[Fish Sandwich]

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Originally Posted by Androzani84

Wow, that was a long review. Almost makes me feel like I?m making this post shorter as a response.

I, on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, almost feel like I made that post so long as a response to my original attempt at conveying my strong opinions on the episode being so tiny.

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Originally Posted by DreadBringer

It doesn't take someone hypercompetent like Haruto to dominate mooks. Even untransformed Riders commonly beat up mooks, albeit doesn't really put them down. Not as much of a surprise for me.

I think that's sort of the beauty of that first fight in 8, actually. It's one of the easiest fights we've seen Wizard have, which makes the contrast with his hardest fight yet that much more drastic. As I tried to highlight in that post, too, though, while the previous episodes create drama in other ways, none of the previous monsters of the week were much of a direct threat to Wizard in a head-on fight either, which is the real distinction of Phoenix. He immediately changes the question from "can Wizard save the Gate this week?" to "can Wizard save himself this week?"

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

Welcome back from your sudden hiatus!

Thank you! Hopefully this was worth the wait!

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

I think the truth behind that platitude is that being a parent doesn't mean you care for your child, but rather, caring for your child means you're a parent.

That's a really nice way of looking at it, for sure.

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

I agree that the spooky cave lair makes Wiseman look like a big deal though, kind of like the authoritative image of a Shogun with the distance he puts between himself and Phoenix and Medusa, conveying the impersonal dynamic they have in a quick and effective way.

This is also a really interesting point to make about the immediate impression it gives having the boss being physically separated from his subordinates by the curtain and everything.

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

Wizard Flame Style was already red, but Flame Dragon is redder, a simple and effective change to show that his magic has just upgraded from Fire to Firaga, if you get that reference.

I have most certainly played an RPG or two in my life! That's actually another one of those little personal things that made this show appealing to me right away. I generally find in those sorts of games that magic-focused characters are the most fun to play, so it sounds about right I'd end up thinking the magic-focused Rider was one of the most fun to watch too.

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Originally Posted by Sh Ranger

Totally a good pick for your favorite! I guess that's why you took so long to get to this one, like you wanted to phrase everything just right to express why you appreciate it so much and yeah, I think you made a lot of excellent points that many Wizard critics overlook.

I appreciate the praise, because, yes, that is absolutely a lot of the reason it took like a quarter of a year(!) just for these two episodes. I didn't intend the gap to be that long, obviously. It was a few different things all piling up in a way I didn't expect.

One -- I maybe started the thread too early? My goal was to have 1-9 already written by the time the first post went up. I wanted to guarantee I could at least have that nice chunk of episodes ready to go, but I was also enamored with the idea of starting a thread where I talk about why I love Wizard on Christmas, for reasons I originally thought I might even be explaining by Christmas, long before I actually started writing and realized how detailed I wanted to make/couldn't help making these things.

Two -- Stuff going on outside the thread that demanded my attention. Maybe the endpoint of my journey with Kamen Rider will one day turn out to be life as a sagely hermit in some remote temple where I spend all my time meditating on the meaning of tokusatsu shows and passing down my wisdom to those devout few pupils who seek my teachings, but until such a time, I unfortunately can't actually crank these things out 24/7.

Three -- Stuff outside the thread I just wanted to avoid putting on the back-burner, because despite the arrogant fantasy I just described, I'm hardly out here trying to purge myself of worldly desires or anything. Sure, one of the things I've been putting above writing about Wizard right now is writing about Gavv each week, but because I don't want to burn myself out on this, I've been making it a point not to totally put all my other hobbies on hold while I'm doing this.

Four -- Turns out it really isn't easy for me to put how I feel about Wizard into words! Heck, even the reasons I can't put it into words are hard to put into words! Maybe it would help to describe it in context of something else I have strong feelings about. Like, maybe another character I like way too much? Maybe some other magic-themed tokusatsu hero out there besides Wizard who also has a dragon motif and in-character experience as a gravure model? You might think there wouldn't be two favorites of mine who both meet that weirdly specific criteria, but you'd be seriously wrong if you did!



So, I spent an entire year in all the Zenkaiger episode threads trying and failing to describe why I love Magine, and every time, it just made me feel like a poser or something? Whatever I'd write would end up coming off to me as way too surface-level, gesturing at the what without explaining the why, as if those reasons aren't the whole motivation of writing it to begin with. I can even shoehorn Magine into an unrelated topic years later just for the sake of it, and only I'll understand what good it actually does mentioning her here!

And after managing to make my way this far into talking about Wizard, I think I finally understand the issue -- it's not that I don't actually have those deep feelings, it's that they're *so* deep they literally don't exist within me in the form of language.

It always seemed paradoxical to me that I could have opinions so strong they become harder to get written down, but now I see the logic of it. My thoughts on a show I like as much as Wizard are just like, a soup of ideas swirling together without clear boundaries, and the process of writing about it, it's like trying to reach into that soup to pull out something solid. To give those ideas form and order where they previously had none, because none was needed.

One of the things that most motivates me to do big projects like this is that they always end up being a huge learning experience for me, and just in these nine episodes, I've already learned a lot. When I wrote about the first episode, I learned I can in fact still do this if I put my mind to it. When I wrote about the second episode, I learned "oh... they're all going to be at least this long, aren't they?" Writing about the eighth and ninth episodes, I learned to identify with Haruto's first great challenge in a new way, as the process itself became a challenge for me. Writing about the tenth and eleventh episodes, it's my hope to learn how to not repeatedly spend entire half hours on single sentences.

That being said, I'm not sweating it as much this time if I do, because I've also learned that it'll come together eventually, and that the way I'm writing these posts is the only way I want to write them. So the pacing of this thread may continue to be quite spotty, but like, where else are you going to read discussion on Wizard so in-depth it'll even inadvertently teach you where the Gozyugers are dancing in their opening every week? (Because if there is somewhere else, please tell me! That sounds like a cool place I wanna know about!)