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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The short answer is "It wouldn't". The longer answer that explains what basically everyone already knows is that such a story would be incredibly boring. The ancient Protoculture are as interesting as they are when they're name-dropped in the Macross because they're kept mysterious. They're fascinating as a long-vanished ancient galactic civilization that was destroyed almost overnight (by historical standards) by the products of their own hubris in a tragedy that sounds almost torn from the pages of classical mythology and leavened with a bit of cold war allegory to boot. The problem is that, once you start examining them up close, they're just a race of sufficiently advanced idiots and total bastards who had a death grip on an idiot ball nearly the size of the Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole and destroyed themselves over petty bullsh*t and wouldn't stop building irresponsibly dangerous macguffins. For their part, the Zentradi and Supervision Army are factions composed entirely of flat characters. We've already seen, in other franchise, that that doesn't work. Star Wars did all it could to avoid focusing on the clones and battle droids during the prequel trilogy because there's little emotional investment in watching two armies of flat characters who are literal mass-produced expendable cannon fodder destroy each other unless you're playing it for horror, and they weren't. That's why when that franchise does it, they only ever do it through the lens of "irregular" units of "defective" clones that exist solely to do protagonist stuff despite not passing QC. The Zentradi in Macross only really began to develop personalities of their own beyond their military roles once they became immersed in Earth's culture. Zentradi from the height of the Protoculture's civilization are basically meat robots. It might look like a person and walk like a person, but it's basically an organic automaton that's been programmed to do one specific job and eschew anything not related to that job. On the other side, the Supervision Army is made up of Zentradi and civilians who've been brainwashed to follow orders without question... which makes them effectively no different. You could do big showy space battles... but they have all the emotional impact of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots because a billion is a statistic and neither side cares.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    No.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Three editions of the new crossover album Deculture!! Mixture!!!!!. In the middle is the regular edition. The other two are limited editions. The album's premise is that the singers from Frontier cover five Macross Delta songs (three selected by poll), and the singers from Delta cover five Macross Frontier songs (three selected by poll). The limited editions have a bonus medley track. May'n and Megumi cover Forbidden Borderline, Our Battlefield, Ruin of a Pure Heart, Giraffe Blues, and Cosmic Movement. Walkure covers The Wings of Goodbye ~ End of the Triangle, Lion, Afterschool Overflow, Universal Bunny, and Northern Cross. All seven artists do a special version of DYRL. The Frontier edition has a medley of Delta songs as a bonus track, and the Delta edition has a medley of Frontier songs as a bonus track.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    As much as Trekkies hate that bloody song, that is probably the biggest missed opportunity in Picard so far... In all fairness, what Jurati was secondhand-subjected to was a psychic message from an ancient machine race that biological life was so profoundly ill-equipped to process that it was mistaken for a vision of unsurpassed apocalyptic horror. An experience so absolutely soul-shatteringly destructive to the psyche that it was shown to drive multiple hardened Tal Shiar operatives - people who are used to murder, assassination, and attempted genocide - so profoundly insane that they were driven to immediately take their own lives after experiencing it by any means available. Something so horribly traumatic that the Romulans who survived contact with it developed a pathological fear of artificial life so profound that they indirectly murdered a billion or more of their own people and collapsed their own government by sabotaging the Federation relief effort rather than risk the possibility of sentient artificial life emerging in the Federation. Whatever it was was bad enough it gave what's left of the Borg collective enough of a bad vibe to sacrifice a cube to un-know it. As a murder defense, being exposed to something that soul-destroying even secondhand makes a pretty good defense... (and Voyager had at least one plot where it was shown that mind melds could be used to implant or activate something like posthypnotic commands, so it's possible she wasn't even acting of her own volition when she killed Bruce Maddox.) Albeit I agree she should've been in a mental hospital... but not because of the murder charge. If exposure to the admonition is enough to send all but the hardest Romulans from the Imperial Bureau of Genocide, War Crimes, and Assorted Atrocities to the madhouse if they're tough enough to not simply blow their brains out or cave their skulls in on the first rock they find, a wimp like Jurati should have spent the rest of the season in a straightjacket to keep her from putting one of Rios's antique phasers in her mouth and the remainder of the series in a mental institution getting serious help and enough tranquilizers to sedate a baseball team. That she's just fine a year after that AND having murdered her ex-boyfriend is pretty damn hard to buy. Almost as hard to buy as that Starfleet just forgot that Musiker got a bad conduct discharge for substance abuse and reinstated her with a promotion... (I doubt it'll ever occur to them, but I guess she could be getting constant doses of antipsychotics from an implant the way Zefram Cochrane was treated for bipolar disorder in the years before World War III left him without refills and having to self-medicate with alcohol.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    ... they're really reaching to defend this mess, aren't they? This is the best they could do grenade-fishing for praise for Star Trek: Picard? A handful of sites known to be paid shills for CBS/ViacomCBS/Paramount, a few of which are owned and editorially managed by the same company, and at least one of which has former Paramount executives running its editorial department?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    So... is Star Trek just not developing original characters anymore? This is just getting silly. It's like the franchise's showrunners no longer even consider it worth the effort to look like they're trying. This is their Hail Mary? Packing the cast with as many recast established characters as possible regardless of whether or not it makes any sense for them to be there in the hopes that nostalgia-by-association will keep the show from sinking as soon as it launches the way Picard and Discovery did? Spock's presence was justified, at least, by his being the only character from the original Star Trek pilot who survived the pilot into the series proper. He was Pike's science officer. Announcing that James Kirk was going to be in the series was a blatant admission they have no confidence in Anson Mount's ability to keep the show afloat. Now they're adding Uhura? Did they forget that the last time they attempted one of these stupid "how they met" storylines it was a three-film box office disaster that wiped out the then-thriving Star Trek merchandising empire, alienated most of the fanbase, lost them tens of millions of dollars, and got canned when their investors unilaterally withdrew their support?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like the lovechild of the Barbatos and the G-Self... with a lot of bias towards the G-Self. Another Reguild Century story? Humanity had set up space colonies in the inner solar system in that era...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Sadly, this meant a golden opportunity for a much better joke was missed... He could've been listening to "Faith of the Heart".
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I wish. Yeah, they found and brought back punk-rock-on-a-bus guy from Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home for a bit part in episode 2x04. His appearance doesn't make any sense for the reasons I explained, but then he's one of a bunch of cases of that in this series... and unfortunately this episode also undermines the idea that 2024 is where the timeline diverged because Guinan is clearly upset by having experienced centuries of humanity at its worst in this episode, meaning sh*t went off the rails MUCH earlier than this supposed 2024 flashpoint. I'm really not sure what's worse, the terrible out-of-place nod to Star Trek IV, Guinan trying to draw a connection to "Assignment: Earth", or the fact that... They could afford to recast Guinan after bringing Whoopi back for an episode but not find someone new to play "The Watcher"? Yup. Were you honestly expecting a member of Star Trek: Picard's dysfunction junction to accept the consequences of their actions? All of them have backstories that involve blaming others for their problems, and that clearly isn't going to stop anytime soon.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    YouTube hasn't completely abandoned YouTube Originals... it just massively scaled back its ambitions there in favor of its much more profitable digital library streaming service, since they have enough clout to ensure they can offer products from competing networks and studios in a single marketplace at reasonable prices. It's kind of unfortunate that CBS/ViacomCBS/Paramount decided to make Star Trek the flagship series of CBS All Access/Paramount+. Ultimately, it means that they'll have to fly the Star Trek franchise into the ground before they'll admit to themselves that a proprietary streaming service was probably a mistake. They did... it was back in "The Star Gazer". Dr. Jurati mentions that she was cleared of a murder charge in relation to the death of her ex-boyfriend Dr. Bruce Maddox when she's trying to shoo away a man who's attempting to flirt with her by explaining her relationships don't last long and end badly. From her description, charges were dropped because she was suffering deliberately and maliciously-induced psychosis from her mind meld with the Romulan agent operating as "Commodore Oh". Essentially, she was easily forgiven because she was brainwashed and crazy. All in all, I definitely feel like Picard is out of ideas and is desperately trying to sail onwards by sheer force of in-jokes, references, and contrived coincidence. Discovery already did the Mirror Universe thing to death TWICE, once in season one and once in season three, and it wasn't any fun on either occasion. The TOS and DS9 Mirror Universe episodes were fun because they weren't taking themselves seriously. They were an excuse for the cast to really ham it up like the villains from the kind of old school sci-fi serials that the likes of Tom Paris found so amusing. Enterprise, Discovery, and now Picard miss the point of them entirely by taking the subject matter completely seriously. Yeah, actually living in such an unpleasant universe would be awful but the audience doesn't want to see that... they were a chance to get some cheap laughs out of the cast being simultaneously aghast at the state of affairs in the Dimension of Stupid Evil and leave no piece of scenery unchewed playing the locals. Enterprise, and more prominently Discovery, deemphasized the bit about Stupid and emphasized the bit about Evil, which just made it an exercise in misery for the audience that failed to escape the fact that for Discovery it was an attempt to get Burnham out of the role of Villain Protagonist. Picard's sojourn into an even worse Mirror Universe where humanity is a successful xenophobic evil empire is just agonizing to watch because it's not even trying to make sense anymore. It's increasingly obvious it's an ill-considered stunt. This really hits a glaring point with the return of the punk guy from Star Trek IV. Why does he act like he remembers being assaulted by Spock when, in this timeline, there would not have been a trip back in time to recover whales and Spock would not have been on a Confederation ship in the first place?
  11. Seto Kaiba
    You'll want to post in the help thread, not the Newbie questions thread.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm not going to get Paramount+ for this... but I will absolutely support it if and when it comes to a digital library-type service or on physical media, because I absolutely want this level of remaster to continue into the rest of the series. Don't want this one stopping halfway thru the way they did with remastering the TV shows. With the best will in the world, The Motion Picture is jokingly called The Slow-Motion Picture for a bloody reason... but hopefully these edits make what was originally some above average VFX into something gobsmacking.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I'd originally put this one on the back burner because the teaser for it was so incredibly dull, but I've started watching Hakozume (localized as Police in a Pod) and it's a surprisingly charming and relatable slice of life series about the local police in Japan. If anyone's looking for lighter fare with some actual substance to it, I'd highly recommend Hakozume. It's currently on Funimation, which means it'll get merged into Crunchyroll in the near-ish future.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, I suspect so. The infrastructure costs for a streaming service are quite expensive. So much so that any newly-launched streaming service is more or less expected to be in the red for its first couple years. It's not a great sign for Paramount+ that the 2021 Q4 earnings call included a prediction that they expect the losses to increase year-to-year for the next few years. IMO, I think we are seeing a streaming bubble that's going to burst in the next couple years. Streaming was convenient because there were only a few streaming services on the market that had everything. Cord-cutters made the cable industry feel threatened, so now the networks are Balkanizing the streaming industry in a bid to claim a portion of what third-party streaming services were making by consolidating all that material previously. Eventually they'll hit the point where a lot of them simply won't be profitable because of how few shows the networks have that draw subscribers when their streaming service mostly just means paying a premium for what's already on broadcast.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's all in the backstory... that the writers and showrunners couldn't be arsed to put in the actual show. Like the 2009 Star Trek (XI) film, the backstory for Star Trek: Picard was dispensed in the form of a limited comic series that was so poorly advertised its existence was unknown to most of the fanbase until long after it ceased publication. The TL;DR version is that "Raffi" - formerly Lt. Commander Raffaela Musiker - was aide de camp to Admiral Jean-Luc Picard for the approximately four years between his promotion to the admiralty in 2381 and his resignation-in-protest in 2385. She was, for all practical intents and purposes, Admiral Picard's right-hand man for those four years of coordination work on the Romulan evacuation. Musiker was also apparently such a problematic officer that Starfleet was planning to hit her with a bad conduct discharge, and once Picard had resigned there was a bootprint on her backside so fast she was convinced it was a conspiracy rather than a result of her substance abuse problem. Well, they did confirm in their Q4 earnings call that they're losing upwards of a billion dollars a year on it.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    A remastering of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series would be focused on restoring and enhancing/upscaling the original animation. They would not waste the time and money to create new footage to replace one mecha design with a slightly different version. An all-new animated feature would likely just use the DYRL versions of the designs, as multiple titles have already done.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    True, if the owner of a hacked account used the same password for their email their email is likely compromised too... but we're talking about the other 99.9% of the userbase who aren't. To them, just showing up and not being able to log in without any readily visible clue as to why is a problem that may lead some to believe erroneously they've been banned, that the forum has been hacked, etc.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It would probably have been a good idea to send a mass email and/or put up a more visible notice that there was a forced password reset beforehand. Just making a thread about it in the forums really doesn't cut it as notification, since most users first impulse on seeing they've been logged out will be to try to log back in before trying to read new posts in the forums and the forums'll tell 'em their account is locked.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Finally, some good news on the release schedule... Crunchyroll has the license for The Rising of the Shield Hero S2, Ascendance of a Bookworm S3, Kaguya-sama: Love is War ULTRA ROMANTIC, Legend of Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These: Collision, Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It: R=1-SING, Skeleton Knight in Another World, and A Couple of Cuckoos. They probably also have Overlord S4.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, what KMG did is more like a compulsive gambler in over their head at the blackjack table. They were taking money needed for day-to-day expenses and betting it on the next big score in the hopes that they'd win big enough to return that money with interest, with a conspicuous lack of success. Eventually it caught up to them when they had to balance their checkbook and realized they didn't have enough to cover their debts and their loan shark decided their free trial of having kneecaps was over. From what I've read, it's kind of a "yes and no" situation. All things being equal, computer animation tools do make the process faster and more streamlined which saves money... but at the same time, it also drives demand for higher quality and more detailed animation which increases cost. (The ever-more-detailed eyes of anime characters are said to be one of the most expensive things to animate in terms of person-hours per frame.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The aforementioned issue with Kew Media Distribution was very much the exception. Mind you, they weren't really in the animation business as such. Their portfolio was almost exclusively distribution rights to live action television and movies. It would not be at all unfair to say that what sank Kew Media Distribution was massively irresponsible and highly irregular behavior of its parent company, Kew Media Group. Anime production is on razor thin margins, yeah... though that's a function of how manpower-intensive animation production is vs. average revenues from a 12, 26, or 50 episode series.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It wasn't always like that... that was a development that came with the pivot away from the titans as the story's main antagonists around halfway through the series.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Considering the monotonous regularity of tragic backstories among named characters, one could be forgiven for cynically suspecting redshirts are a form of assisted suicide. Few are the Star Trek protagonists who haven't been traumatized in some way prior to the "present day" of their respective shows...
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda, yeah. After all, the Titans are the only ones left in the story with a halfway plausible claim to being victims rather than villains. They're just Eldian convicts from Marley who were sentenced to a fate significantly worse than death: the limited immortality of being trapped in one's own mind as an unaging mindless titan. Even that's only halfway convincing because a lot of the mindless titans were Eldians like Grisha who wanted to overthrow the vicious, expansionist, titan-using nation of Marley... by restoring the vicious, expansionist, titan-using empire of Eldia. Knowing that a fair number of the titans are titans because their sole objection to genocidal oppression was not being the oppressor puts a lot of them into "*sshole victim" territory at best. It's impossible to sympathize with the protagonists when the first thing they did after defeating the titans and making contact with the outside world again was to immediately validate everything Marley and the rest of the world believed about Eldians being inherently evil, bloodthirsty monsters. The closest anyone gets to heroism in the second half of the series is... And that's objectively horrible.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the winter season is limping to its conclusion. In the Land of Leadale fails to go anywhere or do anything of interest in its twelve episode run. It's only really remarkable for its sheer number of orphaned plot threads, with Cayna having essentially forgotten all of the goals she started the story with by about the seventh episode. It takes no risks, it pushes no envelopes, and it adds nothing to its genre. The series is, for all intents and purposes, a participation award. So congratulations In the Land of Leadale. You showed up. Didn't do anything, but you showed up. The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest is also wearily crawling to its twelve episode mercy killing with Mattias facing the first enemy in the series to actualy pose a challenge to anyone instead of going down like a chump. Unfortuately, there's no actual buildup to it so it feels like a combination of Giant Space Flea from Nowhere and a Big Lipped Alligator Moment. The best they could come up with for an ending was a dark lord whose existence was never so much as hinted at previously. This series is so scattered and its story so poorly told that it feels like a SparkNotes summary written by an exciteable toddler. Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department is definitely feeling some arc fatigue with its concept, having abruptly changed gears to do an idol singer episode for no apparent reason other than that Zombie Land Saga was popular when it was being drafted. The salaryman gags are fine, but there's no sense of direction to the story anymore as of episode 10. Attack on Titan is... Attack on Titan, which is to say it's still a tedious exercise in darkness-induced audience apathy that's frantically searching for something to hold the audience's attention and coming up empty. They're definitely bringing across the final arc of the manga as faithfully as possible. Unfortunately, that means it's padded like a menstruating fire hose and the characters are all unamibguously terrible human beings.
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