[Fish Sandwich]

Super happy to see the thread back, first of all! Hopefully you can keep up a pace you feel comfortable with, but never feel bad if you have to take another extended break for any reason.

It's great to be back to watching this show right now, though. Since it's been a few months, episode 5 was a real reminder of just how rock solid this show is. DreamSword is dead-on about Liu Bei being a highlight, for one thing. His immense likability is what it makes an episode like this where basically everything goes wrong for him work super well.

You usually don't write an of episode of a toku show so that the main hero loses both fights he's in, least of all so early on, and that's only the tip of the iceberg here. Not only is he failing his partners, he's pretty distinctly failing his friend, too, because Gongsun Zan isn't really wrong about him not having the same level of investment in the whole martial arts thing that she does. He's basically being called out for doing the usual superhero thing of disregarding his daily life in favor of getting wrapped up in bigger adventures, and I like that the show is even touching on that as more than just a fun joke. The plot hinges nicely around this singular central idea that Liu Bei is spreading himself too thin, and it all comes back to bite him at once in the end. As usual, the structure is great, and I'm excited to to see how that cliffhanger plays out.