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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    No, it's nowhere near that bad. Most sources agree that the number of Human survivors of the First Space War numbered approximately 1 million.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yep. In fact, the reason given for why the cloning program was discontinued in 2030 was a marked rise in hereditary diseases in children. (Gene therapy exists in Macross, so presumably they were able to fix at least some of that.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Imagine my surprise to see the G-Self charted at all. I love G-Reco, but I swear it's a borderline "Hear me out..." among Gundam fans. I'm surprised to see the pig-ugly GQuuuuuuX Gundam charted at all. Blech. The usual suspects at the top tho. Nu, Zeta, Wing (ver. Ka), Strike Freedom, etc.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Zentradi and Meltrandi battle suits aren't powered armor in the sense that you're probably thinking. They're armor-shaped, but in principle they're closer to being humanoid battle pods and the pilot's body is located almost entirely (or in some cases entirely) inside the mecha's torso. The only part of the pilot's body that might be at risk that way would be their lower legs, which on some models protrude into the mecha's own upper legs. Presumably there are cases where the cockpit hatch has to be pried open if it's damaged, though since the Zentradi don't really have a concept of "repairing" this would probably be done without regard for trying to reuse the suit later. (Not to mention Zentradi and Meltrandi mobile weapons are generally lightly armored enough that anything that might make escape of the craft impossible would probably have killed the pilot anyway.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. Humanity used the cloning technology they acquired from the Zentradi to carry out a large-scale Human cloning program designed to bolster the overall Human population, artificially boost the availability of personnel with essential skills and training, and support the provisioning of the early emigrant fleets with military crews and emigrants. A lot of the Humans living across the galaxy in the late 2050s and 2060s are the descendants of the clones produced between 2010 and 2030 before the program was halted. It's not clear if it was commonplace, but several characters who started families in that post-war period ended up having large numbers of children. Max and Milia's seven daughters are the most talked-about example, though Shammy Milliome and her husband supposedly had eleven children after she retired from the military. The population ratios aren't talked about, but Humans are still treated like the default/main species in the New UN Government into the 2060s. Part-Zentradi are common enough that nobody seems to find them at all remarkable and as the number of other Protoculture-created species joining the New UN Government grows we can assume that there'll be more interspecies marriages in the future. (It's already been going on long enough for there to be at least one named character with three-species ancestry: Michael Blanc from Macross Frontier.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely my favorite... it's one of the rare cases where my tendency to overanalyze things is actually useful. 😅 I've been doing a bit more poking at the VF-25, VF-31, and VF-31AX Master File books for more details on stealth technology lately. There's some bizarre concepts in there. I think the weirdest being the idea that the VF-17's passive stealth coating is made up of microvilli-like structures similar to an intestinal lining to maximize its surface area to allow it to intercept and absorb radar waves from all angles.
  7. Seto Kaiba
  8. Seto Kaiba
    So... I did a little bit of looking into this and the answer I found is mildly spoileriffic, and thus has been put in a spoiler tag below. It's not in Hathaway's head, but it's about to be all up in his face.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    "But I will have my revenge!" - Maul, being confidently - dare I say hilariously - wrong. This strong contender for Star Wars's #1 chronically aura-farming full-time jobber will, in fact, not have revenge of any kind. He'll be a mild nuisance to the Empire for a while, try to groom a kid, take a second whack at being a crime lord (apparently unsuccessfully), become a nuisance to the crew of the Ghost for a bit, try to groom a different kid, have a force vision about Palpatine's downfall, and then get unceremoniously killed off for real in the desert by Obi-wan Kenobi in a "fight" that barely lasts five actual seconds (three of which are him unnecessarily twirling like the Disney princess he is).
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway ends the same was as the Hathaway's Flash light novel then I can promise you Hathaway won't vanish and Gigi won't be in a coma.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Quess wishes she had a hundredth of Ranka's personality or charm. Gigi wishes she had one ten thousandth of Sheryl's. Also Quess is dead. She's not going to make any progress in a love triangle as a Newtype ghost or a memory haunting Hathaway.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I know that feeling. 😅 In the last 6 years? Well, the biggest bullet point would have to be the 2021 release of the second Macross Delta movie Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! with its all-new story and Macross Frontier's short film epilogue Macross Frontier: the Labyrinth of Time. That gave us a look at 6th Generation VFs and Ghosts, some info about Lady M, the fate of the Megaroad-01, a little hint about the fate of Alto and Sheryl after The Wings of Goodbye, and an array of other related topics. (Not to mention 2021 being when the Macross licensing embargo finally broke, with select Macross titles now available on Hulu/Disney+.) There's been a few more artbooks, a new Master File for Absolute Live!!!!!!'s new Valkyrie, some fan efforts to translate the Macross Frontier, Macross Delta, and Macross the Ride light novels, the promise of a new Macross series from Bandai Namco Filmworks at some point, etc.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Well, every new title adds new mecha and new trivia and we're translating more stuff all the time. 👍
  14. Seto Kaiba
    How "official" do you consider a song that was re-recorded by a dub voice actress during localization? Because this is, IINM, the re-recorded version of Mou Ichidou that was produced by US Renditions for the sixth episode of Macross II: Lovers Again using Ishtar's US/English voice actress Debbie Rogers. Re-recording songs like this was trendy for a while in the 90's. Some even had the original artist record the English version too (e.g. Tenchi Universe) while others had an English-speaking performer record over the original (e.g. Sailor Moon's "Moonlight Densetsu" or Tenchi Muyo! OVA 2's "Pioneer").
  15. Seto Kaiba
    So... apparently Star Trek: Starfleet Academy's performance was SO bad that Skydance Paramount has reportedly opted to end the arrangement that gave Secret Hideout exclusive creative control of the franchise. Something they really should have done after Discovery spun in, IMO, but better late than never and I can't imagine many fans will miss them. Which is weird, because the transwarp network was explicitly destroyed at the end of Star Trek: Voyager. Even if some of the Borg conduits survived because the Queen did, albeit in a diminished state, they shouldn't still be around centuries later after the Borg went extinct.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I'll definitely plan to go see it in the theater. Let's hope it's not quite so long until the third and final part. 🤔
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Apparently Hathaway II: the Sorcery of Nymph Circe is coming to US theaters on 15 May.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Huh... I'm not sure what to make of a pronouncement like that. Granted, G-Witch and SEED Freedom were some weak sh*t in the writing department with the latter's story being entirely unnecessary but they were still light years ahead of the torrent of optical diarrhea that was Netflix's bastardization of Cowboy Bebop. Their stories were at least functional. Western attempts to adapt anime tend to miss the point of the original story with distressing thoroughness. Just asking... but is your day job to greet people who solve a cursed puzzle box? I guess statistically speaking someone had to like it. Most folks considered it to be distilled disgust, and the very picture of sh*tting on a classic for no real reason.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Another highly questionable hiring decision from this project. Honestly, it's starting to feel like Netflix is trying to fail with these live-action anime adaptations. His filmography is far from confidence-inducing... he seems to have been somewhat typecast as "ethnic drug dealer" given that his main acting credit of note is playing a cartel member named "Nacho" in Better Call Saul and he was fired from a starring role as another drug-dealer character in an Apple+ original crime drama called Dope Thief for getting into a fistfight with another actor. >Gundam >Do something original with it 🤣 It's Gundam, the odds of encountering original thought are close to zero unless this ends up being one of those in-name-only adaptations like the last Silent Hill, the new Resident Evil movie, etc. Look back at Netflix's Cowboy Bebop and tell me that's going to be a challenge. I dare you.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely. IMO, Kurtzman-era Star Trek's biggest creative stumbling block is that the paranoid grimdark world of the 32nd century is painfully underdeveloped. Star Trek: Discovery picked up and moved from the 23rd century to the 32nd on a whim to escape accusations/complaints that the series was messing with canon. They just never stopped to actually think out what the 32nd century should be besides "dystopian". They seemed to assume that Star Trek exists in the same kind of cultural and technological stasis as Star Wars and spared practically no thought for how the setting might evolve in 900 years or what the implications of the many technological advancements made in chronologically later Star Trek TV shows would have for their story's setting. The few acknowledgements of progress were to handwave why that progress disappeared. The grimdark could have been made to work if they'd actually thought it out properly, but they didn't. They wanted to make off-brand Star Wars. TBH, I don't think Jeri Ryan could carry a Star Trek series. Her character stood out in Picard because she was one of the only characters in the series who wasn't wallowing in depression and irrelevance or a vaguely racist stereotype. Her story is building on that same grimdark nonsense from Picard, and nobody wants more of that. Definitely. Many fans continually ask why Alex Kurtzman and Secret Hideout are still involved with the franchise when the vast majority of their output has been failures.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That's only because they don't own the IP behind those failures. They have to pump out a string of failures in order to hang on to the license. Paramount owns Star Trek, so they don't have that same incentive to take unnecessary risks.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks are proof positive Paramount/CBS absolutely CAN produce worthy Star Trek material when they engage with creatives who understand the franchise. If nothing else, I hope Paramount/CBS's key takeaway from the crash-and-burn failure of Starfleet Academy is that nobody likes their sh*tty 32nd century setting and they retcon the whole thing into an alternate timeline.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that was predictable... https://gizmodo.com/star-trek-starfleet-academy-canceled-paramount-2000736976 Star Trek: Star Feet Academy... er... Starfleet Academy has officially been cancelled by Paramount. The show's second season, filming of which concluded just a few weeks ago at the end of February, will be its last. It seems likely that low viewership and overall poor audience reception motivated the show's cancellation. The series probably would not have gotten a second season had Paramount not overconfidently rushed a second season into production before the first was even out. For now, the future of Star Trek appears to be up in the air with several pitches that all seem unlikely to reach production including: Star Trek: Legacy, a Picard spinoff/sequel starring post-character derailment Seven of Nine as Captain of the Enterprise-G. Star Trek: Year One, a Strange New Worlds spinoff/sequel that is a de facto soft reboot of Star Trek: the Original Series. A yet-untitled live action comedy series Tawny Newsome is working on featuring workers on the pleasure planet Risa.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Macross is not a hobby for the financially faint-of-heart, that's for sure. 😅 Between the Japanese domestic market prices for things like physical media, books/mooks, models, toys, albums, etc. and the cost of international shipping and the associated taxes makes it pretty darn costly at the best of times. That much spread across a decade or so ain't too bad, but all at once? Ouch. I did some checking, and it looks like the color art was possibly only available in the non-archived digital distribution and/or individual print issues of Dengeki Hobby. EDIT: I was able to find the illustrator's (Tommy Otsuka's) socials, but nothing Macross related on their two twitter accounts. Their old artist website is defunct, and I haven't yet checked their pixiv account but what I can see on Twitter is that it's mostly OC NSFW stuff.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Sadly, several of this season's shows that I was really hoping would be good turned out to be pretty mediocre... but there've been a few standouts to compensate for it. Just finished The Champignon Witch, which starts out as a fairly cutesy and insubstantial little fantasy series about a witch who lives in the woods whose powers cause her to leave a trail of mushrooms wherever she goes. That superficially cutesy start hid a LOT of depth and by the end the series was a rather bittersweet tragic romance. Ironically, the third season of the Initial D sequel/spinoff MF Ghost is proving to be a lot slower than I'd hoped. There's a lot of emphasis on the relationship between Kanata and Ren (and Aiba's jealousy of it) and they're really dragging the races out into five and six episode affairs now. It makes the third season feel a bit padded, especially since Ren and Kanata's relationship is a pretty threadbare affair and adding his ex-girlfriend into the mix doesn't really do anything to further it. Jujutsu Kaisen season three has a very particular vibe to it. Specifically, that Jujutsu Kaisen mangaka Gege Akutami decided what he needed to liven up his series that was feeling too derivative of Bleach was to copy Jojo's Bizarre Adventure instead. So every new character introduced in the "Culling Game" arc that this season centers on eschews the more generic-feeling, obviously combat-focused supernatural powers like "cut", "punch REALLY hard", or "summon shikigami" in favor the kind of bizarre, highly situational powers you'd expect to find in Diamond is Unbreakable. The problem is Gege Akutami is no Hirohiko Araki, so these bizarre powers aren't really all that interesting... they're just an excuse to pad volumes or episodes to the max with "how my power works" exposition. So far all we've really seen is "man with helicopter hair", "woman with jet engine hair", "unfunny amateur comedian who can make his punchlines literal", and "man who summons stuff from receipts". It's a painfully weak story that relies on what's now called "aura farming" to build hype without substance. A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation is... so unremarkable it has left no real impression at all. You and I are Polar Opposites is a generic, but serviceable romcom that also doesn't really make much of an impression. The Casebook of Arne is, to the bitter end an example of how NOT to do a detective story. None of the cases are ever really solved with deduction and none of them really follow any kind of logic, per se. The cast mainly just blunders around until the supernatural monster of the week outs itself and gets one-shotted by the vampire king detective guy. Hana-kimi is this weird time capsule of a series. This manga ended serialization more than twenty years ago and the story really shows its age. It's not BAD, but it feels weird to watch it because of how dated it feels despite having totally modern production. Kunon the Sorcerer Can See is... dreadful. That's the only word I have for it. There's no sense of direction to the proceedings, and it's stuck in a loop of doing the most blatant kind of character shilling where everyone is constantly falling over each other to tell the protagonist what an amazing genius wunderkind he is. The Invisible Man and His Soon-To-Be Wife remained cute but insubstantial until almost the very end. Only right at the end does it actually start to explore the characters themselves in any depth, particularly how a human subspecies of invisible men function within normal society. The most recent episode has an actually-pretty-interesting extended digression on the subject of one of Akira's childhood friends from the town of invisible men who moved to Italy to try and become a fashion model, how he struggled because to people who were concerned only with appearance any/every invisible man is the same, and how he made himself visible and defined himself as a person through art. The Daily Life of a Part-Time Torturer is a series that continues to make me ask "Why does this exist?". It's not bad. Indeed, if I had to describe it in a word it would be "bland". It's an utterly generic workplace slice-of-life series where the workplace just happens to be a private firm specializing in torture. It's treated as casually as you would treat any kind of blue-collar manual labor job. Wash It All Away is sentiment without substance. It's one of those stories that doesn't really go anywhere or do anything, it's just sort of there to put its protagonist adjacent to the incidental daily goings-on of other people so she can dispense the occasional bit of pseudo-profound philosophizing and move on. The Holy Grail of Eris has me a bit torn. It was interesting at the start, the idea of a shrinking violet getting possessed (willingly) by a vengeful ghost looking to identify the people who framed her and arranged her execution, but its story kind of meanders a lot and I gather the light novel it's based on is painfully short so it frequently feels like the story rushes to get from Point A to Point B. (It's also the kind of mystery story that would be over VERY quickly if the police weren't completely incompetent.) Isekai Office Worker: the Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter is definitely not what I expected going into it. Instead of the slice of life that was advertised, it's a Boys Love romance series and it's actually not bad. It's actually a little light on the actual romance, truth be told. It mostly involves itself with the protagonist bringing his profoundly unhealthy Japanese work ethic to a western fantasy world and having everyone around him take shots at how toxic Japan's corporate culture is while he tirelessly works to correct the country's finances and root out corruption. A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans is an eminently skippable copycat series. The Villainess is Adored by the Prince of the Neighboring Kingdom is a pretty formulaic otome series played laser straight. Tamon's B-Side remained a frank examination of the toxicity of the idol industry wrapped in a romcom to the very end. I enjoyed it, though I suspect many might not. Still working on Roll Over and Die and Tune in to the Midnight Heart.
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