IFS

Zeo: IFS:
"Fool for a Lifetime"

There was no word for angel in any of the Triforian dialects, in fact there was no concept for angel on the distant world of Triforia. Standing amongst the cliffs of a dead nation, the rain beating down upon his shoulders and hair, Erasmus found it difficult to entertain the notion of an entire world coming under siege from such beings. The clouds rumbled low in the skies, black ominous shapes portending to a dark and bleak season. On his world such things would be seen as an omen, on Earth they regarded them as little more than natural phenomena. Erasmus however was not as stupid as to entirely disregard such a warning.

Shivering he turned his eyes to the turbulent oceans once more. During the latter part of the fabled TwenCen, Earth had once been the focus of countless events that helped shaped the nature of the cosmos around it. Sometimes passive, sometimes aggressive, the peoples of Earth had burst out from the planet's oceans and reached into the stars in a phenomenal amount of time, equally blessing and cursing the future of their immediate neighbours.

Now, hundreds of years after the human race had abruptly fallen out of the skies back down to its native soil, the planet was little more than backwater, abandoned even by the likes of the Kherubim. Gingerly he moved his short-staff from hand to hand, slowly growing impatient with the building storm. As if sensing his discomfort a fork of lightning tore across the sky and he felt instantly humbled.

Before the great empires of Earth, both terrestrial and galactic, before life had even crawled from that single primordial ocean, beings from the celestial co-ordinates designated M51 had arrived within the solar system, stowing a single crystal on the still burning rock and forever influencing life on the
distant oceans of the world closest to it. Erasmus' people referred to these beings as 'monks', though in all honesty the word was little more than a desperate attempt to grasp the incalculable and divine nature of such beings. The word was too small for their actual purpose.

Perhaps the humans would have called them 'angels', he mused.

sentai_ai

Title: Three Colours Hurricanger (1/3): Three Colours: Blue
Genre: Het, bizarre love triangle
Sentai: Ninpuu Sentai Harikenja
Pairing: Nono Nanami (Hurricane Blue) x Shiina Yousuke (Hurricane Red), Bita Kouta (Hurricane Yellow) x Nono Nanami (Hurricane Blue)
Rating: U
Disclaimer: Toei owns the rights to all Super Sentai characters
banner courtesy of automated_alice



Three Colours Hurricanger: Three Colours: Blue

You need to know about Waki Tomohiro. He's the gentleman on the right (the other gentleman incidentally, is Sorimachi Takashi, the star of GTO ~ which also featured Shigeki Hosokawa who plays Hibiki) and seems to be in everything. So far we've spotted him in Hurricanger (he played one of my favourite guest characters in the whole series), Gokusen (where he plays one of the central characters, Kuma...and wears a red T-shirt which, by subtle sentai subtexts of all new drama should mean that he deserves to play red in next year's sentai) and he's also turned up in Bewitched in Tokyo alongside Shioya Shun.

From this day forth I feel it my duty to scour all Japanese dramas to uncover all shows in which Tomohiro-kun has appeared...and post about them here.

New CD day! At last! Ninpuu Sentai Hurricanger Ongaku Ninpou-Chou Vol. 3 Saishuu Ougi Original Soundtrack and Choju Sentai Liveman Music Collection arrived so now I'm just waiting for the Hibiki OST...(and my new Nao-chan CD! ^_^).

Horse Orphnoch, DekaRed and AbareBlue

Actually Waki Tomohiro (who played Ichiro Taisho in Hurricanger) was a series regular as well. This alone makes Gokusen worth watching.

MASSIVE SPOILERS for Kamen Rider Faizu: Paradise Lost Director's Cut

As of late we've found ourselves watching an inordinate amount of the 'older' new-gen Kamen Rider series (that's an oxymoron, isn't it?). This has been a mixed bag as, in all honesty, a lot of the shows have never really held much appeal for me. Don't get me wrong, I'd shout till I was blue in the face about what a quality series I feel Hibiki is but if asked whether I consider it to be a Rider series, I'd have to say no.

Hibiki deserves props for being a good tokusatsu series, in fact I personally feel it's the best Toei show since Hurricanger but Rider shows are fundamentally about a central character transformed by both machinery and a desire for revenge. The term is 'kaizo ningen' and it is, IMHO, the heart of the Rider mythos. The lack of this premise (and other founding traditions of the franchise) is something that, no matter how much I love Hibiki makes it a Rider series in name alone and yet there are still people who are so consumed with drilling Hibiki into what they perceive as the structure of the franchise that the positive aspects of the series completely pass them by. This attitude is even more absurd when the same people are using shows like Ryuki, Faziu and Blade as examples of what KR should be. Hibiki should simply be accepted for being Hibiki and judged on its own merits.

*sigh*

I've never really been enthralled by a lot of the newer KR series, I tend to find that most of them pass me by simply because I can't summon up any real interest in their stories. In fact Hibiki is actually the first of the new-gen shows that I've really enjoyed and, as stated above, that's a very different kind of show (despite the title) to Ishinomori's Riders. I tried watching Faizu and found myself enjoying it to an extent during the eight episodes we saw ~ yet it never really inspired me to watch anymore. I made a mental note to try and pick up the third volume on DVD but pretty much forgot about it. Returning to watch the series earlier this year I found that I had, in the wake of three consecutively awful sentai series, lost the ability to give Faizu the benefit of the doubt. Having recently watched Paradise Lost Director's Cut I must confess that I felt mildly awful about writing the series off so swiftly - not awful enough to make me want to try and pick up where I left off but none the less there were some engaging moments. As with the series the presence of Kato Yoshika and Haga Yuria was a bonus (although, God, how that makes me feel shallow ~ I always feel somewhat ashamed of admitting that, simply because I still like to think there is more to tokusatsu than just pretty casting). Some things that worked well in the film were the relationship between Yuka and Naoya's characters and the use of Mei Kurokawa's character, Mina (who was apparently in the series also) was nicely done if only for the fact that she added, for those of us with the inclination to do so, more scenarios for tokusatsu girlslash. ^_^

And speaking of girls, Kurihara Hitomi as SMART Lady was fantastic! Gah. I always tried to avoid actually liking SMART Lady whilst watching the episodes but she's brilliant in the film. Really. I haven't stopped listening to the My Name Is SMART Lady song all week.

Other characters of merit were Mokomichi (played by, ah, Mokomichi Hayami) and Peter Ho as Psyga. Mokomichi deserves mention simply because he was another regular in the You're Under Arrest live action show, whilst Peter Ho needs to be mentioned, not because of his awful suit, but because he's a fairly popular soap actor from Taiwan. Aspects of the film that failed so much it hurt were, for starters, Kaixa and his ridiculous bike. Hah. And you thought Psyga's jet-pack was a lame gimmick. Kaixa is the DekaBreak of Riders. Useless and out-classed. It was nice that the writers were brave enough to show him die during the events of the film but his character was still a waste of time...as was our central character, Takumi, but we already knew that.

The CGI was, as per normal, awful but altogether it was a slightly better put together package than the TV series, benefiting from a 90-odd minute run-time to tell the story as opposed to a 20 or 30-minute early morning slot. Of course I'd rather sit through all of Faizu than again endure the horrors of Kamen Rider Ryuki vs. Agito which consumed roughly 11 minutes of my life that I dearly want back. As a character, Kido Shinji is instantly dislikeable. As a Rider, he's a travesty. I'd half considered watching this series based on trailers and to see what kind of characters Kurihara Hitomi and Katou Natsuki played but after having seen this thankfully brief team-up 'movie' I'm inclined to do all that I can to forget about it. I'm aware that this feature was intended as something of a joke but it was seriously in poor taste. I don't disapprove of the 'real people get superpowers' plot but I've seen it done better before...a *lot* better. I would have expected something better from the chief writer involved with Timeranger.

The final two random episodes are the openings for both Kamen Rider Black and Kamen Rider Black RX, the latter having been dubbed in Portuguese for Brazilian television. RX didn't leave much of an impression. I have a soft spot for Saban's God awful Masked Rider series not because I like it but because it was so awful that it was almost hypnotic. Seeing the original source material felt a bit like pulling an identical joke out of a new Christmas cracker...and without the talent (or lack there of) of Mister T.J. Roberts, who played the 'charismatic' Prince Dex. Perhaps it was just the dub but, aside from the central character of Minami Kotaro, the episode felt somewhat uneventful. The opening of Black is a very different story, however. Black comes across with bucketfuls of atmosphere, registering somewhere between Liveman and GoGoV. Everything that the opening of RX lacks, Black has in spades. It's hard to think of them as being of the same continuity, so different is the original Black to its sequel. Serious kudos to SuperHeroBR for their Portuguese subtitles and hard work releasing this show.

In addition to the older new-gen (although, having been concieved during Ishinomori's life-time and still taking place in the original shared continuity of the first series, I suppose Black and RX should be both be classified as shows of an older generation) we've managed to stumble across a wealth of 1990s sentai shows. At some point I really need to make a post Zyuranger and Jetman, however, now I have this nice little sub-categories I think I might wait till later. Woo. Go me. *cries*

GaoRed

VS



Hibiki!

Kamen Rider Zolda (II)

VS



GaoRed

Pointless Post #3974207 ~ During a brief trip into town today automated_alice brought me the Top Galer Dino Brace! Because of this I now own more Abaranger merchandise than I ever intended to buy in my life, but still. So far I've discovered that a cigarette fits perfectly in his mouth if you lodge it open slightly, which means that top galer is even more hardcore than perhaps any of us expected.

Current music: Kenta Satou - Zigzag Youth Road