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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Reworked to better fit the overall aesthetic they were going with for the movie.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    They're already using some pretty fancy stuff, with large-scale atmospheric cleanup and radioactive pollution mitigation using designer bacteria. It's gonna take a long time to restore Earth to anything like the state it was in before the war, though. If they have, we've heard nothing. The closest we've seen is that a number of old model Destroids were disarmed, retrofitted, and repurposed as construction equipment in a sort of ad hoc precursor to dedicated non-military units like the Destroid Work from Macross Frontier. In Macross II's timeline, the civilian-use Valkyries (VC series) started out as craft intended for use in natural resource management and so on before finding their way into more diverse roles.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Earth's environment is still in pretty rough shape, as noted previously, and it's going to take thousands or even tens of thousands of years of constant effort to repair it using available terraforming technology. There are a number of cities mentioned on Earth in the wake of the First Space War, many of them mentioned in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series. The obvious big one is Macross City in Alaska near the remains of Grand Cannon I. There's also Gante City, IIRC this is the city Hikaru visits in the episode directly following the timeskip. Ionesco City, where Quamzin takes Minmay hostage. Onogi City, an industrial city that Quamzin attacked to steal power condenser parts for the ship he was repairing. Trad City, a city with a high percentage of Zentran in its population. Highlander City, which had shades of being a showbiz town. There were one or two others as well. Most of the mentioned settlements in the Sol system in sequels are either "satellite cities" (massive space colonies orbiting a planet) or on other planets and moons like Gamlin's hometown of H.G. Wells City on Mars or Moon Riverside City on Luna, Miho's home town of White Flora in orbit of Jupiter, Rex's hometown of Axia Roader orbiting Earth, etc.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Not stale, but lunches that were made to sell that day which didn't... and would otherwise be tossed at the end of the day if they didn't sell. Most of the characters are students living on allowances in a nearby boarding school. The whole affair is very strange.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yup.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I think you might have the movie one a little big in that shot... if facing front, the TV Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class mothership should be a bit over two Gol Boddole Zer-class mobile fortresses wingspans tall. (2 1/3, to be precise.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    To such a worrying extent that the markdown stickers are trophies. If there's a plot thread here, it has completely eluded me.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Hibiki's arc is even more than that, really. Yeah, he starts out as a (highly successful) celebrity scandal-chaser for SNN who gradually comes to appreciate the idea that journalist integrity and truth matter far more than simply having the latest hot take, but it's kind of a vehicle for something else. His arc is almost a Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket-esque admonishment of the audience to remind them the war is not meant to be entertainment. That it's brutal, horrible, unnecessary slaughter. Hibiki wanted to be a journalist because he saw the heavily sanitized coverage of the Zentradi attack ten years prior, and when he's given permission to cover the Mardook attack he's excited. Once he actually gets into the battle, he's freaking out because he can't conceive of or tolerate showing the UN Forces losing. He has to gradually accept that war really is horrible and that it's not something that should be glamorized. That's a really good, really important point. The Gloria is a flagship in one of the UN Spacy's defense fleets... but a warship is all it is. It's not an emigrant ship. It doesn't have a city built into it. As you say, there wouldn't have been any opportunity for Ishtar to have the revelations about Earth's culture that she did if she were aboard a warship. It also wouldn't have afforded her an opportunity to come into contact with the Macross itself, which is what convinced her that peace was possible. So, yeah... you missed the point of Macross's story completely, even in the original series and DYRL?. The moral here is that the antagonists - the Zentradi, Mardook, etc. - are Not So Different. They're people with thoughts, feelings, etc. no different from the protagonists and war is an unfortunate result of the fear and misunderstandings that come from a failure to communicate with each other. They're not evil and they're not monsters, and making them grotesques would take away from that.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the closest Ben-to offers to a justification for a constant low level gang war fought exclusively in supermarkets is that the boarding school the students in the show attend only serves breakfast in its dining hall, not lunch or dinner.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Wrapped up most of this season... So I'm a Spider, So What? is on hiatus 'til the 9th, so nothing new from that front. Went back for Ben-to, and I am NOT impressed. I'm four episodes in, and I'm kind of sad to say that this show doesn't appear to have anything resembling a plot. It's a one-joke comedy where the joke is comedic sociopathy. Why is absolutely everyone in this world beating the stupid out of each other over half-priced bentos? High school students, college students... even teachers and housewives. Nobody seems to be put off in the slightest to find people laying around supermarkets beaten so badly they have to be hospitalized, over prepackaged lunches. On a few occasions it's even framed as a kind of gang violence, but literally nobody seems to mind. It's especially weird that the supermarkets where all these fights take place never object to their stories being the scene of a bloody brawl every night or think to just make a few more bentos so people don't have to fight over them. I know I'm probably overthinking the premise by... well... a lot, but it feels like the required amount of thought to watch this show is not more than zero.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the Battle Suits are a lot more ergonomically sound and had better overall performance and survivability than, say, the Regult. That said, that's also a different timeline altogether where the direct interface with the pilot's nervous system isn't a thing so there's one less barrier to entry there. The New UN Forces in the main Macross timeline kept the Queadluun series around because of its high flight performance, but insisted on heavily modernizing it to improve its survivability with beefed-up armor, redundant control circuits, and other enhancements. Whereas in Macross II, the UN Forces simply incorporated the technology obtained from battle suits into their next-generation VFs to beef up their performance... which is where they got the proof-of-concept "Zentradi Valkyrie" that became the common ancestor to the VF-2 series. It's another R-word fan midlife crisis thread... like the necro-post in the topic about Macross II's tie-in games. The essence of his "changes" are just wanting Macross II to be exactly like the original.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    DYRL? deliberately reworked the Zentradi more overtly alien without taking away their basic humanoid appearance, and that meant going whole-hog on the already design aesthetic of their gear. So their ships and weapons went from being organically-styled to actually part-organic. Boddole Zer's flagship in the movie is actually a lot smaller than its TV series counterpart, which was so vast that its height was equivalent to the length of the Japanese isles on Earth (1,400km). The problem is it was so vast that there was no way to properly convey in the series just how astonishingly colossal it was. Despite being only a tiny fraction of the size of its TV counterpart with a wingspan of 600km and a center section around 160km across (making the center section slightly larger than the second Death Star from Star Wars) it does rather a lot better job of looking big because it's small enough to be put next to something we can properly perceive the scale of.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    There have been scenes in Star Wars that have acknowledged Macross as an inspiration. To the best of my knowledge, this is not one... though your picture is not showing up.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Ergonomically, it's not exactly a pretty picture.... this is from the production line art of the original series. That's a 9m tall pilot pretzeled into that cockpit. Mind you, cramped conditions and terrible posture are only the beginning of a Regult pilot's woes. Because it was designed to be simple and easily mass-produced, it has overall low performance, low defensive ability due to its thin armor, and a comparatively low level of automation that requires a lot of manual control from the pilot. The amount of manual input needed from the pilot, combined with the awful conditions, is said to make operating a Regult more tiring than fighting on foot.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That's some sweet looking fan animation. I've no idea what to make of this, though... Fanmade unmanned VF-25? Or a VF-25 with a an armored canopy cover like the VF-27's? Hmmm....
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The most popular fan theory for how Macross II: Lovers Again fits into the main/ongoing Macross timeline is as a work of in-universe fiction... a speculative-fiction sequel to the 2031 pseudo-documentary drama Do You Remember Love?. One of the reasons this idea gained traction is that a lot of the Macross II soundtrack was reused for Macross 7, so music from the OVA is EVERYWHERE in 2045. It's the chart-topping music on the Galaxy Network, the indie bands on City-7 play it, and the Minmay Attack girl from the OVA's first episode even puts in an appearance or two. Even the Jamming Birds perform songs from it. (This idea gains a bit more traction from books like Master File implying that there were other docu-dramas like DYRL? that came before the 2031 movie.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Y'see... the thing about the mecha that the ancient Protoculture designed for the Zentradi is that they didn't consider the Zentradi operators people. They were expendable biological military hardware, so little things like survivability or operator comfort either weren't on the priority list at all or were pretty far down. Some, like the Nousjadeul-Ger, require bio-tech implants in order to operate properly while others, like the Regult, are noted to be horribly uncomfortable. (It kinda says a lot that the Mardook variants have demonstrably superior ergonomics, even though the Mardook also treat their Zentradi as eminently disposable.) The Earth UN Forces don't see their Zentradi officers and enlisted men as expendable. They're people, not equipment, and most of them were born and raised on Earth like any of their Human colleagues. With limited resources, survivability is much more of a priority. Especially against an enemy that will always have numerical superiority. So the UN Forces prioritize survivability... and most Zentradi mecha come up short in that department. Valkyries and Destroids are simply more practical and effective in that regard. Massive losses among an all-volunteer armed force are hard to replace, and most Earth-born Zentradi would probably be unwilling to put up with the ergonomic nightmare that the old Zentradi mecha represent (or submit themselves to surgery to operate some of them). Apparently this is called a "proprietary eponym"... when the name of a specific instance of a thing becomes the generic term (e.g. "Kleenex" for facial tissue). It's likely they don't need to... they're heavily implied to be Protoculture themselves, they have what amounts to a main fleet-scale force that's technologically superior to what the Zentradi are fielding, and they've got an equally-advanced mobile fortress running the show. Odds are they probably have the production capacity to sustain and expand their Zentradi forces without needing to attack Zentradi main fleets.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    So... this is another thread in which you complain that Macross's writers took its story in new and different directions instead of lamely rehashing the same story over and over again like a certain other series we don't talk about here? Disregarding all the points that are just that... ... a what now? Isn't that what The Show That Must Not Be Named calls its transformable aircraft? You want him to be a plane? Turbo Teen, but in space? (The proper term for which is "Variable Fighter", or "Valkyrie" for short.) Macross II: Lovers Again follows on from Macross: Do You Remember Love? with interquels Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song. The Supervision Army does not exist in that version of the story. In DYRL?, the Meltrandi are the hostile power the Zentradi have been at war with for 500,000 years. Instead of being along socio-political lines, the war was on gender lines. Mind you, the Mardook are already strongly implied to be a surviving group of Protoculture like those mentioned in DYRL?. ... it already has that. Ugh... I know that a racially-segregated military was apparently something the writers of The Show That Must Not Be Named were OK with, but Macross is a bit more with the times. In Macross, the Zentradi who remained on Earth after the First Space War integrated peacefully into society after a brief period of adjustment and unrest. The UN Forces in Macross II are full of Zentradi and part-Zentradi serving alongside Humans in the same units. Most look utterly indistinguishable from Humans. Sylvie is one, for instance. She's a quarter-Meltran and mentions as much. The UN Forces did have a VF called the "Zentradi Valkyrie", but it was as much a proof of concept for the VF-2 series as it was a VF meant to assist new Zentradi defectors in adapting to the UN Forces gear and it was not a unit exclusive to Zentradi pilots (rather, it was based heavily on newly-captured Zentradi tech). The UN Forces continue to use captured Zentradi ships because why throw away a perfectly good ship whose crew had defected?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the Regult that Hikaru, Misa, Kakizaki, and Max steal to return to the Macross in Ep12 "Big Escape" is stolen from one of the ships in the Laplapmiz Direct Defense Fleet.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Versatility, mainly... though cost was likely also a major factor. One thing to remember about the Queadluun-Rau is that, outside of DYRL?, it's so complex, difficult to manufacture, resource-intensive (read: "expensive"), and difficult to use that the Protoculture had to literally Build a Better Pilot and restrict its use to elite forces. It's also closer to being an aircraft than a proper battle suit. The Nousjadeul-Ger, on the other hand, can be economically mass-produced and widely deployed to regular Zentradi forces. It's designed to be highly versatile, and one way for it to expand that versatility is with handheld weapons. Its main weapon is the dorsally-mounted plasma cannon, though that's only meant for medium-range engagements and is a bit on the cumbersome side. Its secondary weapon is the fixed medium-bore rapid-fire impact cannon in its chest, but its field of fire is limited by the need to point the entire body of the mecha at the target. The laser machine pistol is the standard sidearm deployed with the Nousjadeul-Ger because it offers a high rate of fire, balanced performance at all ranges, and the ability to aim off-axis because it's handheld. It's also not dependent on the mecha's reactor, since it has its own internal power source.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Like real world militaries, the (New) UN Forces have always been cost-conscious... there's that old wisdom connected to basically any government service "remember that all of your equipment was built by the lowest bidder". Most, if not all, of the 2nd Generation VFs were deliberately designed to be "Economy Valkyries" due to the limited resources of postwar Earth and the first wave of emigrant fleets in the 2010s. The VF-4 Lightning III's initial mass production type shared 25% of its parts with the 1st Gen VF-1 Valkyrie. The unseen VF-5, VF-6, and VF-7 were all made to be low cost next-gen VFs cheaper to build and maintain than the VF-1. Comparatively low costs is also mentioned in connection with the VF-9 and VF-5000. You could also reasonably argue it was a cost-saving move to go back to a single jack-of-all-trades main VF instead of multiple regime-optimized models in the 3rd Generation with the VF-11. In the 4th Gen, the less costly VF-171 won out over the VF-19 and VF-22 in the end. There's always an element of cost-consciousness lurking somewhere in their development. Being isolated on the far side of the galaxy, the Brisingr globular cluster's kind of almost never really properly escaped that initial period of isolation that came from being a first wave emigrant government. They developed the VF-31 locally with an emphasis on cost performance and stimulating their local economy, so it's not at all surprising that they would have prioritized the multipurposefulness of the aircraft and tried to do at least as well on modularity and adaptability as the VF-171 did.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Somebody better pick up that phone, because I f*cking called it. Seriously though, there's no story to tell. Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay sailed off into the proverbial sunset aboard the SDF-2 Megaroad-01 and lived happily ever after. That's it. That's all. No more to be said. Their story's over and they're not relevant to galactic events anymore. Somehow, I doubt you'd find much entertainment value in the Megaroad-01 sitting in deep space for months or years while they scout nearby systems and bank energy for their next fold jump with Hikaru and Misa's exciting forays into the world of midnight feedings, diaper changes, and pediatrician visits for their newborn daughter. Given what we know about what happened to the other original TV series characters via Macross 7 Docking Festival, I also find it rather doubtful you'd be very excited with what they did after the series ended. Bruno Global retired and went into politics, and then they named a couple ships and an airport after him. Claudia just kinda dropped off the radar. Kim's an unmarried career soldier living alone with her dog who eventually becomes a Lt. General and the commander of Earth's defense fleet. Shammy quit the military, got married, and had eleven kids with her husband at a colony on the moon. Vanessa quit the military, got married, her husband's alcoholism destroyed their family business, forcing her to work as a hostess in a cabaret club and later become the manager of one. Vrlitwhai got Global's old job as head of the military. The Zentradi spy trio are all unemployed and mooching off of Roli's wife Vanessa. Kaifun bummed around Earth for a while and then left on the Macross-11 where he became manager of an unauthorized Fire Bomber cover band. Yot-chan, the annoying kid in UN Forces overalls, grew up to become the owner of the Nyan-Nyan chinese restaurant and turned it into an interstellar restaurant chain. All in all, it's pretty humdrum stuff. They get to quietly live normal lives out of the spotlight, for better or worse, instead of being dragged back for story after story and get pounded into the ground like a tentpeg until anything remotely likeable about them is long gone.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    We had that. Its name was Macross II: Lovers Again. It did only so-so in Japan but pretty well in the west. Had two tie-in video games, an official manga, a novelization, etc. I believe you were complaining about it earlier. You may need corrective lenses, then. Macross Plus got kind of a lukewarm reception in Japan but western audiences even today laud it as one of the true Must-Watch titles in the mecha genre. Macross 7 was such a huge hit in Japan that its popularity endures even today, nearly thirty years after its original broadcast. Macross Frontier... well... it wouldn't be unfair to say that show set the world on fire on its 2008 debut. In what seems to be a bit of a trend with the few new members who are obvious refugees from the Robotech fan community, your definition of a "true sequel to Macross" is the same dreary stagnation that has been Robotech's status quo since '86... and we all know how quickly that punishing lack of original thought 86'd Robotech's prospects.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, must've been one of the guys from the other platoon that came in behind Roli's... because Roli, Warera, and Conda are still alive to attend the truce announcement later in the film. The one that gets shot down by Hikaru has platoon leader colors, so presumably the leader of the other trio of battle suits.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty damned sure you're the one wearing the grease paint and red nose in this relationship, sweetcheeks. Well, you've seen one of the Strange Machine Games covers... it's what Podtastic posted. It's not surprising that both publishers are consolidating the Masters Saga and New Generation content rather than give them their own books. Neither saga is anywhere near as popular among Robotech fans as the Macross Saga is, so expected sales volumes of individual saga books would be lower. Consolidating Sentinels and Shadow Chronicles is also quite a solid move, since they're both aborted titles that essentially the beginning and ending of a specific story arc without the middle part and there's very little content for the two of them. What's really weird is that the publisher blamed the cancellation on the pandemic lockdowns... even though the book was cancelled two months before the lockdowns started. But that's kinda par for the course when Robotech anything gets past the Macross Saga.
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