The best part of the show was the heroes being friends and there's a bunch of that strewn throughout, so that's nice. Fire Emblem's piece exploring the childhood trauma of growing up queer in a hostile world was fantastic and the whole reason I bumped this up to a 4. Such a great payoff at the end. Obviously, his declaration that being gay (and trans-spectrum) is powerful was the climactic moment. But I also adored his little laugh over how he'd become self-conscious of himself at all after he had long ago accepted himself. Wonderful.
Alas. The additional characters really only affected the hero side of the show, which meant that every time they were on-screen they were distracting from the show's strengths. I'm sorry, HeroTV just isn't a good framing device, even for its satirical intentions. It exists only to say that the heroes arbitrarily can't do things. That's true of real companies as well, but it's not interesting. It's boring. And Golden Ryan being a pure heel version of Barnaby from the beginning of the show is just boring, too. Ugh.
There were stabs at trying to make Fire Emblem's story's theme relevant to the other characters, such as Sky High becoming self-conscious about his perpetual Captain America voice. But, as you can guess from how that is not a real problem people have, that fell flat. They didn't even do the obvious thing that might have been good and continue to have Dragon Kid question her/their gender.
It's a sequel movie to a bad show that only gets worse if you think about alongside the show, really. Blue Rose's crush on Tiger is still fucking creepy. Barnaby and Tiger being incommunicado for most of this is a setback for their relationship that doesn't feel earned. Why the hell are they still going on and on about how old Kotetsu is when he doesn't look any older than the others?
"Tiger and Bunny 2" has better be a surprise Fire Emblem spin-off or I don't give a fuck, frankly.
