[Layton13]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamSword

I personally have no idea how you get all of that out of the line "The power of ruin... is that the best it can do?" But hey, if it speaks to you, great.

I was also factoring in his later little back and forth with Baku when he calls Catastrom "Cati"

[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamSword

I personally have no idea how you get all of that out of the line "The power of ruin... is that the best it can do?"

I'm a little confused myself about how you could possibly take that line to instead be the direct opinion of like, either the show's staff or just The Show as some kind of personified entity, rather than taking it as a line of dialogue that merely reflects the perspective of the single character who speaks it.

Saying the show "does not give the slightest crap about what was established before" seems to me like a needlessly firm statement. I don't think the things you're seeing as clear evidence of that would seem like evidence at all unless you'd already decided on your conclusion beforehand. You've already acknowledged that some of what's going on here is business as usual for Rider narratives, and it only takes a couple further steps from there to see all the ways ZEZTZ is also still building the narrative outward from everything that's been previously established as usual, too. I don't begrudge you for not being into this new chapter for the show, or even for thinking it's a downgrade in quality or uniqueness or anything of that sort, but I feel compelled to argue against this notion that anything it's doing right now is an effort to cast aside anything it's done before.

[DreamSword]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

I'm a little confused myself about how you could possibly take that line to instead be the direct opinion of like, either the show's staff or just The Show as some kind of personified entity, rather than taking it as a line of dialogue that merely reflects the perspective of the single character who speaks it.

Because it's directly pointing out a flaw in the narrative.

If we really are meant to see the things established in the first half as still important, then the Power of Ruin was hyped up as basically one of, if not the most important things in the narrative of this universe.

As such, yeah, Dawn is right. Catastrom should by all means be no selling Dawn himself outright. But it's not.

I get that yeah, this is likely leading up to "the next big form" and what have you, but if the script itself is gonna call this "not actually all that impressive" then like, why should I be invested, you know? It's sort of why many Rider/Battle shows just outright don't address it. Or if they do, take a measure to course correct basically immediately.

And incase anyone thinks I'm glazing Catastrom a bit too much, I wasn't much of a fan of the how and why of it replacing Inazuma Plasma either, though atleast there, the show has established why Baku wouldn't just jump to Catastrom immediately with every encounter. So the second half gets a point there.

[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamSword

If we really are meant to see the things established in the first half as still important, then the Power of Ruin was hyped up as basically one of, if not the most important things in the narrative of this universe.

...Which is why this episode has so much talk of the similarities between Baku and Sieg, and abandoning your humanity for power and all that, complete with a very meaningful cut to the Dualmare Capsem as Three is tempting Five. Because the fact Baku has this power now is still very, very significant, and will probably continue to have ramifications for a long time to come, which itself has precedent for Takahashi as a writer, considering he's done things like that with other powerups in his other shows, even after newer toys come along.

Again, the fact that Catastrom didn't win a fight seems like a weirdly specific thing to be hyper-focused on at the expense of everything else in the story. We don't even know exactly what DAWN's powers are to say for sure it doesn't make perfect sense, and the clear implication is that Sieg is basically someone even further gone down the same path of using the power of Nightmares, so I'm not seeing any immediate, obvious contradiction there.

[DreamSword]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

Again, the fact that Catastrom didn't win a fight seems like a weirdly specific thing to be hyper-focused on at the expense of everything else in the story

Because not only is that exactly what the quote I'm focusing on is talking about, but "power" is not only what everyone talks about in regards to Catastrom/Ruin, but also what Battle shows tend to focus on.

If you wanna argue that Zeztz isn't a battle show, I won't argue against that, but from my perspective it's certainly leaning that way more and more as we move forward. But again, I'd love to be proven wrong.

Like, the script can hype up Catastrom all it wants in terms of dialogue via other characters, but if it doesn't live up to that hype, then I kinda have a hard time believing in it.

[Frontier]

I'm just thinking to myself, how many active agents does CODE even have?

1, 2, and 4 went rogue, 3 barely does anything outside office work, Kureha was decommissioned, so that only leaves 5 until Baku was activated as 7.