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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The one time we see them eating, it's a roast leg of something-or-other that resembles a drumstick. Presumably if you can clone a forty-foot tall man in a matter of minutes, 3D-printing or cloning a large avian to roast would be child's play. There ARE birds that big in the setting, like Eden's giant sauro bird, which seems to be reminsicent of Quetzalcoatlus... but twice the size according to Macross Chronicle. (Picture is a statue of a Quetzalcoatlus lawsoni at the Detroit Zoo for scale, the smaller of the two species with a wingspan of about 5m. The Quetzalcoatlus northropi is around twice as big, with a wingspan of 10m, the height of an average Zentradi. The Sauro Bird is about four times the size pictured here.) Yup... the very first thing we see from them is Quamzin and his subaltern Oigul gambling with liquor rations on how many ships they'd collide with by folding out too close to the Vrlitwhai branch fleet.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Macross tends to do its anniversary stuff and especially new series announcements in the latter part of the year.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure it's that so much as Kawamori deciding that the events of VF-X2 were both more and less important than previously indicated. The string of armed conflicts that were to be retroactively dubbed the Second Unification War became the catalyst for the New UN Government and New UN Forces to move to a more EU-like decentralized model, while the actual failed coup d'etat itself was deemphasized somewhat and is considered more a symptom of the move than its immediate cause. Basically, those changes in how they reworked the government and armed forces were the basis for the shape of the world in Macross Frontier. Manfred, in particular, ended up being rather important because they chose to tie the "hyperspace resonance lenses" that his company developed to fold quartz, making him the retroactive developer of practical applications of the stuff and the original driver for exploration of Vajra space looking for more of that amazing substance. I don't recall seeing a Nousjadeul-Ger in the Delta movie #1, but it has been a while... Mind you, Zentradi mecha are extremely cost-effective and have a low failure rate, but they're also ergonomics and survivability nightmares. Humanity tried to solve the surviability issue, but ergonomically the Regult et. al. are still kind of a mess, and presumably kept around because some Zentradi prefer a familiar unit. So, there's a story there... The bit that made the Queadluun series hard to produce (in general) and reproduce (under human engineering) was the Inertia Vector Control System, an extremely complex form of inertia capacitor that required very pure fold carbon in order to operate. It was extremely difficult to replicate with the technology Earth had at the time, so the Queadluuns that Earth had were highly prized but rare units until the factory satellite was captured and repaired. Replicating the rest of the Queadluun series presumably wasn't so difficult, but its acceleration is such that without the IVCS the pilot could suffer some pretty nasty consequences from high g-loads (mentioned to be 18G+), so the IVCS was necessary to draw the full potential of the Queadluun-Rau out. The ISC used by 5th Gen VFs like the VF-25 is a derivative of that technology, to give you an idea of how advanced the IVCS was. So you end up in this point where reproducing the Queadluun-Rau effectively was only possible from about 2040, at which point development of a VF that exceeded its capabilities began. So there was this brief golden period where the reproduction Queadluun would've been quite good, but it's offscreen and by the time we see it a craft that surpasses it was on the way in. It's mentioned in passing in connection with Klan and Michael in Frontier that certain genetic conditions and anomalies can have serious or even fatal health consequences in the micloning process... and that keeping giants around is a huge drain on resources, so most fleets don't do it. Most models of VF tend to take a "one variant to rule them all" attitude, like the VF-4, VF-11, VF-14, and VF-171. While they are certainly more action figure-friendly, the VF models that have a bunch of different head variants are actually the exception rather than the norm in-universe.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Okay, yeah... Trapped in a Dating Sim: the World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs can't seem to stop coming across as a bit misogynistic. To be honest, I'm not sure if that's an accidental byproduct of the way the story plays many of the worst cliches of the genre laser straight while viewing them from the outside or if the author really just has it in for independent women. Harem stories are always low levels of cringe, but this is so heavily laden with cruelty and sexism that it's actually a little bit unsettling. This goes way WAY beyond the kind of objectification you see in harem shows to the point that the women are near-universally depicted as being greedy and uncaring social climbers who are only interested in men for money, status, and appearances and have zero qualms about saying so publicly or being physically abusive. (It's like this is a training academy for Disney's evil stepmothers of something... it's really off-putting. Even the most blatantly fanservice-y harem shows aren't THIS sexist about it.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It's... it's not bad, I guess? The production values are pretty iffy even for the period but its main issue was it had a lot of seriously iffy screenplays like "The Infinite Vulcan" (the one with Giant Spock), "BEM" (the one with a colony-alien who's built like a LEGO man), or "The Practical Joker" (the one where the Enterprise's computer goes mad and becomes a 3rd grade troll handing out dribble glasses and screenprinting insults on people's uniforms). IIRC Amazon Prime has the license for streaming right now if you feel like giving it a whirl. It has some moments, my favorite being "How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth?". It was non-canon, or at best apocryphal, basically from its release until the early 2000s when Paramount suddenly reversed its position on the series and made it canon. There is debated theory that the decision was motivated by Enterprise's showrunners wanting to introduce the Kzinti to ENT Season 5. (Which, considering the Kzinti were established to have been epic failures in basically everything, would probably have landed them a spot below the Ferengi on the "ineffectual comedy antagonist" spectrum.) As to recasting... well... usually when you're recasting an existing character you try to cast someone who looks like the previous appearances of the character. The elephant in the room being that, from his conception in Star Trek's earliest drafts to his one canonical appearance and many non-canonical appearances, he has always been depicted as a white man. When a character is recast/reimagined as a different ethnicity from their previous appearances, the audience usually expects an explanation of some sort. Like the way the live action Ghost in the Shell felt compelled to add a massive subplot to explain why the explicitly-Japanese main character was being played by a white actress, or how Star Trek: Into Darkness had to come up with a lame excuse for Khan (an Indian Sikh previously played by Mexican actor Ricardo Montalban) being played by the very white and painfully British Benedict Cumberbatch. (I don't want to get into a debate of the identity politics side of it, so let's please avoid that and simply note the narrative confusion.) Fans are, innocently or otherwise, going to ask that rather awful question of how and why Robert April changed ethnicities between 2258 and 2270 and point to that as evidence that the series is an AU, or non-canon, or whatever. I have a feeling it's going to be a very contentious casting decision in the short term, at least. Of course, if you're not invested in TAS it's all gravy... so I have no dog in that fight myself.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    He had a starring role in the Star Trek: the Animated Series episode "The Counter-Clock Incident". https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Robert_April?so=search Memory Alpha has a number of screenshots from that episode in his bio. Other than that, the file photo used for him in the Star Trek Encyclopedia is a photoshop that put Gene Roddenberry's head on Bill Shatner's body in one of the screen test photos from when they were (re)casting TOS after "The Cage". Since Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is tangentially topical, I can use this scene from the original Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as a metaphor for the casting discussions. (I happen to find this bit hilarious, mainly because I've been the... tall... man in the discussion on a few occasions myself.) That said, I have basically zero attachment to TAS and found a lot of it kind of cringeworthy so I'm not at all bothered by this casting decision. If it means TAS gets the boot again, well, in my mind that's a feature not a bug.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    He Ghost in the Shell'd himself prior to his death fighting the VF-X Ravens in the Macross Frontier novelization... his disembodied consciousness is one of the "Cyber Nobles" pulling the Galaxy fleet's strings. EDIT: I should stress the digital lifeform "MANFRED" is a copy of his consciousness, not the original... We don't actually know when they entered service... just that they're human-made models. 2067 is the first we see them, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily new. The Queadluun-Rhea was pushing twenty years old when we saw in for the first time in Frontier, with the specific model used being a 2056 update to the spec. The New UN Government was manufacturing Regults for its forces shortly after capturing the first factory satellite in 2011, but without knowing exactly how long it took them to arrive at the ZBP-104 spec, we don't know how long it took to develop it. It's been indicated that the miclone systems are capable of a bit of genetic plug-and-play when it comes to adding or removing genetic modifications specific to Zentran/Meltran battlefield roles... presumably when he sized up, his cloned giant body was grown with the necessary bio-fiber optics.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Part of me wants to make a news post about the casting of Adrian Holmes as Robert April for the series... but I'm really hesitant to because the main newsworthy point is that it's going to be a contentious casting decision for continuity reasons that may be mildly politically-charged.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Delta didn't give the designation ZBP-104 to the stock Esbeliben Regult... the ZBP-104 and the other Zentradi mecha in Macross Delta are new models developed and manufactured by humans using captured factory satellites similar to the Queadluun-Rhea. The VBP-1's other designation, VA-110, is a nod to the CONSTANT PEG designations used for captured Soviet MiGs, informally denoting it as a captured or reproduction captured aircraft. Eh... a contrast in aesthetic is all it really is. The Nousjadeul-Ger in the movie uses a similar setup, except instead of bio-fiber optics the Nousjadeul-Ger connects directly to the pilot's organic nervous system. Yup. It's definitely not something you see in a lot of sci-fi. The scale's just too big to be easily captured onscreen.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I believe they're used in one shot in the low altitude city dogfight between Isamu and Guld in Macross Plus.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, they're not Supervision Army... but the more detailed and distinctive DYRL? designs have essentially retroactively replaced the SDFM TV versions throughout most sequels in the Macross franchise. It's one of those things that's best not to think too hard about, because it's basically not explained AT ALL in most cases. A plausible hypothetical would be that the less organic design aesthetic belonged to the faction opposed to the Stellar Republic during the Stellar Republic dissolution conflict and were simply rolled back into the regular Zentradi forces when both sides united against the surprise attack on both sides by the Protodeviln and their Supervision Army. If you work backwards from the published total population of the Boddole Zer main fleet and the number of ships in the SDFM TV series, you get an average crew size of 1,470. That's probably slightly misleading, since a large percentage of the ships are very small 500m-class fleet radar picket ships and there's that massive mothership the size of Japan to account for, but it's a ballpark figure for the crew of an average-sized (~2km) Zentradi warship.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It wouldn't be the only example of a duplicate name. The first Haruna was ARMD-10. If it left and was presumed lost with the Megaroad-01, they may have recycled the name. There are also known to be two ships named for Bruno J. Global: a Macross-class SDFN and a Uraga-class escort battle carrier.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Presumably the 1st Large Scale Long Distance Emigrant Fleet. Originally, the Minsk and Haruna were going to be attached, physically, to the Macross-class SDF-2.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I'm kind of wondering what the hell they can actually put in the book, since a lot of the material from the VF-31 Siegfried book was reprints of material from the VF-25 Messiah book, and the Kairos Plus has even more in common with both.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Started Trapped in a Dating Sim: the World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs. Honestly, this has one of the worst starts I've seen from an isekai title outside of zero-effort isekai shovelware shows like Isekai Cheat Magician. It's surprisingly straightforward on the topic of its own setting being an unholy melange of genres that do not go together, but the opening setup feels more like it belongs to a parody than the played-straight story of this series. (I would not have been at all surprised if the protagonist, instead of dying by falling down his apartment's staircase, had done a handspring back to his feet, landed in the street, and been creamed by a truck or had a forced-perspective shot make him look like he was about to only to be hit in the ankle by an RC car.) ... ... ... I have kind of a really REALLY bad feeling about this show. Like, the uncomfortable vibe at a large family gathering right before some slightly-drunk distant relative launches into a racist and/or sexist tirade.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's usually assumed that ARMD-09 Minsk was the first postwar fold-capable ship.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I'll order my customary two copies once it's listed on CDJapan or HLJ. My hopes aren't high for the actual content, but the art should be pretty good as usual.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I get more of a kick out of Igarashi and Takeda... but then, that has some personal resonance since I'm like 2m tall and short girls are disproportionately overrepresented among my direct reports at work. Ascendance of a Bookworm is getting a bit dark. I kind of miss the happy-go-lucky adventures of Myne the bookworm before it got all political intrigue-y.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    ... I can't get past the tagline. "They'll die when they're dead". ... I mean, to be dead you kind of have to have already died. Should've workshopped that one a bit more before going to print.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if nothing else, it'll be interesting to see how they screw this one up. I want to be optimistic and hope this series will succeed and convince the others to course-correct back towards Star Trek's core themes of a better, brighter future... but I have a nasty suspicion this'll devolve into another wannabe space action movie.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Only a handful of Earth UN Forces warships survived the First Space War, as a result of being attached to either the UN Forces moon base or the L5 Manufacturing Station. None of them were outfitted with fold systems at the time. The ARMD-class had been designed to be fold-capable but the first eight or so ships of the class were completed before the fold systems meant for them could be delivered. The SDF-2 was still incomplete and under construction on the moon when things went pear-shaped, though it too was designed with a fold system. When construction resumed after the war, fold-capable ships were being built in large numbers to support the emigrant fleets. So, for at least a year or so immediately following the First Space War's nominal end in 2010 the newly established New UN Forces were dependent on the hundred Zentradi ships sailing under their banner for interstellar capability. (Not that fold capability was considered a priority for Earth's defense in that period, it was all about the emigrant fleets initially.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The actor who voiced K.I.T.T.. Also well known for playing Mr. Feeny in the sitcom Boy Meets World.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    If the book is specifically for the Kairos Plus, I kinda doubt it.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-31 Siegfried book was... well... it basically all but ignored the production VF-31.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... "man" used without an article is a gender-neutral term. It's derived from mann, proto-Germanic for "person" and passed into Old English with the same meaning.
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