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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    ... at first I was like "didn't he die, though?". No, no that's what you meant. I guess it all depends on how much "timey wimey ball" you assume is in play. The Klingons seem to take it as read that Pike is going to end up an overcooked burrito in a high-tech foil wrapper no matter what. They were pretty clear that, if he takes the time crystal, that is how he's guaranteed to check out.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, most Macross titles get reruns on the major anniversaries.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it is a matter of record that Netflix tried to initiate a de facto cancellation of Star Trek: Discovery by withdrawing its financial support from the series at the end of the show's first and second seasons due to its poor reception among international audiences. Discovery's second and third seasons got funded anyway because CBS twisted Netflix's arm using the threat of a lawsuit for breach of contract if they bailed early. Netflix got away with reducing the show's budget, and eventually backed out successfully after the show's third season. That poor performance also saw Netflix pass on Picard and Amazon offer far less money for it, leading to the show's seasons being reduced to just 10 episodes. I strongly suspect the reason this mess is allowed to drag on the way it has is that CBS - now Paramount - is a mixture of two factors: Star Trek is what's keeping the lights on at Paramount+. Star Trek: Discovery was created specifically to be the service's flagship original programming, and even years later the Star Trek shows are about all Paramount has to show for its proprietary streaming service. If they cancel it without a replacement on deck to take over as the service's - what's the TV equivalent of a "killer app"? - main draw then the business case for Paramount+ evaporates and it's just an overpriced library of forgettable sitcom reruns. Star Trek shows have a history of doing poorly right out of the gate and being vindicated in later seasons (or by reruns). While they're massively upside-down on Kurtzman-era Star Trek right now, I think their hope is that if they keep the ball rolling and keep retooling until they find the right stuff that draws the lifelong Trekkies back in they'll get their money back with interest in the end like they did on TNG, DS9, and VOY. Paramount shareholders are already upset. That much is VERY clear from the reaction to CBS's big stock sell-off to fund streaming development (and likely cover the money they were no longer getting from Netflix) that erased years of gains in the stock price virtually overnight, the repeated downgrades in the stock's rating, from reactions to demo reels at shareholder meetings, and the very existence of Star Trek: Picard and Strange New Worlds as very calculated attempts to recover the fanbase that was such a rich vein of merchandising revenue done on much tighter budgets and in the latter case recycling the props and sets already constructed for Discovery. Because this is streaming, and not dependent on ad revenue and Nielsen ratings, Paramount can take more risks with it without immediate consequences. With Paramount itself funding the production, it's not going to get canceled until or unless the show(s) completely crash and burn or the stars decide they're done with it. The latter is the reason that we got for why Picard is slated to end after season three... Sir Patrick is apparently done with it and ready to move on. Otherwise, it might as well be cancellation-proof until they run out of money or the share price falls enough to put them in violation of their merger agreement. As noted above, the overwhelming majority of the Paramount+ library is the collections of underwhelming sitcoms and such that the network airs on broadcast and streaming. It has relatively few original-to-streaming properties.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Far from it. In fact, that Southern Cross's mechanical designs are so ugly and so obviously ill-conceived even in-setting is a VERY strong contender for the #1 complaint about the series thanks to the Robotech adaptation sparing its viewers from most of its "original" story. The view that the Southern Cross mechanical designs were blatantly flawed and extremely unlovely was so widely held among Robotech fans during the franchise's brief renaissance in the early 2000s that it ascended to canonical status, with the official Robotech setting making it official that they were badly designed in-universe too. They're held in such low esteem that the series that is easily responsible for 99.9% of Southern Cross's total viewers made them into hard evidence of corruption and incompetence on the part of the military operating them. One of the most frequently revisited topics about the "Masters Saga" is how stupid the Spartas's design is, it being a frontline tank that inexplicably leaves its operator exposed to battlefield hazards from every side including the front (AKA "the end that faces the enemy and the direction of incoming fire") and that it seems to also be missing any means of keeping its operator from being violently and unintentionally ejected in the event of a crash. The cheap shots, of course, are always taken at the Logan's robot mode being short and topheavy and the Auroran being a "space helicopter" despite the helicopter mode not actually being used in space.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It was a training cruise... not the sort of thing you get assigned to out of the blue. Moreover, he seemed to have at least a vague idea of when too, at least in Discovery. Meh... I'm just tired of this modern Star Trek and its unrelenting misery. Nobody gets to be happy or have any kind of a fulfilling life. Everybody has to be broken and depressed, living with some kind of terrible trauma that causes them to seclude themselves from the rest of the galaxy and wait to die. The whole reason Pike stood out on Discovery was that he was the only one around who wasn't a damaged, self-loathing soul wallowing in misery with people he hated. This world sucks enough as it is, let us have a happier future at least in fiction, y'know?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Instantaneously-effective medication is kind of a Star Trek gimmick... all the jokes about instant sedation and the so-called "off button" hypospray, y'know? It is a bit out of place in the modern day, though, but I'm so used to it in regular Star Trek that I guess it sailed right past me. Of late, I feel like we've reached the point where Kurtzman Trek has alienated everyone it's going to alienate - which is to say, most of the established fandom - and the ones left to talk about it with anything more than the morbid fascination of a rubbernecker looking at a car accident they're driving past are the ones who'd gushingly praise the series with no regard for its content or quality. The J.J. Abrams movies didn't really resonate with most Trekkies, and especially not the die-hards who were driving the franchise's merchandise empire. Discovery's first season drove most of the fans away from the franchise, and everything since has been a desperate attempt to recapture that lost audience as licensees and investors desert the franchise because most of the fanbase has moved on and it's no longer profitable. If they're just denying that your complaints are valid, I'm not sure that's gaslighting by the accepted definition... gaslighting would be insisting those problems don't exist at all and trying to make you question your sense of reality. The thing is, the investor disclosures Paramount Global (fmrly. ViacomCBS) is required by law to make and guarantee the accuracy of paint a much less rosy picture of the entire situation. Paramount+ is losing over $1B/year (US) on Paramount+ right now and that amount is expected (by Paramount) to increase until at least 2024. Kurtzman's Star Trek is supposed to be Paramount+'s flagship property, but it's not proving to be the draw they hoped it would be. They've gotten in trouble in the past for inflating the subscriber counts for Paramount+ by including "free trial" subscriptions bundled with other companies services. Merchandising apparently isn't much help to cover the shortfall, since sales have been slow and the exodus of licensees between Discovery's first and second seasons hindered things somewhat as well. The sudden move to take Paramount+ global and their decision to raise $3B with a massive stock sell-off that tanked their share price may have been motivated by Netflix's third, final, and ultimately successful attempt to terminate their involvement in Discovery as its financial backer in light of the show's ongoing poor performance on their service in international markets. Picard is reportedly set to end at just 30 episodes, Discovery is limping badly, and Strange New Worlds is an unknown quantity that investors were reportedly not terribly happy with when demo reels were shown. While I'm sure there are some fans who are undeniably stoked about various bits of production-related celebrity news... a lot of the business-side news definitely seems to be not-so-positive.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The first round is already on offer... the worldwide Macross VF-25.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    He'd have to get the crystal back first... that was what was powering Burnham's imitation-brand Iron Man armor, meaning she took it 800+ years into the future when she left.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    There's the thing... in Star Trek: Discovery's second season, it was made clear to Pike (and the audience) that if he took the *gags* "time crystal" on Boreth the future he saw when he touched it would be immutable. His destiny is written. His fate preordained. In theory, this means Christopher Pike is practically bulletproof. He can't die or even suffer an untreatably severe injury because the timeline says But Thou Must! on the matter of him surviving to lead that disastrous training mission that leaves him a vegetable in a spacefuture iron lung. I don't think they're redoing TOS... they tried that once already and it got crucified by the fans. This is just another ill-advised prequel.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Ech... perhaps because the author of this article seems to have single-sourced his research from a three year old YouTube video, they miss some pretty important points. Most of what the article - and the YouTube video it's copying from - list are the symptoms of the underlying condition that ensured failure was the only option: Southern Cross was a low-effort cash grab. Tatsunoko Production wanted a piece of the booming real robot genre and they wanted to get it in a way that would let the monopolize the profits. So they rushed the series through development, keeping costs down by recycling as much as they could from previously-rejected series concepts and having in-house staff do as much of the work as possible even if they lacked the necessary skills to do the work they were being assigned. Naturally, what they ended up with was a complete mess so heavily and so transparently derivative of Gundam and Macross and so rife with bad ideas that it flopped miserably despite a great time slot and the popularity of the genre as a whole. Oh my, no. Southern Cross was a ratings disaster. No amount of toys were going to pull the series out of that death spiral. (Toys and such were delayed by the late freeze of production designs for the series, but most of the planned merchandise was ultimately cancelled precisely becuase the show's ratings weren't so much in the toilet as halfway to the wastewater treatment plant. Toy and model kit companies decided it was less painful to take a loss on the license fee and move on than risk even greater losses rolling out product for a show nobody was watching.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Available for order on CDJapan and other sites, FYI.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    While I am undeniably happy to see Anson Mount back in the center seat, I feel like it's not particularly congruous that he knows when, where, and how he will be incapacitated yet he claims it's making him hesitate? He basically knows he's bulletproof, predestined to meet a very specific fate at a very specific time and place. If anything, the knowledge that fate refuses to let him end any other way should make him overconfident.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Master File straight-up calls it a 6th Generation Valkyrie... and the reference to derivatives of it as 5.5th Generation would tend to support its position. No, it's called The Strongest Valkyrie... at least, in Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!'s promotional materials. What you're probably thinking of is the 5th Generation Valkyries in general being referred to as the "Last Manned Valkyrie" in a reference/nod to the way 5th Generation fighter jets were expected (at the time Macross Frontier was made) to be the "last manned fighters" the US military would use. That belief, of course, goes back a ways to the development of the 5th Generation fighters referenced in Macross Plus and the competition between the 4th Generation Valkyries and unmanned fighters like the Ghost X-9 and Neo Glaug. For now, anyway. The main thing that makes it so expensive is the ultra-large, ultra-high purity fold quartz that is necessary to manufacture and operate the fold wave system. The required size and purity were/are only readily available from the carcasses of Vajra queen forms, so the investment of resources necessary to aquire it makes the production of the YF-29 an absolutely bank-breaking endeavor. Even worlds with access to large stockpiles of fold quartz like Uroboros only have the resources to manufacture a few of them, so it's the inability to synthesize fold quartz the way they can synthesize fold carbon that ultimately makes the YF-29 an unattainable super-prototype unfit for even limited production. (Master File suggests the VF-31 Siegfried type's fold wave system was an innovative redesign of the fold wave system that was able to function with much less fold quartz than a regular fold wave system, but at the cost of reduced performance and losing the ability to activate the system at will the way the YF-29 could.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    There is nothing "crazed" about it. The movie's title and the design of its title card were careful and deliberate choices intended to support the film's marketing. Why would there need to be? The licensing roadblocks in China and southeast Asia were cleared years ago, and Macross releases are already well underway there. For Europe, Australia, and South America, the licensing of anime and manga titles tends to flow through North American distributors to their subsidiary companies or localization/distribution partners in those regions. We'll be seeing releases announced for those markets in fairly short order once the North American releases are announced.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's a gimmicky title, one exclamation mark for each idol... five for Walkure and one for the Siren Delta System. The recent anniversary album did the same thing, with seven... five for Walkure, and two for Ranka and Sheryl. It's actually noteworthy as the first movie in the franchise to not be a retelling of a series storyline.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    At this point? I would lean towards "No" because the galaxy is still dependent on finite reserves of fold quartz from former Protoculture settlements or Vajra remains, and so can't economically mass produce something like the YF-29, YF-30, VF-31 Siegfried Custom, or VF-31AX Kairos Plus. Gen 5 is still in the process of entering service, so I think it'll be decades yet before Gen 6 is ready for prime time with synthetic fold quartz.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Depends what source you ask? "Not official setting" materials from the Macross creators like Master File have suggested the YF-29 is itself a 6th Generation VF or equivalent. Officially, the VF-31 Siegfried, and presumably the Kairos Plus type, are considered 5.5th Generation.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Isekai is unfortunately still very big, so there's a LOT of that. Ascendance of a Bookworm is one of the better ones, though... being about a librarian who dies in a tragic book-related accident and is reincarnated in a fantasy world that hasn't yet progressed to the point of bulk printed, easily accessible books and decides that sh*t will not stand. Overlord is getting a new season soon too, which I rather enjoy though it's a more niche taste since it is a villain protagonist story that deconstructs a lot of standard western fantasy tropes... especially ones related to humans being the default fantasy species. Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It is a mildly amusing romcom with a heavy comedic emphasis about two members of a university research group who are so bookish and so obsessed with the scientific method that, once they discover they're into each other, they miss the point completely and try to scientifically analyze the phenomenon called "love" by various means and test it empirically. (It borders on edutainment, since it diverges on occasion into lengthy explanations of the scientific methods used.) The Rising of the Shield Hero is getting another season, though unfortunately it's past the point where it was an underdog story about an isekai hero butt monkey who gets stuck with a useless superpower until he discovers how to abuse wrong context magic and now he's just a standard overpowered isekai hero. Kaguya-sama: Love is War is an excellent romcom with a similarly heavy emphasis in comedy. Two very bright students at an elite private school - one rich and talented girl and the school's token clever poor boy who works psychotically hard - are into each other, but refuse to yield the advantage to each other by being the first one to admit interest, so they go to preposterous lengths with conniving plots to corner each other into a confession. Miss Kuroitsu of the Monster Development Department is also a fun little office comedy, about a researcher working for the corporate front of an evil secret society of bad guys in a tokusatsu hero setting. Komi Can't Communicate is also good, a fun little comedy/slice of life series about a girl with extreme social anxiety and a guy who tries to help her make friends despite it.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Because that's a consequence of its fancy nextgen fold wave-based energy conversion armor, apparently... Tron lines are apparently a secondary side effect?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I doubt it. It's likely nothing more than Big West planning to begin releasing Macross globally as part of their big 40th Anniversary events. Licensing is going to be a little bit more complicated due to Harmony Gold's peripheral involvement as Big West's junior partner in distribution now, but not unduly so, and they have a pre-existing business relationship with Funimation who own Crunchyroll and are in the midst of migrating their entire library to it.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Predictable, but entirely welcome. I just hope they have fewer technical glitches this time. The Macross Plus screening went well in my neck of the woods, but for others it had a number of issues.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... and that, combined with the unrelenting darkness of the story, makes it all but impossible to stay invested in what happens to the characters or the setting. IIRC, TVTropes likes to call that "Darkness Induced Audience Apathy". On a brighter note, the first of the Spring simulcasts have begun to stream on Crunchyroll. At time of writing, the Spring 2022 season Simulcast offerings there are: One Piece Boruto Dragon Quest: the Adventure of Dai Digimon Ghost Game Detective Conan Ascendance of a Bookworm Cue! I'm Kodama Kawashiri Build-Divide #000000 Code Black Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It Legend of Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These Shadowverse Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club Shenmue the Animation Love All Play Fanfare of Adolescence Mahjong Soul Pon ESTAB Life: Great Escape Following the Funimation merger and the consolidation of Funimation Now and Wakanim into Crunchyroll's service, this is supposedly going to be the largest simulcast season in Crunchyroll's history thus far.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It's the usual suspects that CBS - now Paramount - would call up when they needed some gushing, effusive, puff piece written to defend a controversial or poorly-received creative decision in the public forum. For some, especally CBR, CBS/Paramount was far from their only content creator they indulged in that for. Needless to say, those sites all engage in fawning praise for Star Trek's current direction while the more reputable news outlets tend to take a much more neutral or negative view. The Borg Queen Returns... for no reason other than that Star Trek: Picard's first season was such a stinker that the best they could come up to salvage the series was a season-long string of callbacks to classic Star Trek episodes wrapped up like a burrito in a First Contact-esque plot Borg Queen-and-Time Travel plot. This is - or at least, I hope this is - the culmination and conclusion of the Borg Collective's badass decay. An unbroken trend of humiliation and humbling defeats for what was once the Federation's most intimidating, inscruitable, and indomitable foe. First Contact utterly demolished a lot of the Borg's mystique by turning the Borg drones into zombies and then putting an actual (unborrowed) face on the Collective in the form of the Borg Queen, who acted much too human and much too much like a standard Evil is Hammy movie villain so Picard would have someone to defeat. Voyager made it worse by making the Borg a familiar face who suffered repeated defeats at the hands of Species 8472 and then by a single Starfleet science vessel, proving in the bargain that not only was resistance not futile... it was all but an excuse to shake the Borg down for increasingly powerful tech. That ended with a future Admiral Janeway destroying the Borg Queen, disrupting the Collective, and wiping out the Borg transwarp network in one fell swoop. Enterprise made it even worse in its turn, by having the 24th century Borg defeated by 22nd century technology and Dr. Phlox even coming up with a cure for Borg assimilation. Star Trek: Picard may have rescued the Borg from extinction, but they're worse off than ever. Not only are they suffering from a special effects failure so bad they look worse now than they did in a late 90's TV series with a much smaller budget, we're treated to a scenario where the Borg are apparently desperate for humanity's help and a timeline where the Borg were wiped out by mid-24th century Starfleet and the Borg Queen is just a disembodied torso awaiting execution. Their humiliation is complete, and they've been reduced to an ineffectual reminder of traumas Picard has apparently gotten over.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Not really, given what we know of that era. "Hey, we found a dead bug the size of a semi truck." "Well that's kinda f***ed up. Where?" "Deep space." "Well that's kinda f***ed up." "It's made out of sh*t we can't identify that our tools can barely scratch and has no obvious means of space propulsion." "Well that's super f***ed up, someone should look into that." Unlike humanity, who had all the answers practically dropped in their lap, the Protoculture had to work that out from scratch and it took centuries to do. Little inter-colony conflicts apparently happen all the time, but apparently don't last very long or have much in the way of consequences for either side with the New UN Government stepping in to curb both sides when things get out of hand. There are only a few extreme examples, like Kaname's home planet Divide basically being Space North Ireland circa the Troubles... which is less "civil war" and more "prolonged civil unrest". It was worse before the government reforms following the Second Unification War in 2051, but that was some Earth-supremacists using the NUNS to stomp on planets seeking governmental autonomy by declaring those groups "terrorists" for the most part. And from what I've seen, you weren't wrong. Hell, there's more than one of them in this thread.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Picard himself certainly set the tone for the series when he drew a very incorrect parallel between the Dunkirk evacuation and the Federation's relief effort on Romulus. He was an archaeologist, historian, and Starfleet officer... he has exactly ZERO excuses for getting history THAT wrong. The Dunkirk evacuation was an enormous undertaking to rescue BEF troops in danger of being wiped out by the Germans in France during World War II, which was supported by not only the British Navy but also British civilian ships and a handful of French and Canadian Navy ships. It was a wartime rescue operation that had broad government and civilian support. The Federation evacuation of Romulus was nothing like it... being a peacetime humanitarian mission to the Federation's oldest enemy who shouldn't even need the help undertaken purely by the Federation's de facto military (Starfleet) that was done over the objections of a decent percentage of the Federation populace. If Picard's willing to lie to himself, and others, like that just to allow himself to believe he holds the moral high ground... well... that definitely says a lot, doesn't it? (Though I guess it's also pretty awful that Picard believes he's saved the galaxy at the end of season one... when it wouldn't have been under threat at all if he'd left well enough alone.) Sounds like you'd get more use out of a phaser, TBH.
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