Seto Kaiba

That's not a bad headcanon. I like that. Especially since the Lanthanite name is derived from the Greek λανθάνειν (Lanthanein, "to lie hidden"), referencing how they've existed hidden among Humanity on Earth for many thousands of years (allegedly). There were El-Aurians at least visiting Earth in 1893, and it wouldn't be surprising if there were some that decided to stay there permanently in years past. IMO, the main problem with how Holly Hunter's character is written is that Star Trek audiences are used to a certain level of professionalism from Starfleet officers and that's almost totally missing from her character. Pelia can kind of get away with it because she's one of the minor secondary characters on SNW and she's mainly there to be comic relief. Nahla Ake's overly casual attitude definitely feels out of place for someone who's supposed to be running the most exclusive and demanding educational facility in the Federation. Also, since Starfleet Academy is a service academy... shouldn't her title be Superintendent not Chancellor? In past series (TNG, DS9, VOY, etc.), the head of the academy had the title of Superintendent. (Such as Rear Admiral Brand in TNG.) Edit: Come to think of it, isn't her rank a little low for that job too? The superintendent of Starfleet Academy is usually an admiral. Depends on the species and culture, I suppose... the El-Aurians live practically forever and they seem pretty well-balanced throughout. There's a running theme with the two exemplar Lanthenites we have that they both seem ill-equipped to handle their incredibly long lifespans. Pelia's a little unhinged because she's constantly bored and thrill-seeking. Nahla definitely has a lot of unprocessed trauma that's leading her to blow things way out of proportion, like the whole Caleb business.

Lately, one detail I've been looking at is where the inspiration for certain bits of Macross technology came from. Ever since we discussed a while back how Studio Nue's in-house doujinshi circle SF Central Art and its monthly get-together were how Kawamori originally became acquainted with Studio Nue and ultimately what gave rise to a lot of Gundam and Macross's technical setting, I've been wondering what their inspirations were/are. One thing I've come to suspect, but need more details to confirm, is that a good part of Macross's technical setting was inspired by Toru Yano's Japanese translation of Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune that were published by Hayakawa Bunko from 1972 to 1979. Hayakawa Bunko are, not coincidentally, also the publishers of SF magazine, the same science fiction magazine that SF Central Art formed around leading to the creation of Studio Nue. The part I need/want to confirm is that Toru Yano's translation of the books was serialized in SF magazine in addition to being published in stand-alone multi-volume releases. (For some reason, Yano broke Dune into four volumes and Children of Dune into 3.) It feels a bit much to be entirely coincidental that both Dune and Macross have a set of interrelated technologies that allow reactionless flight/hovering, faster-than-light travel by folding space, faster-than-light communication through folded space, and energy shielding via spatial distortion. Esp. when the third Dune book was coming out in Japan around when Kawamori first started drafting Macross. They even have similar limitations, like the Macross's dimensional fault-based barrier exploding when hit with too much firepower or needing relays to retransmit fold communications across long distances.

My standards are so low that I'll really take practically any Star Wars story that averts Filoni's tendency to have every established character meet, know, and have at least eight pages of backstory with every other. I'd like a Galaxy Far Far Away that feels a bit bigger than, say, Weehawken, New Jersey.

There's a term for what you just did there. "Damned by faint praise"

Considering he's been cut in half like... three times now? Yeah, probably. Eighty percent of his dialog is just him screaming "KEN-O-BIIIIIIIIII!" like he's off his rocker and the rest is him trying to persuade people he's totally sane and someone you should join or work for in the least convincing manner possible. That's what they said about Boba Fett, and we know how THAT ended.

Dave Filoni starting as he means to go on. Dave, this is the third time you've brought back Darth Maul for show and tell. Please bring something else next time.

Give it a couple projects... Filoni might not repeat whole plot references, but he'll repeat plot beats and characters to death and beyond. You'll be wishing for the Death Star Trench Run v3.0 around the time Rey is coming back from the dead for the fourth time with the help of the Mortis Gods to assist an aging Finn and Poe with the rescue the kidnapped granddaughter of Jar-Jar Binks (who is also force sensitive and a princess) from a resurgent Second Final Order under the command of Palpatine's forty-third heretofore unmentioned super-secret Sith apprentice assassin Darth Expy and his brutal gimp-suited enforcer Lzmp Stimpy. It'll be absolutely critical that the audience has read Star Wars: The Rise of The Fall of the Newer Jedi Order Part XIVI: Biflo Scrungus goes to Quiznos so they'll know Lzmp Stimpy is really a clone of Rey's long lost cousin's uncle's neighbor's ex-boyfriend's former roommate's biological son by sperm donation, that his real name is Ichabod, and that he turned evil because his mom divorced and married an elderly and abusive Sebulba. That's how Filoni writes 90% of the time. The man is deathly afraid of original ideas and wants to build stories around existing characters and set pieces whenever possible because to develop original characters and ideas is too much like work. He just wants to play with his action figures in peace. That's why the next series up is ANOTHER attempt to shake Darth Maul down for gangland drama. He's already been back to that well TWICE! Once in The Clone Wars and again in Rebels.

As far as we know... not really. It's absolutely not the safest thing you could choose to do. Strong gravitational fields complicate the math for a fold jump (which is why ships usually fold into or out of high orbit or interplanetary space) and emerging so close to a planet's surface carries the significant risk of crashing immediately thereafter or ending up defolding into a terrain feature. That said, it doesn't actually create any significant negative consequences for the ship itself or its immediate surroundings because the fold system is exchanging the area of space occupied by the ship for an equivalent volume of space inside the planet's atmosphere. You're teleporting a chunk of the planet's atmosphere into the void, which probably is not sustainable long-term, but since the volumes of space being exchanged are equivalent it's not going to cause the kind of havoc that folding OUT of an atmosphere would, since in that case you're swapping the volume of the ship for an equivalent volume of vacuum and the ensuing collapse can get messy (as seen in the original series).

Well, that'd depend on the size of the emigrant fleet more than anything. After all, the 1st Generation ones using Megaroad-class ships had populations in the tens of thousands. That's probably not a particularly tall order. The 3rd Gen and later ones that have populations in the millions... that could take a hot minute. Especially for a 5th Generation one like the Island Cluster-class Macross Frontier. That fleet had a population of ~10 million but the ship had capacity for 10x that. Building a city capable of housing and supporting 200 million people isn't gonna be quick. 'course, those City-class and Island Cluster-class ships are designed to basically be prefab cities you can just drop from orbit, so building a whole new conurbation probably wouldn't be the highest priority. I'd assume it'd probably be driven more be need than anything, so a slow expansion of a meticulously planned city over a course of at least a few years if not several decades as the population grew to require that extra space. If they really needed to with the quickness, those later ships could probably throw something together in a year or two given that they're equipped with massive semi-automated factories.

Completely reasonable confusion. After all, the Lanthanites and El-Aurians are both sharing the hat "nearly immortal Human Aliens who have lived among Humans throughout history without revealing their presence". They definitely have different aesthetics, though. The El-Aurians tend to be confident, dignified, and serene and their reputation as listeners and advisers who give sage counsel from their centuries or millennia of life experience is such a meme even in-universe that Mariner disgustedly remarks that a 30 year old El-Aurian is "just a regular person". The Lanthanites we've seen (all two of them) seem to be the polar opposite. They're irresponsible, unprofessional, seemingly ill-equipped to deal with their own long lifespans, and tend to give off a sort of elderly ex-hippie vibe. This is completely spot-on, though.

Yeah, her interview says she's not retiring completely. She's just getting out of the boardroom. She intends to continue her career as a producer.

Granted, security in Star Trek is usually a bit of a joke... but it's swiss cheese even by those low standards in Starfleet Academy. Normally, unauthorized computer access leads to an alarm, to security finding out almost immediately, and subsequently getting busted (e.g. TNG "The Wounded", "The Hunted", DS9 "Civil Defense", "Broken Link"). The Athena's 800 years more advanced than the Enterprise-D or Defiant and Caleb, a cadet with no security clearance to speak of, breaks into the ship's comms to send an unauthorized transmission to his mommy and doesn't even get caught until hours later when pirates attack the ship because of it. He then proceeds to break into the ship's computers multiple times a day to go AWOL and is only caught hours after the fact. Even the hologram set up specifically to stop him leaving the campus without permission is defeated with comical ease...

To be honest, it doesn't actually stand out that much in the series proper. The reason it doesn't stand out is that the series is trying so hard to sell her character as "quirky" and "eccentric" like her fellow Lanthanite CDR Pelia from Strange New Worlds that the writers have given her multiple annoying habits. Pelia can get away with it because she's mainly a comic relief character. Nahla Ake can't, because the series wants us to take her and her position seriously. So instead her habits just make her come off as unprofessional, rude, and occasionally hypocritical. Something something "even a broken clock is right twice a day"... Don't you be hating on my farmer's market folks now. Starfleet Academy is being marketed to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. The show's actual presentation definitely feels like the showrunners don't actually respect those viewers much, if at all. With the exception of SAM, the cadets are all old enough to be undergrads or grad students but the series resolutely treats them like a pack of unruly grade schoolers. Caleb's in his early 20's, but his behavior's really childish and the faculty treat him like he's an annoying tween.

As per NuTrek's usual, there's an absolutely massive gulf between the glowing reviews the professional critics are penning and the much less positive feedback from verified viewers in the audience. The series is currently sitting no-so-pretty with an audience score of 43 against a critic score of 87. A Discovery-esque 44 point gap. The positive reviews from the critics are full of vague praise for the show's "creativity" and "vibe", and the negative reviews have surprisingly little to say about culture war BS and are mainly focused on the issues with the show's writing and to a lesser extent the obnoxiousness of Paul Giamatti and Holly Hunter. The need to make every character "quirky" comes up surprisingly often.

Getting ready to watch Starfleet Academy's 2nd episode... pray for me. 🤮 Still wanna know where my Cerritos and Protostar are in this new 60th Anniversary eyecatch... maybe the showrunners are just jealous that both shows are jealous that both shows are something fans actually liked. OK, right off the bat... what is with this series and the f***ing piss filter? Seriously. First Bajor looked like we were watching it through a used coffee filter and now San Francisco looks like we're seeing it through a pint mug of cheap pilsner. Like, I realize the visual effects team is probably three unpaid interns and a AI tool but come on. At least send the interns out to touch grass and maybe see the sun for once... unless they've been in captivity for so long working on Discovery they've devolved into Morlocks. What happened to Starfleet? Before the Kurtzman years, Star Trek treated Starfleet Academy as a not-quite-military college with various postgraduate programs that was designed to take the Best of the Best and turn them into consummate professionals. The sort of people who didn't need to be told to make their beds or to get to class on time. The Starfleet Academy series is treating it like high school, full of inept children who need their hands held at every moment. Like, I don't even like these characters and I'm still offended on their behalf by how patronizing this is. I will say one thing in its favor. I do like that they've gone to the trouble to include a decent helping of alien cadets in the academy class even if most of them are minor background characters. There's one particularly noteworthy blink-and-you'll-miss-it minor detail among them too. The Ferengi cadet is wearing a skirt, and is likely female... meaning at some point in the intervening millennia their species finally got its sh*t together. Lots of reused makeup here. Several of the aliens towards the back are clearly wearing prosthetics that were used for background aliens on Discovery. The Federation War College apparently has a lot more aliens too, their representative closest to the camera appears to be Romulan. A Prodigy-style Brikar shows up at one point. We don't see any Cardassians but there are apparently enough of them to have their own student association. A singer who belongs to the same species as Natalia from Star Trek: Beyond appears at one point (a rare Kelvin timeline reference). There's also a Starfleet Exocomp whom the subtitles reveal is named Almond Basket. We keep cutting back to this stupid f***ing speech. Holly Hunter's voice is rapidly becoming The Most Annoying Sound. They are doing one thing right about depicting her as an educator. They've successfully depicted her as someone who is simultaneously in love with the sound of their own voice and incapable of writing an actual speech anyone might want to listen to. I'm not gonna criticize the jerkass behavior of Cadet Reymi. Even Kirk had to deal with a classmate like that... so much so that his fantasy on the Shore Leave planet was a chance to sock him one. Interrupting a lecture to poke fun at a fellow student... not funny, just annoying. All that before the OP! Ugh... As for the OP itself... this doesn't really say "Star Trek". It's mostly just watching buildings get built and cherry blossoms blow down hallways. OK, there's a Lower Decks reference. There's a Starfleet Exocomp just hanging around in the turbolift. It keeps having to move out of the way because the Doctor apparently still can't read body language despite 900 years of practice and Captain Ake is practically fleeing from him. There is a brief moment where this series comes dangerously close to being self-aware about how unfunny it is. They're really committed to trying to sell the idea that everyone's just so quirky. The Chancellor of Starfleet Academy just wanders the campus out of uniform and without shoes. Even her colleagues look annoyed. We of course have to have a Discovery character remind us how stupid their plot was before being interrupted by Caleb. Why bother setting a series at Starfleet Academy if your entire cast save for the annoying girl are characters who firmly believe they're Too Cool for School? This is worse than boring, it's downright frustrating to watch. Every class they attend is just a venue for them to act out. Honestly? The biggest problem with this episode is that the writers suffered a Critical Research Failure about what Betazoids are. They seem to have mixed up a combination of traits from the half-Betazoid Deanna Troi and the Ramitisian mediator Riva from TNG "Loud as a Whisper". Instead of the dark-eyed telepaths who can speak but communicate mainly via telepathy they are in every other series, these Betazoids are light-eyed mute empaths who communicate via sign language. Actually, another huge problem with this show's logic. Why are the negotiations for Betazed's reentry into the Federation taking place at Starfleet Academy in San Francisco in front of a class of cadets? It's not even the right place or audience for it. Betazed's reentry into the Federation should be something negotiated between the Betazoid delegation and the Federation Council headed up by the Federation President. Those absolutely critical stakeholders aren't even on this planet. They're at the Federation Headquarters space station! I have a feeling that quite a few of the people who worked on this series either never went to college at all, or only went to art school. The tour of the Academy only seems to visit a coffee shop and the quad between some buildings where the students are reading outdoors, tossing around a ball, playing frisbee and hacky-sack, and generally doing everything you only see in the staged photos for college brochures. They couldn't even be bothered to make a replicator for the replimat... they just have cups appear on the serving area of a completely modern-looking espresso machine. That might actually be worse/lazier than Picard using an off-the-shelf 3D printer as the La Sirena's replicator. No corner left uncut. Honestly, it feels like it's more rewarding to watch this series for the background continuity nods than the actual story. At least there it feels like there's some affection for Star Trek as a whole... even if it is entirely superficial. ... ok, when your plot is so badly written that your antagonist starts to sound distressingly like the voice of reason, it might be time to reconsider your entire plotline. So after some fairly weak rationalizations, the plot wraps up with Starfleet seemingly arbitrarily deciding that the Federation will put its next capital on Betazed instead... noting that the entire Federation council and Federation President have been absent this entire time and probably ought to weigh in on that. This kind of further diminishes the relevance/significance of Starfleet Academy on Earth. It would've meant something if the Federation had reestablished the capital in Paris as it'd been since the founding, which would have made that Academy campus the de facto flagship campus again. Now there doesn't really seem to be a reason for it to exist there at all, since there are many other campuses with presumably better staff and conditions than what's available on an Earth that only came out of isolationism two or so years ago. This episode is... "better" feels too much like praise. Let's go with "Less awful". It's following a very old Star Trek diplomacy episode formula that's been used since TOS... but it's just not doing it very well because it's not committing to the bit. It wants to keep drama at arm's length and focus on being "quirky" and "funny" in a very forced and unnatural-feeling way so it ends up in this emotional flip-flop where there are scenes that were meant to be tense and dramatic that are just bland and emotionless because the series keeps trying to shift attention from the drama to a kid in the background who won't stop playing with his zipper to the great dismay of the adults.

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.