[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Well, him or Todoroki, who seems like The New Pet for the writing team on the second phase. Todoroki gets WAY more of the spotlight in the second phase, for better or worse.

There's a joking defense I like to make about the later part of Hibiki, which is that it's a lot better if you just pretend it's Inoue's Todoroki fan-fiction. I've been meaning to find some excuse to bring that up in here, and I guess you confirming for me I'm not just misremembering the (excessive?) amount of focus he gets is just that. It's not some particularly clever thing, but I love describing it that way because it straddles a fine line between sounding like genuine apologist talk ("you just need to adjust your expectations") and an outright condemnation ("it's about the quality you'd expect from your average fan-fic").

That ambiguity expresses my conflicted feelings on what happened to this show pretty much perfectly; I don't actually hate it anywhere near as much as I think a lot of people do, but even then, I wouldn't exactly say I'm fond of it on any significant level either. Except maybe those first two Inoue episodes, which, again, I legitimately mistook for part of the old era somehow.