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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's fun... for the second time in under two weeks I've found a recent show that I really can't pidgeonhole. Birdie Wing was hard to classify because it was a completely insane intersection between shounen anime tropes, an intense sports drama, garnished with a bit of organized crime drama. The Raven of the Inner Palace is... ... ... ... ... ... ... I don't ****ing know. I just watched three episodes of it in a row and I don't think I could even put a genre on it. It's either set in feudal China or some fantasy world with feudal Chinese theming. It's more or less entirely character drama, but with supernatural aspects and actual magic in play and a lot of emphasis on the court relationships in the Emperor's palace. It's all drawn like a classic shoujo series but it's veered hard into mystery, horror, fantasy, and political territory a few times. I can't imagine there'd be a lot of shipping going on for the shoujo audience in light of almost all of the male characters explicitly being eunuchs. Whatever the hell it is, it's interesting viewing. I only meant to watch one episode but before I knew it I'd seen all three currently-available ones.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That's a very definite "Maybe". It's complicated. "Lady M" was an invention of Macross Delta's writers and had never been mentioned in any previous Macross works. Throughout Macross Delta, "Lady M" remains a vague existence whose circumstances are only ever discussed in terms of rumors and hearsay and she only ever seems to communicate with the cast indirectly by having others relay her messages to them. The Macross Delta TV anime and its movie adaptation Passionate Walkure seemed to be building "Lady M" up as Xaos's version of Richard Bilra. That is to say, as the ultra-wealthy, highly influential, and terribly eccentric borderline recluse who founded the original company that grew into the mega-conglomerate Xaos we see in the series proper. The rumors we hear from the Epsilon Foundation representative Berger Stone also suggest "Lady M" was throwing her vast personal fortune around for the sake of private research projects. "Lady M" had supposedly been researching the power and military potential of songs since the end of the First Space War. One such set of rumors that turned out to be true or at least so close to it as to make no odds was that "Lady M" had used the fruits of her research and either cloning/genetic manipulation or artificial intelligence to develop an ultimate weapon based on the power of songs... revealed to be Mikumo Guynemer, a clone based on reconstructed Star Singer DNA. The rumors are contradictory about when "Lady M" first became involved in galactic affairs. One of the rumors conveyed suggests she's been active since the First Space War and may have contributed to the work of Dr. Chiba and others. The other suggests she only recently became active, after the Vajra conflict in 2059. It wasn't until Absolute Live!!!!!! that "Lady M" was changed from an enigmatic weirdo and (theoretically) one-woman Omniscient Council of Vagueness into some kind of Deep State figure... an oligarch who corruptly controls the New UN Government, New UN Forces, and PMCs somehow and acts as the sole arbiter of what knowledge humanity is "ready" for. It's that hot take that retroactively inserts "Lady M" into decisions from the previous 50+ years like the New UN Government's ban on cloning, the restrictions imposed on AI technology after the Sharon Apple incident, the implant ban, and the strict controls imposed on MDE weapons. Unfortunately, it really doesn't tally with previous material at all... so it doesn't fit at all if you've seen more of Macross than just Delta. Most unusually for that Fandom Wiki, that article isn't wildly inaccurate or a pile of nonsensical fan-fiction. Statistically, I guess it had to happen sometime.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, this season's off to a start... not a great start, but a start. Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun has hit the point in the manga where it fully switched genres from a slice of life comedy with occasional shounen elements to a regular shounen anime series. Unsurprisingly, that coincides with a sudden spike in the amount of filler so the first two episodes set up a plot point and then basically do nothing. Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! is off to a good start and staying close to the manga. It's cute, it's funny, and it's finally hit the point where the two main characters are starting to notice they're into each other. My Hero Academia is doing another one of its big arcs, and it feels pretty padded. I'm the Villainess, so I'm Taming the Final Boss is almost exactly what I expected it to be. It's playing the tropes of its otome game villainess genre absolutely laser-straight with very generic characters and plot lines and the occasional obligatory talking animal. Several of the events really don't fit the generic shoujo anime art style though and it's a bit odd that a villain gets away with so much. The villainy was pretty petty up to the most recent episode, where the main antagonist thus far jumped off the slippery slope... It comes off as too easily forgiven. I finished Birdie Wing the other night. It's... got a lot of Gundam references for a sports anime about golf. Not just the gunpla-obsessed girl in Generic European Country... the main girl's golf coach is a blonde man who refuses to put his jacket on properly voiced by Shuuichi Ikeda (Char Aznable) and his rival/disciple is a coach voiced by Toru Furuya (Amuro Ray) who is even named Amuro. It's also really weird how blatant the shilling for Gunpla in that series is. It's not even tangentially related to the plot, but there are several scenes where they basically STOP DEAD and start talking about gunpla (with one character lamenting that she received an obscure HG one instead of a MG). It's still very much on all the drugs and a sports anime conceived by a crazy person who has only a vague idea what golf is, but it seems to also be headed into shoujo ai territory at the end. Later I'm gonna throw a rewatch of Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion into the mix since I still haven't gotten around to watching Lelouch of the Resurrection and Akito the Exiled.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    One would assume that an AI bent on ruling humanity from the shadows would want or need a lot of the things Lady M banned in order to govern effectively. Not just other (subordinate) AIs that it could delegate tasks to in overseeing humanity, but a plethora of robotic weapons both covert and overt that could be relied upon to be there for the AI to seize control of should its meaty subjects rebel. Not to mention a cyborged populace with networked brains who could be easily subjected to mind control to keep them from revolting and be used as infiltrators and sleeper agents. Yet all of that is (allegedly) banned under Lady M's regime... (though past works definitely disagree) It's way harder to do something like Control from the Star Trek novelverse, which basically just gaslighted the brilliant but naive into working for its fictitious off-again on-again black ops organization. Certainly the same people allegedly dogmatically enforcing Lady M's diktats on technology to the point of allowing entire planets to burn and millions of people to die rather than use "banned" weapons in their defense would not flex so readily if it turned out the one dispensing those edicts was also a piece of banned technology. Personally, I suspect Absolute Live!!!!!! is gonna end up swept under the rug and "Lady M" will be quietly forgotten about in whatever the next series is. They wrote themselves into a corner and have no easy way out. Better to just roll with the TV series where "Lady M" didn't have a defined origin.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    ... he's "Lady" M because he kicked off a Rocky Horror Picture Show revival there. He'll show up to the final battle of the next series in drag and perform an uptempo Jpop remix of Sweet Transvestite. Brings a whole new meaning to "shipping" doesn't it?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Loved him in Blackadder... and he did an amazing job as Rubeus Hagrid in Harry Potter. His absence will be keenly felt for a very long time.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    A bit, yes... though I don't believe they've ever been described as independently-operable warships like the ARMD-class. It's possible they started out as partially-completed ARMD-class ships that were integrated directly into the ship's structure. The process of launching from them is a bit odd, but only seen in the OP for Macross M3. There is an extreme case in the "handedness" of the individual ships that make up the Macross Quarter-class as well... But no, apart from the movie ARMD-class - called the ARMD II-class in some cases - there aren't any ships that I know of that exhibit mirror-imaged variants like that. The painting seen in Macross Perfect Memory (pg203) is kind of a blue-gray color? The art in Macross Chronicle's History Sheet showing crews examining the ASS-1 shortly after the crash depict it with a Zentradi green hull.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yup. Unfortunately the real world parallels there (esp. in the field of medicine) are very heavily politicized and not at all suitable to discuss here. Because DNA is, of course, an organic molecule that breaks down like any other when cellular processes stop any recovered Star Singer DNA would have been fragmentary. DNA's half-life, as best modern science can estimate it, is 521 years without the intervention of preservation techniques or fossiliation for longer-term relics. The oldest recovered DNA in fossils is fragments of mammoth DNA retrieved from teeth that had been preserved in permafrost for 1.6 million years. (My understanding is that teeth are especally good at DNA preservation long-term, and are commonly used when attempting to sequence DNA from extinct species like premodern Humans, Neanderthals, etc. With relics potentially 500,000 years old, the illegal underground genetics lab Lady M used probably had its work cut out for it recreating a complete genome for a Star Singer from fragmentary DNA. It's likely they had to do a bit of Jurassic Park-ing to fill in gaps with Human or Zentradi DNA. Very. While your summation of Macross Galaxy's unlawful activities is broadly accurate, your conclusion is not. Granted, Macross Galaxy was a rogue state... but nobody actually knew that until they began moving openly against the Macross Frontier fleet. The only thing you listed that was actually public knowledge beforehand was that the living conditions of the working class in the heavily industrialized Macross Galaxy fleet were not good and that implants were often used for augmented reality to improve overall comfort. In the TV series, nobody had any suspicions about Macross Galaxy until right before the end of the series when the coup happened and the SMS crew discovered Grace's implant network plan. In the movies, suspicions about Macross Galaxy were driven by their rivalry with Macross Frontier in light of both fleets being after the same valuable resource (fold quartz) not by any knowledge of Galaxy's clandestine misdeeds. It wasn't until right before the end that Frontier's government finally understood the Galaxy fleet's intent and moved to stop it. In terms of what was actually public knowledge, there wasn't anything that would have put the Epsilon Foundation off of doing business with the Macross Galaxy fleet prior to the climax of the Macross Frontier story. You're confusing what you - the viewer - know with what the populace in the story knows. ... that is a WILD guess on your part, with no supporting evidence.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, it was an innovative idea in 1994... but now it's something that's been defictionalized, so it's no longer unique or compelling as a premise.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, maybe... then again, maybe not. It'd really depend what operational role those classes of ship are for and/or what the job of their parent fleet is. For instance, you wouldn't necessarily want to dispatch specialist ships for support roles like tugs, tenders, couriers, or rescue and recovery ships to the front lines of a major fleet action. Esp. if they're earmarked for the cleanup afterwards. Alternatively, there may be other reasons that they were not dispatched like being in the middle of being reprovisioned, awating a new crew or commanding officer, being part of a skeleton crew of defenses for the mobile fortress, or being a mobile reserve just in case something goes wrong.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Not to me? It's just kinda... square? There are a few in-joke references in that episode but I don't believe that's one.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    As an addendum, outside of the main Zentradi designs of the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV anime and Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie, I believe there's only been one other named class of Zentradi warship added... and that was in a canon game in the Macross II timeline. That was Quamzin's Oktii Granduraa flagship from the PC Engine games.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Its description in Macross Chronicle's Technology Sheet for it mentions that the uppermost conical section of the Grand Cannon's barrel contains a deflection field generator that is used to skew the beam's firing angle by up to 120 degrees. Presumably it's something similar to the spatial distortions that are used to corral the beam of the Macross-class's main gun or the ones used to aim the "high angle" beam guns of certain Zentradi and Human ships by locally warping space similar to a pinpoint barrier. Nope. There are a number of designs that are thrown in for just one specific shot or cut that have no official information.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I guess it depends what she means to you. There are some fans who are just excited about "Lady M" raising the theoretical possibility of more legacy characters returning than just Max and Exsedol. There are others who are annoyed with "Lady M" because one of the franchise's most enduring mysteries got an incredibly lame anticlimactic answer. And, of course, there are still more who are considering the narrative implications from Absolute Live!!!!!! and saying "Wow, that doesn't make sense AT ALL." That's also the problem with her role in the narrative of Absolute Live!!!!!!, she wields too much power. It's just ridiculous if you think about it even a little. There's no reason for anyone to listen to "Lady M" at all, never mind take direction from her. They could maybe salvage the whole mess if they avoided the Delta movies entirely and built on the TV series version of "Lady M" who was just an enigmatic CEO of unknown and dubious origin who existed mainly as a one-woman(?) Omniscient Council of Vagueness.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I'd suggest you take the disingenuous strawman arguments somewhere else. Nobody's interested. In Macross Zero, the Anti-Unification Alliance forces are the remnants of an anti-government militia whose armed opposition to the Earth Unification Government and UN Forces had frequently crossed the line into large-scale terrorist activities. Just two years previously they had destroyed the city of St. Petersburg in Russia with a thermonuclear weapon. In the OVA they deployed a thermobaric bomb on Mayan island. They are NOT people who would have followed a government ban on researching certain technologies or types of artifacts. The fundamental fact that you keep missing here is that a government ban on a type of research or a particular technology doesn't magically remove that from existence or place it out of reach for everyone. Blanket bans only work on the pathologically law-abiding. That research will inevitably still happen and those technologies will still be used because there will still be people for whom the benefits outweigh the risks, who believe they're above the law, and/or who refuse to acknowledge the ban because they find it unjust. Cromwell and Lady M are perfect examples of that. Lady M violated the ban on cloning because she believed she was above the law and that her cause was more important than adherance to it. Cromwell likewise violated the ban on AI research because he views the ban itself as unjust and argues that the technology has highly beneficial legitimate uses. A blanket ban achieves little besides depriving the government of the ability to properly regulate that research or technology's application and preventing any beneficial applications of that research/technology from being used for the common good. Of course, because the movie's whole plot makes no sense in context it's worth noting that past works have already effectively established that Cromwell and Heimdall's viewpoint is objectively correct. I'm not going to dignify your political strawman with a response, but if you keep trying to inject politics into this I will report your posts and have you removed. From a basic engineering standpoint, it is preposterously unlikely that Mikumo was the only clone constructed. It took Lady M YEARS to recreate a viable Star Singer from the genetic material her agents unlawfully removed from Windermere IV. There were doubtless many tests conducted to create a viable clone as they reconstructed the degraded DNA of the Star Singer. There are probably quite a lot of terminated prototypes that were created before Mikumo. It's also rather implausible that there wouldn't be a backup or two, considering Mikumo Guynemer was created to be a frontline soldier. A fundamentally quite dangerous role which lends itself to violent and messy death, especially for an unarmed, unarmored person on a battlefield dominated by things like uncontrollable rioters and soldiers driven mad by Var syndrome. There's that strawman again. Pack him up or clear out. No, nobody here is saying that the Epsilon Foundation are "good guys". They're pretty clearly and consistently amoral, but the only thing you're accusing them of that was actually a crime is Sydney Hunt's theft of a Star Singer relic. The rest is distortions of the facts or blaming them for the actions of their clients. Macross Galaxy's corporate government was a questionable undertaking in hindsight but it was a recognized New UN Government member state. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing business with them, especially since said business would've had to occur BEFORE their ulterior motives became known. Similarly, there was nothing inherently wrong with selling weapons to Windermere IV because the Kingdom of the Wind is a recognized government and former New UN Gov't member that the NUNG still openly trades with. Their involvement with Heimdall is more questionable in strictly legal terms, but as Heimdall's goal was to overthrow a despotic oligarch who secretly controlled the government their decision to assist him isn't exactly card-carrying villain stuff either. Even the Epsilon Foundation is not significantly worse than Xaos, who violate the laws of war and collude in illegal cloning and slave-trafficking.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Three more. It would have been four, but Grand Cannon II was destroyed in the Unification Wars... so the coverage had a pretty big hole in it. Unfortuantely because of how long it took for the Grand Cannon systems to charge up, it's unlikely they would have ever got the first shot off... which is probably why the idea was dropped after humanity moved out into space.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    True that! Had a "where do I know that voice from?" moment when Eve's teacher started getting actual dialog... he's voiced by Shuuichi Ikeda. Eve learned golf from Char Aznable.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Wow, Birdie Wing just never stops being completely insane. This episode started out with underground betting on golf matches (already pretty weird) to city council members being assassinated on the freeway with rocket launchers over a casino construction project. It never fails to blow me away how this whole series goes above and beyond the normal insanity of Japanese sports anime to treat golf not only like it's the biggest sport EVER but such serious business that drives a frenzy of gambling and an entire criminal underworld. It's just so surreal, especally for someone who used to play the sport, to see it as a thing the world revolves around instead of entertainment for the elderly and one of the few public settings where it's acceptable for upper middle-class twits to go day drinking. EDIT: Not to mention the occasional incredibly gratuitous plugging of Gunpla like they're highly valuable collectibles instead of relatively inexpensive plamodels. EDIT2: A training montage that involves jogging and meditating with a stack of books on one's head... EDIT3: OMFG the bad guy's tee shot was so hard HER HAND FELL OFF AT THE WRIST! What drugs is this show on?!
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The shape of the airframe changed a bit, and the wing got thicker, so I think it's a safe bet to say that they did.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The only kind of implants that posed any risk were networked brain implants. There is no risk whatsoever from ordinary limb or organ replacements, and indeed we see several characters in past works who had such limb replacements with no issue whatsoever. The problem every single one of your arguments is going to run into is that for every one misuse of the technology in question there are a thousand legitimate and beneficial uses. You also keep making this strawman argument about Cromwell pushing for total deregulation... he only advocated for legalization of those banned technologies. That's a load of bull, and you know it. Even in the movie, literally nobody attempts to defend what Lady M did. They even say Lady M is at least as bad as Cromwell. How do you know she didn't? How do you know there isn't some laboratory somewhere with ten, twenty, a hundred Mikumos waiting to be activated should something happen to the one we see like Gendo's tank full of Reis in Evangelion? Maybe Mikumo is just the prototype. Maybe she's not even the first Mikumo. Maybe Mikumo is just the first one that worked, and there's a laboratory full of failed clones that were terminated because they didn't meet requirements like Ripley-8 in Alien: Resurrection. Because Lady M created her clandestinely and illegally, there is potentially a LOT of shady stuff that could be going on there. You keep saying that, and it's still not accurate. ... wow, you really haven't been paying attention at all have you? Did you forget that the events of Macross 7 happened because one of those government-appointed "responsible and morally right" people decided to try to monopolize the finds from the site on the Varauta iceworld for their own gain? Then those finds and that research would be subject to the New UN Government's technology-sharing laws, meaning research like that would not be able to proceed in secret and threats like that would be much harder to create with many more eyes on the situation.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    True, though it also helps to not have your story start with the characters having spent a decade-plus beaten and miserable and living in isolation. Without those breaks to reset the tone, if you start your story in a place of doom and gloom there's little opportunity to significantly lighten the mood when the bleakness begins to pall. The Jean-Luc Picard of Picard bears little resemblance to the one in Star Trek: the Next Generation because he's spent over a decade letting his misplaced guilt over the whole Romulan situation turn him into a bitter and self-hating old man and he never really gets a chance to get noticeably better because he just jackknifes from one guilty topic to the next. TBH, I think it probably owes a LOT more to simply starting from a much brighter, happier place and largely staying there.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    So if we get a video explaining where Lore's apparently been since he was dismantled in the TNG season 6/7 two-parter does that make the video Lore lore? Not a bad looking ship, I guess... she doesn't quite have the charm of the Sovereign and looks a bit too much like an oversized Nova-class, but she's a damn sight prettier than that trainwreck called the Titan-A.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Huh... I have to admit, that was quite a bit less exciting than I was expecting. Rather like episode 3, it was mostly buildup with the actual action confined to the episode's latter half. I have to admit I was expecting things to go wrong a lot sooner in the heist. This played out like a garden variety bank robbery for the most part... which, I guess, is kind of what it was. It's also really weird how that one rifle that keeps doing the rounds of Vel's rebel group is just a totally unmodified Kalashnikov. Yeah, it's a laser gun like all the others but it's just... an AK. At least tart it up a little bit, guys?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It'd be interesting, but I suspect the lukewarm reception of the Chogokin Macross Quarter may have soured our chances of that.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    This argument of yours was already refuted in previous posts. It is mildly entertaining that you accidentally made a fairly compelling case for Lady M being the real villain though. You realize this is refuted right in the movie itself, right? "Evil people or organizations" with the resources and desire to do something like that are going to do it regardless of whether the technology is legal or not... like the criminal Lady M did. That is debatable at best, considering you're repeatedly misrepresenting what the Siren Delta System even was. Like Lady M did? It's worth noting the New UN Government does consider clones to have the same fundamental rights as a natural-born being, and the vast majority of humans in the setting are the descendants of clones. This is a legitimate concern... but only for one very specific type of cybernetic technology. As noted previously, this ignores the fundamental reality that non-networked medical cybernetics can greatly improve quality of life for people needing limb replacements and the like and allow them to live full and unrestrained lives. This also ignores some pretty important facts. The Sharon Apple incident was triggered by the last-minute addition of technology that was known to be dangerously unreliable and which had not been a part of the Sharon Apple system up to that point. To a lesser extent, it was also caused by sampling emotion data for Sharon's AI from a person with a hideous amount of psychological baggage. It wasn't a flaw in the underlying AI technology being developed, it was an issue of methodology in developing the Sharon virtuoid. That same AI technology is later used without incident in multiple models of unmanned fighter. Stable personality emulation AIs have also been created by LAI, based on people who weren't nuts. Not all of it... there have been a few big disasters caused by buried Protoculture weapons, but humanity has also used a lot of captured Protoculture-built tech to considerably positive effect like the factory satellites that underpin mass-manufacturing in the New UN Government and the genetic engineering technology that was used to keep Earth a habitable planet after the First Space War.
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