[Fish Sandwich]

Fish Sandwich also watched Kamen Rider Saber Episode 41

Funnily enough, at the time this episode aired, I was not entirely sold on the thematic relevance of Storious as the big bad, despite enjoying his character well enough to this point -- pretty much the opposite of how Die feels. I liked the direction this episode moved him in for similar reasons, mind you, but it still felt like a few more pieces were needed to really click the guy into place for me as the show's ultimate villain. Of course, I also wasn't sold on Solomon right away either. But I can talk more about Storious later.

If there's one thing I most want to single out from this episode, it's absolutely got to be Tassel. Saber makes a real habit out of taking innocuous concepts from early on and giving them much more interesting dramatic context later on, and I feel like the move they pull here with Tassel is one of the finest examples of that in the series. His role in the show at the outset was to fill screentime and provide easy exposition, and it wouldn't have been that unthinkable for Saber to mostly leave him acting in that capacity. He's a wacky dude whose function as a storyteller fits the thematic trappings of this Rider show about stories. You don't need too much more, right?

But of course, throughout the show's run, he's been gradually wrapped more and more into the actual world of the narrative proper, and here, Saber takes another round of what could be dry exposition in a lesser series, and turns it into an opportunity to show us some true emotion from Tassel after all this time. All the dots you may have already connected by yourself if you were invested enough go from being implied subtext to outright text, and we have it shown very explicitly that underneath the colorful outward appearance, Tassel is a man bearing the profound sorrow of being unable to end a conflict that has dragged on for millennia. The hope he found in Touma then reframes a lot of his enthusiastic raving about the series in those bookend segments of all those episodes it took to get here by giving it a real motivation. I like to think I'm fascinated by these characters and their story, but even I can't compare to Tassel, the guy who is, beyond all doubt, Kamen Rider Saber's first and biggest fan.