Seto Kaiba

Let's Play's fifth episode is out. I know the original author's from Kansas City, but could she at least have done a little location research before setting a series in LA. I can tell I'm getting old and cynical because this has the sitcom apartment problem and my first reaction was "There is no way in hell a barista can afford an apartment that big or that nice in downtown." Sadly, the character drama was flat enough to calibrate laser levels. 🙃

There are times when it can be satisfying to see a villain confront the consequences of their actions and have to live with them. However, that only works when the villain's offenses are comparatively minor and there's a suitably karmic form of self-enforcing retribution available. For Ben Solo, the consequences of his actions are a New Republic war crimes tribunal and a swift execution by firing squad. He was Supreme Leader Snoke's right-hand man and then Supreme Leader himself after he assassinated Snoke. His crimes are not minor. He personally murdered hundreds if not thousands of people and was an accessory to the murders of billions more as Supreme Leader Snoke's enforcer and later Supreme Leader himself. What he did as Kylo Ren was way, WAY too heinous for him to be allowed to live and walk away after the war ended. We know from The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett that the New Republic executed senior Imperial officers for their crimes. Kylo Ren's offenses are an order of magnitude or two worse than the crimes that got Moff Gideon the death penalty in a New Republic court. There's no way that letting him live and walk away from what he did would ever be a satisfying or natural conclusion to his story arc. He was a legitimate monster. It's the same deal with the Emperor and Darth Vader. The sheer scale and number of their crimes meant that death was the only acceptable way for their part of the story to end. Eh... I think Star Wars will be better off putting that Skywalker nonsense behind it. It suffers too much narratively from The Main Characters Do Everything as it is.

My first thought, which I omitted because it didn't go much of anywhere, is that it might be numeric substitution goroawase... but none of the results I got there really seem to fit the characters. After all, who would describe Alto as nikoya (smiling, cheerful)?

Hi and welcome! To explain a bit, Macross II: Lovers Again was made as a far future sequel to the first Macross movie Macross: Do You Remember Love?. It has a different/separate timeline from the sequels that were created afterwards like Macross Plus and Macross 7 and is officially considered a "parallel world" story separate from the other sequels. It's not "essential" in the sense that it's not part of the timeline leading up to (currently) Macross Delta, but it's still a fun installment in the franchise and it does get referenced as a sort of easter egg in some later titles anyway. Normally, the recommended viewing order is release order. So if you're just finishing up the original series your next port of call would be the movie Macross: Do You Remember Love? and then the epilogue OVA Macross: Flash Back 2012 before moving on to (optionally) Macross II and then Macross Plus.

Well, to be fair it jives with what's said in the films about how his life was basically "abducted as a kid, raised as a stormtrooper, deserted on his first combat mission" and not a lot else. 🤣 I don't really follow Star Wars's "Expanded Universe" either, but my Google-fu is strong and I know a bunch of Star Wars die-hards. Eh, he's got a "found family" in La Resistance though... he doesn't really need to go looking for the biological parents he doesn't remember or know. Not just that, it's a universe built around the idea of an unending cycle of morally simplistic Good vs. Evil conflict where the forces of Baby Eating Villainy will always rise up to threaten the galaxy so that there can be another Chosen One to lead the fight against nonspecific tyranny. It's basically a galaxy of forever war like Warhammer 40,000 because that's what's needed to keep the audience invested. Warhammer 40,000's just honest about it. 🤣 Just that one sentence makes you a better writer than most of the folks who worked on the sequel trilogy. The rest probably makes you at least as good as whoever's writing Spaceballs 2. The biggest lesson that Disney failed to learn from pre-Disney Star Wars is that pulling a Happy Ending Override on Return of the Jedi in order to drag the original trilogy cast back into action for a neverending series of battles and crises that brutalize and traumatize them and their children over and over again until they're broken down husks of the beloved characters they were onscreen is inevitably going to test poorly in the long run. The only thing Disney did was speedrun the negative reaction by skipping straight to showing the burnt-out, broken down husks of the OT protagonists first with the intention of filling in the prior traumatic events later. With literally nothing to cushion the blow, well... What Disney LucasFilm should have done - what Paramount was smart enough to do when picking up Star Trek after the end of its original series - was set the new story a lifetime or more into the future. That way the achievements of the original work's characters can pass into history and the new work can build on that legacy without stepping on any toes. Can you imagine how much less b*tching there would have been if The Force Awakens had started with: Boom. Just like that, you can do almost the exact same plot but without dragging Han, Luke, and Leia through the mud. Kylo Ren is Leia's great grandson or something and enough time has passed in the galaxy that the Empire's crimes aren't as sharp in people's memories.

Given that the song presents these as phone numbers, that's probably just part of the area code picked to fit with the song's rhyming scheme. Japanese phone numbers have an area code anywhere from 2-6 digits in length starting with a 0. Usually the first three digits denote a major city, a prefecture, or a cluster of adjacent subprefectures and the longer ones denote specific districts within those subprefectures. Hokkaido, for instance, has six separate three-digit area codes that collectively cover the 14 subprefectures of the island. Area code 013 covers Oshima, Hiyama, Shiribeshi, and the northern part of Ishikari. Hakodate, in Oshima subprefecture, has an area code of 0138. The longer the code, the more specific the subdivision of the area. An area code for a single district might be six digits. It doesn't seem to have any connection to ship number, since we know Sheryl's home was the Macross Galaxy's Mainland and Alto Saotome's family home AND the apartment he lived in after running away from home were both in Island-1 with the latter being in the Senzoku block (suggesting there's a district in Island-1 either named for or recreating Taitou Ward). That said, Alto's number is probably his business phone so it may be registered/coded for the San Francisco area on Island-1's portside where SMS headquarters and the SMS Macross Quarter are docked.

Li'l Miss Vampire Can't Suck Right really confuses me. Despite the title, it's a squeaky clean romcom. The setting is a modern Japan where various fantasy creatures like vampires are just a part of everyday life. The protagonist hits it off with a vampire girl in his class who is desperately trying to look cool because she's awful at being a vampire. But the series never really bothers to explain how she's survived if she's unable to do the one thing vampires need to do to survive, or if there's an alternative why is she always coming to school so hungry that she can barely participate? (Not much room for romance either when the female lead's basically reduced to the status of a crying infant two or three times an episode.)

I wouldn't call it miraculous... I'd call it a difference in working conditions and staffing. Rogue One and Andor are products of studio confidence in a creative team that had a clear and consistent vision for what they wanted to accomplish, and enough non-fans in senior positions to ensure that the focus remained on telling a tight, focused story set in the Star Wars universe. IIRC, Tony Gilroy said at one point that he got all of one note from the studio on Andor and that was that Maarva couldn't drop an F-bomb in her posthumous speech. The Rise of Skywalker came out hot on the heels of two highly contentious Star Wars projects so there was low confidence on the studio side from the outset. The creative team got overhauled right before filming and the incomplete script was being constantly revised during principal photography, so the creative vision was all over the place and couldn't even settle on key plot points like Rey's origin story and the studio was watching and second-guessing everything. A bunch of Star Wars superfans on the creative team probably did not help matters either, but that seems almost trivial in comparison. I'd say the difference between the likes of The Wrath of Khan and Section 31 is about that big. There are Star Wars fans who'll defend The Last Jedi and the Rise of Skywalker. I've yet to meet a Trekkie who'll defend Section 31 even in jest. Warhammer 40,000 also has an example I'd point to with the galaxies-wide gulf in quality between the exemplary Gaunt's Ghosts novel series by Dan Abnett and the near-universally scorned Inquisition War trilogy by Ian Watson, with the latter being infamous for prose so purple it practically flies and eats people and its tendency to make extended digressions into its author's sexual frustration and creepy fetishes. As Bruva Alfabusa once put it: The only reason anyone reads that dreadful tome is bile fascination... wanting to see if it's really as bad as the rumors say. The answer is always "No, it's worse."

Let's Play dropped its fourth episode, and honestly this series is still kind of headache inducing to watch. The story fairly screams that its creator has at-most superficial knowledge of the "gamer culture" that it's supposedly deconstructing, it does demonstrate a very clear understanding of one thing: toxic online fandom. There's actually a very good moment early in this episode where Marshall Law's YouTuber girlfriend talks him out of attempting to publicly apologize to Sam for his overwhelmingly negative review of her game and shame his fans into deleting their negative reviews. She practically recites John Gabriel's Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory while explaining to him how his fans, being anonymous and knowing their actions are largely consequence-free, will likely double down instead of doing as he asks and not only make Sam's life worse but turn on him as well. The first halfway interesting thing this series has done is show Marshall grappling with the desire to make things right and the knowledge the internet simply won't let him undo the damage, and making things worse with the person he's trying to apologize to in the process. Sadly, that moment of actually-interesting character writing is short-lived and the series quickly pivots to its usual cringeworthy nonsense.

Understandable. After all, The Rise of Skywalker was a pile of desperate corporate-dictated course corrections in a trench coat pretending to be a movie. 🫤 's kind of why I've been arguing that there's no saving The Rise of Skywalker's big bad switcheroo plot twist no matter how much setup you do. He's still an outside-context problem brought in because the studio probably felt Kylo Ren's villain cred was insufficient to carry the final third of the trilogy.

She's a minor character in The Rise of Skywalker. Rey's group meet her and her tribe of ex-First Order stormtroopers on the ocean moon of Endor while they're looking for the throne room in the wreckage of the second Death Star. She later goes with them to Exegol to fight the Sith and brings the horses they ride on top of that one Star Destroyer. At the end of the movie, she goes off with Lando Calrissian to look for her original family... though TBH the vibe I got was that she was meant to be the daughter Lando mentions was abducted by the First Order as a toddler. Nah. Disney backed away from the idea of Rose being Finn's love interest after she got almost Jar-Jar levels of hate when The Last Jedi came out. It did seem like Jannah was going to end up Finn's new love interest for a hot minute there since they were paired up several times in The Rise of Skywalker, but nothing comes of it either.

Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota remains cute but directionless in its fifth episode. It has exactly one joke, and that is a deadpan reaction followed by serial escalation. My Friend's Little Sister Has It In For Me has hit almost white noise levels of unremarkable.

They've delved into his history in secondary works, based on what I can find... and his past is exactly as unremarkable as the films made it out. Basically, he was "recruited" at age 3 and raised in the First Order's indoctrination centers to be a future Stormtrooper cadet. He did well in training though got up to various comic relief-type hijinks on various assignments and the rest of his squad didn't like him so he never got a nickname. Jakku at the start of The Force Awakens was his first time in combat outside of simulations. He means Jannah, the female ex-First Order stormtrooper that Finn partners with in The Rise of Skywalker. (Yes, I had to look up her name too.) Nobody in Star Wars gets to live happily ever after. Only misery in this galaxy.

Honestly? In my opinion, any potential Finn might have had as a character was squandered by The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. He didn't have a lot to do in The Force Awakens aside from being Rey and Han's comic relief sidekick. The film did briefly tease that he might have the force potential to become a Jedi in later installments, but that was ultimately dropped. His subplot in The Last Jedi was one of the most heavily criticized parts of the movie and I think that was ultimately what got him demoted to almost an advertised extra in The Rise of Skywalker (alongside Disney's worries about the box office take in China). None of the main characters in the sequel trilogy are what I'd call well-developed, but I feel like Finn was the one who had it the worst by a significant margin. He's basically only ever a sidekick. First to Poe, then Rey, then Han, then Poe again, then Rose, and finally back to Rey. He gets Worf'd so Rey can look good, he sets up catchphrases for Poe, etc. He doesn't ever really get to be his own man... which I find disappointing because he was set up to have a much more interesting character arc than Rey (the Chosen Mary Sue) or Poe Dameron (cocky Ace Pilot rogue) given that he was a defector from the First Order. All of that said, I feel like at this point characters and set pieces from the sequel trilogy are water from a poisoned well. He didn't have enough of an arc for there to be any sense of direction to his character that might drive an original series centered on him. If anything, he might get to come back as a minor character in some far future story where we'll learn that he's serving as a general in the Defiance as they fight the Second Order on the New New Republic's behalf because it can't be arsed. Other than that, he's probably going to be strictly an EU novels character.

Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota is cute, but doesn't really seem to be going anywhere story-wise... which is a bit disappointing. The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess feels like it's determined to take at least one shot at every overused otome character trope and plot device. It's a bit predictable in that regard, though it definitely lands (mostly) in affectionate parody territory.