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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I'd expect the opposite... that a "low cost" Variable Fighter would economize by removing GERWALK mode. There's not a lot of use for GERWALK mode in space and GERWALK mode was an unintentional addition to the original design (in-universe) that originally called for just Fighter and Battroid modes. Several previous space-use VF designs have omitted GERWALK mode like the VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie from Macross II: Lovers Again or the non-canon VF-X3 Medusa from FamilySoft's series of Macross games. Nothing whatsoever, yeah... Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried is kind of a mess, and largely disregards the New UN Forces-spec VF-31 Kairos in favor of waxing lyrical about Xaos's ace custom version. The book has a fair number of variants that aren't in the series but they're all basically just bizarre wing configurations that were clearly dreamed up to pad the book.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    When it comes to Gundam, how would you even tell if 90% of the cast were "race-flipped"? The vast majority of the characters in most any Gundam show are of ambiguous or at best uncertain ancestry, and spacenoids in particular are variously implied or outright stated to be mixed. Even names are no bloody help in the matter. Kai Shiden, for instance, has a very conspicuously Japanese-sounding name... but his profile reveals his family hails from Puerto Rico. He's far from the only one like that too just in the UC, never mind the AUs where you have conspicuously Japanese names and aliases taken on by people who are anywhere from Kurdish (00's Setsuna F. Seiei) to Russian (Wing's Heero Yuy). Hell, we've already had a version of the OYW with a female lead... that was For the Barrel. I can honestly say I've never felt hurt by a different take on a character... I've certainly been annoyed when writers substitute shameless pandering based on a character's gender or ethnicity for actual character development, but that's about the limit of it unless the new take on the character is just pure hot garbage. Gundam has already given us plenty of mutually contradictory alternate takes on the UC era, so I'm not going to be bothered if we end up with another alternate take where someone is a slightly different shade of brown or something. What'll bother me is if the writers sh*t all over Gundam's setting and themes in the name of making another boring big stompy robot movie.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Call me crazy if you like, but given that it was critically panned and was a box office flop... I have this sneaking suspicion that's objectively untrue. TBH, I think that concern is valid for Gundam in general. American producers and writers aren't big on subtle at the best of times, and Gundam's trademark character drama is likely to be lost completely between that and the temptation to go all-in on a giant robot property destruction extravaganza. That said, I'd argue that the "pointless gender and race flips" are a borderline nonevent for Gundam anyway. Between the mukokuseki animation design and the fact that many of the franchise's spacefuture settings are frequently far enough removed from modern concepts of nationality and race that it's difficult if not impossible to assign an actual national origin and ethnicity to most of the characters, it hardly feels like it matters. (So much so that this is an acknowledged issue for spacenoids, many of whom are two or more generations removed from any kind of Earth nationality and no longer identify in those terms.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    What WASN'T wrong with Speed Racer? The Wachowskis produced, wrote, and directed an adaptation of a TV anime about professional car racing and made it about everything they could think of except the actual racing that was the source material's main draw. If anything, the idea that the live action Gundam film is potentially in the hands of fans makes me more pessimistic about its prospects... not less.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Trying to guess Kawamori's direction is an exercise in futility... when he's really trying, he comes up with the weirdest sh*t and somehow makes it work. I mean, c'mon... Macross 7 was "what if an indie band fought soul-sucking space kaiju vampires with the power of rock?". We've had stories about a retired idol who became a soldier and then an air racer. We had a stage musical that was a thinly veiled criticism of Japanese rearmament and the government's reassessment of Article 9. Macross Delta was a shot at rising nationalist sentiments explored through the antics of a middle aged 14 year old teenage runaway idol singer and an aerobatics team. Let's not forget the one that was literally "save the whales". He'll come up with something that sounds completely insane on paper and he'll make it work somehow. He's an arms dealer. The ancient Protoculture left a distressing amount of advanced military hardware laying around, some of which was so distressingly powerful that they themselves were afraid to use it. Not to mention his fascination with the battlefield applications of music, which he has not-unreasonable grounds to suspect might've been their ultimate weapon.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Hey RightStuf, that's the wrong stuff! Did they even? It would not be the first time Harmony Gold "cheated" a little on a media format change and just transferred what they already had. Like how the initial Robotech DVD releases were transfers from degraded VHS tapes. My money's on this being an upsampling of Robotech Remastered.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Feeling a little flat after the last few episodes of the shows I've been following this season, so I'm going back in time to watch the original The Slayers series. I've seen most of the OVAs, but it occurred to me while I was doing some cleaning that I'd never actually seen the original show.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, no... what you found there is Brofessor's site, and it's pretty damned far from "great". To be brutally frank, it's incredibly pretentious and almost entirely unresearched faux-academic garbage that would have to improve considerably before I could call it a travesty. Its author knows precious little about Macross and even less about film theory, but is desperate to make himself out to be an expert on both. Since he can't read Japanese and do actual research on the subject matter, he instead tries to add a superficial appearance of depth to his "analysis" by throwing around film analysis terminology willy-nilly without any actual knowledge of what the terms he's using mean and ascribing deep, hidden meanings to ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. He seems to have taken W.C. Fields to heart: "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullsh*t." When it comes to his "analysis" of what Zentradi designs were based on, not only is he wrong but his analysis was nothing more than taking the knowledge that Zentradi designs had a basis in the organic and then attributing it to the first living thing he could think of that bore a vague resemblance. The Regult, for instance, is actually based on an earlier reverse-jointed walker design from an unrealized hard sci-fi series concept with the working title Genocidas. The design that was done for Genocidas was not organically inspired, but was an attempt to make what they felt would be a more practical and realistic ambulatory design for a giant robot. It was built on in Macross both as the VF-1's GERWALK mode and the basis for Zentradi pods, the latter of which started out as a sort of walking gun turret before taking on more organic aesthetics. It reminds me of nothing so much as a college student throwing a bunch of random garbage on an essay an hour before it's due in the hopes that the professor will grade it without actually reading it at any point.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The above is also why, on the few occasions we've seen New UN Forces-aligned Zentradi troops outside of Macross II, they've ended up as hostiles rather than friendlies... it's easier to tell what team are the "good guys" if everyone's wearing the same jersey.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    When the ancient Protoculture created the Zentradi to fight their wars for them, several measures were taken to ensure that the Zentradi wouldn't - or couldn't - turn on them. They thoroughly indoctrinated the Zentradi to limit their thinking to matters within the strict military hierarchy created for them and instill obedience to the Protoculture's directives. They also deliberately limited the education available to the Zentradi to the training needed to fulfill their military role and also forbade them any knowledge of (non-military) culture and creative/productive pursuits. This left the Zentradi dependent on the Protoculture at the top of the chain of command for their literal and figurative marching orders, and on the factory satellites created for them for every aspect their logistical support from troop replacements to production of fresh weapons and ammunition. You could say that the so-called "Lost" Zentradi who have not yet encountered Earth's culture see their technology as a series of black boxes. They know that it works, and they know how to work it, but beyond that they have no real understanding of how it works or how to repair it when it breaks down. To them, "it just works". So even if the Zentradi were to actually examine their factory satellites and clap eyes on the "blueprints" for what it was making, it wouldn't mean a thing to them because they lack both the basic knowledge and frame of reference to properly understand what they're looking at. It's not entirely true that there are no changes or upgrades. Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for the Factory Satellite in the original series mentions that it has the some capacity to make incremental improvements to the standardized weapons it produces and has presumably been doing so for ~500,000 years.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, the VF-171 is getting the same treatment the VF-11 got... where we were only introduced to it as its eventual successor was entering the final phases of testing. To a certain extent, it's understandable that we're seeing a lot of it nevertheless since Delta was the second series in a row where we were introduced to a PMC that'd been hired to do operational evaluation testing on the next-generation fighter before it entered mass production and began to be phased into military service. The VF-25 entered military service in the mid-2060s and the VF-31 is set to enter military service in 2069 or 2070, and even then it'll take YEARS to phase them in as squadrons undergo model conversion training in their respective local defense forces. All in all, the VF-171 is indicated in print materials at least to be an effective and highly versatile Valkyrie that balances respectable performance against impressive ease-of-use, so it's not surprising it's an attractive option.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    So... the official Macross website and the Bandai Mecha Colle model kit for the VF-171s in Macross Delta refer to that type as the "Remote Sector Specification" or "Frontier Sector Specification" (辺境宙域仕様). The English text on the mecha colle kit translates that as "Rim World Model". One thing that was introduced around the time of Macross Frontier was the idea that when individual governments build VFs locally under license, they will sometimes modify the specs of those VFs to accommodate locally-available technologies or just better suit their perceived needs. Depending on the severity of the changes, this led to either an all-new local variant (like the VF-19EF Caliburn) or a local specification of an existing variant. The Delta VF-171s appear to be a local specification based on c.2055 VF-171 Block II. (It's a reskin of the base VF-171 model from Macross Frontier.) Similar coloration, but not the same. The VF-171EX type is white, not khaki. Also, being equipped with MDE weapons isn't a requirement of the VF-171EX specification. Just the modifications to the aircraft itself like the adoption of the VF-25's ablative anti-beam coating, the improved engines, and cockpit retrofit to adopt EX-Gear. In the Macross Delta gaiden manga Macross E, we see a Xaos branch operating VF-171EX Nightmare Plus EX's without the MDE weapons package. Block IIIF is the Macross Frontier movie upgrade version. It got the same sensor and engine improvements, but did not adopt the remodeled cockpit, EX-Gear, or anti-beam coating that were present on the EX-type. The movie-specific writeup to the IIIF type in Macross Chronicle treats the 30mm machine gun and MDE beam gun unit from the EX-type as part of the AAS-171 Armor Pack, describing it as a "composite weapon pack". The AVM-11R anti-ship missile launcher mounted opposite is the same as the EX-type's as well. Given that the Block IIIF was a Macross Frontier fleet original development, and that the Brisingr Alliance is... "economically troubled"... I think it's safe to assume that these are local spec versions of the Block II.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    For the record, Funimation did confirm that they'd struck an exclusive licensing agreement with Harmony Gold back in 2019. That said, the actual status of the contract is unclear because the actual license was managed by a third party (Kew Media Group) that went out of business about five months after the announcement. So the actual status of Funimation's stake in all this is... vague? Uncertain? A complete mystery?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    As long as you aren't holding out hope for a high-quality English dub, it should be fine.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    "Mecha" isn't an in-universe category... it's an out-of-universe only term. The Gnerl, the Quel-Quallie, and the troop lander are all officially lumped in the general category of "Pods"... being an "Air Battle Pod" or "Aerial Dogfight Pod", "Theatre Scout Pod", and "Large Landing Pod" respectively. I don't believe the recovery craft is officially listed in that category, but it probably should be "Recovery Pod".
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Used literally, the definition is a lot broader than that. Even in Macross Chronicle, you'll find the Mechanic Sheets contain relatively mundane things like conventional aircraft, cars and motorbikes, and even vending machines alongside the more exotic things like space warships and giant robots.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That'd do it, yeah... I know it's a source of some frustration/irritation for him that Macross has sort of stopped publishing final line art in favor of using images of the CG models the animation actually uses. So instead of scanning, cleaning up, and coloring the line art it's an effort to scan and clean up official pics of CG models which last he and I spoke wasn't quite as compelling artistically. I really wanna get the framework for it launched before Super Dimension Con, at the very least. I'm a good software engineer and a pretty good server admin, but I am a rubbish web developer so it takes for-freaking-ever since I'm re-teaching myself the latest versions of the various design technologies I'm using.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yes... I believe Mr March is working on Macross Delta content for the Macross Mecha Manual. I'm not sure when it will go live. I know his enthusiasm for Macross runs hot and cold where mine is kind of a constant low simmer. I've been keeping the site's backend running, but I haven't been contributing to new content development for a while as a result of my day job and development of my own website project which has a scope that's incompatible with the Mecha Manual's.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The New UN Government has rather a lot of captured factory satellites. More than twenty were captured in the postwar period and several more have been discovered and taken since. It's highly probable that "lessons learned" from factory satellites WRT automation have been applied to factory ships like the Three Star type.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Long story short, the New UN Forces captured a Quimeliquola automated factory satellite and relocated it to orbit of Eden, then contracted General Galaxy to restore/repair it. General Galaxy used what they learned from repairing the factory satellite to develop a modernized/improved version of the Queadluun-Rau and also applied some of what they learned to the YF-21.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    An almost literal case of what TV Tropes would call Offscreen Villain Dark Matter. (It should probably be read Protodeviln Heritage, or "Legacy" in the sense of "Inheritance".) Basically, it's an advanced type of automated factory satellite that doesn't need an outside source of raw material, violating conservation of mass. It's capable of pulling energy from higher dimensional space and turning it into matter. It's believed that these facilities produced the Varauta Grand Fleet that the Protodeviln used in Macross 7.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Catching up to various shows in this season... It looks like So I'm a Spider, So What? is going to end its season right where the light novel because a master class in blueballing readers who were hoping for the plot to progress. The bit where... The unnamed protagonist is still moderately likeable, even if she's showing more and more sociopathic tendencies now that she's out in a world of eminently squishy humans, but the writing in this is faithful to the light novel in all the bad ways. At this rate it'll be 2-3 more seasons before this sidebar flashback rejoins the actual plot and still doesn't really help that the generic fantasy world isekai story is still way more interesting than watching a misanthropic spider shovel fruit into its gullet. I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level continues to be enjoyable, light-and-fluffy nonsense. Nothing groundbreaking or even particularly interesting to make it stand out, but it's pretty much the perfect "breather" show if you're watching something heavy. Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun! has actually taken a turn for the interesting with Iruma's "evil" side - apparently "evil" is VERY relative - having taken him over and made him into someone with an actual spine. Now it feels less Actually, I am... and more Rosario+Vampire II-esque. It's actually become rather interesting and I kinda wanna see where "Evil" Iruma is going with this. How Not to Summon a Demon Lord: Omega is... itself. It's one of those shows where I really suspect the people working on it tell their families they're unemployed. Started watching Osamake: Romcom Where The Childhood Friend Won't Lose. It's been a while since I've felt like a series managed to pull a bait and switch on me so quickly, with the title seemingly like a straightforward declaration of intent but the series quickly revealing it's a two childhood friend love triangle. Also a weirdly aggressive love triangle story. The girls are NOT messing around.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, given that Kakizaki's death in the in-universe movie Do You Remember Love? has even become something of a meme or popular superstition, odds are Roy enjoys the in-universe status of "memetic badass" in addition to basically being the guy who wrote the (possibly literal) book on VF aerial combat. 's probably not accidental command units keep including gold trim for ages afterwards.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It's not just that. Roy was a fan favorite character and was/is famed in-universe enough for the military to have named a medal after him. It's not surprising his is the one that's constantly referenced.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It's the only part of that other show that its fans actually like... so probably. But @Einherjaris right, this really isn't a place where discussion of The Show That Must Not Be Named is welcomed.
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