[Fish Sandwich]

Fish Sandwich also watched Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger Episode 20

Okay, a lot to talk about with this one! First of all, the real reason you describing the Saber chunk of this thing as "incredibly fun" was so amusing/spooky to me was because I consciously said it *wasn't* that as a setup, where the punchline was me in the next post immediately describing the even more enjoyable Zenkaiger half of this crossover as, you guessed it!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

Well this was just delightful, wasn't it? And I mean, this was incredibly fun!

But who cares about that stuff. I'm really just here to talk about Magine, because I happen to be a huge fan!

How much do I love her, you ask? Let me put it this way -- she's just about the only thing in a thread about Kamen Rider Saber I'd rather discuss than Kamen Rider Saber. Yeah, that much. Like, I'll attempt to spare you all from me getting too deep into it right now, but for the sake of Die having context, since I'm pretty sure he hasn't heard any of this from me before, Magine is just the best. It'd be underselling it to even say she's by far my favorite character in Zenkaiger. Indeed, even over the course of a whole year of writing posts about Zenkaiger episodes, I never truly found the words to properly express just how much literally every aspect of her character appeals to me. Even right now, I'm still defaulting to enthusiastic yet vague rambling, which always seems to happen when I try this. But I'll keep trying! I'll take any chance I can get to talk about Magine, because even far enough removed from Zenkaiger for Donbrothers to already be over, my bottomless affection for the most adorable tokusatsu hero of them all will never waver.

There is one person out there, however, who I must humbly admit surpasses even my own excessive infatuation with Magine, and that happens to be Reika's actor, Angela Mei, which should start explaining a lot about this episode.

She was extraordinarily vocal about it on Twitter from pretty much the moment Zenkaiger started, as far as I know. Just week after week of constantly making sure to mention how cute Magine was in a given episode of the show, or just like, in general. Just as a random example, here's her happily displaying the papercraft figure of Magine from an issue of TV-kun she made during breaks in filming. Just, nothing but the deepest raw affection, all the time. The woman is literally the self-proclaimed mother of Magine. And clearly the staff on these shows caught wind of that, because Nobuhiro Mouri was kind enough to write a script that seemingly exists at least 50% solely as wish fulfillment? It wouldn't be that surprising if Reika hugging Magine was just some improv bit, but no, it was right there in the script and everything!

The episode is already great on its own merits, but that extra meta context really elevates it into something even more heartwarmingly fun. My favorite little anecdote about this whole situation is that Angela Mei apparently couldn't quite work up the courage to ask Magine's suit actor to take a picture with her, only for the staff to be right on the ball with that too, with the end result being a Tweet with the two resulting pictures, and text that reads simply "My Tanabata wish came true." This is what living your dreams looks like, people.



So yeah, that's... uh, wait, I guess I barely talked about the actual episode, didn't I? Ah well, past me can cover that stuff again. I'm going to go ahead and use what little attention I can bring myself to give to anything besides Magine right now to mention the other thing that's important to me personally about this one, which is that this crossover changed the whole way I watch tokusatsu to a level I can only appreciate now, in retrospect.

I forget exactly what my motivation for doing it this way was (I think just the fact that the discussion thread was one thing?), but I made it a point to write the posts about each episode together, and post them back-to-back, really embracing the crossover nature by making it a kinda-sorta crossover of the way I wrote posts about both of those shows. (Zenkaiger happened to be another show I was already writing about every episode for.) There was just one problem with me trying to do that on good ol' Saber Sunday, though -- fansubs weren't out for the Zenkaiger part yet, which meant I simply watched the episode raw. Despite having a functional enough knowledge of Japanese to ~mostly~ follow stuff unsubbed in a pinch, I was still making it a point to wait for fansubs of the latest Rider and Sentai episodes, because, like, I'd been doing that for about a decade. Why stop now?

This was the very first time I'd ever broken that little rule I'd kept for myself, and it ended up becoming a whole new habit. I had a whole side-project going during Zenkaiger where I was writing about every Sentai premiere ever, and as those posts got longer and longer the closer I got to the end, I started watching Zenkaiger episodes raw more and more often simply to get those posts written earlier, and give myself more time to work on whatever tome I was writing that week. Somewhere along the line, my attitude completely shifted, and I was watching Donbrothers raw from the get-go just because I wanted to. I'm literally not even sure who in all is subbing Kamen Rider Geats, because I've only watched one episode of that show with subs.

It's worth noting that even before all this, I'd often watch random spinoff stuff (like the Ghost crossovers!) raw simply because I don't want to forget I still need to watch them by the time they finally get subbed, but this random episode of Zenkaiger still marked the start of a pretty dang significant shift in how I engage with these shows. Just one more reason to look back fondly on it!