[Fish Sandwich]

Fish Sandwich also watched Kamen Rider Saber Episode 22

This is about the point where my old posts about the episodes start getting noticeably longer, and from what I remember, they don't really stop, which is how you know I was actually starting to consciously realize Saber was special to me. I spend a lot of time talking in this particular one about how much I'd come around on Touma, but it's like, I was so totally absorbed in all of these guys by this point I just sort of naturally got fired up to dig into their adventures more and more, even though it often takes more time than I'd like to write up even that much. (And by the way, Die, this thread's fan-fiction shtick is reminding me all over how impressed I am by your endurance.)

But yeah, the show moved from what I felt was a thrilling act-one climax into this little trilogy of more leisurely paced, utterly rock solid three-parters, and cementing Touma as my favorite Rider in the show very much put everything in place for the show to just keep leaping to greater heights from here.

Die finally made a remark about the repetitive nature of Touma's speeches lately, but again, I really appreciate that the show decided to drill into his attitude towards heroism this thoroughly. The repetition in the formula these last six episodes have had is eased a lot for me because it's like the show's three writers all taking their own crack as the same base idea, and I think they each end up emphasizing different details. I remember feeling like Hasegawa here maybe made the actual nuts and bolts mechanics of the monster plot the most engaging, but when he was right there writing so much Double back in the day, it's hardly surprising he does well with this sort of thing.

The other thing that eases up the repetition is that, like I said, I consider these two-parters a sort of trilogy, and the plot will be picking some speed back up with some new wrinkles and twists shortly. I feel the month and a half spent with the foot on the brake was pretty much just the right length to reorient the series a bit. We stripped things down to the absolute basics with Touma, Mei, and Yuri, and now we're gradually wrapping the other Riders back in, except now there's like a ton of extra dramatic weight behind it. I feel like I'm probably rambling in circles again here, but yeah, I don't know, this episode was real good, and Saber's real cool, as ever.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Layton13

These are all unmistakably heroes, maybe minus Ren

Wow, you'll let Ren off with just a "maybe" here; that's very generous!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

Saber-text is called Ridermoji.

Is it, actually? I was going to bring that up, but I can't actually remember where that came from. I know I saw it a lot before the show actually started airing, but every official source I've seen since only ever refers to it as like, "the ancient script" or whatever. I've been under the impression it doesn't really have a particular name?