[Fish Sandwich]

It is insanely rewarding whenever my initial faith in a series starts paying off like this. I'm sure there will a bump or two along the way at the very least, but these past couple episodes have given me so much trust that Saber has a solid plan for what it's doing, and it's also doing a great job at making each step along the way exciting in its own right.

I mentioned last time what an appropriately epic fantasy touch the use of Espada's gear was, and that kind of theming is proving to be a strong suit of this show. There are all these awesome plot elements at the core of the Saber/Calibur conflict here; proud warriors having to choose between loyalty and creed; legacies that are passed on, and doubt being cast on them; mortal enemies reaching a greater sense of mutual understanding through battle; it feels HUGE.

Mei's introductory shot in the opening has always been her in that office she's never been to, right? And that's always felt like it was from a version of this show I maybe would've liked more. The simple, human show about Touma Kamiyama, up-and-coming writer by day, and swordsman by night. One that maybe would've captured the same sort of slice-of-life vibe Ghost often had. The direction the actual show has is emphatically not that, and, perhaps as a natural result of the production woes of the year it's made in, Saber has gone out of its way to exclude any kind of extraneous civilian guest characters. But the tone and style they've found for the story instead takes excellent advantage of the motifs to feel natural anyway, and I'm super happy about that.

And hey, it looks like Saber will get to have a huge emphasis on differing perspectives and moral relativity going forward, and there are few writers I would trust more with those concepts than the people who wrote Ghost, so I have no doubt that much will be recaptured. The reveal of Kamijou's motivations didn't disappoint, and this was a suitably epic sendoff for him. I mean, they used my idea about letting him ride a dragon, so already it's got that going for it, but his reconciliation at the very end with Touma felt surprisingly earned; not really justifying his crimes, but also allowing him to gracefully admit defeat in his final(?) moments.

It's the kind of thing I was hoping for, where the show had a good reason for keeping his character so ambiguous, because it feeds directly into Touma's dilemma by the end here. Even the Sentai similarity hanging over the show is apparently just a set up to tear everything down in a way a Sentai show straight up can't do. It seriously feels like everything is starting to come together. I can even tell the Megid trio apart now! Though admittedly they still really could've used a focus episode each...

At any rate, this was an awesome conclusion to the first arc that did a lot of great setup for a shift in direction. As ever, I eagerly await the next chapter.

Oh, and I can't smoothly mention this, but I believe the music track that plays right after everyone transforms with Mei in the background was a new one, and it really stuck out and got me hyped up. Kousuke Yamashita has done some very stellar soundtracks (Gaim is one of my favorites in all of Rider), and while it's taken a bit for Saber's BGM to start sticking in my head, I'm finally hitting that point where I'm starting to really appreciate it.