Seto Kaiba

I've mentioned her a few times before in this topic. First mention of the Graf Zeppelin II (CVN-100) was in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix (2012). She's mentioned and shown in the section of the book devoted to talking about the Asuka II (CVN-99) as a second ship of the same experimental class and type that was a predecessor to the Prometheus (CVS-101). Master File says she served as part of the UN Navy 2nd Fleet and that her home port was Norfolk, VA. She's seen among the ships defending South Ataria island in December 2008 in Macross the First (2014), as a carrier launching VF-0's. Her name is noted to be something of an irreverant in-joke regarding the circumstances of her construction. The Asuka II-class was designed in Japan and was originally meant for service with the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces. When the UN Forces decided to build a second ship of the same class, the contract to build the new ship landed at some unspecified shipyard in (West) Germany. The irony of this was apparently too much to be contained by anyone in the military administration, and she was named in honor of Germany's only other aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, which had also been a copy of a Japanese aircraft carrier design. Defense forces for those worlds settled by the short-distance emigrant fleets were probably initially quite small. They're probably not small anymore, given that those emigrant planets are within spitting distance of Earth and were among the first planets colonized. They'd have had more time than almost anyone to build infrastructure, harness natural resources, and grow their local defense forces with the close support of Earth's immense manufacturing power. I'd assume the lander can operate independently. Zentradi ships use networked clusters of reactors and drives, so I'd assume the lander probably has its own fold system cluster and we know it has its own reactors, engines, and weapons. For a given value of "assault"... they're not really made to land ground forces. The Daedalus II-class is as close as it really gets, but it's not an assault lander like the Daedalus was. It's a dedicated space carrier like the ARMD-class but with the capability to carry out ramming attacks.

Normally when a film is that bad we see a brief advertising blitz to get as many people in theaters for opening weekend before word gets around that it's a turd. From this one? Nothing. It's like theater chains entirely forgot that this film comes out less than a month from now. It's not even in the "Coming attractions" reels in the actual theaters themselves.

If you think about it, that's kind of... everywhere. Post-war culture is a hodgepodge of whatever cultural artifacts and traditions survived the First Space War and whatever they've come up with since to fill in the gaps. There are whole fleets that devote their living spaces to enthusiastic recreations of pre-war Earth like Macross-11 or Macross Frontier. Macross Frontier goes so hard on it that they made recreations of multiple cities worth of historic districts complete with superficially appropriate vehicles and other aesthetics. The ultimate fate of the Asuka II is not stated, but she was likely destroyed in the bombardment. Her sister ship, Graf Zeppelin II, was assigned to protect South Ataria island and may now be floating out near Pluto. At the very least, we know of one crew member on the Asuka II who has living descendants after the war. The movie Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure establishes that Walkure member Makina Nakajima is the great-granddaughter of the VF-0 program's chief mechanic aboard the Asuka II: Raizo Nakajima. That's the Battle Astraea, yeah... from the NUNS's 7th Fleet, prior to it being stolen by its commander and crew and becoming the flagship of Heimdall. Available information suggests planetary defense forces vary in size depending on the emigrant fleet that ultimately colonized the planet. The New UN Spacy escort fleet that the emigrant ship was protected by becomes the planet's New UN Spacy defense force after colonization begins. So some planets have a Battle-class to rely on because they had the good fortune to be colonized by a 3rd Gen or later emigrant fleet. Fleets that didn't leave with one (or lost theirs) would have to build one or buy one. Presumably the reason we see no Battle-class ships in the Brisingr cluster is that it was colonized by 1st and 2nd generation fleets like Megaroad-04. Macross Frontier is just as blatant, with the uppermost level of Island-1 being a loving recreation of several parts of San Francisco... right down to the infestation of Toyota Priuses and Ozma's replica of an early 90's Lancia Delta HF Integrale. Though I think no example better suits the post-war fervor for recreating pre-war history than Culture Park in Macross II: Lovers Again. Lovingly crafted recreations of many world famous pre-war monuments with Disneyland-like abandon. The whole scene is a massive homage to Roman Holiday, so we see a lot of Roman landmarks like the Trinita dei Monti church and the famous Spanish Steps, the Mouth of Truth in the Piazza della Bocca della Verita, and the Flavian Amphitheatre. We also see several other monuments from other places and cultures like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Louvre in Paris (we see Ishtar pose in front of Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People), the Moai from Easter Island, the Great Wall of China, and Petra's Khazneh el-Far'oun... all lovingly recreated for the sake of an enormous historical theme park. Or that Marines are simply carried as infantry aboard naval vessels... the Marines we see postwar have been the Spacy Marines.

We got another month before this one comes out, right? I've been to the theaters like half a dozen times in the last two weeks and I've seen NOTHING about Kraven there. If there was any advertising at all, it seems like it's been buried under the advertising blitz for Red One.

Is there a petition we can sign to get the showerunners of Andor put in charge of Star Wars as a whole? Seriously. This is ten thousand times more interesting than anything about the glowstick society.

Just got back from a showing of Overlord: the Sacred Kingdom. Not gonna lie, I can see why IGN gave the movie a bad review. It's a very compressed adaptation of the light novel that is absolutely no ambassador to anyone who hasn't seen the anime up through the middle of its fourth season. It cuts out several major scenes, and merges a few others. Unfortunately one of the scenes it left out was a really important one that explains why the demons absolutely ham it up about Neia's bow being a "rune" weapon, so there are several scenes where demons just engage in dreadful acting about it with zero direct explanation. It's not a bad speedrun of the story, but it's definitely not for the non-fan.

As narratively unnecessary and painfully dull as the movie was, I can honestly say I feel no inclination whatsoever to watch its equally dull and unnecessary prequel. On the scale of "better things to do with my time", watching Freedom Zero is going to fall somewhere below teaching myself to play the bluegrass banjo with my feet, catching the flu for purely recreational purposes, or rewriting the entirety of the European Union's tax code in dactylic hexameter pig Latin and publishing it as an epic poem. A hard pass even then.

That alone was enough to get my attention. So much of Star Wars is focused on military affairs or the life of ne'er-do-wells on the fringes of society that there's little indication of what life is like for the billions upon billions of normal workaday folks who aren't living and working in the almost-literal ivory towers of the rich and powerful, the wretched hives of the crime lords, or the little farming villages in the middle of nowhere. Skeleton Crew'll be doing some interesting worldbuilding.

Nothing is too weird for the Star Wars setting as a whole. Disney's in this to make money, though... so I expect the writers of this kid's show will keep the weirdness to a kid-friendly and marketably controversy-free level. (Elective cybernetics might veer too closely to a politically-polarizing real world topic for Disney's comfort.)

Star Wars's Galaxy Far Far Away is an absolutely gargantuan setting that's allegedly home to over 20 million sentient species. I'd assume the only practical limits on "weird" are the imagination of the writers and the size of the budget for practical and digital effects. In a way, isn't that kind of the theme here? Skeleton Crew is a story about some bored kids from a nice, safe, middle class neighborhood where nothing interesting ever happens digging up a buried spaceship and finding out how weird, wild, and dangerous the rest of the Galaxy Far Far Away really is.

In a way, it is oddly impressive that Disney LucasFilm's writers managed to make "Lesbian Space Witches" unappealing to Star Wars's predominantly male audience. (Even more so given that pre-Disney LucasFilm managed to sell fans on the idea twice. Once in the EU novels and once in The Clone Wars.) That said, pre-Disney Star Wars had its fair share of "Holy my beer" bad narrative decisionmaking too. Phantom Menace introducing three different alien species that read like racist political cartoons, absolutely every bit of dialog between Anakin and Padme, so very much of the Expanded Universe. It is not a new development by any means. It's gotta be there for a reason. AFAIK, Star Wars cybernetics are mostly organ/limb replacements for people with life-altering injuries. The few exceptions are low level clerks and functionaries who get elective surgery to boost their brains with computer hardware. That's why I hypothesized she might be blind. The casting does seem to be aiming to make the group of kids as diverse and representational as you'd expect for a kids show (which is not a bad thing, to be clear). Social media does absolutely feed the toxic fandom... but on the other hand, Star Wars has also served up enough disappointments in its rapid-fire release schedule since Disney took the helm that general audiences are greeting new titles with less enthusiasm and more skepticism/suspicion too. For every Rebels, The Mandalorian, or Andor there's a The Acolyte, The Book of Boba Fett, or The Rise of Skywalker serving up a bland and disappointing viewing experience or irritatingly bad writing.

Nah, she's probably meant to be an inclusive character for viewers with disabilities. Like Geordi LaForge was in Star Trek: the Next Generation. It'd be a bit too weird for Disney to make a kid into a cybernetics fetishist like that ridiculous moped gang from The Book of Boba Fett. As memorable as he is, I'm sure I'll forget him again soon enough. And if not, there's bourbon.

I completely forgot that he exists. I think my brain glossed over his existence entirely, since he looks like an especially ugly Chia Pet and he and his crew managed to be slightly less intimidating than stormtroopers.

Yeah, it'd just feel wrong to have a space pirate story in Star Wars without Hondo... seemingly Star Wars's only space pirate.

Honestly, that sounds like a recipe for hilarity to me. I would watch that. The undead Emperor just... getting completely casually disrespected by a bunch of exciteable kids who have no idea who he is, trying to keep his flesh from falling off his bones at the same time he's trying to keep their grubby mitts off his Sith artifacts until he can find someone to dump them on so he can have a moment's peace. The most dangerous and deadly villain in the galaxy treated like a Scooby-Doo villain for a few episodes. (And you can't tell me Star Wars has never done that kind of thing before. I've seen the episodes of The Clone Wars where Dooku is taken hostage by that magnificent ham Hondo and ends up chained to Anakin and Obi-wan.)