[Fish Sandwich]

Hey everyone, guess what time it is!



Okay, I've been holding back for a good month or two now to see how it played out, but it's time for me to talk about Sougo. More specifically, how he seems to have taken all his advice on fighting fate from Kouta Kazuraba despite having also met Kazuma Kenzaki.

The second Sougo decided his goal was to collect the remaining Ride Watches after the Blade arc, I got extremely worried, but I held out faith that Sougo, a character constantly shown to be way smarter than he looks, was not genuinely planning to beat Oma Zi-O by doing exactly what he wants and then trying to fistfight him in the future after he's already done the things Sougo wants to prevent.

But no, that's seriously what he tried, like a complete doofus, and it really bothers me because this feels like a huge regression for Sougo. All his character development so far has been about him accepting that becoming Oma Zi-O is a real possibility, but given his dialogue late in this episode where he theorizes about why history has been rewritten, he seems to be back to blissfully assuming they're two completely different people again.

I have to say, I was let down a bit by this episode. After the bombastic fun of the Den-O arc, I was expecting from the premise here a very character-driven story that would really get to the meat of Sougo's motivations and the growth he's had by putting him in the worst position he's been in the entire series. Thankfully, that is more or less what we're getting here, so it's far from a bad episode, and is in fact, quite good in a lot of ways. The idea of pulling the rug out from Sougo like this is a very necessary plot to do, because Hiryuu is absolutely right that he's had it easy. Sougo has never been any sort of underdog. He's literally destined for greatness and has power handed out to him like candy. So showing him having all that torn away, and presumably showing how he has learn and grow as a person to work his way up from nothing back to where he was, it's wonderful.

But I thought Kento Shimoyama was Zi-O's head writer.

I've gone into detail before about the differences I feel Nobuhiro Mouri's episodes have in style, and after his last set of episodes came to a literal Grand Climax, I was expecting Shimoyama to step back in for the final stretch and give us the more intimate character development he was doing in the middle of the show, especially since Another Zi-O is back. The upside of this still being Mouri is that the high concept stuff in this episode is great, with some serious Paradise Lost vibes in the setting and the way Geiz straight up tries to kill Sougo for real and these other cool moments, but outside of episodes 15 and 16, I just don't think his grasp on the characters is quite as strong or nuanced as Shimoyama's became after an admittedly rough start.

Granted, as we've seen with Tsukuyomi, it's entirely possible I'm wasting my breath talking about something that will make more sense in retrospect (since we don't totally get into Sougo's head here), but something about this episode gave me a bad feeling even though I otherwise loved it the same way I've been loving Zi-O since the start. Just to end on a positive note, I'll also single out that Hiryuu not having forgiven Sougo at all actually totally matches up with his reaction to that speech at the time and is far more interesting than if he did. The Another Zi-O arc is still the pinnacle of this show to me, and Hiryuu and Sougo were such great foils I'm happy to see the show taking advantage of the potential their dynamic has.