[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

予告する！

Considering the current news regarding Super Sentai's future is starting to become more concrete, I think it's worth explaining the subtext of the immediate response I chose, for people who maybe don't think about LuPat as obsessively as I do. The words themselves are important, but I was also specifically evoking the narrative that comes with that title -- an episode about the Lupinrangers mistakenly believing something is definitively finished, only to realize they simply hadn't figured out the whole story yet.

Obviously, I'm in pretty much the same boat as everyone else right now in not being able to see the future. What I'm about to get into next is also likewise going to be colored by my own opinions the same way as the people who are apparently convinced Sentai was cancelled entirely for not doing the things they personally wanted to see. But still, if we're trying to guess what the future holds, I think there's value in looking at the foreshadowing hidden within Super Sentai's past, which might point towards a plot twist I've only seen a few other people come close to guessing. These might seem like unprecedented times, but really stop and consider how difficult it is to do something with Super Sentai that truly has no precedent within those 50 years.

We've got a show like Gozyuger airing, where the team is technically not a team and in over 30 episodes have only begrudgingly done a roll call exactly once. Gozyuger even shares a distinction with Ohranger in that its premiere only features a Red hero, calling into question the idea a Sentai needs to have a team right away at all, something Zenkaiger did in its own way by introducing the protagonists an episode at a time. Shows like Zenkaiger and Go-Busters have gotten away from the notion the costumes have to be the usual spandex and black visors. Each show has to stand apart as its own thing, except for when Zenkaiger and Donbrothers tried out the idea of a transition that's more of a gradual fade from the current show to the next, actively tying their identities together. You might think it's not Super Sentai without a giant robot, but the very first two Sentai demonstrate that's not the case, just as Goranger and JAKQ also prove that shows can be categorized as Super Sentai or not retroactively, at the whims of the times. Meanwhile, the other "first" Super Sentai show, Battle Fever J, makes it apparent that even having "Sentai" as part of the name isn't a prerequisite for joining the club, just as you're also apparently allowed to have your lineage trace back to a different Toei tokusatsu hero entirely.

There are a lot of things in Sentai that people generally consider required parts of the formula, but the reality is that, on an individual basis, most of those tropes have already been proven to be optional. It's a much more flexible franchise than people seem to give it credit for, drastically reinventing itself more frequently than goes noticed. I'm not sure what absolutes are really left besides "colorful hero" at this point?

What Toei currently intends with Project R.E.D and what they end up doing with it may turn out to be two separate things, and what I suspect their goal is might not line up with either of them. However, especially given the title they went with, and the difference between the vague wording they've used to describe the change, compared to the firm language TV Asahi is using, I think it's a fairly rational guess to say this is all an extension of what's already been going on for many years at this point, rather than the perceived sudden seismic shift that -- perhaps also by design -- makes it more buzzworthy than usual.

I'd feel even more certain if I knew for sure how involved he is, but I especially sense Shirakura's hand in all this. It's exactly the kind of galaxy-brain scheme I'd expect him to cook up, at any rate. A Sentai show that doesn't even need to actively identify as a Sentai show would in many ways be the ultimate culmination of the experimentation that kicked into overdrive when he was chief producer on Zenkaiger.

It may be just as wrong as anyone else's reading of the situation, but that's my theory at the moment -- Sentai is over, but only because that's necessary to set up the reveal that Sentai was never over at all.

I'm pretty sure that tracks logically with the series of events that led us to the point we're at right now, without necessarily contradicting most of the other theories of How We Got Here, but who knows? Maybe it turns out that in times of crisis, I just like to fool myself into imagining our chaotic reality will somehow come together as cleanly as a Junko Koumura script.