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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    My girlfriend's a huge Potter fan so I know I'll get dragged to see it regardless. That said, I absolutely adore the attention and care the production crews went to in recreating the period dress and architecture and I'm VERY curious to see how Mads Mikkelsen will do as he steps into Johnny Depp's former role as Grindelwald. I really didn't care for Depp's performance in The Crimes of Grindelwald, and I kind of suspect that Mikkelsen is going to be a much better fit for the role. He's playing almost-literal Wizard Hitler, someone who oscillates between social awkwardness and bombastic rage and charisma, which seems like a good fit for Mikkelsen's more reserved acting style.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    As I near the end of the series, I'm not even sure the writers injecting their own hot takes on everything and everyone is the reason Netflix's adaptation of Cowboy Bebop bombed. Sunrise's Cowboy Bebop certainly didn't lack for lighthearted or comedic/absurd moments but it was still a mostly-serious action/drama for all that. The showrunners working on Netflix's Cowboy Bebop seem to have concluded that, because the original work was an animated series, Joel Schumacher-era Batman levels of camp was the way to go. This could've been an absolutely amazing series if the showrunners had taken it seriously. Instead, the showrunners were so committed to the stylistic suck of making the series high camp that they keep disrupting the flow of the serious dramatic moments with unnecessary mood-killing jokes. Like when Asimov Solensan is trying to sell his stolen drugs to the bartender in the first episode and is momentarily thrown when the previously gruff bartender jovially offers him cupcakes. The double-take Asimov does is the only part of this scene that's actually believable, with him clearly racking his brain to determine if "cupcakes" is slang for something before being assured that he was being offered an actual piece of confectionary. They just keep doing it. Every time the series starts to set the mood they puncture it with a cheap gag, an incredibly campy line, or a deliberately terrible-looking fight/effects sequence right out of a schlock horror movie or cheap kung-fu flick. They clearly had the money and the resources to do the job right, but what they did with it was accidental self-parody. If you totally disassociate it from Sunrise's Cowboy Bebop and watch it like it's a cheap exploitation flick, it's not half bad. If you watch it as anything else... it's just cringeworthy. It's a weird thing about Cowboy Bebop that most of the characters were drawn mukokuseki-style without any (stereotypical) identifying features, except for the non-mixed Chinese syndicate leadership, the black characters, and Spike's one Native American friend.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    "Yes and no"? Presumably all ships of the same class as the Supervision Army gunship that crashed on Earth could theoretically transform the same way... but it's what you'd call an "unintended operating mode". It's likely not something the Protoculture who designed that class of ship ever considered doing. Without some of the additions made by human engineers, it wouldn't be particularly useful either. Not in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross. However, the DYRL? designs have largely supplanted their TV series versions throughout the Macross franchise seemingly because the production staff prefer the less dated and more "alien" appearance of the movie versions... so it's highly probable that the Nupetiet Vergnitzs-class with the heavy converging beam cannon exists in the main timeline either as a replacement for the TV version or a variant of the class that coexists with it. (They do that kind of thing A LOT with the movie designs.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Initially, she didn't have implants because her parents were influential members of anti-legalization movement... and then her parents were killed and she was left a homeless orphan who was living on the streets until Grace found her and took her in. After that, she was exempted from the borderline compulsory implant use in the fleet for several reasons. Apparently being "all natural" was considered a selling point as an idol over in Galaxy despite the unaugmented otherwise living rather rough lives there. That's the reason she gives Alto in the series. (That the wealthy over there can have a fully prosthetic body that looks however they like may go a ways towards explaining why that is a selling point to Galaxy's population.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The Macross Galaxy fleet is quite a bit worse than just that. It's a space-going, dystopian, cyberpunk company town that seems to be on a mission to collect the complete set of cyberpunk human rights violations. Instead of having an elected civilian government, the fleet is run by - and as - a corporation. Its parent company is the defense and technology industry megacorporation General Galaxy and it serves as a kind of massive flying R&D facility for all kinds of technology. The corporate government is exactly as amoral as you'd expect a cyberpunk dystopian megacorp to be, so there's some pretty significant economic inequality and high unemployment due to the corporate government axing several labor-intensive industries in the name of efficiency (e.g. the farming and the aquaculture that provided natural foodstuffs were replaced by more efficient synthetic food production). After implants were legalized (by using terrorist tactics against the implant protesters and murdering their ringleaders), implants became more or less mandatory to live and work in the fleet. The population with implants is essentially living in a permanent augmented reality state where their senses are controlled by their implants to make them perceive the conditions as less uncomfortable. The fleet's government and their corporate army are involved in a lot of unethical human experimentation involving mind control and cybernetics, and are invested in the plan to create a galaxy-wide fold network to unite the human race into a sort of collective consciousness under their direction. They also support their agenda with a modest amount of corporate (and regular) espionage against their erstwhile allies. TLDR; Cyberpunk 2077 or Ghost in the Shell's Tokyo would call Galaxy a "rough neighborhood".
  6. Seto Kaiba
    They're said to have the same performance as the standard New UN Forces designs they're based on... but they adopt more Zentradi overtechnology in their construction. It seems to be a sentimental/aesthetic touch on the part of the all-Zentradi Macross 5 fleet.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, this one's a popular question. Due to some syntactic ambiguity on the part of some fansubs, it was accidentally made to look like Howard Glass was president of the entire New UN Government. He's not. He's the (4th) president of the Macross Frontier fleet government, which is a New UN Government member "state". The New UN Government's seat of power and general assembly is back on Earth.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Many of the folks in Cowboy Bebop's heavily Chinese-influenced space-future are supposedly mixed. I'd always assumed the same is true for Jet, since his skin tone is close to Spike's and a fair bit lighter than Edward's.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's never really touched on, that I'm aware of... We know emigrant fleets sometimes mine asteroids for raw materials. I'd assume they'd go for something a bit safer than tapping a star, though. Like extracting water ice from comets and other space debris to be decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen or mining the atmospheres of gas giants which typically contain large amounts of hydrogen and hydrogen compounds.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes... though even just adapting the existing story is enough to get a writing credit. It becomes a problem when they get carried away and start putting their own "spin" on the story that takes it in a very different direction from what they were adapting. It's certainly possible... though, for me, the divergences are blatant enough to break my immersion in the story because the characterization ends up being very different, often in ways that do not aid the story. Eh... I dunno, maybe I'm overreacting to that. But then again, maybe not. Jet was hands-down the most experienced, versatile, multi-talented, and intellectual member of the Bebop's crew in the anime. When you cast a black actor in the role - apparently for no reason other than because the character's surname is "Black" - and subsequently rewrite that erudite and highly-skilled character into a barely literate ten-thumbed dumbass ex-convict who is so hopelessly stupid he has to be told not to wash his feet in the toilet, it's pretty easy to look at that and think to yourself "That feels kinda racist. Is that racist?"
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Ghost in the Shell: Arise today. It's not bad... but Arise is weak tea compared to the likes of the Ghost in the Shell movie or Stand Alone Complex. It's every bit as beautifully animated as you'd expect from a Ghost in the Shell title, but it's lacking on all fronts in the narrative. It has neither the heavy cyberpunk atmosphere of the original Ghost in the Shell movie nor the lighthearted humanity of the Stand Alone Complex series, and it lacks the philosophizing about the nature of humanity, society, and the soul that underpinned both. It's just a clumsily-executed prequel and origin story for Public Security Section 9. Despite being an OVA with the longer per-episode runtime that entails, the story feels weirdly rushed and jumbled. There's some decent worldbuilding involving Japan's participation in nuclear World War III and non-nuclear World War IV, but it all gets swept under the rug because it's only in service of a there-and-gone-again plot about a JSDF colonel being a defense industry war profiteer. My Senpai is Annoying continues to be light, fluffy, slice of life shenanigans... but nevertheless quite enjoyable for it.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Unlike the SDF-1 Macross, which needed to transform in order to reconnect its main gun up to its power distribution network again after the disappearance of the fold system due to insufficient quantities of replacement energy conduit... the transformation of a ship like a Battle-class entails reallocation of the ship's reactor/generator output because power usage is prioritized differently for combat vs. normal cruising. When cruising in Fortress Ship mode, a later-generation Macross-type is using the output of its thermonuclear reactors for: Propulsion: the engines use plasma produced in the thermonuclear reactors as a propellant. This unfortunately means that a fair amount of energy in the fusion plasma is lost as it's blown out of the reactor to produce thrust. Stealth: the later-generation Macross-type warships, like most later New UN Forces warships, uses a mixture of passive and active stealth technologies to reduce the odds of detection by a hostile power. Active stealth is rather energy intensive, since it involves analyzing incoming radar waves and broadcasting waves of the same amplitude and frequency but opposite phase to cancel out the enemy's radar return and trick the enemy radar into thinking it didn't receive a return. Supplemental power for Colony Operations: when connected to a City-class, Mainland-class, Island Cluster-class, etc. emigrant ship, some of the Battle-class's reactor output can be redirected to the needs of the environment ship(s) incl. charging the larger fold system used to fold the two ships when they're docked. When the ship switches to Storming Attack mode, power is reprioritized for: Weaponry: the Macross Cannon gunship invariably has its own internal thermonuclear reactors, but it can be charged much faster by allocating energy from the ship's other reactors. There are also many defensive and offensive beam weapons scattered all over the body of the ship which draw on generator power in combat as well. Even under normal conditions it can take upwards of five minutes to charge the Macross Cannon for a single shot, so every little bit helps. Defense: the technologies used to improve the defensive ability of a space warship are notoriously energy-intensive. Later generation Macross-type warships are known to use energy conversion armor to supplement the already-impressive strength of their hypercarbon composite hull armor. Barrier technology, even pinpoint barriers, are also known to be extremely energy-intensive to operate since they derive their defensive capability from a localized warping of spacetime. (On VFs, the relatively small pinpoint barrier system is known to consume as much as 60% of the total generator output of the VF.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    There are three main reasons: More (exposed) surface area on which to mount weaponry. Greater combat maneuverability via thrust-vectoring of the main and sub-engines in the legs and torso. More freedom to employ the main super dimension energy cannon ("Macross Cannon") in terms of field of fire (as in being able to aim the gun without having to turn the entire ship). It's been said that the smaller Macross-type warships like the Macross Quarter-type have taken the maneuverability aspect to the point of practically being able to dogfight like a very large fighter. Since weapons on later Macross-type warships are mainly stored internally except for the heaviest turrets to keep the ship stealthy, the transformation allows the ship to expose more weapons than its Fortress Ship mode would ordinarily be capable of presenting with its available surface area.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Presumably that capability was covered elsewhere... like the heavily armed Grave Battleship and the heavy converging beam cannon-equipped scout.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    We don't know. Why the Supervision Army was the Supervision Army has never been explained.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Not that we know. Booby-trapping wrecked warships seems to be a Supervision Army thing. Hard to say... but the UN Government would've had the opportunity to make peaceful contact as they had originally planned instead of accidentally convincing the Zentradi that they had located a Supervision Army military installation and provoking a shooting war. How successful that might've been is a mystery, but the fact that the Macross had been remodeled extensively from its original design would probably have bought them time to talk via the Zentradi's sheer confusion. The only time an alternate series of events surrounding first contact was touched on in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, it was a rogue NUNS colonel trying to use a Protoculture temporal weapon to make the first contact event un-happen altogether rather than changing the circumstances.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I don't think it's even necessarily anything visual. It's that the writers and producers working on these projects can never seem to leave well enough alone. They always feel compelled to mess with the original story and/or setting in some way, and it's usually detrimental. Like whatever the hell the coked-up writers of Dragonball Evolution were thinking. Or how Speed Racer's writers wasted precious screen time on a nonsense subplot that tried to fake out Racer X's identity. Or Ghost in the Shell's writers devoting fairly half the movie to a convoluted subplot intended to justify whitewashing the very explicitly Japanese Motoko Kusanagi. Cowboy Bebop's writers couldn't resist messing with almost everything. Anime Spike as a mysterious loner with a temper who didn't care for dogs, kept his past a secret, and spent his time pining for his lost love Julia. Netflix Spike is a quirky action-comedy protagonist with a noodle obsession, who squees over Ein rather than proposing corgi carbonara, and has an atrocious gangland alias of "Fearless". Anime Jet was a salt-of-the-earth ex-cop with a great love of music and excellent mechanical skills who keeps the Bebop and everything on it in working order while also serving as the ship's cook. Netflix Jet is a barely competent dumbass who has to be told that you use a bidet to wash your arse, not your feet... which comes off as more than slightly racist since he's played by a black actor. ESPECIALLY since his backstory was changed to also make him an ex-convict. Anime Faye was a femme fatale, a liar, and a con artist with a gambling addiction who eventually falls in unreciprocated love with Spike. Netflix Faye has none of anime Faye's character traits except her tragic backstory... and is now a fanservice bisexual. Anime Vicious was a complete psycho with a ruthless will to power who had no problem at all with murdering his superiors to seize control. Netflix Vicious is... Lucius Malfoy with a katana, complete with compulsive toadying. Netflix massively expanded Julia's role and made her a main villain but she also has to be sympathetic so she's a domestic abuse victim as well. It goes on and on and on. There's basically no character in this mess that resembles their original version. I think perhaps the most egregious case is Gren, the crime syndicate member who was a victim of human experimentation in the original work is now just a non-binary character with none of their original backstory. With so many arbitrary and detrimental changes to the characters and story, it doesn't feel like Cowboy Bebop... it's more like an original skit performed by Cowboy Bebop cosplayers at an anime convention.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Like I said earlier, if you have questions we have answers. This thread wouldn't be 157 pages long (and counting) if people didn't have questions worth answering.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Technologically speaking, no... there was nothing at all special or unique about the ship that crashed on Earth and became the Macross. If it'd been another class of ship that crashed, about all they might've missed out on would've been super dimension energy weaponry. Assuming, of course, humanity wouldn't end up recreating it through application of the principles they learned in reverse-engineering the ship's systems like they did with thermonuclear reaction weaponry. It's noted in Macross Chronicle to have had some battle pods aboard, though what type isn't specified.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It depends on what's stored on the wing pylons. For large munitions, it simply doesn't fold the wings... as seen in Super Dimension Fortress Macross ep27 with the RMS-1 thermonuclear reaction warheads. For smaller munitions like the AMM-1 Arrow multipurpose missile, the underwing pylons can rotate and there is enough clearance for them to do so with the missiles attached without having them bump up against the cockpit block. Nah. Hikaru was, however, one of the more skilled pilots in the SVF-1 Skulls and was selected to assume command of that squadron after his CO (Roy) passed. The F203 Dragon II is not related to variable fighter development. It was a UN Forces conventional fighter jet that was developed during the Unification Wars to adopt new materials and technological improvements that would have been difficult or impossible to retrofit into older models of fighter. It served alongside various pre-OTM conventional fighters during the Unification Wars until it was... forcibly retired... when the Zentradi vaporized them all in the orbital bombardment shortly before the First Space War ended. (While it is not strictly canon, Variable Fighter Master File even asserts there was a naval version that was considered to be F-20N.) Most of the battles in the Unification Wars were fought with conventional weaponry. Even in 2008, there were maybe a hundred operational Variable Fighters on the entire planet, with only around 60 VF-0s existing and most of those assigned to just two aircraft carriers - CVN-99 Asuka II and CVN-100 Graf Zeppelin II - for evaluation and ad hoc training use. It wasn't until very late 2008 that the first VF-1 Valkyries came off the line... most of the first few production lots went to the CVS-101 Prometheus and SDF-1 Macross, and ended up out in space.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Most Macross resources to comment on the topic put the post-war human population at approximately one million people. With the exception of the crew of the SDF-1 Macross, the survivors were those individuals who were assigned to underground military bases like the incomplete Grand Cannon III and Grand Cannon V or were offworld at installations like Apollo Base on Luna, the L5 Manufacturing Station, the space colonies at the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, and the few UN Spacy warships assigned close protection duty at those locations like the Constellation and the Midway. After the war, the New UN Government authorized a mass-cloning program to increase the size of the human population and duplicate individuals with essential skills in order to accelerate the postwar recovery effort and provide enough people to support the government's plans for extrasolar space colonization via long-distance emigrant fleets. Human cloning efforts were terminated after twenty years due to a sharp rise in the incidence of recessive genetic disorders. There were also noted to be approximately eight million Zentradi remaining after the ~4 million surviving ships of the Boddole Zer main fleet withdrew from the Sol system.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Starting Ghost in fhe Shell: Arise right now... it's a little weird seeing how everyone in this looks more or less exactly the same as they did in Stand Alone Complex except Motoko. I guess her new design better fits the idea in the movie that she went with a generic face on her prosthetic body... but stylistically it's nowhere near as appealing as her design in the manga or SAC. Her face looks painfully under-detailed compared to the rest of her, and those of the other characters. Almost to One Punch Man levels in a few shots.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Kawamori's pretty hard to predict... It's not impossible, but after so much time it feels a bit unlikely esp. since the Supervision Army's creators have already been dealt with. Edit: Not to mention the Protoculture have supposedly been extinct for a long time themselves outside of Macross II, where the Mardook were supposed to be a surviving group of them.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Prior to Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! the prevailing theory was that the SDF-2 Megaroad-01 had entered some kind of portal near the galactic core. That was based on a mail-in promo gift that came with the PlayStation Macross: Do You Remember Love? game that purported to be Minmay's last message to Earth. Another popular theory was that they had settled on some remote world that was isolated from the rest of the galaxy by fold faults like Uroboros or Windermere IV are, and that fold communications simply couldn't reach them because of that. Now, the answer seems to be that... Because neither side cares. The Zentradi mindset is pretty simple and straightforward. They're interested in pursuing and destroying enemies - the Supervision Army - and the ancient Protoculture's decision to indoctrinate curiosity out of them for the most part has left them largely uninterested in anything else. The Supervision Army is likely in the same boat with their brainwashing and being under constant threat from the Zentradi, there's no reason to attack an alien race that doesn't seem individually intelligent enough to have spiritia and isn't attacking them. If the Vajra aren't shooting at them, the Vajra belong to the category called "Not an Enemy" and are therefore firmly in "I don't care about that" territory. The Vajra, for their own part, are quite happy to be left to their own devices and ignore anything that isn't an overt threat to them. They'll respond with force if attacked themselves, but they have no real interest in going on the offensive unless their own kind are in imminent danger. That's not to say the occasional battle doesn't happen... but it's rare, since both sides tend to be thoroughly disinterested in each other. The Vajra attacked and destroyed a Zentradi main fleet and repurposed its mobile fortress as a nest for reasons unknown c.2009 that is seen in the second Macross Frontier movie. The novelization of the film asserts that the mobile fortress in question belongs to the Koper main fleet, a surviving reconnaissance unit of which attacks the Macross Frontier emigrant fleet in 2058 in the light novel Macross the Ride. The reason the Vajra attacked the Macross Frontier repeatedly in 2059 was because the biological fold waves in Ranka Lee's songs convinced the Vajra she was a Vajra herself, and they were trying to rescue her from danger. If not for that, they'd have left the Frontier and her fleet alone.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... sadly, an early cancellation was always the most likely outcome for this project. Live-action adaptations of anime or manga produced in the west have never been commercially successful. It doesn't seem to matter much how iconic or successful the original is or how much money the studio can afford to throw at it. Some things just don't seem to translate well enough to be viable. I'm inclined to suspect going for titles that already have brand awareness in the west hurts more than it helps since the show/movie then has to contend with the audience's memories of the original in addition to trying to succeed on its own merits. IMO, familiarity definitely hurt Netflix's Cowboy Bebop. I'm one episode in, and while it's not bad... or at least not agonizingly so... I'm not sure I could call it good either. The cast is clearly putting in a sincere effort but the writing, choreography, and effects just aren't there. My viewing experience as a Cowboy Bebop fan is a lot like having someone disguised unconvincingly as a family friend show up at my home uninvited and having to decide if it's worth the effort to call them on their dodgy impersonation before showing them out. Netflix seems to be making a lot of its keep-or-cancel decisions for its original or sponsored shows based on international market performance these days. Like Star Trek: Discovery, which did OK in the US but was poorly received globally. Netflix was only prevented from cancelling the series after just one season by CBS threatening to sue them over it.
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