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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Hell of an earworm, isn't it? That's the same reason I watched it. 🤣
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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?
  15. Seto Kaiba
  16. 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.
  17. 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."
  18. 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.
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  21. Seto Kaiba
    "All over the place" would be the simplest answer. The YF-21/VF-22 has composite optical sensors scattered across its airframe to provide 360 degree all-around awareness and enemy search functions. Exactly how many and where they are are not stated, though the primary ones are located under the red-colored transparent panels in the aircraft's nose (one on top, one on bottom, and two on each side) with a rear-facing unit on the back of the head. Given the angle, I'd assume the sensor Guld switched to to get the view he did was probably one of the sensors used for assisting in aiming the aircraft's built-in laser cannons, which are located at the base of the tail. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II asserts that there are thirteen separate sets of LAPR-37 composite LADAR camera systems including the seven mentioned in the above paragraph, as well as ones on the sides of the engine nacelles, ones in the forearms for aiming asisstance for the laser cannons, and on the underside of the aircraft near its gunpod ports. "Official setting" publications like Macross Chronicle or the old This is Animation books don't really offer any kind of detailed explanation for the limitations of the initial-type fold booster (FBF-1000A). This is Animation Special: Macross Plus mentions it in passing in its article "Variable Fighter's Aero Report", but goes no deeper than attributing the unit's limitations to difficulties miniaturizing the technology. Macross Chronicle also skirts the topic, sticking to just a general statement that the technology improved over time to the point that fold boosters had become capable of longer distances and multiple uses by the end of the 2050s. IMO, the most likely explanations for the limitations of fold boosters would be tied to energy storage or the quality of their fold carbon. The explanations of fold navigation going back to the original series usually identify energy storage as the main limiting factor for how far a ship can fold. Macross Frontier and later titles have had a lot to say about how the purity, quality, and size of the fold carbon or fold quartz crystals used to produce fold waves or heavy quantum impacts the performance of those devices. It's possible that part of the improvement is simply better-quality synthetic fold carbon in later fold boosters. Variable Fighter Master File does briefly touch on the topic in several volumes. Both the VF-19 and VF-22 volumes lean into the fold carbon angle. They describe the FBF-1000A fold booster as being a very rough, very bare-bones fold system that uses a large quantity of relatively low quality fold carbon in the fold system core. The description suggests that the fold booster's operation consumes/destroys the fold carbon in the core during operation and that that's the reason it's limited to a single fold jump of not more than 20 light years. That distance is all the low-quality fold carbon in the core can provide. The VF-22 book repeats the same information, and implies that later models of fold booster achieved reusability by turning the system core into a removable cartridge and equipping the booster with a magazine of multiple cores.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure I'd agree that they were treated as Serious Business in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series. Vrlitwhai and Exsedol were caught off-guard by Earth's use of reaction weaponry, but that owes far more to it being a technology the Zentradi had believed lost for hundreds of thousands of years. Earth spammed them pretty heavily without much comment in the actual fighting via the ship-mounted ones carried by the Oberth and ARMD classes, and the SF-3A space fighters and VF-1s as well. Macross 7 treated them quite seriously, though they ended up being ineffective because the Protodeviln used their innate space fold ability to teleport the high-yield reaction missile Max intended to kill them with back to the Stargazer in orbit. Macross Zero treats them with a lot more gravitas, though the stated reason for doing so doesn't actually make sense as noted previously. (Everyone involved probably should've been a lot more concerned about four reaction bombs with a maximum combined yield of 200 kilotons going off just a couple kilometers away. The shockwave would probably not have done great things to the Asuka II, which was a largely conventional aircraft carrier.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, I think using it that way was the point... to make the connection explicit (and also to highlight the connection to the real world term). I don't think it poses any problem for the story itself, esp. since Macross Chronicle et. al. indicate that Hasford and Turner's theories were neither widely known nor taken seriously in the academic community at the time. Their reactions are pretty understandable. Misa telling them that the Zentradi have millions of ships is the very picture of hyperbole or even hysterical fear. The UN Forces brass were thinking of things on a planetary scale, which would make the logistics of operating a fleet of that size completely ridiculous if you haven't actually seen it. The US Navy is Power Overwhelming at 470 ships... and the Zentradi are supposed to have a fleet ten thousand times the size? No wonder they balked. General Global believing the report wasn't likely to lend it any credibility, since he has a well-known personal connection to the officer making the report. Nutuk and Dr. Hasford believing that is only to be expected. After all, neither man was a soldier and both were referencing the Mayan mytho-historical account of what the ancient Protoculture told them would happen if the Birdhuman was activated. Even the Birdhuman mentions its mission is to exterminate Humanity if they failed its Test of Character. It probably would've been an apocalyptic scenario if Humanity hadn't acquired alien overtechnology from a crashed Supervision Army gunship nine years earlier. The Protoculture who left the Birdhuman on Earth to Kill All Humans™️ almost certainly did not expect Humanity to have advanced far enough to be able to actually fight the Birdhuman never mind severely damage it. They definitely handled the use of thermonuclear reaction weapons with more gravitas than usual. Of course, they're new technology there. Macross 7 was, IMO, pretty serious about them too. They were only shown being used in Operation Stargazer as part of the mission to destroy the Protodeviln and their usage was a serious godzilla threshold for the series which had up to that point avoided large-scale destruction. The only Macross title to be really cavalier about them is DYRL?, where they're spammed against the Zentradi from the very start. Macross Zero did one strange thing with them though, and that was treating them like conventional nuclear bombs. Shin's statement about fallout is actually pretty weird in context because of the key attributes of thermonuclear reaction weapons is that they don't produce lingering radiological hazards like fallout. Reaction weapons are "pure fusion" bombs that use the intense gravity produced by heavy quantum as a trigger instead of a small fission bomb. The lack of any radioisotopes in the warhead means the detonation doesn't scatter radioactive material and the aneutronic nature of the reaction means that debris exposed to the blast isn't being made radioactive by neutron activation. His statement is so weird and inconsistent that Macross Chronicle had to explicitly hedge around it.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    There is nothing continuity-shredding about it. If anything, it's a reasonable usage of a real world term AND an in-joke to how Macross's creators came up with the name. "Protoculture" is not a made-up sci-fi buzzword. It's a real scientific term used in anthropology that was coined decades before the original Macross series was made. Its meaning is "the origins or rudiments of culture", and is normally used to refer to passing down learned behaviors from one generation to the next. Macross's creators deliberately used that real-world term to refer to the extinct ancient alien species who created the Zentradi and Humanity for its literal meaning: the origin of culture. The ancient Protoculture created the Zentradi and their wholly military culture, and also uplifted pre-modern Humans and guided their development. Macross Zero is set on a remote island populated by an isolated tribe whose entire culture is built around things the Protoculture taught them to do and mythologized history of their encounters with the Protoculture. They are evidence of the Protoculture species literally acting as the origin of a culture (protoculture the scientific term). Dr. Hasford and Dr. Turner are researchers - probably anthropologists - employing techniques from cultural and molecular anthropology in an attempt to prove a hypothesis about advanced aliens visiting Earth in prehistory and guided/accelerated Humanity's development. It's perfectly reasonable that they would use a well-precedented existing term from anthropology to refer to the ancient aliens they theorized were the origins of modern Humanity. (They dubbed the ancient aliens "Protoculture" for exactly the same reasons that the show's creators did.) The Earth UN Forces skepticism over Misa's claims about the Boddole Zer main fleet's size are perfectly understandable, given that they'd only seen fleets of at most a thousand or so ships and Misa had no actual evidence (due to having dropped the camera she'd been using). They had expected, and prepared for, a classic "alien invasion" scenario and were completely unaware that EVERYONE had massively underestimated the scale on which the Zentradi and their creators operated. Given the state of Earth's infrastructure, it wasn't unreasonable to assume a planet could support a few hundred to a few thousand ships, but millions would require infrastructure on a scale Humanity hadn't even begun to think about. As for the Birdhuman, well... it wasn't that impressive. It would've been an apocalyptic and potentially unstoppable threat to a less developed civilization, but Humanity had already obtained the overtechnology of Alien Starship 1 and begun to reproduce it nearly a decade earlier. A lot of its technology was cause for scientific curiosity, since it was clearly a lot more advanced than Alien Starship 1, but at the same time its systems were still recognizable and many were just different or more advanced versions of systems Humanity were already reproducing. The one weapon it demonstrated that would've been cause for significant concern was the heavy quantum reaction beam gun it used to destroy the Alliance fleet, but even that appeared to be significantly less powerful than the ones Humanity had in its possession. That the Birdhuman was ultimately "defeated" by the detonation of a handful of low-yield reaction weapons wouldn't have made it out to be an especially powerful foe either.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Need one of those Spongebob title cards "6 YEARS LATER"... Yeah, Zero's not much of a prequel if you think about it. It doesn't do anything to set up the events of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series. It's really more of a side story. Its dependence on the audience being familiar with Macross 7 really makes it a terrible choice to start new fans on. Chronological order isn't always the best order, esp. since Macross installments are not always in chronological order themselves. In fairness to Macross Zero's writers, the idea that aliens visited Earth in the distant past and interfered with humanity's development has been a thing in popular fiction since at least 1898 and a (profoundly racist) pseudoscientific theory in its own right since 1954. In Macross, having hard evidence of alien life literally fall out of the sky in 1999 seems to have allowed the "ancient astronaut" theory to graduate from pseudoscience to actual science. Thankfully, apparently without the incredible racism that the pseudoscientific theory was largely built on if Dr. Hasford and Dr. Turner's work is any indication. "Protoculture" is also a real anthropological term that is not entirely inappropriate for Hasford's hypothesis that Earth's civilization was originated by alien interference. It is a very odd coincidence that it happens to coincide with what the Zentradi call their creators. The incident on Mayan was classified top secret, so the entire military brass wouldn't necessarily know. Records weren't unsealed until 50 years later. That said, the main thing they were incredulous about was the sheer size of the Boddole Zer main fleet. Up to that point, they had only seen the ship that became the Macross, the one Birdhuman, and a few branch fleets of a few hundred to ~1,200 ships. The biggest fleet they'd seen was only 10 times the size of the Spacy's fleet. It's onyl natural that they'd find "the enemy really has millions of ships" hard to swallow. What they understood of the Birdhuman's abilities was not that far outside what they were already reproducing from OTM, sometimes on a far bigger scale. That's one reason that Zero really has to be watched after Macross 7. Macross 7 was the point where the ancient Protoculture crossed the boundary of Clarke's Third Law into the realm of "Sufficiently Advanced" aliens whose technology was indistinguishable from magic. They've stayed camped out in "Sufficiently Advanced" territory ever since.
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