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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's debatable, since many alien cultures in fiction tend not to share the same values, morals, and priorities as humans... which makes them less relatable to most audiences. You could say that it boils down to moral "purity" and moral "relatability" not being the same thing... No, I'm afraid not... because it is an objective matter of record that Southern Cross was a failure as a series. Despite coming out at the height of the mecha genre's popularity and a favorable time slot previously held by highly successful shows, it bombed so hard and got such poor viewership numbers that its broadcast run was cut almost in half in mid-production, its merchandising partners abandoned it, and it failed to be vindicated by the reruns either in Japan or abroad. Its reception abroad was only marginally better, and to be fair was mainly a result of association with better shows. Even then, its reception as part of the Robotech series was still so overwhelmingly negative that merchandising for the Southern Cross portion was explicitly indicated to be not worth the effort by their licensees and it was even excluded from rebroadcast in some markets due to its poor ratings performance. That's a pretty damned strong performance-based argument that it's not a good show.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Off with your head. 😛 We lost the axe, so we're gonna have to do this with dental floss. Please hold VERY still. The Logan is about the worst thing you could possibly conceive of to fight the Zentradi. It's smaller than they are by a good bit, it's like 80% cockpit so a center mass shot will kill the pilot dead, its weapons are too light to fight... well... anything, and the Zentradi rebels were wiped out in the early 2010s in Robotech and the rest shipped off into deep space in 2022. ... wrap-around monitors weren't a thing in Robotech or Southern Cross though, and that doesn't really justify an armored fighting vehicle with a drivers compartment that's exposed to enemy fire from the front. While Robotech made it unambiguously canon that the Southern Cross Army was the military's dumping ground for incombustible garbage, I'd always privately suspected that the Spartas was literally designed to get its pilots killed or maimed in live fire exercises as a way of gently encouraging the worst offenders to leave the service voluntarily or in a free military issue permanent sleeping bag. For Southern Cross, my assumption was more like that the Southern Cross Army was an all-flash no-substance chocolate box regiment meant to keep the bored colonist kids who would otherwise be causing trouble in one place and under adult supervision. The series never really explains why the colonies bother to maintain armed forces at all, since there were no aliens in the setting and no known threats anywhere in the wake of humanity abandoning Earth after nuclear war ruined it. Nor does it really offer a rational explanation - or any explanation at all - for why someone like Jeanne who all but lives in the stockade hasn't been punted out of the service on a bad conduct discharge. Considering how small the number is, even among people who like Southern Cross, it's statistically indistinguishable from zero. It's almost like the audience are humans themselves and relate best to their own kind... who'da thunk it? ... there is some hilarious irony here in that you consistently agitate in favor of clones. ... that's your opinion, let's not confuse it for fact or even fact-based.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    While I don't care for the character, I'll admit she had one really good self-aware moment when she hangs a lampshade on the fact that the audience usually only sees the exciting bits... and that most of space travel and space exploration is just getting there via very long, very dull spans of straight line warp flight.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    FWIW, I found DS9 to be about the ideal blend of serialized and episodic storytelling in its last four seasons. If Strange New Worlds can manage about that level of balance between the two, it'll be doing better than the other offerings by quite a bit right out of the gate.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, I don't recall anything like that ever being used in the series... or the first movie.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    At the risk of pointing out the obvious, Valkyries make up the overwhelming majority of the mecha in Macross. So it's not "just one"... it's the single largest category of mecha in the franchise by an absolutely overwhelming margin and the only one which is consistently relevant with each new installment in the franchise. Destroids and the Zentradi mecha basically tapped out after Macross II and didn't become even tangentially relevant again until Frontier, and even then their relevance was ONLY tangential. It's hardly surprising that merchandising favors the Valkyries when they're basically 100% of the "hero" mecha in the series and around half of the antagonist mecha (via 7, Zero, Frontier, and Delta). I get that you like to be a contrarian, but do try to align with reality sometime eh? Valkyries are the attention-getters for the Macross franchise. Always have been. And they were and are considered VERY distinctive, inspiring a frankly massive wave of copycats and homages that is STILL ongoing. It says a lot that one of Gundam's all-time most iconic designs is an acknowledged Valkyrie homage (the MSZ-006 Zeta Gundam).
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Like Kill la Kill was a thrown gauntlet to cosplayers, the Sv-303 Vivasvat is a thrown gauntlet to model kit builders between the TRON lines, iridescent paintjob, and what appear to be street effects.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, only the HMM-01. So... someone did a bad bad cropping job there. That's page 49 of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1, and there's actually an arrow to the left of that square and more text to the right. You see, NP-AR-01 is not the name of the missile in question... it's the designation of the forearm-mounted part of the VF-1 Valkyrie's Super Pack. The missile used therein hasn't been consistently designated, usually only being referred to as "Micro Missile for NP-AR-01" and occasionally alleged to be either a derivative of the GH-32 or GA-100. I believe it has occasionally been assumed that it is a GA-100 variant in many fanmade RPG stats, since the GBP-1S Armored Pack uses the GA-100 in its forearm launchers as well.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Let's just cross our fingers and hope Patrick Stewart doesn't decide Picard'll check out the way Curzon Dax did... jamaharon'd to death on Risa.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    That much is probably fair... though the issues with the designs would probably fall more under "miserly" since they didn't want to hire an outside design studio and risk having to share profits from the series and ended up with the mess they got because the perfectly competent artists they had in-house just were not up to the extraordinary demands of an interesting and aesthetically pleasing transforming robot. There's a reason so few series indulge in them as liberally as Macross... they are hard to design in general, and REALLY hard to make look good. Designers who can pull that off reliably are a rare and valuable commodity.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Ironically, Kirk's alien hookups were mostly under duress... the poor dude was apparently just man-candy to various flavors of evil space babe. Mind you, some of the backstory developed for Star Trek: the Motion Picture suggests that Starfleet officers in general have been boldly coming in an irresponsible manner for very nearly as long as Starfleet has been a thing. First contact with the Deltans - Lt. Ilia's people - apparently ended up as a hookup so good it nearly killed the away team. That bizarre product of Gene's dirty-old-man-itis managed to find its way into the Star Trek: Enterprise relaunch novels. IIRC, one of the Starfleet officers who was badly hurt in that impromptu bout of destructo-whoopie was an ancestor of Kirk's. The first incident is probably Commander Tucker's unknowing fling with that alien girl who got him pregnant in ENT Season One. That probably has something to do with the later-referenced Starfleet regulations prohibiting intimiate contact with alien races without the go-ahead of the chief medical officer...
  12. Seto Kaiba
    You do realize that Southern Cross's story was about the human characters of the Southern Cross Army, right? Who cared about the human mecha? Almost nobody cared, and that was the problem that got the show cancelled. If you're making a mecha anime series and your audience hates your main characters and finds your main character mecha designs hideously unappealing, you're screwed. The one Japanese fan this show had is all about the Auroran. Nobody gives a toss about the Bioroids. As we've noted, your tastes are more or less completely at odds with practically everyone's. The things you dismiss so ready are usually the main selling points for a given series. Now that's unfair. The story of Southern Cross makes sense. It's just incredibly derivative and badly executed. Journey to the Center of the Earth... whether you like it or not. I'd call that unfair. Compromises can lead to highly desirable end results as long as everyone is working towards the same end. Star Trek would've been an unwatchable mess if Gene Roddenberry hadn't been forced to compromise on his vision for it by D.C. Fontana, Gene Coon, and others. Same for Star Wars and George Lucas. Southern Cross wasn't a victim of compromise, it was a victim of uncaring laziness.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It never hurts to follow the money. It does, however, hurt to own stock in CBS/ViacomCBS/Paramount. Quite a bit, in fact. The damned fools tanked their own stock price to prop this mess up. I'm probably not going to watch... I really really don't want to see more childhood heroes as depressed old people desperate to relive better days. Maybe we will finally get an answer to Odo's question... do they still sing songs of the Great Tribble Hunt?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It's leftover bad blood from the days when MacrossWorld was a rougher community than it is now. Some people just aren't ready to let go of that animosity, even though Macross's main themes are pretty darn clear about that being a bad idea. (Hell, some of the guys I used to fight like cats and dogs with on here back in the day I'm now on quite friendly terms with.) On an interesting side note, the aforementioned countervernier system is indicated to have been deemed unnecessary and replaced with sensors because its function could be adequately delivered by the other verniers on the airframe. Master File does some bizarre things with the VF-1 later on, like adding more powerful or just more sensors of that type. It starts to get weird in the Squadrons book.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    "It's just another of one of the main things about this franchise." That sentence needed to end a bit earlier than it did. YouTube Music as well, apparently. We had a few of those not so long ago... the Evolution Toy VF-2SS and the Bandai Hi-Metals.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Presumably they had planned to make use of the helicopter mode later on in the story... the half of the story that never made it to production thanks to the show's cancellation. Either that or I fell into another Dearborn pothole. There's acceptable kinds of process optimization and cost-cutting... and then there's what Tatsunoko did. Of course, The Price of Smiles is kind of proof positive that Tatsunoko learned NOTHING in the thirty-five years since Southern Cross.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    On the bright side, at least this means Geordi isn't dead. There was a very popular fan theory that Picard had killed off Geordi off screen during the Utopia Planitia attack in the Short Treks since he'd been established to be working there in the years Picard was in charge of the Romulan evacuation. Also, this may confirm what the show's promotional material said about Worf becoming Captain of the Enterprise E after Data's Search for Spock escape clause (B4) was reconned into a red herring.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I guess now we know where the season two effects budget went...
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I see "Macross Fan Central" continues its downward spiral apace since they started to ban anyone who knew more than the group admins or actually cited sources. Might as well rebrand as Misinformation Fan Central. Anyhoo... no, there is nothing on the specified page about that. Nothing even remotely resembling that, in fact. Page 45's brief section on the ROV-20 concerns itself entirely with the lasers on the monitor turret (head) and the engineering challenges faced when integrating that system into the Valkyrie in terms of the aiming system and capacitors which provide its power. There is a bit on page 41 under cutaway item 34 "Nose Sensor Pod" that mentions that was originally a blister for a reverse-thrust vernier that was eliminated early in the VF-1's development and replaced by a mount for a super-telephoto and infrared camera which was the standard production fixture. It does note that mounting a laser in their place is something considered on an experimental basis for models with enhanced engines, but that's as far as it got before the idea was scrapped. (This being Master File's nod to the animation error that showed the VF-1 firing lasers from the blisters in the original series.) In the official setting, it's just an animation error. The VF-1's nose blisters were originally intended as verniers but in production were used as mounts for the aforementioned high powered telephoto camera and infrared camera systems. The only place where the laser thing is canon is the R-word series we don't talk about.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Remember when Star Trek: Picard's creators said, on no uncertain terms, that the series was not going to be a TNG cast reunion? I do. Turns out that statement aged like milk.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The horrible part is that this is basically canonical for both Robotech and the original Southern Cross. Even the promotional materials for Southern Cross describe the Logan as an ineffectual, if not downright useless, fighter. That's why I took care to note that the Auroran's helicopter mode is not actually used in space at any point. The Auroran's a spacefuture Sikorsky S-72 "X-Wing". VTOL and low-altitude, low-speed flight like a heli. High-altitude, high-speed flight like a jet. In space, it does all its business in its jet or robot forms. It's been a while since my last watch-thru of the series, but I don't recall the helicopter mode ever actually being used. 90% of the mechanical designs for this series just kinda did nothing... except run towards each other in the OP. Most of them don't even appear in the animation proper, and all but a few were so minor they didn't even get named. Part of me wants to be incredibly pedantic (business as usual) and note that since the Zor are mutated humans, there technically aren't any alien designs in the series... But hey, shamelessly knocking off iconic designs that've remained iconic for over 40 years probably has higher odds of success than a semi-original design done by someone who really didn't have the design chops for transformables. (If anything, I feel bad for Ammonite. They were in so far over their heads on this one their feet were sticking out the other side.) Would've been better if they'd just done Science Fiction Sengoku Saga and used all that armor in its original context where it could shine as a main design.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Considering the Klingons canonically weaponize basically everything in their daily lives, I can only imagine the Klingon microwave likely has a suspicious amount in common with a disruptor pistol.
  23. 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.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, most Macross titles get reruns on the major anniversaries.
  25. 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.
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