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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It's all in the backstory... that the writers and showrunners couldn't be arsed to put in the actual show. Like the 2009 Star Trek (XI) film, the backstory for Star Trek: Picard was dispensed in the form of a limited comic series that was so poorly advertised its existence was unknown to most of the fanbase until long after it ceased publication. The TL;DR version is that "Raffi" - formerly Lt. Commander Raffaela Musiker - was aide de camp to Admiral Jean-Luc Picard for the approximately four years between his promotion to the admiralty in 2381 and his resignation-in-protest in 2385. She was, for all practical intents and purposes, Admiral Picard's right-hand man for those four years of coordination work on the Romulan evacuation. Musiker was also apparently such a problematic officer that Starfleet was planning to hit her with a bad conduct discharge, and once Picard had resigned there was a bootprint on her backside so fast she was convinced it was a conspiracy rather than a result of her substance abuse problem. Well, they did confirm in their Q4 earnings call that they're losing upwards of a billion dollars a year on it.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    A remastering of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series would be focused on restoring and enhancing/upscaling the original animation. They would not waste the time and money to create new footage to replace one mecha design with a slightly different version. An all-new animated feature would likely just use the DYRL versions of the designs, as multiple titles have already done.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    True, if the owner of a hacked account used the same password for their email their email is likely compromised too... but we're talking about the other 99.9% of the userbase who aren't. To them, just showing up and not being able to log in without any readily visible clue as to why is a problem that may lead some to believe erroneously they've been banned, that the forum has been hacked, etc.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It would probably have been a good idea to send a mass email and/or put up a more visible notice that there was a forced password reset beforehand. Just making a thread about it in the forums really doesn't cut it as notification, since most users first impulse on seeing they've been logged out will be to try to log back in before trying to read new posts in the forums and the forums'll tell 'em their account is locked.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Finally, some good news on the release schedule... Crunchyroll has the license for The Rising of the Shield Hero S2, Ascendance of a Bookworm S3, Kaguya-sama: Love is War ULTRA ROMANTIC, Legend of Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These: Collision, Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove It: R=1-SING, Skeleton Knight in Another World, and A Couple of Cuckoos. They probably also have Overlord S4.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, what KMG did is more like a compulsive gambler in over their head at the blackjack table. They were taking money needed for day-to-day expenses and betting it on the next big score in the hopes that they'd win big enough to return that money with interest, with a conspicuous lack of success. Eventually it caught up to them when they had to balance their checkbook and realized they didn't have enough to cover their debts and their loan shark decided their free trial of having kneecaps was over. From what I've read, it's kind of a "yes and no" situation. All things being equal, computer animation tools do make the process faster and more streamlined which saves money... but at the same time, it also drives demand for higher quality and more detailed animation which increases cost. (The ever-more-detailed eyes of anime characters are said to be one of the most expensive things to animate in terms of person-hours per frame.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The aforementioned issue with Kew Media Distribution was very much the exception. Mind you, they weren't really in the animation business as such. Their portfolio was almost exclusively distribution rights to live action television and movies. It would not be at all unfair to say that what sank Kew Media Distribution was massively irresponsible and highly irregular behavior of its parent company, Kew Media Group. Anime production is on razor thin margins, yeah... though that's a function of how manpower-intensive animation production is vs. average revenues from a 12, 26, or 50 episode series.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It wasn't always like that... that was a development that came with the pivot away from the titans as the story's main antagonists around halfway through the series.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Considering the monotonous regularity of tragic backstories among named characters, one could be forgiven for cynically suspecting redshirts are a form of assisted suicide. Few are the Star Trek protagonists who haven't been traumatized in some way prior to the "present day" of their respective shows...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda, yeah. After all, the Titans are the only ones left in the story with a halfway plausible claim to being victims rather than villains. They're just Eldian convicts from Marley who were sentenced to a fate significantly worse than death: the limited immortality of being trapped in one's own mind as an unaging mindless titan. Even that's only halfway convincing because a lot of the mindless titans were Eldians like Grisha who wanted to overthrow the vicious, expansionist, titan-using nation of Marley... by restoring the vicious, expansionist, titan-using empire of Eldia. Knowing that a fair number of the titans are titans because their sole objection to genocidal oppression was not being the oppressor puts a lot of them into "*sshole victim" territory at best. It's impossible to sympathize with the protagonists when the first thing they did after defeating the titans and making contact with the outside world again was to immediately validate everything Marley and the rest of the world believed about Eldians being inherently evil, bloodthirsty monsters. The closest anyone gets to heroism in the second half of the series is... And that's objectively horrible.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the winter season is limping to its conclusion. In the Land of Leadale fails to go anywhere or do anything of interest in its twelve episode run. It's only really remarkable for its sheer number of orphaned plot threads, with Cayna having essentially forgotten all of the goals she started the story with by about the seventh episode. It takes no risks, it pushes no envelopes, and it adds nothing to its genre. The series is, for all intents and purposes, a participation award. So congratulations In the Land of Leadale. You showed up. Didn't do anything, but you showed up. The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest is also wearily crawling to its twelve episode mercy killing with Mattias facing the first enemy in the series to actualy pose a challenge to anyone instead of going down like a chump. Unfortuately, there's no actual buildup to it so it feels like a combination of Giant Space Flea from Nowhere and a Big Lipped Alligator Moment. The best they could come up with for an ending was a dark lord whose existence was never so much as hinted at previously. This series is so scattered and its story so poorly told that it feels like a SparkNotes summary written by an exciteable toddler. Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department is definitely feeling some arc fatigue with its concept, having abruptly changed gears to do an idol singer episode for no apparent reason other than that Zombie Land Saga was popular when it was being drafted. The salaryman gags are fine, but there's no sense of direction to the story anymore as of episode 10. Attack on Titan is... Attack on Titan, which is to say it's still a tedious exercise in darkness-induced audience apathy that's frantically searching for something to hold the audience's attention and coming up empty. They're definitely bringing across the final arc of the manga as faithfully as possible. Unfortunately, that means it's padded like a menstruating fire hose and the characters are all unamibguously terrible human beings.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    If it weren't such an old, and comparatively obscure, property they could probably have made some decent money giving it a full-ham tokusatsu treatment as a kids movie. Unfortunately, Hollywood's short memory means every few years a new idiot crawls out of the woodwork convinced they'll be the first to turn a profit on a live-action adaptation of a classic anime property instead of losing tens of millions of dollars like everyone else who's tried.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Voltron might not be at the top of the list of things which will not translate well to live action... but it's pretty damned close. Beast King GoLion was inherently high-camp as a super robot show, and Voltron only made it campier. I wonder which live-action anime adaptation route they'll go with? Will they attempt to do a faithful adaptation of part of the series while paying extensive homage to its anime roots that turns it into a nigh-unwatchable mess (ala Cowboy Bebop), "grim up" the story to make what was a childrens show more palatable for a nostalgia-driven adult audience and suck all the soul and fun out of it in the process (ala Speed Racer), or make an in-name-only adaptation that has no connection to the title besides the proper nouns in an attempt to put their own "stamp" on it (ala Dragonball Evolution).
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I wish Discovery's writers and showrunners had enough self-awareness to try something like that. Then again, if they had enough self-awareness to parody their terrible decisions they'd never have made them in the first place. Maybe Lower Decks will give that one a go.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    'lil bit, yeah... though Star Trek has always been kind of rough on Starfleet officer protagonists. Many of them have either tragic backstories, tragic eventual fates, or both. Trauma makes drama, I guess? Though I guess part of it is probably just an acknowledgement/tie-in to the fact that in TOS living in the colonies seemed to be pretty darn rough as the Enterprise and other ships spent a LOT of time charging to the rescue of some colony or other. (Enterprise had plans on that front that went unused after its cancellation, like T'Pol supposedly being half-Romulan via her sleeper agent dad or Archer being the true identity of "Future Guy" trying to correct the distortions in history.) He gets to do both in the novels, which are based on some of the unused plans for the show's later seasons. Archer's promotion to Admiral in the novelverse came because he lost the Enterprise in the Earth-Romulan War and accumulated damage from transporter use left him with a neurological disorder that would otherwise have made him unfit for duty. It's one thing to throw in a nod to them here and there, but they're rushing to appeal to fans by saying "Hey guess what, Kirk is in this!" as if they're not at all confident that they can actually sell the series on its own merits. Kirk, Spock, et. al. are supposed to be nobodies in this time period. Spock's only real reason for drawing attention would/should have been the fact that he was the son of Vulcan ambassador Sarek. Kirk was just some guy until he became Captain of the Enterprise in the 2260s and went on a bunch of space adventures so exciting Starfleet routinely wrote his reports off as bullsh*t. When Discovery brought Spock in, they made a huge fuss over him totally out of all proportion to the fact that he wasn't anybody special except for his parentage and wouldn't be for another fifteen years or so. I kind of expect to see the same from a young Kirk as a scene-stealing squad with Spock. I can certainly understand them being a bit gunshy about fan reactions based on Discovery's... reception... but that was as much a result of their stupidly over-the-top grimdark take on Trek as the characters being a bunch of miserable and utterly unloveable bastards. This is supposed to be a return to classic form in multiple senses, and that means running on an ensamble cast.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    For my money, I want Strange New Worlds to spend less time leaning on established characters and more time building up the mostly undeveloped or original crew of the 2250s-era USS Enterprise. We've had quite enough of Kirk and Spock as it is.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, if they're going to reference the NX-01 Enterprise and her crew, it's probably better to stick to file photos. FWIW, I think they'd be better off flashing back to the transfer of command where Captain April stepped down and handed the Enterprise to Captain Pike.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It shows a lack of confidence in the series and the franchise... they're still leaning on established characters rather than develop their own. (Also, shouldn't Jim Kirk be on the Farragut in 2258?) Assuming Star Trek: Strange New Worlds picks up approximately where Star Trek: Discovery season two ended in 2258, Jonathan Archer would be 146 years old... and 13 years dead. (Production materials for Star Trek: Enterprise revealed that Jonathan Archer passed away in 2245, the day after he attended Starfleet's christening of the USS Enterprise.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Only if they were weeping for the fate of Star Trek as a whole... because the crew of the Discovery are still unlikable berks.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Long story short, they ended up in default on their loans after they released a retraction of one of their regular financial reports indicating they'd overstated their financial resources after overspending on acquiring new properties.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Kew Media Distribution.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    No, the intermediary company that Harmony Gold used to set up their original licensing deal with Funimation went under due to a bankruptcy triggered by "creative accounting" practices. That's why it took like two years for Funimation to actually put up any of HG's episodes.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, they pulled it a while back... I believe around the time they initially negotiated their new license with Funimation that fell through when the intermediary went bankrupt and then out of business.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Considering Picard was the network's saving throw to win back the Star Trek fandom after Discovery bombed... I feel like the meeting probably went the other way around, with the network showing a Ferengi-like willingness to agree to anything as long as Patrick Stewart would consent to come back and save them from themselves. He probably didn't have to twist any arms at all. Ah, yeah... that's definitely what it feels like. There's no subtlety, there's no pacing, the whole concept of an ensamble cast seems to be dead as Patrick Stewart and Sonequa Martin-Green dominate their respective shows to the point that everyone else is just sort of "also present", etc. It's really evident in Picard, where they all but completely abandoned the new characters in favor of walk-ons for TNG veterans because nobody liked them.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek's original series was able to be the success it was (in syndication) in part because the production had people who could, and often did, tell Gene "No" and rework or reject his crazier or more offensive ideas. It probably wouldn't have been as successful without people like Dorothy Fontana and Gene Coon to rein in Roddenberry's excesses and make his ideas into something marketable. TNG Season 1 was, of course, what happened when the network let Gene off the leash and it wasn't until his health forced him to bow out of the project that Rick Berman and others were able to salvage the series and grow the brand. Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I feel like Kurtzman and Chabon don't really have someone... or enough someones... around to tell them when they're workshopping a bad idea or a bad approach to an idea. It was really telling that Discovery's second and third seasons were revivals of pitches for stories that Berman-era Trek showrunners had rejected as patently unworkable. It's clear Sir Patrick has a lot of sociopolitical commentary he wants to work into the story, but the delivery is so unsubtle that it feels like self-parody instead of allegory.
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