Seto Kaiba

I'm just looking forward to whatever obscure references they'll dig up.

Give it a little longer and you can get it on deep discount in the bargain bin. 😉

I have to admit, so far I'm pretty disappointed in this season's offerings. Nothing's really jumping out at me except Overlord season 4... which was a forgone conclusion because I love the light novel. The only one on Crunchyroll's currently available simulcasts for this season that really grabbed me was The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting... which seems like it will be either a laugh riot or terrible, with no middle ground whatsoever. I might pick up The Devil is a Part-Timer season 2, but there is just nothing else here. I guess it's going to be a good season for my backlog, at least.

Macross II's "parallel world" setting is a very different place to the setting of Macross Plus and later installments. Macross II: Lovers Again, its timeline, and its two prequels Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song give much more attention to the ongoing threat posed by the Zentradi than the later titles did. The ongoing Macross timeline has the surviving ~3 million ships of the Boddole Zer main fleet retreat into deep space seemingly never to return. Macross II didn't get so lucky, with rogue branch fleets and other forces of varying size periodically wandering back into the Sol system to have another go. Some of those surviving forces even linked up with other main fleets. That led to the 2036 invasion by the Neld main fleet in a bid to exact vengeance for the destruction of the Boddole Zer main fleet, and a 2037 attack by the Burado main fleet who were hoping to use Earth's culture as a weapon against the Meltrandi fleet chasing them. As a result, the UN Forces of the Macross II timeline not only became intimately familiar with how the Zentradi and Meltrandi wage space warfare... they also ended up with a small mountain of secondhand Zentradi and Meltrandi military hardware and multiple factory satellite complexes. Their defense strategy was heavily influenced by lessons learned from the First Space War and what they later gleaned from commanders like Vrlitwhai who joined the UN Forces in the aftermath of the war. What developed was a battleship-based force not dissimilar to what the Zentradi and Meltrandi field composed mainly of Zentradi warships with a couple Earth-built ships. It wasn't until after the disastrous 2054 Zentradi invasion of the Sol system wiped out most of the former Vrlitwhai branch fleet that the UN Forces started giving serious thought to force modernization. Earth's engineers put a lot of time and effort into reverse-engineering all of their captured Zentradi and Meltrandi technology over the years and this was finally put into practice with a new generation of warship designs, valkyries, and destroids built on a combination of Human, Zentran, and Meltran overtechnology. The end result was all of the new designs in Macross II: Lovers Again... which led to the UN Forces absolutely steamrolling the next major Zentradi invasion force to wander into the solar system in 2082. That overwhelming victory over the Zentradi was what led to the UN Forces becoming overconfident and complacent in the 2090s, leading to the disatrous events depicted in Macross II. We all thought the VF-4 book wasn't gonna happen for much the same reason... given that it appears only in Macross: Flash Back 2012 for maybe a minute or so and only ended up in a main role in some of the games (e.g. Macross M3). The VF-22 book was also a pretty big surprise. The VF-11 book less so, since that was a fairly prominent design in Macross Plus and Macross 7 that had multiple main characters associated with it incl. Milia, Gamlin, and Isamu. Minor Valkyrie designs tend to end up being covered briefly as asides in the books of more major Valkyries. Like how the VF-3000 and VF-5000 ended up being touched on by the VF-1 and VF-4 books, or how the VF-4 book launched into a brief history of Alexei Kurakin's career that touched on the VF-9 and some later General Galaxy designs since he cofounded the company. If we're going to see much coverage of the Vampire, I'd kind of expect to see it in the form of a side section in a VF-17 or VF-171 book. Of course, we know the next Master File is a complete waste of time. VF-31AX Kairos Plus. At least half of the first VF-31 book was just reprinted content from the VF-25 book, and considering the VF-31AX Kairos Plus is a production VF-31 (which is mostly VF-25 parts already) upgraded with some of the Siegfried's detuned YF-30 parts, I can't imagine there'll be much to that book. Made worse by the fact that, like the Siegfried book, it'll probably ignore the mass-production VF-31 Kairos almost entirely to focus on an aftermarket custom job with single-digit production numbers.

Roy's good, but he's not Godmode good... that's Max. Roy racked up quite the kill count in the Unification Wars according to the original series, but the events of Macross Zero are probably a pretty trivial part of that since the number of aircraft involved was only a few dozen in total and he probably wasn't allowed to officially add them to his score because the whole thing was classified top secret. That's the thing about emigrant fleets... you've got a captive population, but in order to maintain a viably large defense force the military ends up being one of the largest employers in the fleet simply because of the number of people needed to support it both in the service itself and private enterprises supplying it. They'd probably cool on that pretty quick when they realized there are only a handful of inhabitable planets in the entire galaxy, everyone's declaring genocidal war against each other, and what's left of humanity is ruled by something that's less a military dictatorship than it is a military-run kakistocracy. Only if it defolded in the Sol system... if he moved it somewhere else, or destroyed it before it arrived, the Zentradi would never have bothered looking for it on Earth. They have an ancient directive to leave miclone planets alone. This directive is not always respected. Up until the main fleets rolled up, anyway. The Macross Cannon-class were made to wipe out branch fleets in a single shot, since most of the Zentradi encounters the Spacy had were against scouting forces and remnants of the Boddole Zer main fleet. Unfortunately, they weren't developed under after the 2054 Zentradi invasion that so badly hobbled the UN Spacy in that timeline, meaning that their first real trial by fire was in 2082.

Apart from the fact that it's already out, the answer is a resounding "No" due to quality issues.

That one wasn't retained knowledge... my Google-fu is just way more advanced than the average bloke's since I spent a few years as a "Google Guide" after my employer switched from MS Office to Google's G Suite/Workspace. I ran a site search against all the pages listed under Wikipedia's index of "List of Horror Films of the 1980's" looking for synonyms related to zombies and ghosts along with the keywords "50's" and "girlfriend" and read the handful of pages the query spit out. (Some of my colleagues were not big believers in things like using descriptive file names and/or folders to organize materials in cloud storage, so power user-level searches were something I got real good at against my will to maintain my sanity.)

One thing that has been repeatedly hinted at in Frontier-era and later material, and outright stated in Master File, is that the New UN Government member nations are expected to reinforce each other should one come under attack by a hostile alien/foreign power. The Frontier movies referenced it with the Frontier Government declining to reinforce Galaxy because they believed the distress call they received was a deliberate act of subterfuge. In Delta's gaiden manga Black-Winged White Knight, the Kingdom of the Wind c.2060 is salty towards the New UN Gov't partly because of the losses the Aerial Knights sustained fulfilling their obligation to support a neighboring world that was attacked by Zentradi. For the Spica III incident in Master File, it's mentioned the New UN Forces called up every available ship and fighter squadron within reasonable fold distance to assist in making the attack on the main fleet that destroyed Spica III. Not that I'm aware, though the VF-0 was not intended for use in live combat and the total number of engagements the handful of aircraft fought in was very small indeed. Probably not THAT much bigger than what they are now... the miltary is overrepresented as a career path because of how important defense is, but as populations grow the actual percentage of the population employed by the military is likely to drop. Well, yes... that other series we don't talk about wrote out the fact that there were thousands of other Zentradi fleets. To that story, there was only ONE main fleet. By preventing the Supervision Army gunship from crashing on Earth in the first place. Mind you, he was armed with what was essentially a weaponized time machine built off the same biotechnology as the Birdhuman and the Protodeviln's Evil-series bodies. In terms of the number of ships sunk in a single discharge, the Macross Cannon-class in Macross II does appear to be quite a bit more powerful... destroying hundreds of ships each vs. dozens, and across a much wider area due to having been designed for anti-fleet saturation bombardment.

From the description, I feel like this might be the 1985 made-for-TV movie The Midnight Hour.

I admit I'd have liked to see how that one ended too... if only because of how audacious it was for the publisher to use the Robotech license to print a borderline troll fic aimed at taking the piss out of Robotech and its fanbase. They literally made it a plot point that every previous Robotech work up to that point represented a nightmarish bad future of unending war created by a stable time loop in which all the characters are messily killed, and then made the good future timeline after they broke out of the time loop an unauthorized Macross spinoff. Bonus points for the unauthorized spinoff having a lengthy aside at least once per issue for someone (often Sad Dana from the penultimate time loop iteration) to hang a lampshade on how stupid some aspect of the "classic" Robotech story was. It felt almost like an End of Evangelion-style demonstration of contempt for the audience and the material.

For what it's worth, I much prefer this early version of the Borg over what they eventually became after Star Trek: First Contact. There was so much more power and mystery surrounding the Borg back then. They were a dark mirror of the Federation, a species far advanced over humanity that had taken the Federation's ideals of equality, the free exchange of knowledge and ideas, and using advanced technology to raise quality of life to their logical extremes. A race of cyborgs who'd adopted an extreme form of collectivism in the form of a literal groupmind that allowed for the instantaneous sharing of thoughts and knowledge, who addressed their biological needs by increasingly replacing their biology with technology as they age, and who quite innocently believe they are doing everyone a favor by sharing their philosophy with other, less advanced, species. There was nothing that could really equal the menace they projected as a literally faceless antagonist with the voice of legion. I hate what First Contact turned the Borg into... a race of cyber-zombies whose collective mind was ruled by an evil queen who, despite her protestations, behaves exactly like she's an individual and inverts the Borg's original intention by regarding the galaxy as biological and technological resources to be harvested to improve the Borg. The Borg Queen was a mistake.

To the best of our knowledge? Only one operational Battle-class in-system, though it may be possible to obtain others by prematurely activating ships under construction or asking for reinforcements from nearby systems. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur mentions the Battle-7 having been appropriated for such a purpose before its formal launch, to destroy the Zentradi main fleet that glassed Spica III. By all accounts, the VF-1 had a K/D ratio of about 12 in the First Space War. Master File has suggested that number has increased quite a bit with subsequent models. The VF-25 Master File presents a story where VF-25s fought against a Zentradi force that outnumbered them more than 24 to 1 without any significant damage or losses. Yup. It's an odd touch of horror for what is otherwise an optimistic series... humanity is using emigrant fleets to spread itself throughout the galaxy precisely because the threat of planetary-scale annihilation at the hands of a Zentradi fleet is a remote but ever-present possibility. It's all about preserving the species from extinction at the hands of an uncaring clone army. That's Ushio Todo from Macross 30 right there... he was so traumatized by the events of the First Space War that he orchestrated the events of Macross 30 in the hopes of using the Fold Evil sealed on Uroboros to travel back in time and make the First Space War unhappen. In Macross II's timeline, Earth was lucky in that most of the time they were caught between Zentradi and Meltrandi fleets and were able to tackle them while they were distracted by each other. The occasions where they were fighting a single main fleet on its own were considerably more fraught, with the 2054 invasion leading to a year-long war that ended with the Spacy decimated but victorious.

Since he wouldn't have had any way of knowing about the Grand Cannon systems, I doubt much of anything would have dissuaded him once he decided Earth's culture was a threat. Even in the scenario we saw in the series and movie, there were over a hundred Oberth-class missile destroyers in orbit armed with thermonuclear reaction warheads and the single largest deployment of thermonuclear weaponry in human history was a practically beneath Boddole Zer's notice thanks to the sheer size of his main fleet.

At the very least, the overwhelming majority of them did not live long enough to regret the error in judgement. The VF-0 Master File is one of the better installments in the series. It offers insight not only into the VF-0's development but also its brief postwar operation period between the end of the Unification Wars and the First Space War. Macross the First threw it a nod too with the other VF-0 test carrier, CVN-100 Graf Zeppelin II being at South Ataria island for a final retaliatory attack by the Anti-Unification Alliance on Christmas 2008.

Almost certainly, yes. Something THAT killy as a planetary defense weapon of the last resort? They'd have been insane not to. Grand Cannon 1 wiped out close to 800,000 Zentradi ships in ONE SHOT. If they'd been able to fire all five, Boddole Zer could've found himself losing most of his fleet. That's OK, based on what's said in Master File and other publications, the New UN Forces kinda forgot the VF-0 existed for a while too. As to why they didn't start producing the VF-0 in large quantities... the VF-1 had more new technology, and was designed around fighting Zentradi infantry. The bias towards a ground-based defense made the VF-1's fuel issues less important. Not very. Master File mentions that a modified VF-0 was used for the initial space testing of variable fighters while outfitted with the QF-3000E Ghost's FF-1999 thermonuclear reaction engines. That was the VF-0-NF. There is also the VF-0+ that is mentioned in some side story material that was a VF-0 retrofitted with the FF-2001 engine from the VF-1. Plus the replica versions from Uroboros c.2060 that were equipped with engines from the VF-5000.

Definitely not. While we might gleefully poke fun at the Harmony Gold staff's many inadequacies and moments of idiotic behavior, one thing that can be said in their favor is that they have a very clear understanding of what rights they do and don't have (even when deliberately doing a bad job of explaining it to fans) thanks to their many experiences in court defending the Tatsunoko license over the last twenty years. You can bet your bottom dollar that all appropriate disclosures regarding their rights under license and the limitations thereof were made while negotiating their deal with Sony. Now, you can probably safely assume that Sony didn't pay very much for the rights... given their limitations and the extremely limited value they have outside of maintaining the now-defunct Macross embargo. Really, that'd depend on which version of the NUNS's origin they decide to go with. Technically, the NUNS has existed since the original series 2 years after arc. One of two competing stories regarding the insignia change is that it was brought in as a result of the reorganization of the New UN Forces following the Second Unification War, while the other holds that it was like that almost immediately after the First Space War and only certain particularly hidebound planets like Earth and Eden retained the old markings out of pride until the Second Unification War (which explains why Ozma is shown flying a VF-171 that has the Frontier-era NUNS markings in the 2040s). That's the problem with a multiple-choice past.

I suspect they'd still have had the Destroids, but they'd be more focused on the air defense role for space warships. Possibly replacing the Tomahawk with something along the lines of the Maverick from the FamilySoft games as a complement to the Monster. The Earth UN Forces were pretty serious about completing the Grand Cannons... they had problems because some of them had only recently been started when the Zentradi first arrived, and at least one was damaged in the Unification Wars. I'd imagine there is a more immediate interest in the military applications of fold faults... that being generating dimensional faults for use as a barrier the way the Vajra do and the Protoculture ship Sigur Berrentzs did. Surrounding planets with artificial fold faults would have some pretty awful consequences for interstellar commerce and travel until humanity can mass-produce fold quartz and super-fold drives. That's the VF-0 or VF-3000, basically. The VF-3000's issue was that they basically tried to just scale the existing VF-1 design up without respect for its greater mass, etc. Being purpose-built at a specific size, the way the VF-0 was, eliminates the issue.

... and finished Deaimon: Recipe for Happiness. It's cute and fluffy and generally a feel-good sort of series with enough emotional weight to it that it doesn't feel substanceless like some of the other offerings from this past season. On the whole, I think I'd recommend it, though it's definitely too short and the ending doesn't really offer any closure.

It's not a bad idea in theory. It's just not a theory that'll hold up in practice because it's built on too many hideously unrealistic assumptions. Basically, for that theory to become practical, Sony Pictures (fmrly. Warner Bros) would have to be willing to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into developing and producing an all-original giant robot movie AND unnecessarily pay Harmony Gold license fees and millions upon millions of dollars in royalties on distribution and merchandising for the film in order to use the title of an incredibly obscure and generally unsuccessful 1980's cartoon series dogged by an enormous amount of bad press for their totally unrelated all-original film and any sequels, spinoffs, etc. that come of it. In short, only a crazy person would expect anything to come of that. It's a ridiculous pipe dream in which Sony is willing to do all the actual work and give Harmony Gold millions of dollars for essentially no reason because they can't actually adapt Robotech for legal reasons.

All in all, I don't think it would have made much difference in the course of the war itself. An enemy force the size of the Boddole Zer main fleet simply isn't something you can prepare for with resources on the level of a single planet. There would have been some minor differences. The Valkyrie would likely have been a much larger aircraft closer in size to the VF-0 and SV-51 so that its internal fuel tanks could hold enough fuel for extended operations in space without FAST packs. The space forces would likely have invested much more heavily in the QF-3000 series Ghost than they did in the SF-3 Lancer II space fighter. It's possible they might've rushed out the fold systems for the first few ARMD-class space carriers and had a more mobile space fleet, but they wouldn't have been able to build nearly enough of them to make a difference against the sheer size of the Zentradi forces arrayed against them. I think the most effective thing to do would probably have been to simply build absurd numbers of thermonuclear reaction warheads and either try to mine high Earth orbit with them or establish clusters of missile batteries in orbit to rapidly target enemy ships en masse since you don't even necessarily need a direct hit to sink an enemy ship with one due to the huge amount of heat energy a detonation produces.

By their terms (see the PlayingWith tab), they've already got it listed correctly as a deconstructed trope because the Zentradi had no interest at all in Earth itself or invading it until they decided to destroy the planet from orbit. The Earth UN Government and Earth UN Forces, however, spent ten years being Wrong Genre Savvy with a massive military buildup aimed at resisting a classic Alien Invasion with huge underground command bunkers, giant anti-orbit beam cannons, and plans for five planetary defense fleets centered on Daedalus-class and Prometheus-class warships and the hundreds of mecha they carried.

It's too damned hot to work in my study, so I spent part of today watching Deaimon. The series is localized by Crunchyroll as Deaimon: Recipe for Happiness. It's a cute little slice of life drama about a carefree 30-something who moves home to rejoin the family business (a traditional Japanese confectionary shop) after his music career bombs and discovers his family have taken in a girl named Itsuka whose father abandoned her at the shop and have been raising her as their successor. It's cute, but a bit weird, as the episodes seem to revolve around solving a character's personal issues through some metaphor vaguely involving traditional Japanese sweets. The foreshadowing involving the identity of Itsuka's father is as subtle as a half-brick to the head.

That much was given away in the initial announcement that Big West and Harmony Gold had struck a deal. Last year's joint announcement by Big West and Harmony Gold talks quite a bit about what Big West got from the deal. Big West got a clear path to distribute Macross worldwide and gained partial control over Robotech's distribution in partnership with Harmony Gold, but the only thing it mentions Harmony Gold receiving from the agreement besides a pro forma acknowledgement that its license from Tatsunoko is valid (which wasn't in dispute anyway) was a promise from Big West that they wouldn't obstruct the release of a future live-action Robotech movie should one be made. That, combined with what we know of the prevailing legal situation right before the deal was struck, fairly screams that Harmony Gold was (justifiably) feeling cornered by rulings against them and gave away a lot in the negotiations to protect the proposed live-action movie. Harmony Gold themselves told us the "why" of it back in '07-'08. After RSTC spun in, their management shifted its focus to the live action movie as a way to reboot Robotech again and make a clean start with all-original IP.

Hard to say... but my inclination would be "probably not". The Earth UN Forces built their planetary defense strategy around the belief that a war against aliens would take the form of a classic alien invasion scenario with troops landing to seize territory and resources. Those theories turned out to be pretty wide of the mark when the Zentradi rolled up and revealed that their approach to dealing with enemy planets is right out of Ellen Ripley's playbook of "nuke the whole site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure". After the war, the newly-reorganized military did reestablish a traditional Air Force and a blue-water Navy, but the main burden of defense seems to have shifted to the space forces as part of a space-oriented overall defense strategy. (We know part of this due to remarks in Isamu's service record as seen in Macross Plus, including a notation of him having served a brief period aboard the (New) UN Navy ship Enterprise.) Something like a ballistic missile submarine might have some limited use in planetary defense as a surface-based platform to deploy high-yield thermonuclear reaction missiles to orbital targets, but it's nothing a space-based ship couldn't do faster and better. The only submarines that've appeared in the story after the Unification Wars are unmanned ones in the Critical Path corporation's security force protecting its facility on Eden 3. Five of them are wiped out in pretty short order by the Ravens VA-3M, so they don't seem to be all that effective.

It would've been a hell of a shake-up to the show's status quo, if nothing else. Not only would it have shaken up or destroyed the "Will they or won't they?" holding pattern the writers kept Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher in the entire run of the series, it would've offered a much better explanation for how Wesley was treated on the Enterprise. Think about it. One of the first thing we learn about Picard is that he doesn't like children, to such a degree that he all but begs Riker to deal with them for him early in the series. Yet Picard not only tolerates Wesley's presence, he very quickly gives Wesley an extraordinary level of privileged access aboard the Enterprise. Wesley almost immediately goes from being barred from sensitive areas like every other civilian to having the run of the ship, including key operations areas like the bridge and main engineering. The entire senior staff follows Picard's example and dotes on him. He gives Wesley an acting Starfleet rank well below the age where he should be able to, and then gives him a field commission. It's all very unnatural and a big reason Wesley is seen as a Marty Stu... but if Wesley were secretly Jean-Luc Picard's illegitimate son, it would all make a lot more sense. Instead of being given such huge latitude "just because", it could all be reframed as Picard using his position to find excuses to spend time with his son in a way that wouldn't reveal his past indiscretion. Having Wesley find out would also have been a pretty big character moment for Picard. Wesley practically hero-worshipped him as a paragon of Starfleet virtue. He and the rest of the crew would have to cope with the reality that Picard is a fallible human being like everyone else. It would've been a way more interesting plot twist than Wesley dropping out of Starfleet Academy and bumming around the galaxy with the Traveler.