Seto Kaiba

Yes. Initially, anyway. A year or so later there it's no longer a one-off and is in some kind of semi-official limited production. No. The YF-29's weapons are powerful, sure... but they're only impressive by the standards of an average Valkyrie's normal firepower. Yeah, it has a heavy quantum beam gunpod that can theoretically sink a small escort warship in a single hit in beam grenade mode. So does the VF-27. That's about on par with a warship's charged particle beam gun turrets. Its next heaviest weapon, the TW2 beam turret, is said to be the same type used for point defense on aircraft carriers. Its missiles and built-in guns are formidable because they have the same MDE ammunition used on the VF-25 and VF-171. In a way, this broadly mirrors the original RX-78 Gundam. Its beam rifle was an extremely powerful weapon by the standards of Mobile Suits-carried weapons at the time, but the firepower was comparable to a single warship-mounted beam cannon and the rapid proliferation of the technology meant that it went from "extremely powerful" to merely above average in a matter of months. Just five or so large chunks in specific places. Unclear... he does let the YF-29 crash after abandoning it, but there's nothing saying it's unrecoverable. We've seen worse.

FWIW, I enjoyed it clear through to the end. Scarlet is so delightfully free of the usual restraint and timidness of so many other female leads in her genre, and I promise the punching does not stop until the very end.

"Transitional" feels like the wrong word for it. After all, real(istic) robot anime didn't exist as a genre before the original Mobile Suit Gundam series. They were defining what it meant to be a non-super robot anime as they went and everyone that came after built on that concept. Mobile Suit Gundam made a clean break with a lot of iconic super robot tropes. The titular robot was a military prototype built for a morally ambiguous war between humans and a weapon based on explicable, reproduceable, practical technology meant for mass production. Its capabilities were impressive, but finite and limited by its specs. Its weapons were only what you could see and did not exceed the capabilities of more conventional platforms. It wasn't Earth's sole defender or even necessarily involved in many key conflicts. Super Dimension Fortress Macross went a fair bit further with the idea by having the Valkyries and Destroids already be mass produced weapons before the war started and by putting more detail into the designs themselves that emphasize their practicality and both "real" vehicles and military hardware. In his Macross Design Works book, Shoji Kawamori talks a bit about how the design of the VF-1 entered unprecedented territory by including realistic details emphasizing its practical use like its aerodynamic control surfaces, landing gear, or the way various parts of it fold or open for maintenance and storage. They went further than simply putting a giant robot into a realistic setting and emphasized trying to make the robot itself feel more grounded and believable as a practical weapon of war. That same unusual attention to detail shows up in Miyatake's designs for the Destroids too. Not only did they prioritize having a clear design lineage and show common platforms in use for different purposes, they went as far as figuring out things like how the various joints should be articulated, where the ammunition for certain weapons are stored and how the feed systems work, and even giving them realistic military bumper codes and bumper numbers based on US military formation markings. (That same attention to detail even extends to the Zentradi mecha, where Macross's creators even bothered to sit down and figure out how the Zentradi forces markings would work and even how they would record kill marks.)

I suppose so! Of course, when I think of "super robots" I tend to fall back on how Japan likes to define the term. A super robot is in the most stringently literal sense a robot that is functionally the same as a comic book superhero. A larger-than-life figure that gets its power from unexplainable or unscientific sources, is impossible (or nearly impossible) to duplicate, is the Last Line of Defense against some evil that the military just can't handle despite being piloted by some random civilian, requires a lot of flamboyant posing and Calling Your Attacks, manifests new powers or weapons as the plot demands, and responds to the operator's heroic willpower or some other special quality in a way that causes it to exceed its specs, and exists to fight Evil in a fairly straightforward Good vs Evil-type narrative. Gundam doesn't usually indulge in those tropes. There are a few titles that flirt with some super robot-adjacent tropes like Gundam Wing having each Gundam be made by a single genius scientist working alone, or G-Reco and G-Witch having a Gundam that can only be piloted by a specific person... but those are usually paired with extensive subversions of the rest. IMO, the main sign of super robot "DNA" in the OG Gundam series was the Gundam's garish paintjob that Tomino so bitterly opposed. Macross's creators were even more gung-ho about realism, which is why they went to the trouble/effort of ensuring the designs included things like aerodynamic control surfaces, the feed systems for bullets, and how the powertrain actually worked to drive a walking robot. (And of course they put a lot of that same energy into GUNSIGHT, which provided an ex-post-facto explanation for same for Gundam.)

Nah, we'll get full-on Terminators. Human-scale bipedal robots armed with conventional weapons. Probably supported by other drone weapons platforms. Back in April 2017, Russian robotics firm Android Technics caused a bit of an uproar when they published a video of their multipurpose humanoid robot prototype FEDOR conducting a target shooting exercise as a demonstration of its precision and dexterity. Android Technics strenuously maintains that the FEDOR prototype was designed for rescue operations and absolutely not intended to have any military application, but the Russian deputy prime minster at the time still felt compelled to make a public statement in response to the demonstration that Russia was on no uncertain terms absolutely NOT developing a Terminator. (Which, I am certain, reassured exactly nobody.)

Eh... back when the OG Mobile Suit Gundam series was made real robot tropes had yet to be codified so it did have some leftover elements of "super-ness" to it. That said, most of the traits that are now said to be emblematic of super robots are generally absent from Gundam. The exceptions being, of course, those Gundam installments that unapologetically cross that line into super robot-ness like SD Gundam and Mobile Fighter G Gundam. A "super prototype" and a "super robot" are two different things... though their key distinction is usually whether they're handled like a practical weapon or a superhero.

TBH, I think that impression was probably made literal years before Kawamori actually began his career at Studio Nue. After all, he started attending SF Central Art's monthly meet-up "The Crystal Convention" during his first year of high school in 1975. SF Central Art got its start as a fan group for SF Magazine doing illustrations, analysis, and theory-crafting based on the magazine's publications of domestic and translated western sci-fi stories. They turned that into a business in 1972 when they formed Crystal Art Studio (later Studio Nue) and were doing illustrations for translated western SF as well as developing setting materials and doing some outsource mechanical design for SF and mecha anime works. He basically spent the last 3-4 years of his pre-professional life regularly hanging out with detail-obsessed SF design artists and illustrators whose passion and profession was analyzing and crafting highly detailed science fiction settings. He joined Studio Nue the same month that Mobile Suit Gundam started airing (April 1979) and got wrapped up in SF Central Art's analysis and theory-crafting about that series that spawned GUNSIGHT and then Gundam Century while working on The Ultraman and Diaclone. I don't think any criticism of giant robots hit Kawamori badly. He was already the kind of person who'd ponder the implications and ask probing questions about a SF setting and he had spent four years with pros learning how to build, analyze, and critique detailed sci-fi settings. He was one of the ones making the criticism of giant robots while he was watching and discussing Gundam with the other members of SF Central Art and those criticisms and observations about how Gundam's story was put together informed his own work on what would become Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

It's OK, as shounen anime titles go. It feels a lot like Bleach at the start between the art style, tone, and the basic premise. It loses that sense of fun and adventure after the first few story arcs and starts leaning a lot more heavily on horror. Especially almost Junji Ito-esque body horror. Past the Shibuya arc it kind of devolves into audience alienating levels of unstinting darkness and misery. That's right about where it lost me. IIRC when the manga ended the fans were pretty upset with the ending too... saying that the main villain kind of goes down like a chump. (IMO, it's a real shame because when the series was screwing around doing anything BUT advance the main plot, that was when I had the most fun with it.) I think so. YMMV, of course. It's not great or doing anything groundbreaking in its genre, but it's at least pretty good as a romcom goes and I had fun with it to the end. A lot more so than most of the other titles I watched this season. The ending is abrupt AF. It's car crash levels of sudden and out of nowhere. Not bad, but just very... "that escalated quickly". Yeah, I get the feeling they're kind of hitting the limits of the premise at this point. Right up 'til the end I was convinced they were going to try to announce a fourth season by dropping one of the other successful isekai titles into the mix like Ascendance of a Bookworm.

So there's a bit of a story there too... but a shorter one. Y'see, before Studio Nue was founded as Crystal Art Studio in 1972 its founders collaborated together in a science fiction doujinshi circle called SF Central Art and published a science fiction fanzine called Crystal and ran a monthly fan get-together called the Crystal Convention. They continued to publish doujinshi under the SF Central Art name for years after they formed the company and began doing science fiction planning and illustrations professionally and Studio Nue employees were able to get involved in that in their spare time. Shoji Kawamori attended the Crystal Convention as a student and got involved in SF Central Art around the time he joined Studio Nue in 1979 where he was involved in their newest publication GUNSIGHT, a Mobile Suit Gundam fanzine. That project would ultimately be responsible for a LOT of the familiar lore and worldbuilding that now makes up the foundation of Gundam's Universal Century. Despite being credited now as the founder of the Real Robot genre of mecha anime, Gundam at the time was still pretty much seen as a Super Robot anime because there were a lot of gaps in the original show's worldbuilding and technical setting. SF Central Art's GUNSIGHT saw a lot of dedicated adult SF writers and artists put their heads together to come up with what they felt were plausible and cogent explanations for everything from what the colony drop actually did to Earth to why Mobile Suits exist and how a lot of the technology works (including how Minovsky particles function). Shoji Kawamori was a part of this effort (and threw a nod to it into Macross with the Macross's bridge callsign being "Gunsight 1". They took it from the realm of Super Robot unexplained science-is-magic to more of a hard sci-fi angle. Kenichi Matsuzaki, a Studio Nue member who'd been a writer on Gundam, was able to organize this fan effort into the original official Gundam setting publication Gundam Century. One of the things that Kawamori et. al. were a bit bothered by when it came to Gundam's worldbuilding was that the series never really established the why of the story's iconic giant robots. Other than "it's the space future", why are 18 meter giant robots the new standard of warfare? Why 18 meters? Why giant robots at all? GUNSIGHT, and later its successor Gundam Century, had to figure all that out after the fact and explain what in-universe contrivances could make such a weapon practical. There really wasn't any clear reason or justification for why a giant humanoid robot would exist AT ALL. So when Shoji Kawamori was working on his own giant robot anime project at Studio Nue, he made a point of ensuring that he had a clear and cogent explanation for his show's setting containing giant robots built directly into its story. That being that Humanity had developed giant robots in anticipation of possible hostilities with a race of similarly sized giant aliens. Presumably the size was finessed a bit in development, but I'd expect they probably stuck to nice round numbers given that the Flight Suit was around 4m tall (twice human size) and the final result was 10m tall (five times human size).

Glad you like it. The reason I ended up going into so much detail is I really wanted to capture a proper explanation for why horizontal stabilizers don't seem to have ever been a part of the concept, from the first drafts in late '79 and early '80 clear to the finished product in '82, despite it being based on a real aircraft. (For a lot of its development, it was a VERY different aircraft that seems to owe a lot to the X-24B, Gundam's FF-X7 Core Fighter, and the G-Fighter.) EDIT: In his designer's note book, Kawamori notes he was very fond of Thunderbird-2 and built in in papercraft as a kid... which is also, perhaps not coincidentally, a lifting-body design with an unconventional twin boom tail.

To an extent, I feel like that's a product of the design's evolution and what was The Style At The Time. I'm going to tell a bit of a story here, but stick with me... there IS a method to my madness I promise. Back in the 1970s when Shoji Kawamori was still a student attending middle and high school in Yokohama, tailless delta wing designs were very popular as a futuristic fighter design in contemporary science fiction. 1974's Space Battleship Yamato made extensive use of them with iconic designs like the Cosmo Zero and Black Tiger throughout the 70s. The Battlestar Galactica pilot that hit Japanese theaters in 1978 had the Colonial Viper. And of course Mobile Suit Gundam had designs like the FF-X7 Core Fighter and a great many background designs like the Flymanta, Flyarrow, and Dopp. That seems to have informed some of his earliest design works in the period that led up to the creation of Super Dimension Fortress Macross after he joined Studio Nue. If you look to the earliest of the designs credited as having evolved into the VF-1 Valkyrie - the "Flight Suit" flying powered suit - the design draws obvious inspiration from the Martin Marietta X-24 "Flying Flatiron". A tailless delta lifting body design that was used to evaluate reentry and unpowered landing approaches that would be used in the space shuttle. (One of the sister designs from the lifting body program, Northrop's M2-F2, appears to have been the inspiration for Miyatake's "Superbird" that evolved into the QF-3000E Ghost.) The design for the Flight Suit later evolved into the larger "Breast Fighter" and began to take on some of the aspects of the VF-1's final design like the cannons mounted on the head, but was still more fantastical and super robot-y. That version replaced the Flight Suit's vertical stabilisers with canted winglets at the wingtip similar to the Core Fighter's, but lacked both a vertical and horizontal stabilizer. That version also gained some outward-canted fins on the lower legs similar to the VF-1's. That design would then be polished a bit further, keeping a lot of the Breast Fighter's transformation but adopting a silhouette based on the F-14. The canted winglets simply moved backwards onto the legs to become the tail to facilitate the adoption of the F-14's VG wing, and then inboard onto the beavertail when the "backpack" became a part of the design. There was already plenty of precedent for "ruddervators" via designs like the Fouga CM.170 Magister and CM.175 Zephyr, so using that as a substitute for a horizontal stabilizer that would otherwise make the transformation messier was probably a desirable solution. The transitional design between the Breast Fighter and the early F-14-based VF-1 drafts looks like it might have become an early version of the F203 Dragon II and MiM-31 Karyovin. Sky Angels (1984) directly acknowledges (from an in-universe perspective) that the reason the VF-1 Valkyrie lacks a horizontal stabilizer is because the engineers who designed it had not been able to find a good way to securely store it when the Valkyrie transformed. It goes on to explain that the aerodynamic issues caused by its removal are compensated for by the large vertical stabilizers, ventral fins, thrust-vectoring nozzles, and wingtip roll-control thrusters. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix (2012) explains the lack of horizontal stabilizers as a design concession to improve stealth performance. It weaves an interesting narrative around the Grumman Super Tomcat-21 proposal, claiming that both the Grumman Super Tomcat-21 and McDonnell Douglas A-12 Avenger II programs were dummy projects which were used to camouflage appropriations for a top secret US Navy stealth fighter program codenamed "Shadow Cat" that was launched in the wake of the US Air Force's unveiling of the F-117 to other branches of the service and was cancelled in the 1990s before it could get past the mockup stage. The idea was revived in 2001 as part of the restart of the F-14's production for the UN Forces because it shared 75% of its parts with the existing F-14 and a completed Shadow Cat was rolled out as the F-14++ Advanced Tomcat, which would be used as a starting point for developing a practical VF prototype due to its structural similarities to Stonewell Bellcom's E303 design proposal.

Yeah, that was my thought too... it'd be next to impossible to hit anything smaller than a large warship at a light second out when you have a 2+ second targeting delay. It makes no sense as a sniper weapon unless your target's stationary, huge, or both and it wouldn't be powerful enough to be a significant threat to anything much larger than a Zentradi battleship. Every now and then, Master File puts in something that is pure "rule of cool" and not quite practical... and also often weirdly on-brand feeling for the kind of insane "because we could" engineering Humans in the Macross universe practice. Yeah, it's +/- about 43,000km based on the most commonly used measurements. Pretty much all orbits are elliptical to varying degrees because of the effects of gravity from objects outside any given two-body system. A perfectly circular orbit is practically impossible in nature and would probably be a subtle but unmistakable sign that the Protoculture were up to some BS in the area. Similar to the impossibility of Libera being an ice world given its distance from the Ballota star in Macross 7 or the airborne islands and kilometer-tall tree on Uroboros in Macross 30.

To be fair, that's exactly what Solo Camping for Two advertised itself as... an infotainment-type manga/anime about the camping hobby. It's sponsored by like thirty different outdoor equipment companies. There's a literal wall of their logos in the credits. It's just a really phenomenally sh*tty ambassador for the hobby it's promoting because it does almost nothing to present camping as a fun or engaging pursuit. Kind of the opposite, really. If it weren't for Shizuku being there to be someone for Gen to talk at, it would be the incredibly depressing story of this perpetually unkempt 30-something misanthropic loser with no social ties who goes out into the woods alone every weekend to get drunk and rant to himself about camping gear. There are other titles that deliver edutainment way more effectively like Ruri Rocks (mineralogy), How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift? (fitness), Let's Make a Mug Too! (ceramics and pottery), or even Iwakakeru - Sport Climbing Girls (rock climbing). Not really... it's a pretty mixed bag this season but nothing good that's underreported as far as I've seen.

To be fair, I feel like the unusually low altitude of that particular bar owes a lot to the fact that most of the fantasy anime produced in the last couple years has been isekai. Edginess doesn't really pay dividends when it's cringeworthy Godmode Sue MC power fantasy like That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Re:Monster, etc. Thanks for the heads up. I have a feeling I'll probably decide to pass on Clevatess S2. Clevatess S1 has already pretty much lost me. As of episode 8, it really feels like the author of Clevatess didn't really know what to do with the story after the protagonist gets back to civilization. The evil Human wizards would be an enormous downgrade from the dark beasts as a plot-driving antagonist even if they weren't all flat characters. Bug Guy and Magneto from Wish.com somehow manage to be less intimidating than the bandits from a few episodes back, and the angry mob they find to do their bidding isn't even a patch on them. I genuinely had to stop for a minute almost right away because one nameless extra goes on this weirdly specific and emotionally charged rant about how the Heroes ain't sh*t because their weapons and armor were paid for with tax dollars and all they do is kill unstoppable man-eating monsters no-one else can fight instead of doing real work like tree farming, logging, and construction. It's clearly meant to be a rousing speech in context, and he clearly intends it as a grievous insult to Alicia, but it's such a bizarre and nonsensical pronouncement from this random background character that it took me right out of the story and left me laughing and Alicia doesn't even acknowledge that someone is talking to her. There are some good ideas here, and some good world building... but as strong as it started it wasn't able to keep it up more than a few episodes.

Pass the Monster Meat, Milady! remained a pretty fun series to the end. Not terribly substantial by any means, but it never failed to be entertaining in a cute sort of way. My watch group finished up The Apothecary Diaries S2 last night. They had a pretty good time with it, and the promise of a two-part Season 3 in October 26/April 27 and an original film around December 26 was definitely well-received. Solo Camping for Two also ended this week. I won't miss it. It's a terrible ambassador for the hobby it's meant to be promoting and its attempt to liven up what's basically a camping equipment infomercial starring a low-functioning alcoholic with a romance subplot founded on a threat of a false rape accusation lands exactly as poorly as you'd think. The animation is unmistakably cheap start-to-finish, and it feels like they only made it to two cour by making most of the series pan-shots across static frames.