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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    *coughs diffidently* HG seems to have sorted out the legal issues from their licensing intermediary going belly-up... so Robotech, at the very least, is now showing up in Funimation's streaming catalog. If HG is assisting with distribution of Macross titles stateside, that means Funimation is a likely port of call too.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sure OP was serious... but yeah, everyone else appropriately saw this as an appalling joke. 😅
  3. Seto Kaiba
    lil bit, yeah.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    After the events of Macross VF-X2 - which have since become referred to as the Second Unification War - the victorious pro-autonomy faction's reforms to the organization of the New UN Government and New UN Forces granted the individual member governments more autonomy to manage their own affairs. There was also a general housecleaning to remove the members of the fascist movement that attempted to overthrow the government by force. Part of that was creating an oversight bureau that was tasked with policing the special forces to prevent the military brass from abusing their authority to suppress political dissent, in direct response to them having done exactly that in the Second Unification War by branding a variety of anti-fascist movements as terrorists or rebels and ordering the special forces in to suppress them. (Whether or not the special forces have a heel realization and join with the largest of those anti-fascist organizations is the difference between the good end and bad end in the game.) The newly formed oversight bureau was named for the leader of the Vindirance paramilitary organization that successfully prevented the coup, Mariafokina Barnrose. (Whom Macross Chronicle claims is possibly Therese Jenius operating under a paper-thin alias using her middle name and an assumed family name.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    So... yes and no? Earth is the de facto capital of the New UN Government, but it's also an individual member government that apparently has its own local defense force operating under the banner of the New UN Forces in addition to the central/"federal" New UN Forces that answer to the supranational New UN Government directly. In theory, the local-level governments and their defense forces are semi-autonomous in a lot of ways but are also answerable to the supranational government and the authority of its armed forces respectively where laws and circumstances demand. You can kind of think of the local forces as being a bit like the national guard in that sense, able to fight independently or as a reserve element for the central forces. There is a special oversight agency specifically tasked with preventing abuse of authority by the military brass on Earth too (the Barnrose Authority).
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The backlog marathon has no brakes... I finished the entirety of The Irregular at Magic High School. Kind of an anemic series on the whole, since Tatsuya has the emotional range of a not-particularly-fresh cucumber and would otherwise fall into the category of "smug super" if he was capable of expressing emotion at all. There's some good worldbuilding going on there but it suffers terribly from the cold indifference of its main character and how quickly everyone accepts that this supposedly-substandard magician from an unknown family is an utterly unstoppable godmode sue who defies all logic, reason, and the rules of magic as they understand them. I question the sanity of Funimation's viewing recommendations too, since the site tried to fob me off with a short ONA called Bikini Warriors. It's... not quite what I expected, in that it's a parody of the kind of gratuitously exploitative crap that the title would make you think it was. It's still pretty skeevy tho. At five minutes a pop including credits the entire series lasts maybe an hour and offers a few cheap D&D-style murderhobo laughs and some forgettably gratuitous fanservice. I've started The Devil is a Part-Timer!, and it's also wildly different from what I expected. I was given to understand this series was a comedy. It's veering more and more towards the territory of action drama and has a lot more substance to it than I was prepared for. I can't but feel like this has almost the same premise as I Couldn't Become a Hero, So I Reluctantly Decided to Get a Job!.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'd always assumed it was because she couldn't think of a way to make it look like an accident. It's probably also a way of clawing back some money from the bootleg uploads too... if there's an official channel airing a rotating catalog of the genuine article for free, they can steal views from the bootlegs AND rake in some ad dollars while they're at it, and whatever its faults YouTube is a pretty widely used streaming service. I just wish Big West would put a little more effort in. These videos from their Macross mobile game aren't exactly great-looking or representative of the actual content of the franchise.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Avoiding spoilers for a twenty-seven year old OVA they're planning to re-release to a much wider audience in the near future? Mind you, they're also ignoring that Mikumo is Lady M's walking, talking, human rights violation... a three year old illegal clone created and brainwashed to fight by her "mother", kept as a virtual slave, and given only the bare minimum education and social interaction. Or that Mylene is frequently less interested in dancing around Basara during concerts than she is in entertaining the innocent fantasy of garroting him with his own guitar strings for being a pillock. Minimum-effort promotional material while their efforts are focused elsewhere. I'd assume eventually, once their distribution agreements are in order, we'll start seeing proper Macross promotional materials or whole episodes appearing on the official channel like Gundam's official rest-of-world YouTube channel does.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, Lt. General Kabirov isn't the Chief of Staff of the Space Forces... she's the commander of the Earth defense fleet and its flagship, Macross-13.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    At what level? The Earth UN Forces and New UN Forces organization is, by all indications, based on the organization of the US military and Japan's SDF and we can make some basic inferences from that and from information presented in the series and supplemental material. Based on that, there are probably several different individuals at different levels of organization that you could point to as the "head honcho" depending on how technical or granular you want to get. At the very apex of the chain of command would be the Prime Minister of the New Unification Government who also serves as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Below the Prime Minister, the cabinet's Minister of Defense overseeing the Ministry of Defense. Below the Minister of Defense, the Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff. Below the Chief of Staff of the Joint Staff, the Chief of Staff of the Space Forces. Based on Macross Frontier's Leon Mishima and Macross Delta's Lauri Malan, individual emigrant governments also appear to have their own local Joint Staff offices overseeing the local defense forces which presumably have their own local chiefs of staff for the various branches of service. So in any given location there are probably at least or seven different people with a fair claim to being "head honcho" of the NUNS depending on what level of organization you're talking about. Very little has been said about the individuals who actually hold such high offices in official Macross material, though. The only person ever explicitly identified as the commander specifically of the space forces is Vrlithwhai Kridanik, who assumed the post after the First Space War ended. We don't know how long he occupied the position, who his predecessors were, etc. General Takashi Hayase may have been one of them. Two Prime Ministers have been named, but they're both prewar old UN Government ones: the inaugural PM Harlan J. Niven and his successor Robert A. Rhysling. The military named the first and fourteenth ARMD-class ships after them (respectively). We know Bruno J. Global joined the New UN Government after retiring from the military post-war, and he may have served as term or more as the Prime Minister given that they apparently named a Uraga-class carrier after him (CV-339 Bruno J. Global) in addition to the Macross-class battleship that they'd already named after him in his military capacity (SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global). There may be another in Macross M3, by the name of Lawrence Yun Kamal.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Both Stealth Wing X designs there are presented with an (unofficial) in-universe setting of them being stealth technology evaluation airframes that were prototyping a passive stealth VF that would operate in tandem with the passive stealth-focused VF-17 Nightmare. Presumably the Stealth Wing X would be an unrealized 3rd Generation VF since the subject of the passively (and actively) stealthy Next Main Fighter was resolved some time after the VF-17's introduction in the form of Project Super Nova (Macross Plus). Real world influences aside, the unofficial setting for the Stealth Wing X designs seems to exist in that weird developmental moment that spawned the VF-17, where radar systems had caught up to the 2nd Generation active stealth systems in use at the time and it was necessary to have greater emphasis on passive stealth technology. 3rd Generation active stealth's introduction tipped the scales back into active stealth's favor, somewhere around the time the VF-19 2nd mass production type rolled out, reducing the need for internal storage of a VF's weaponry. (3rd Gen active stealth is why we see the VF-171 and VF-25 having gone back to hanging large numbers of missiles and other hardware from the wings, though some sources e.g. Master File assert that the 5th Gen VFs also included new passive stealth design choices meant to foil fold wave radars incl. fold wave-absorbent materials.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Back when Macross Zero was in production, Kawamori answered basically this exact question in a column he wrote for Character Model magazine. For that column, he put forward two different designs that were his modern takes on the VF-1 Valkyrie: the SW-XA1 Schneeblume and SW-XAII Schneegans: As you can see, the SW-XA1 isn't much different to the VF-1 Valkyrie we're familiar with from the 1980's. It was nearly the same aircraft, though you can see a number of areas of its design changed to accommodate passively stealthy design changes and other more modern touches. You can't see it on this particular spread, but one of the touches was having a pair of internal missile bays in the outside of the leg in place of underwing pylons. The SW-XAII is a more radical design that is more reminiscent of Kawamori's later designs for the VF-25, VF-27, and especially YF-29. (There are hints that this is not an accidental relationship, including a YF-29 in the Schneegans's white-and-green colors on page 27 of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, it wouldn't be hard to make Nichijou a lot better... just cut the overlong reaction shot gags and drop absolutely everything to do with the professor. I don't know if it's cultural or what, but I can't find a bratty kid abusing their caregiver with impunity funny. If ever a kid needed a swift caning, the professor is it.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    So... yes, the VF-19 Excalibur and VF-22 Sturmvogel II are in limited use in some emigrant fleets. The New UN Forces decision to drop the VF-19 from its planned adoption as the Next Main Fighter due to a combination of factors including cost, training accidents, and arms export restrictions imposed by the New UN Government saw the VF-19 effectively join its one time rival the VF-22 as a Special Forces VF. The Macross Frontier fleet (c.2058) was known to have a special forces unit codenamed Round Table that used a locally-developed VF-19E derivative designated VF-19EF Caliburn (see Macross R). The Frontier fleet used customized VF-19s for data collection in the development of the YF-25 as well (the VF-19ACTIVE). The VF-171 was the New UN Forces Main Variable Fighter though due to the lower initial cost and lower cost of operation it ended up effectively sharing the main fighter role with the semi-autonomous AIF-7 Ghost.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    So... I'm nearly done with Nichijou. I can definitely say that I didn't enjoy this series as an anime. It might be more enjoyable as a 4koma. Its main problem is that what little content it has is spread so painfully thin that it tries to fill runtime by presenting excessively long reaction shots as a joke in and of themselves. That kind of gag is funny once, or once in a while at the absolute best. If you use it every episode or multiple times per episode like the Nichijou anime does, it becomes obnoxious very quickly.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness, it wasn't even really Sharon Apple's fault... the computer model of a human mind she was built on was populated with emotion data from Myung Fang "I have issues" Lone, and then that idiot Marj Gueldoa installed a processor that might as well have had a label "CRAZY INSIDE" into her to make her autonomous.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, probably not. Much like how, in the real world, there are some pretty significant technological and ethical hurdles to be overcome before unmanned fighters achieve enough acceptance to wind up being considered as a true replacement for manned fighters, the Macross universe seems to still have a lot of unsolved ethical concerns about unmanned fighters that aren't going to be going away anytime soon. If anything, I'd say we're in for something more like Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere or Ace Combat: Infinity's Butterfly Master with pilots operating Valkyries remotely much the way that Grace O'Connor and Brera Sterne were shown doing with their VF-27s. Almost certainly not. Especially since artificially intelligent virtuoids like Sharon Apple was initially faked-up to be (and later became) are illegal under the New UN Government's laws. The "last manned fighter" thing? That's mentioned in a few different sources in connection with the VF-25 and VF-27. Master File mentions it as well, IIRC.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, absolutely they do. The... "assertions"... about supposed World War II subtext in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series are completely baseless nonsense you posted in an utterly transparent attempt to appear knowledgeable. Macross Dynamite 7's entire A-plot revolves around Basara becoming involved with a Zolan family who are involved in galactic whale conservation efforts, a group of poachers who are illegally hunting galactic whales in the Zola system, and Basara's efforts to communicate with the galactic whales via song. The story ends with Basara successfully communicating with the leader of the pod of galactic whales, foiling the poachers, and establishing that the galactic whales are intelligent life forms. It's about as transparently Save the Whales as it gets. Macross Frontier's official setting materials are similarly quite clear that the events of Macross Plus caused the New UN Government to shelve its plans to adopt an unmanned fighter as the next main fighter of the New UN Forces on the grounds that it deemed autonomous unmanned fighters dangerously unreliable. That, combined with the issues the military had in its efforts to transition from the VF-11 to the VF-19, led to the development and adoption of the VF-171 as the 4th Generation main fighter and the deployment of the stripped-down semi-autonomous AIF-7S Ghost as a supplemental aircraft. It's also noted in several publications, incl. Macross Chronicle, that the fully-autonomous combat functions that the Ghost X-9 demonstrated are prohibited or heavily restricted by law. The Macross Galaxy fleet is noted to have illegally loaded its AIF-9V Ghost V-9's with autonomous air combat AIs and to have programmed them to carry out kamikaze attacks if they were running out of fuel or ammunition. (When Luca enables the autonomous air combat AI in his three Ghosts, which he's noted to have received special dispensation to install, he refers to it as "the power that once plunged Macross City into the depths of fear". It even carries a rather ominous name, "SYSTEM JUDAS", in keeping with Luca's habit of giving his gear biblical names.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... though Kawamori is known as something of an "out there" director who does unconventional things as he pleases. Oh, likely. After all, the 5th Generation Variable Fighters are tipped to be the "last manned fighter" in Macross the same way that real world 5th Generation fighter jets are tipped to be the "last manned fighter" before unmanned fighter aircraft take over. Given concerns about the usage of unmanned combat aircraft it seems unlikely that the 5th Generation will be a final one for manned fighters in the real world or in Macross, but it's wearing the real world parallel on its sleeve. ... no, it's not taboo. It would just be completely unfounded nonsense. And no, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not a common theme in 70's and 80's anime. Outside of a few rather niche and very strange titles, Japanese media tends to avoid or downplay the Second World War and the rather touchy subjects therein. There have been whole franchises cancelled for the suggestion that they were in some way glorifying Japan's... behavior... from that period. The one real influence from World War II that you'll find in sci-fi/mecha anime most of the time is the taboo against the "good guys" using nuclear weapons... which is frequently worked around by the simple expedient of either calling nuclear weapons something else or explicitly having some form of ersatz nuclear weapon that is just as destructive but is explicitly non-nuclear. Even then, both Gundam and Macross buck the trend by explicitly featuring the protagonists using nuclear weapons.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Macross does tend to mirror real world issues in its setting fairly often. It's not surprising that modern anxieties about unmanned combat aircraft would find their way into the story in one form or another, not just in terms of general anxieties about arming robots but also in terms of the revelations from whistleblowers about the frequency with which drone strikes were killing people other than the intended target (a whopping 90% of the time). Macross Dynamite 7 was perhaps Macross at its most blatant in that regard, being a spectacularly blunt Aesop about whaling.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That was kind of inevitable the minute they announced it was getting an Autumn release. Here's to hoping there's no more pandemic-induced disruptions to the release schedule.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    There is at least a promotional screening mentioned in November: https://macross.jp/news/?id=1489
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It might be... and the exact reason that the VF-19S has so many guns is unclear. That said, the VF-19S is actually carrying two different types of directed energy weapon on its monitor turret. The VF-19's first mass production type - the VF-19A/B/C/D/E? - had only the one Mauler REB-30G anti-aircraft laser cannon on its monitor turret. It was replaced by a small bore particle beam cannon on the VF-19F and VF-19S and the VF-19S adopted that quartet of anti-aircraft laser cannons in addition to it for reasons unclear. Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for Docker's VF-19S notes that the laser cannons can also be used as a laser communication system, suggesting that's part of the communication robustness improvements that tend to come with the "S" variant command specification, but offers no further justification. I'd almost argue the extra laser cannons are simply a New UN Forces tradition at this point to make it look more like the VF-1S. Master File has a rather odd (unofficial) take that the VF-19F/S type also normally uses the REB-30G laser cannon that the initial production types used, that the particle beam cannon is not an entirely stable system, and that the lasers were added to the VF-19S type to provide a backup in the event that the beam cannon fails.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    But he's looking for the... Cannon... answer.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Same with Azumanga Daioh, as it happens... the parallels are stacking up.
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