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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    More than that, it's a really clear sign you need some quality time with a mental health professional when the AI programmed using your emotional responses goes crazy rampage nuts the instant it gains autonomy. If you think about it, it's actually probably a good deal better for survivability. Putting the cockpit on the back of the Battroid puts a lot more energy conversion armor and misc. structural material between you and whoever's shooting at you. Something like that. He retired from the New UN Spacy and became a reservist, then joined up with Strategic Military Services. As a metaseries, Macross always tries to write its antagonists not as villains but as generally decent and relatable people who are doing what they do because they believe it's the right thing to do for themselves and/or their people. With that in mind, Sharon Apple probably didn't want to kill or even seriously injure Myung. She likely just wanted her out of the way while she tried to act on her inherited feelings for Isamu by giving him the ultimate adrenaline high.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's Character Sheet for Myung Fang Lone suggests that Sharon did not originally intend kill Myung... only to restrain/incapacitate her. She may have escalated things to attempted murder after Myung broke free and started fighting back. When Sharon tells Myung she doesn't need her anymore, she means it literally. The Sharon Apple that climbed the charts to become the galaxy network's top idol in 2040 was an elaborate fake. Her AI was incomplete, so the engineering team from the Macross Concern and the Venus Sound Factory were forced to fake their way through her performances by sampling "Sharon's" emotions from the mind of a living person. Myung Fang Lone was a failed idol singer the project hired to be the source of Sharon's emotion data, and they kept her real role confidential by announcing her as Sharon's producer. When technical director Marge Gueldoa "completed" Sharon's AI by installing an illegal bio-neural chip, she gained emotions of her own and thus no longer needed Myung to function. (This is why Marge snidely informs Myung they'll keep her on staff for form's sake.) We don't know. Nothing is said about Myung's life after the events of Macross Plus. Macross Chronicle and a few artbooks suggest she regained her confidence in her singing after the events of the OVA/movie, but nothing is said about whether she went back to pursuing a career in music as an artist or anything like that. We don't really know much about Isamu's life afterwards either, only a few small details related to his cameo in the second Macross Frontier movie. We don't have any really good line art of the VF-14 from behind, so it's hard to say. There may be a small nozzle cluster back there similar to what the VF-19 has. Mentions of the VA-14 are few and far between, but they are out there and it is identified as the aircraft upon which the Az-130 is said to have been based. Macross Chronicle Technology Sheet 01L "Variable Fighter: Mission-Specific Transformable Aircraft" mentions the VA-14 twice. Once in the context of being a derivative model of a VF that had a strong tendency towards fighter-bomber operations (alongside the VF-17/VF-171), and once specifically as the aircraft the Az-130 is said to have been based on. Exactly where the VA-14 is first mentioned, I do not know, but it definitely exists.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... and they don't need a ton of power to get the VF-31 moving at a respectable clip. GERWALK mode's made to hover and to be agile at low altitude low speed flight. A few hundred kilonewtons is gonna be plenty, and they have access to all kinds of stuff that they can use to heat the propellant up... waste heat from the cooling system, electrical arcs, lasers, lots of great choices.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    OK, there's more talent in this season than I expected... which is a nice surprise. Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms is an amusing little romcom that feels a little bit Alto x Sheryl from early Macross Frontier and a little bit B Gata H Kei. The series is all about a very spoiled/self-centered girl named Mona Kawai who is used to everyone fawning over her because she's just that pretty. She's going absolutely spare because the new transfer student Medaka not only doesn't fawn over her, but seemingly won't even give her the time of day. So she sets out on a quest to make Medaka fall for her no matter what, becuase her ego absolutely cannot stand not being adored. I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons is a real bait-and-switch. It starts out with a young noble girl's gloomy daily life being groomed to be the future queen after her marriage to the local prince is arranged. When he rocks up to the ball with another girl, she becomes a completely different person. It changes gears in a way that is basically the opposite of what I expected given the tone, and completely surprised me. I am genuinely curious to see where this one goes, because it's already effectively suckered me once about its tone and direction.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Started another new one over lunch today... Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time. It's nothing remarkable or particularly worth watching. Just another form letter isekai series where the protagonist is accidental collateral damage when someone summons The Hero to their JRPG fantasy world and gets to have an awesome slow life with the implausible super cheat powers granted by the gods. It doesn't cross the line into being out-and-out bad, but it is bland and formulaic and, as a result, pretty unintersting. I've picked up two more titles that were just added to the simulcast lineup between then and now: Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms and I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons. Gonna give those a whirl shortly.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Piped in from elsewhere in the fuselage. The VF-19 is noted to have propellant tanks in several locations including the wings and the shoulders. There are two small clusters of three nozzles along the underside of the beavertail where it links to the shield. You can kind of see them in the upper left portion of this image: Size is, after all, not everything. Thrust can be just as much about how much propellant you're willing to use, how hot you can make the propellant, and the structure of your nozzle. We don't know exactly how these nozzles operate, there are several different approaches used for maneuvering thrusters (verniers) in Macross including combustion nozzles, laser thermal rockets, arcjets, and in specific use-cases diverted engine exhaust. Master File suggests that many VFs mix and match types based on where the system is located in the airframe. No official word on that, AFAIK... but Variable Fighter Master File points to the slots in the trailing edge of the wing near the engines as being nozzles. They have BEWARE OF BLAST markings in the Caution Signs & MODEX section. I haven't fully translated either volume, but with that placement it's likely they're dual-mode systems that are using the cooling system in the sub-intakes as a heat source to drive the nozzles in atmosphere and are probably bleeding propellant from the wing tanks in space.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Hell of an earworm, isn't it? That's the same reason I watched it. 🤣
  8. Seto Kaiba
    One more new one today, also a romcom... OKITSURA: Fell in Love with an Okinawan Girl, but I Just Wish I Knew What She's Saying. What a title. The series is exactly what it says on the tin. It's a romance comedy about a high school student who falls in love with a local girl after his family moves from Tokyo to Okinawa. As the title suggests, he struggles immensely with this because he doesn't speak Okinawan and she keeps lapsing into it with a thick accent when they talk making her unintelligible to him. I'm enjoying it so far, though the art style is throwing me off a bit. The protagonist, Teruaki, is drawn with the industry's usual mukokuseki art style but all the Okinawan locals are drawn with a range of more realistic tan/olive skintones. The end result is slightly surreal since the titular Okinawan girl is very tan and looks almost orange next to him. It's set up as a love triangle comedy. The protagonist is crushing on the local girl Kyan with the super-thick unintelligible accent, so he relies on her friend Kana to translate for him, and Kana is crushing on him and Kyan totally ships it though he's incapable of understanding the very blunt things she says about it. They do get one really good joke early on about how common the surname Higa is... Teruaki calls out for a friend who interprets for him, but her surname is Higa, so he draws an enormous crowd of people whose surname is Higa and ends up doing a visual gag about how he drew so much unintended attention it felt like a zombie movie... which he then captions ZombieLand Higa... a nod at Zombie Land Saga. They do the same joke again a few minutes later as a nod to the second season Zombie Land Saga: Revenge. It's definitely not a show you can give less than your full attention to, esp. if your Japanese isn't good, because you'll be stuck following two sets of subtitles... one for the Japanese rendered into English, and one parsing whatever Kyan is saying in Okinawan at the time if someone's not translating for her.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Hulu was officially merged into, and became a proper subset of, Disney+'s service officially back on 27 March '24. They've been gradually nudging members of both services to merge their accounts ever since. Hulu is now one of the content categories in the Disney+ app, like Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, NatGeo, and ESPN.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Started another new Winter 2025 series, I'm Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class. I'm honestly not sure what it means when a series has to have its protagonist point out that its entire premise is literally illegal barely seven minutes into the first episode. In short, two high school students (Saito and Akane) meet at a fancy restaurant where they both discover Saito's widower grandfather and Akane's widowed grandmother had been lovers in high school, have recently renewed their relationship, and have made the frankly psychotic decision to unlawfully force their grandchildren to get married against their will due to their own regrets from childhood. This series is meant to be a romcom, but it's genuinely unsettling as a premise considering how downright deranged both grandparents act about it. Maybe I'm taking this too seriously because of personal experiences with a similarly batsh*t insane grandparent, but this whole premise is pretty f***ed up IMO.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Project No.9 did a great job with the animation and the presentation is overall actually pretty good. Most of the characters are actually pretty likeable and I have to admit I couldn't see the resolution to the first "mystery" ahead of time. Its main problem isn't even its protagonist's unprofessional behavior as a medical doctor or CSI-like interference in a police investigation. It's the frankly insane leaps of logic that drive the plot, with several based on blatantly incorrect or questionable-at-best medical knowledge. I'm not sure if the problems in the story are because they're compressing the story of the original light novel to fit the 24 minute TV anime format or the original story is just THAT badly written.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, as I understand it, the official take is actually worse. Apparently the Force in its natural state is just the light side. The dark side is a distortion of the Force created by misusing it. Balance is the absence of darkness... That they most assuredly did. The effects work in Skeleton Crew has been pretty impressive throughout, minus a few minor moments of green screen awkwardness.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the titular doctor from the medical drama series House were an anime girl? If so, you're a very strange person... and Project No.9 is currently serving up a new anime series which should scratch your phenomenally peculiar itch. Ameko M.D.: Doctor Detective is a very strange medical drama about the director of a hospital's pathology department wandering around the hospital and of the nearby area in sandals and solving medical mysteries while generally being rude and judgmental.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think there's anything weird about that, honestly. The Jedi, like the Sith, are an inherently self-limiting concept in the Star Wars universe. Because the Force exists as a rigidly self-enforcing system of simplistic moral absolutes, the characters who wield it are inevitably far more limited in their potential development than those who don't. The inevitable polarization into either a selfless hero or a sadistic villain makes them extremely predictable, and not just to the audience. It's such an overbuilt trope that the Jedi's uncontrollable chronic hero syndrome is the cornerstone of the Empire's strategy for hunting them. Characters who aren't locked into the Force's binary moral choice system can be written with a good deal more depth and complexity and be more believable and relatable as a result. Like Din Djarin, or Cassian Andor, or the kids on the Onyx Cinder. There's this old saying "only the dose makes the poison". The Jedi can be cool and interesting in small doses (e.g. Mando season 2), they're just painfully overused most of the time.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Can't really say I disagree. A lot of it, IMO, goes back to Disney+ Star Wars and its obsession with fanservice. The few good shows like Skeleton Crew and the first 2/3 of The Mandalorian are mostly focused on just telling a fun space adventure story in the Star Wars universe. The ones stinking up the joint are mainly sequels, spinoffs, and side stories tying into Dave Filoni's work to do continuity porn like The Acolyte, Ahsoka, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett, The Mandalorian season three, etc. My hope is that Skeleton Crew (and possibly The Mandalorian and Grogu) will convince Disney+ to focus its future Star Wars endeavors on new characters and new stories.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Another new Winter 2025 series, Headhunted to Another World: From Salaryman to Big Four. I was morbidly curious about this one since its premise sounds a fair bit like As A Reincarnated Aristocrat's... and it definitely seems to be headed in that direction. It's the story of a thoroughly underappreciated Japanese salaryman who is summoned to a generic j-fantasy alternate world not to be The Chosen Hero but to assist the Demon Lord with governing because his administration is critically lacking in the People Skills department. The poor schmuck they get is a low-level salaryman from a borderline black company who finds the Demon Lord to be a more humane and reasonable employer. It's not bad. It has some potential, but it definitely feels a bit rough.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    YMMV of course, but my impression of the current direct-to-streaming model is that most shows end up being too short for the writers to have the luxury of waiting for the finish line to trip. When a series is going to end badly, it's usually bad right out of the gate like The Acolyte or Star Trek: Discovery and doesn't really improve. Disney+ Star Wars titles seem to be particularly committed to telegraphing their quality as early as possible. Often before the series even airs. If the series pitch sounds like it's "by fans, for fans" it's almost guaranteed to be a turd.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    On most models of VF, there's a dedicated cluster of rocket nozzles or high-thrust verniers that's used for forward thrust in GERWALK mode and often also supporting thrust in Battroid mode. That cluster of nozzles usually ends up on the back of the Valkyrie pointing down in Battroid. The VF-0, VF-1, VF-3000, and VF-5000 had a cluster of three liquid fuel rockets in their "backpack". The VF-9 has a pair of high-thrust verniers directly under its stabilizers that it uses for that. The VF-11 has two smaller nozzles on each shoulder, the VF-19 and VF-25 have a cluster of small nozzles that is exposed when the arms are deployed, and so on. Variable Fighter Master File also offers the not-exactly-canon suggestion that some later model Valkyries like the VF-25 can reverse the function of the cooling system in the wing glove and use that as an ad hoc engine as well.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I gotta say, I find your lack of faith disturbing. Skeleton Crew's writing team has shown us nothing but narrative competence so far, so I'm not sure why y'all are so convinced the writing team didn't care about making sure their plot-critical macguffin had a cogent explanation. Come to that, Skeleton Crew being a "kids show" doesn't mean the plot is immune to scrutiny. It's not a cartoon so it's not running solely on Rule of Funny, and its target audience according to Disney is tweens and young teens. Maybe it's different where you guys live, but around here kids in that age group are no dummies. They've got critical thinking skills and they know how to use 'em, making them more than capable of spotting when a narrative's plot doesn't make sense. I'm betting on Skeleton Crew sticking the landing, though. The writing team have done a great job so far. This is no Acolyte or Rise of Skywalker where the writers are just BSing their way through the runtime.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It's the macguffin and central mystery driving the entire f***ing story. It's the entire reason the kids home planet was hidden from the rest of the galaxy and thus the reason they're on this adventure trying to get home. It's also the reason the Onyx Cinder ended up on their home planet to begin with, Jod's motivation for helping the kids, and now what's motivating Jod's entire former pirate fleet. You'd think something that central to the entire story would at least make sense in context, no?
  21. Seto Kaiba
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Started my first show of the Winter 2025 season... Bogus Skill <Fruitmaster>. It's one of those now-common isekai-adjacent j-fantasy stories in the heavily overused format of "I became a total badass once I learned that my bad skill is secretly broken AF". It is fantastically boring.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I know, I asked if she was a cyborg back when we got the first trailer. 🤣 This, at least, settles one point for me. The only characters I can recall seeing in Star Wars who had cybernetics in their brains were adults who'd undergone elective surgery to be more effective clerical workers. The implants were shown to be pretty detrimental to their lives too. It seemed pretty dark to have a kid receiving the same kind of implants, which made me wonder if she was a clone or a droid mocked up to look human or something. Her implants are the result of life-saving surgery not something intended to make her a better worker. "Throw everything at the wall to see what sticks."
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Well, new episode dropped... "Zero Friends Again". This episode officially confirms that KB is a cyborg. That thing on her head is part of her brain. All in all, not bad... but it feels a bit lean and antlclimactic after the last episode. The whole episode is just the kids getting back to the ship.
  25. Seto Kaiba
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