Seto Kaiba

Eh... now, I'm pretty sure Star Wars did a pretty decent trade for a decade and a half with no new films coming out because they had comic books and novels and such building up the setting and doing their own thing. In fact, isn't that that material got tossed one of the things the fans were upset about when the franchise changed hands? Not enough of a problem to stop the movies from making serious bank. 🤔 They may be bland, uninteresting, forgettable, or even downright cringeworthy at times... but they still put buns in seats in epic numbers at least temporarily. Filoni's the man behind Star Wars's forgettable franchise slop on Disney+. Almost every series there is based on his work from The Clone Wars directly or indirectly. Genuine, utterly unambiguous flops like The Acolyte have his fingerprints all over them.

So... wading into this with my expectations as low as possible. The new 60th anniversary eyecatch is nice. I have to wonder why the Cerritos and Protostar didn't make the cut, though. The tech here looks... like... honestly the prison transport looks like it belongs to Archer's era, more than a millennium ago. We finally get to the opening credits after 14 minutes of agonizing generic slop... and the title card looks like it was thrown together in 20 minutes using GenAI assets. Honestly, like everything else about 32nd century NuTrek, Starfleet Academy seems to be built around a plot hole. Namely, the idea that reopening the Starfleet Academy campus on Earth is in any way significant. It's the oldest campus, sure. But it's far from the only one. There were EIGHTY campuses in 2401 and that number almost certainly went up not down. There is zero reason for Vance to be recalling an officer who has been out of the service for 15 years and doesn't want to be there to run the reopened San Francisco campus. There's no real reason to reopen the San Francisco campus at all other than creator provincialism. But we have to have a protagonist who's playing the martyr, having resigned in "disgrace" over having made a child a ward of the state after his mother was sentenced to a penal colony for piracy and murder (which is incredibly stupid) and Admiral Vance has to kiss her ass to get things rolling. Also, what is the Discovery-era's fetish with making every protagonist an ex-convict? OK, no... I can't take this seriously anymore. The acting here is absolutely terrible, and the writing might be worse. I am twenty minutes in and I am ready to stop. It's not Section 31 bad, but it's getting there. Robert Picardo delivers a pretty typical performance as Voyager's EMH. It's a shame he's wasting his time here. Because Discovery got made fun of for not bothering to name the bridge crew, Starfleet Academy takes the time to have the Captain personally name every bridge officer on taking command so we know that the writers weren't that lazy again. I have a nasty, nasty feeling that Kerrice Brooks is going to get a lot of hate for her character. Like Mary Wiseman, she seems to be stuck playing a character who is what can only be described as Hollywood Autistic. It's overacted in a way that makes her feel less autistic and more developmentally delayed? Even the Doctor ends up actually fleeing from her due to how obnoxious she is. Yes, the doctor really doesn't know what the word "casualties" means now. "Do not kill your instructor on day one". Words to live by. That's got to be at least second semester curriculum. Also, medical technology seems to have taken a massive step backwards with tissue regenerators now being incredibly painful for some reason? The fight scene at the end has enough shakycam to make you think the lead cinematographer was Michael J. Fox. Oh no, the first episode is bad. It's worryingly bad. "We have learned NOTHING from the failure of Star Trek: Discovery or Section 31" bad. Based on my own experience, I doubt it's culture war BS driving the generous helping of negative reviews. The writing is atrociously, cringe-inducingly bad. If they could fix that it might actually be watchable, but as it is it doesn't matter how good (or bad, in the case of Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti) the actors are if they're delivering dialog and following storylines that read like someone asked ChatGPT to write Star Trek in the style of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The series can't decide if it wants to be serious or funny, and it REALLY needs to pick a lane because it can't do both.

I was just about to start when I saw this post. One of my friends watched it earlier, and could only manage damning it by faint praise as "more fun than Discovery". EDIT: The initial batch of reviews and review scores are NOT promising. This sucker's sitting at a 35% audience score. That's enough to put it in Trek's bottom 10 titles right off the bat.

That hasn't really been the case for a long time. Star Wars is a merchandising empire that goes far, far beyond the movies. That's what made George Lucas a billionaire. If anything, it would be more accurate to say the movies and TV shows are a way to milk more money out of merchandising because they're launchpads for toys, for games, for novels, for comics, and all manner of other goods. Does the studio's president deserve some of the blame when the work her subordinates do doesn't produce the intended result? Yes, absolutely. Most of it belongs to the project's creative team who dropped the ball. But that's not what Star Wars's crybaby culture warriors are complaining about. In their desperate delusion, they imagine her to be chiefly if not solely responsible for every single thing they don't like about the franchise (which is ridiculous) and conveniently overlook that those projects were still financially successful and that she presided over a number of extremely well-regarded Star Wars projects like The Mandalorian, Rogue One and Andor as well. The hilarious irony is her anointed successor has a far better claim to being responsible for what ails Star Wars than she ever will. 😆

IMO, Rebels was pretty good. Its main problem is that, like The Bad Batch, it's basically a direct continuation of The Clone Wars and puts at least as much effort into picking up and running with plot threads from that series as it does coming up with its own story. Ahsoka and The Mandalorian are basically spinoffs of it with Ahsoka literally picking up right where Rebels ended. My guess would be that Filoni is going to run the Disney+ Star Wars originals and future movies like the Expanded Universe. It's going to be "continuing adventures" and continuity porn, because that's what he does. His idea of a good time is origin stories for one-dimensional villains from the 2000s (e.g. the Tales series).

Even so, blaming the president of the studio for a lack of leadership on the part of the lead producer, writer(s), and director(s) is a bit like blaming the CEO of a restaurant for a line cook getting your order wrong or blaming "Can you hear me now?" guy for a cell phone network outage. 🙃 Kathleen Kennedy was just a convenient blame figure for the fandom's culture warriors because she was a woman in authority and they're sexist AF, and because her position as the studio's president made her highly visible as the company's de facto head cheerleader responsible for all manner of promotional work. Give it time. Those reserves of goodwill will only last so long... especially if he continues trying to turn Star Wars into Star Wars: a Clone Wars Story. The man genuinely cannot let go of a 20 year old cartoon and he's rapidly running out of ideas. If Ahsoka is anything, it's a desperate plea for help and a sign that the well is running dry.

Oh yeah, it's gonna be wild when the fandom's culture warriors arrive late to the realization that nothing's gonna change because Kathleen Kennedy was the company's president not someone who was heavily involved in the day-to-day creative work. 😜😆 I wonder who the new scapegoat will be? If it's Dave Filoni, at least they'll be blaming someone deserving for once.

The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter dropped a new episode today. So... um... Crunchyroll's list of applicable genres and short description of the series is missing a very critical detail. Their series page lists The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter in the Fantasy, Slice-of-Life, and Romance genres with a 14+ content advisory for "suggestive dialogue". The actual genre this series belongs to is Boys Love, as protagonist Seiichiro found out "the hard way" in this week's episode. 😅 I didn't look the series up on Wikipedia before starting it, and nothing in the entire first episode gives any hint that it's anything other than an isekai fantasy slice-of-life title taking a couple shots at Japan's toxic work culture. The first (and only!) warning of where things were headed was when the protagonist gets sick from drinking too many of the potions that are this world's equivalent of energy shots and, after being rushed away for treatment, [...] Once that's over, it's right back to firing shots across the bow of Japan's office culture like nothing happened with the knight order's doctor being absolutely horrified by Seiichiro's overall poor health, lack of sleep, and atrociously unhealthy vegetables-only diet. The rest of the episode is the knight commander borderline bullying Seiichiro into abandoning a whole array of ingrained toxic corporate culture habits like constant overtime, excessive use of stimulants, skipping meals and poor diet, taking work home after work hours, and so on... which sounds distressingly like a bunch of the conversations I've had to have with contract staffers at my day job. 😕 Still, I'll ship it. Probably the first human kindness that the poor bloke's felt since graduating college and entering the workforce. Honestly, I'm having a real problem writing this because 90% of the turns-of-phrase I want to use to describe how unexpected that was sound like double entendre in context now. 😅 Still an interesting series... the adult content was frankly unnecessary and adds nothing to the story.

In most cases, those "hows" and "whys" of the ancient constructs in question had already been found out and fairly well documented years if not decades before von Daniken put pen to paper. Von Daniken's books ignore the findings of real archaeologists in favor of fantastical nonsense about alien intervention because they aren't trying to present a serious scientific theory, they're a vehicle for racist ideology. The whole premise underlying the ancient alien intervention hypothesis von Daniken popularized is minimizing or handwaving the achievements of indigenous cultures in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (but not Europe) by claiming those native civilizations couldn't have built or discovered what they did when they did without a superior civilization's assistance. Looking up who his editor was is enough to make it very clear that that is not accidental.

Tried out You and I are Polar Opposites today over lunch. It's very similar to Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota in its basic premise of "someone with no poker face is very clearly down bad for their incredibly stoic classmate". IMO, it functions a lot better as a story because the protagonist Miyu is very aware of her feelings for her stoic classmate Yusuke and just not quite able to spit it out instead of being a bratty bully. It sold its romance well enough that it got me in Miyu's corner before the end of the episode, so I'm looking forward to more. 👍

For all the vast and far-reaching harm his pseudoscientific quackery has done in the fields of history and archaeology, it can at least be said that he indirectly did some good in his first book inspiring Stargate.

Also sampled The Villainess is Adored by the Prince of the Neighboring Kingdom and A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans. Both appear to be passable but unremarkable, utterly by-the-numbers examples of the otome game isekai and "normal guy teaches a class at paranormal school" genres respectively. The Villainess is Adored by the Prince of the Neighboring Kingdom is the story of a girl reincarnated in medias res as the villainess in the otome game she was playing when she died by Truck-kun, regaining memories of her past life just before she's due to meet her fate in the usual otome game villainess manner. Her story starts in earnest when her ex-fiance's plans to send her into exile are derailed barely a minute after being voiced by a prince from the neighboring kingdom declaring that he has Always Loved Her and immediately popping the question. It's not bad. It's just... really committed to that formula. A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans is similarly formulaic. Another one of those series about an eccentric but otherwise normal human getting hired to teach at a school for paranormal beings in part because their life kinda-sorta sucks and also because part of the school's curriculum is teaching said paranormal beings how to act human. In this case, the teacher is a guy with social anxiety who quit his job as a regular teacher and is now stuck with a class containing three animal girls and a mermaid. Also not bad, but following its formula so strictly that you'd suspect deviation is published by caning or something.

The third episode of Kunon the Sorcerer Can See dropped today. The first two episodes definitely didn't make a good impression and the series definitely started as it meant to go on. Partway through the third episode, I had to pause when I finally found the words to articulate why this series feels wrong. It's not just that the story is a badly written mess barely paying lip service to its own central premise. The combination of its directionless-feeling story and wildly uneven pacing makes it feel like the series is rushing without a destination in mind. Like they're just trying to get through the story as quickly as they can so they can go do something else. For instance, the main character only just started school the previous episode and is already set to graduate in this episode without ever actually attending a class. The school seems to serve no purpose in the story besides providing another group of randos to frantically glaze the protagonist at every turn. It's done so often, and so such ridiculous extremes, that it's actually quite disruptive to the story. I don't think I'll bother watching any further.

The first Infinity Castle movie is gorgeously animated... but because it follows exactly the same format as the TV series despite being a 155 minute movie the flashbacks REALLY REALLY drag on. Like, I remember I did not check the length of the film before going to see it at my local theater and was absolutely flabbergasted that the film was still going and still aggressively flashback-ing at the two hour mark. Caught another episode of The Daily Life of the Part-Time Torturer over lunch today. Its outrageous premise is no more than superficial so far and it's really just a "my daily life with my quirky coworkers" slice-of-life title. The vast majority of the physical business is offscreen or implied so the "torture" part is mostly just refuge in audacity for an office setting, since the characters don't really treat their work with any more gravitas than might normally be reserved for an afternoon spent shucking clams. It's not really bad... it's just... why? Why is this a thing? If you changed their occupation to rubbing grease on weasels it would be exactly the same story.

More new season stuff... Jujutsu Kaisen's third season has started, picking up where the last one ended with the start of the Culling Game arc. The part where the original manga began seriously inflicting darkness-induced audience apathy on casual readers. It's a tournament arc, and IMO a bit of a pointless one since its villain's ambiguous goal being little more than "for the lulz" and it only really serves to put off the final confrontation with the story's big bad (Sukuna) by putting two dozen or so cannon fodder characters in the way so what's left of the main cast can farm them for powerups.