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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Super Dimension Fortress Macross was a bit of a joint effort. Studio Nue, and particularly Shoji Kawamori, originated the series concept and pitch and they developed it initially under the sponsorship of the Wiz Corporation... a name that Artmic briefly rebranded under in 1980-1981. Due to the reorganization of Wiz Corp, the series was cut loose and found a new sponsor in ad company Big West. They continued to develop it in partnership with Artland. When they completed development and went to start production, they quickly found out Big West had significantly lowballed the budget because of their lack of experience in animation sponsorship and so Studio Nue and Big West entered into a deal with Tatsunoko Production to have Tatsunoko bankroll the animation production and in exchange grant them the international distribution and merchandising rights to the series. (Artland's development involvement was the contribution of Haruhiko Mikimoto, who designed the characters, though the designs are owned by Studio Nue and Big West.) Ownership of the material is all about who paid for it to be made (work-for-hire). Artmic (as Wiz Corp) originally sponsored development but Studio Nue bought out Artmic's stake in the series when they parted ways. Big West sponsored the rest of development. So Big West and Studio Nue jointly own the designs, concepts, etc. of the series because they essentially split the check. Tatsunoko, for its part, owned the copyright on the physical animation itself but not the material in it because they only financed the show's production. Not without a retrofit. Since only twelve more Macross-class ships were made between the end of the First Space War and the design's retirement in favor of the Battle-class, it wasn't a concern that ever really came up. Especially since there's not really anything wrong with the postwar ARMD II-class that's usually used in that capacity except that it isn't particularly stealthy. Big West. They lowballed the budget on Macross because they were inexperienced with animation sponsorship and weren't expecting the series to take off like it did. Once it did take off, they (in partnership with Tatsunoko) are the ones who greenlit an extension to the series (ep28-36) and then Big West later greenlit a movie version based on the show's continuing success.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Ghost in the Shell: Arise's Alternative Architecture and New Movie today. For a watered down version of Ghost in the Shell, it finally started to feel like a worthy installment once I got to the "Pyrophoric Cult" story and the movie. It's definitely weird having a version of the story where the Major's origin is actually known... she's always been a Multiple Choice Past sort of character, with various versions of the story going so far as to suggest NOTHING was known about her down to her age or pre-cyberization gender. Especially having EVERYONE ELSE apparently know it too. Not sure I care for the actual ending, since the villain of the piece gets off scott free and there are no real consequences for anyone involved in the Firestarter incident. It got a little into Ghost in the Shell's traditional transhuman philosophizing near the end... not enough to have any significant thoughts, but enough to at least feel like it deserved the title. My viewing group's gonna start Jojo's Bizarre Adventure VI: Stone Ocean later.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Alas, the world may never know what Kakizaki's favorite dry rub for steaks was... "Sort of" and "Signs point to No", respectively. Macross Chronicle devoted a World Guide sheet devoted to them (#18A). It mentions the prevailing theory is that Galactic Whales are a species that predates the evolution of the Protoculture. It also makes multiple references to the Zolan belief/theory that the white whale that Graham Hoyly was so intent on bringing down was potentially over one million years old (though the average whale's lifespan is believed to be ~7,000 years). If true, that'd mean the white whale was around when the Protoculture were still figuring out things like agriculture. Given what was established in Dynamite 7 about being able to harvest material from Galactic Whales for use in fold systems and Frontier's material later establishing the ancient Protoculture's technology was inspired by study of natural super dimension life forms like the Vajra, it seems likely that the reverse is true. That the Protoculture may have made studies of galactic whales to learn the secrets of space folding and potentially modeled the Zentradi's warships on the whales themselves.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    "I told you we should've pulled over to ask for directions..." ... I think there might be some Robotech-isms creeping in here. There isn't a Vajra "king", as such. The Vajra are not even individually intelligent. What their species has isn't quite a traditional hive mind so much as each Vajra is an individual node in a vast biological version of a distributed computer network achieved via biological zero-time fold communication. They have a communal intelligence that exists "in the cloud" the biological fold wave network forms, though its thought process and worldview are wholly alien to the individually-intelligent humanoids of the galaxy. The Vajra's Queen forms are no more sentient than any other Vajra on individual terms. Biological reproduction aside, their function is to serve as network routers that regulate and direct communication inside the Vajra's distributed network. It's not clear if the Vajra even have a concept of "conquest", their species has led a harmonious existence for so long that the Protoculture supposedly idolized them for it and tried to emulate it technologically in a bid to solve their internal strife. They nest in various places that are convenient to the resources they need to thrive, but they're not aggressive unless provoked and since they can live in places that are generally inhospitable to humanoids they're not exactly competing with humanoids for territory either. The only reason they were attacking the Macross Frontier fleet in Macross Frontier was that Ranka's biological fold wave emissions made them think Ranka was a Vajra and needed rescue (not to mention it was her signature song "Aimo" that is tuned to produce fold waves equivalent to a Vajra mating call), and they attacked Macross Galaxy because Macross Galaxy attacked them first and was actively hunting them for their fold quartz. As long as humanoids leave them alone, the Vajra don't seem to even mind living on the same planet as humanoids as on Uroboros.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the turnout being low is kind of expected since they did pretty much bugger-all to actually advertise this one-day engagement outside of the die-hard Macross fandom, which has more or less been an underground phenomena for the last twenty-odd years. It's still a promising sign of things to come, and I'm glad they did it.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... as @Keith said, RottenTomatoes has kind of lost its utility as an actual metric for gauging audience opinions. It's too vulnerable to review-bombing from both sides in the general audiences section. It is interesting that two-thirds of the Top Critics, who are usually bought-and-paid-for or at least try to soft-soap their criticism, are raking the series over the coals too. CNN's reviewer straight-up called the series "dull". Time Magazine, the New York Times, New York Magazine, Empire Magazine, and Roger Ebert all basically said the only thing it's good for is reminding you the much-better anime exists. Ebert suggested someone should put a bounty on the showrunners! The nicest thing some of them could muster, like the Japan Times, is "not as bad as Death Note". That's somewhere between "damned by faint praise" and "murdered by words" considering that one usually gets mentiond i the same breath as Dragonball Evolution. There's no freaking middle ground in the audience reviews. It's all five star tongue polishing of the show's boots that tries to put the blame on fans of the original anime or one star reviews blasting Netflix for murdering a classic. There are a few more nuanced opinions, but they're a very small minority of the ~2,000 posts of gushing praise and scathing hate. (I am slightly bemused that the people who tried to drag politics into it from either side of the aisle seem to be united by their agreement that it sucks even while they blame each other for ruining it.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Whose "hyperspace drive"? That term is used by a lot of different sci-fi titles and performs differently in each. In Macross, space folding is already traveling via the higher dimensional spacetime broadly analogous to (and sometimes translated as) "hyperspace". It differs from a hyperdrive in, say, Star Wars in that the ship is not physically sailing through that higher dimension. Instead, the ship is using gravity control to bridge two points in realspace by compressing the higher dimension space between the two points until their respective coordinates overlap and then pushing the ship into and out of that collapsed higher dimension space to cirumvent the distance between Point A and Point B without actually moving at all. (Some Japanese publications refer to this as "exchanging" the space, with the implication the fold actually causes two volumes of space to violently switch places along with everything in them.) I'd assume that if the dimensional distortion of a fold fault is enough to knock a folding ship out of higher dimension space that it'd probably do something equally unpleasant to another other kind of stardrive tapping the same higher dimension to get around.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Just got back from the screening at the Rochester Hills, MI Emagine theater. The turnout was about what the online booking showed... roughly a half-full house. Everyone seemed to be pretty excited going into it, and the audience seemed to be having a good time throughout. I know I enjoyed myself immensely. The subtitle translation was a bit dodgy, but not enough so to be truly jarring.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't that kind of a books-only thing? It's been a while but IIRC it was only really Voldemort and the Hogwarts teachers who wore robes everywhere in the movies and everyone else would throw the occasional robe/cloak over a regular suit or school uniform. It'd be harder to do action sequences if everyone were pantsless. (That and, y'know, since they tried to grim things up a bit they don't have accidental comedy from folks going around dressed like the dumpster behind a Goodwill.) We should probably count our lucky stars they haven't gone back far enough to see pre-modern bathroom Hogwarts where students and staff canonically just sh*t on the floor and cleaned it up with magic. (J.K. Rowling is a very strange person.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Looking forward to seeing all these mysterious Macross fans I didn't know existed at the Rochester Hills showing...
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The surprise the Zentradi of the Vrlitwhai branch fleet felt when they saw what humanity had done to the Supervision Army warship that'd crashed on Earth ten years previously had a slightly more mundane origin. One of the ways the ancient Protoculture kept their Zentradi in line and under control in addition to strict military regulations was to impose mental conditioning (brainwashing/indoctrination) to dissuade them from pursuing creative/productive thoughts and actions. Not just in terms of artistic/cultural pursuits or reproducing, that also extended to the kind of thought processes involved in repairing or modifying technology. This set them up to be wholly dependent on the factory satellites that were also controlled by the Protoculture. That someone on the planet had changed the ship's design was reason enough for them to be gobsmacked. That, combined with the way humanity's original ships and fighters subsequently opened fire on them with weapons based on lost technology, gave them a lot of pause for thought about who exactly they'd been shooting at. The way the crew of the Macross constantly defied the rules of space warfare as the Zentradi understood them only exacerbated the Zentradi's bewilderment.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.)
  15. 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.)
  16. 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".
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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?"
  22. 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.
  23. 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.)
  24. 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.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Presumably that capability was covered elsewhere... like the heavily armed Grave Battleship and the heavy converging beam cannon-equipped scout.
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