#in my mind the precures and sentais and kamen riders are best friends always and forever | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cina-full-moon-xanadium · 3 years

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At long last, I’ve finished my rewatches of Kamen Rider OOO and Kamen Rider Ghost. Every single episode, watched weekly, matching original airdates; that I’ve been doing throughout the entire year. How’d it go?

Once again, this isn’t quite over yet. You didn’t think I was gonna watch all this stuff and end it purely at the last episodes of OOO and Ghost, right? Nah, course you didn’t; loads of movies and little specials for post-series content I’ll be getting too later! Two of them in fact are on Friday and Tuesday, if you can believe it! Ghost was a series that really didn’t slow down for content it seems.

And I’m not complaining -- starting off with my final thoughts on Ghost, this was a beautiful, beautiful ride and despite being partnered with my former favourite OOO, who I would still say I like a bit more than this one; Ghost ended up the highlight of this rewatch by a longshot. SO much depth and theming I didn’t realise was there; frankly a lot of surface-level things I didn’t allow myself to see back in mid-2018. And because it’s been such a highlight I feel I’d be repeating myself a lot here -- the themes of connection! Reaching out and valuing life through a religious lens! Alain’s arc being the best thing ever! Takeru’s heavy emphasis on protecting and being at one with life!

A lot of it fell off at the end, unfortunately. Ghost was a show that I felt was best at expressing its ideas and characterisation through MOTW stories; there was expert craftmanship at play with how engaging those were while still advancing our ongoing stories. It unfortunately doesn’t translate well to when the end is a long, long section of dealing directly with that ongoing story and quite a bit of the theming falls apart there -- not to mention how unfortunate it is that connection is expressed quite a bit through “there’s no parent that doesn’t love their child” which, ech, horrible lesson to send to kids. There’s a bit of an opposite to OOO going on here; where I felt watching that show weekly made the flaws of its episodic plots more apparent, but seriously upped the hype of the final segment? But here it makes the positives of the episodic plots more apparent while making the last stretch feel far more dull.

But while those negatives do remain and they did dull my experience a little towards the end, they can’t keep down what is otherwise in my opinion one of Kamen Rider’s greatest outings and it certainly helps that we had one hell of an epilogue dealing with some of Ghost’s greatest points, bringing things full circle and looking back at all the things that brought us here while looking to the future of not just its own world but what Kamen Rider as a whole would have going forward. This is a show that I wasn’t quite sure what I’d get out of on a rewatch -- it’s one where I did remember not liking a lot of aspects of it and rating it as one of my least favourites; but as time went on I could barely remember why that was while many people around me whose opinions I generally agree with were speaking praises of their own time with it. I wasn’t sure how this would go, and my harsh initial viewing of it meant it was a lot more mysterious to me than OOO. But what I’ve ended up with is something seriously special, something that’s become one of my favourite Tokusatsu shows, and it’s difficult to think of much better for my favourite series’ 50th anniversary.

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Rewatching OOO and Ghost has been a wonderful ride. Again, it’s not quite over; there’s post-series content most of which I will be waiting a little while to get to (maybe about a month? give or take?), but in terms of the shows themselves, watching every episode weekly... that was something else. It was a bumpy road, mind: I didn’t even get to start it when I wanted to due to computer issues; other delays came up from other computer repairs and the like... but all in all that’s stuff that could have happened to me back in 2010 and 2015, y’know? And one of the whole points of this little experiment was to replicate the experience of what it would be like to be watching OOO and Ghost when they were originally airing. It wasn’t just about OOO and Ghost themselves - but they were very intentional picks, celebrating the 50th by going back to what was my favourite and what was one of my least favourites and seeing how they held up to my tastes in the modern day - but also about watching a past series roughly as it was meant to be watched. In the same way I was watching Saber or Kiramager or Z.

It was... an exhausting one! I always try to keep up with whatever new Kamen Rider, Super Sentai and Ultraman episode is out each week; and this year I even added Precure to that count for the first time. Not to mention that at around the same time as all this, the official Ultraman channel was also uploading episodes of Gridman weekly and I decided to follow on with that -- so keep in mind at one point this meant I was watching about 7 shows weekly! It was a bit insane! That’s a lot of Toku (and Precure counts as Toku shut up) to take in, and all the while I was having to use wikipedia episode guides and looking up movie dates and doing some research into stuff like HBVs to make sure they all lined up correctly as well. I also initially attempted to do big write-ups for each episode on friend groups on discord! There was a LOT going into this! It’s not something, spoiler alert, I intend to be repeating for Fourze and Ex-Aid now that they’re ‘starting’! I definitely won’t be doing anything like this for a while... but I absolutely do not regret it, and it absolutely was a fun time despite (perhaps because of?) the effort I put into it. What can I say? It started off as a fun little experiment, but seeing these heroes reach out and live their lives burning bright... it hit me as emotionally as it could have. Seeya next movie!

#the king who controls desire #fight with the power of heroic souls

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