a Category 8.

It's been mentioned that these were Shou Aikawa's first episodes of the show, and I honestly think even just right now you can how much sharper his writing arguably is in a lot of areas. Which is maybe apparent in that the thing you seemed to have the biggest problem with was the lack of thought with regards to geography, something so ubiquitous to Kamen Rider it's basically never worth bringing up.

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Originally Posted by FreshToku

Well now I can never listen to that song seriously anymore.

Ironically, I only started legitimately liking Rebirth after finding out about that meme. I distinctly remember finding Tachibana's singing voice kind of grating the first time I watched Blade, which in retrospect was probably just me being disappointed I wasn't going to be hearing Kakusei anymore. Any song would've felt like a downgrade at that point.