Seto Kaiba

How can I put this gently? That's her doing her job. One of a producer's main responsibilities is ensuring that the production is as profitable as possible for the investors and whatever network, studio, theater company, etc. is putting the production together. Hell, there's an entire classic comedy movie built around the premise of producers abusing their financial authority for personal gain: Mel Brooks's The Producers. That's more an indictment of him than a defense of him, TBH. Like Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas is an auteur weirdo who isn't a very good writer and functions best when he has a small army of people filtering and polishing his ideas for him. As Harrison Ford once said to Lucas about his writing "You can type this sh*t but you sure as hell can't say it." Filoni is a promoted fanboy, and like many promoted fanboys working on franchise fiction he's blinded by his profound affection for the source material. He has a very narrow view of what Star Wars is and what kind of stories Star Wars can tell, and that's reflected in his body of work. He's an imitator not an innovator. His creative "comfort zone" is what Star Wars was when he was a regular fan. It's a sucker bet that his attachment to The Clone Wars has a lot to do with it being where he worked with his idol, George Lucas. That's why so much of his work feels like Expanded Universe franchise slop. He's not interested in broadening Star Wars's horizons and exploring what new and different kinds of stories the setting could accommodate. He wants the comfort of the familiar. So what he writes are elaborate and unnecessary backstories for minor/secondary characters and factions (e.g. the Tales anthology) and various forms of The Continuing Adventures stories built around established characters and their descendants that are positively infested with fanservice, continuity nods, and tie-ins. Everything has to revolve around the Jedi and/or tie back into the Skywalker Saga too, as though they were the center of the universe and literally the only thing happening in the galaxy. Not being crap is kind of what sets Andor apart in the first place. It stands out by not being franchise slop. Filoni builds Star Wars stories around tie-ins and references to other stories, pre-established characters, homages, and other forms of continuity porn. The character writing in his stories is never better than mediocre because the story treats the characters more like props than people. Their interactions are shallow and superficial most of the time because they're just filling time between action scenes. Andor is character-first writing. That's why it's so much better than the others. It takes pains to ensure the audience gets to know the characters as people and get invested in the struggles they face. Not just the protagonists, the antagonists too. References to other Star Wars characters and titles are little more than set dressing because all attention is on the interactions between the characters. You could take it out of the Star Wars universe and it would be just as compelling because its connection to the rest of Star Wars is not a main focus of its story. This is a perfect example of the above. The Mandalorian's third season was where continuity nods and whole-plot references to other Star Wars media fully overtook Din's story as the driving force of the plot. The whole thing is an attempt to tie up a plot thread from The Clone Wars that Rebels had already picked up and run with. Ahsoka was an unasked-for continuation of Rebels after that story had reached what was Very Definitely The End (Rebels itself being an almost-direct continuation of The Clone Wars) that only really exists to get two fan favorite characters back into play: Thrawn and Ezra. Its story is extremely heavily dependent on Clone Wars tie-ins to the Mortis Gods arc and the Witches, both of which were kinda dumb even in their original context. The Acolyte is a promoted fan creator's love letter to Expanded Universe media and has a plot structured almost entirely around callbacks to Prequel Trilogy and Clone Wars events. Its writing suffered terribly because its characters and entire first season story were largely irrelevant to the story's actual goal of introducing the mentioned-but-never-seen Darth Plagueis and providing a backstory for the terminally underdeveloped Knights of Ren. Its showrunner was so sure everyone was as invested in her fanservice as she was that it lost the audience almost right away and got cancelled before it did any more than hint at its goal. That's a problem with franchise fiction. Once a franchise is popular enough, finding a creator who understands the assignment but can balance affection for the source material with the need to tell a compelling story that is accessible to everyone is REALLY FREAKING HARD. Star Wars, as a cultural icon, is stuck with a lot of writers who adore Star Wars and thus are mostly writing Star Wars fan fiction and finding a capable writer who isn't a fan and will put in the effort to tell a compelling story is a big ask.

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.

Started A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation. It's an isekai series, but it's one of those rare ones that tries to subvert the usual formula by having its protagonist get isekai'd from one fantasy world to another. In this case, a young and sheltered nobleman finds himself suddenly transported to another world and rather than make a fuss about it by panicking he opts to take the whole thing in stride and treat it as an extended vacation. First impressions are that it's actually pretty dull. It's definitely different... but the protagonist is so utterly unbothered by every aspect of his predicament that it feels like he's on something. He greets being dumped in an alley in an unfamiliar country or having someone try to lop his head off with the same energy that a normal person might reserve for informing their waiter that a drink they ordered didn't make it onto the check. Hard to get invested in the protagonist's story when they don't feel like they're invested in their own story! The Invisible Man and His Soon-To-Be Wife is a supernatural romcom about a blind woman named Shizuka who works as a receptionist at the Tounome Private Detective Agency. Her employer, detective Tounome, is a literal invisible man (ala the H.G. Wells novel) who is utterly fascinated by her ability to perceive him where normal people cannot. So they start up an odd relationship together as a blind woman and unseeable man. The setting seems... a bit odd. Mostly like the modern world, though there seem to be various flavors of beast-folk (running the gamut from "human with animal ears" to furry mascot). One set of clients that show up at the Tounome agency profess to be literal space aliens. It's mostly just a framing device for a cute but straightforward romcom. It's very light and cheerful. Almost to slice-of-life levels. Definitely one for the "easy viewing" category, if you're looking to clear your palate after something heavy.

OK, lots more shows dropping now. The third season of MF Ghost has begun in earnest. The eurobeat's back with the OP Timeless Power... but is it really necessary to show the chubby race queen getting hit in the face with a packaged ham in the OP? They're finally starting to wrap up the plot they left hanging at the end of season two with an injured Katagiri who couldn't use 2nd gear falling way behind. They're really dragging this race out though, yeesh. It was 2-3 episodes last season and it's gonna be at least 3 this season too. Tamon's B-Side... jeez this girl Utage is thirsty AF. She's taken the "fangirl turns her room into a shrine" thing to the point of even having a poster of the titular idol on the ceiling over her bed. Honestly, it's part of what makes the comedy work. She's so absolutely obsessed with this idol that she refuses to reject him for being a real person with real problems and manages to come off as a bit of a heroic comedic sociopath while she's helping him because she can't bear to see him fail. It's cute, it's funny, and it's on the unconventional side. I quite like it. One new one I picked up is Champignon Witch, a light fantasy series about a feared and shunned, but generally harmless and well-meaning, young witch who makes a living brewing medicines for nearby towns and generally helping people. The people of the kingdom are wary or afraid of her because her magic causes poisonous mushrooms to spring up in her wake wherever she walks, which is also the reason for her unusual nickname "the Champignon Witch". Apparently there's some fantastic bigotry involved with the kingdom she's in being ruled by one faction or species of witches and her belonging to the other.

One of the points of some debate WRT the Ikazuchi is whether that 300m figure is inclusive of the fins on the back. I tend to side with the school of thought that it isn't, since that allows the rest of the ship to be slightly larger and makes the fit for the bays easier. If I use your art there as a sample, the fin-less 300m is approximately 800px (so a resolution of ~0.375 pixels per meter). That makes the interior dimensions of the bays 85x32px, or approximately 32m x 12m. The Legioss Armo-Soldier's only 4.3m across the shoulders according to MOSPEADA Color Graffiti and a bit under 2m front-to-back meaning six ranks of Legioss's stacked side by side only gonna run ya 25.8m x 8m, meaning there's room for 'em to fit with the spacing seen in the anime in the 300m ship as long as the fins aren't part of that 300m. Making it 1/1000 at 35cm more or less aligns to the "the fins don't count" theory of its size. (That's a topic that the MOSPEADA and Robotech fandoms have chewed over many times in the past.)

It's possible it doesn't have traditional landing gear. After all, it's a fold-capable aerospaceliner, so it's got gravity control capabilities. It may just be landing on skids or potentially even just hovering there on gravity control levitation.

~35cm would not be 1/2000 scale for the Ikazuchi space carrier from Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. Per Artmic's settei for Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, the Ikazuchi space carrier is "a large warship with a total length of nearly 300m." This is referenced in B Club Special Artmic Design Works, MOSPEADA Complete Art Works, and a few other publications. 1/2000 scale would be approximately 15 centimeters, not 35. A model with a length of approximately 35cm would be 1/857 scale.

Ooo, that came out really well. I'd say don't worry overmuch about the wings, since they kind of mysteriously retract seamlessly into the edge of the airframe in a manner that suggests the designer probably did not think too hard about it themselves.

Tried two more new ones today. I was hoping for something unconventional, and Isekai Office Worker: the Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter seems to be set to fit that bill. Its basic premise seems to be very similar to titles like The Saint's Magic Power is Omnipotent, with a general j-fantasy alternate world that's under threat from periodic outbreaks evil miasma™️ that only the chosen isekai'd Lady Saint™️ can clean up with her magical powers. Where it differs is that it's about a random office worker who is accidentally isekai'd along with the future Lady Saint while trying to save her from being isekai'd. He's so used to Japan's toxic work ethic that, despite being told the kingdom will give him a generous stipend to live on as an apology for being isekai'd by mistake, he demands a job. So the kingdom sets him to work in its government accounting office, where he is immediately stunned by its relaxed work ethic... then finds its lax practices have been allowing all kinds of questionable accounting that he tries to crack down on just as the miasma sends the kingdom into a state of emergency. It's... unusual. I'm curious to see where it goes. The Case Book of Arne is, most unusually, apparently an adaptation of a freeware horror mystery video game made in RPG Maker and released back in 2017. Apparently it garnered enough of a following to be adapted into a manga in 2018, and now an anime. On paper, it's a supernatural detective story about a vampire who works as a Sherlock Holmes-style private detective solving crimes with supernatural origins that the conventional authorities just can't. I'm going to withhold judgement on this series until I've seen at least another episode or two, because the first episode is so badly composed that calling it a mystery or a detective story feels like Blatant Lies or at least false advertising.

Two more new ones today... You Can't Be In a Rom-Com with Your Childhood Friends! is about a first year high school student named Yonosuke who is obsessed with rom-coms where the protagonist falls in love with their childhood friend. That old and overused story trope. Of course, he is also realistic/cynical enough to understand that romance comedies are fiction and doesn't believe he could ever encounter such a circumstance in real life. Because he is IN a rom-com, he's also entertainingly wrong. Both of his female childhood friends have the hots for him and he either has suffered so much rom-com brainrot or is so uninterested that he hasn't noticed. By 1:05 into the first episode, it's pretty clear what we're in for is another one of those ecchi excuse plot harem comedies where the driving force of the plot and the only things that keep the story from ending at chapter one are the protagonist's Buddha-esque aversion to desire, his chronic inability to read even the most blatant signals imaginable, and a total failure to comprehend how abnormal his situation is despite abundant evidence. By 4:10, this series has lost me. This excuse plot is painfully thin even by the already-low standards of the genre. I'm not even going to bother finishing the episode. and deleting it from my watch history. SKIP. Wash It All Away is a slice-of-life series about an amnesiac girl named Wakana Kinme who runs a private laundry service in a quaint seaside town as she navigates daily life. This seems to be one of those titles that either has some clear creator provincialism or government sponsorship behind it, given that the first couple shots of the series are devoted to faithfully recreating real locations. Enough so that we can practically identify what street her fictional business is on. We see her pass through several Tawarahoncho landmarks like Atami station and pass through Atami Heiwa-dori shopping street on her way back to her small business, suggesting she's probably in Sakimicho, Atami, Shizuoka. It's cute, but so far there doesn't seem to be a lot to this one besides the incidental events of the slow daily life of a girl who just really likes doing laundry.

Y'know, ever since I first read Dune I always felt the setting's prohibition on AI felt a little silly and arbitrary. I'm starting to see what the Butlerians were on about. AI really is an affront to Humanity in general. I want to say that's the worst thing I've seen from Star Trek recently, but that'd be a lie. I've seen Starfleet Academy's teasers. So that's a close second. Just EUGH.🤮