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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The Shy Hero and the Assassin Princesses is another addition to the list of titles I'm dropping this season. Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer is also joining the drop list. Ruri Rocks is a lot more fun and interesting, despite being edutainment. It's clear the art department on this one likes their girls EXTRA THICC. Even Nagi's undergraduate assistant is drawn that way. Cultural Exchange with a Game Centre Girl had a pretty good episode today too. Started Hotel Inhumans... It's... it's something. I wouldn't say it's something good. The premise seems rather thin.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that conversation between Ozma and Alto is split across episodes 2 and 3 as a prelude to Alto joining SMS. Of course, one detail that is tactfully omitted in Ozma's explanation is that the reason SMS got the lucrative contracts to support the Frontier NUNS as an advance scouting force and elite special duty unit, as well as field testing the next-generation VF-25 and Macross Quarter-class carrier, is that the fabulously wealthy interstellar shipping firm that is SMS's parent company wields an enormous amount of influence over the Frontier Government. Macross Frontier and Macross Delta both remind the audience in various ways that the PMC troops get a pretty raw deal despite being paid better than the regular military. They are legally civilians and thus enjoy none of the benefits or legal protections afforded to the government's soldiers. If they die in the line of duty, no matter how it happens, it's legally an accidental death. There's no government pension, no death benefits, no promise of an inquest or board of inquiry into wrongful death, no military burial or memorial... nothing. On top of that, it's confirmed in-series that their status as armed civilians makes them unlawful combatants in wartime so they're ineligible for legal protections afforded to prisoners of war or regular civilians. Kind of the ultimate F-about Find Out situation... PMC troops are as close to legally expendable personnel as it gets.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Private Tutor to the Duke's Daughter has joined the list of titles I'm dropping this season. It's not as out-and-out creepy lolicon bait-ish and criminal feeling as Strike Witches, but it definitely leaves me ready to assume that the original light novel's author is more than a bit creepy when it comes to teenage girls.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Mr. Gilroy out there putting it mildly and humbly... Andor set the new Gold Standard for writing in Star Wars and served up one of the year's best and most impactful shows. No doubt it'll be celebrated and discussed for many years to come. It'll probably also be cursed by every creative working on a Star Wars TV series after it because Gilroy raised the bar so high that other Star Wars creatives need a telescope to even see it.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Migraine meds are a hell of a sleep aid... lol Anyway, caught the latest episode of Betrothed to My Sister's Ex. It's still adorkable. Also started Solo Camping for Two. I'd initially pegged this one as an edutainment series shilling for a particular sport or hobby like Iwa-kakeru or Let's Make a Mug Too. Instead, the series seems to be shaping up to be a comedy about a 30-something camping enthusiast who just wants to be left alone in peace and the dojikko-moe girl who keeps disrupting his quiet enjoyment of nature. All in all, very little entertainment value in this one... unless you really get off on depicting generation gap "comedy" depicting the younger generations as spoiled, selfish, lazy, and pathologically stupid.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, but I do insist. I love seeing what people come up with for this sort of thing... for much the same reason I enjoy the "Squadron Marking" sections of the Master File books and the Macross Plus This is Animation Special book, and the custom model kit features in Model Graphix, Character Model, etc. It's a beautiful grab bag of "just looks cool", neat references and in-jokes to the series, and historical references to famous fighter squadrons or other things. That's kind of intentional, yeah... One detail that's not really brought up in either series but is fairly important and comes up a lot in supplemental material is that the reorganization of the New UN Forces following the Second Unification Wars (the events of Macross VF-X2) stripped the military of a lot of the authority and unchecked power it previously wielded and decentralized command to the individual (and more autonomous) emigrant governments. As a result of that and a growing reliance on unmanned fighters, the quality of the average soldier in emigrant fleet New UN Forces has declined a bit. The troop quality situation is surely not helped in the least by having PMCs owned by unfathomably wealthy mega-corporations headhunting top talent away from the military with sheer spending power. That said, the presentation of the New UN Forces at the start of Macross Frontier is pretty unfair to them. The Frontier branch of SMS is the very definition of the words "spared no expense". They are the very finest mercenaries money can buy, headhunted away from the most elite New UN Forces units and equipped with the very latest and best weapons, to protect an emigrant fleet sponsored by SMS's parent company on a mission set by the company's founder as a part of his personal obsession with finding a way to overcome fold faults. They're not just the most elite soldiers in the fleet, they're likely SMS's most elite soldiers in the galaxy. Plus the Frontier NUNS initially doesn't have weapons that can hurt the Vajra. Scorning them for feeling fear when they're fighting a fight they have no hope of winning and dying for it is pretty unfair. Once they get better munitions meant for use against the Vajra they give a pretty good accounting of themselves. It's perhaps more blatant and also less intentional in Macross Delta, where the Brisingr Alliance's economic situation means the local New UN Forces are underfunded and less well equipped, though even they still thrash the Aerial Knights despite a massive disadvantage when the playing field is leveled. Macross 7 was perhaps where it was most justified to have an elite unit with ace custom mecha. After all, the anima spiritia users were rare and effectively irreplaceable assets who were 100% necessary to oppose the Protodeviln and their forces. Maximizing their effectiveness meant non-standard gear designed for their non-standard approach to warfare, and giving them gear with the best possible defensive ability was only sensible to ensure that they came back alive. (Why the fleet military didn't assign them a permanent bodyguard unit like Diamond Force or Emerald Force is beyond me... could've saved a lot of trouble, not that Basara would've given them the time of day.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Secrets of the Silent Witch had a pretty decent episode today.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    At the very least, link it here. It's definitely on topic!
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the first of the new episodes last night - Part II of "Hegemony" - and I have to say I still hate what Strange New Worlds has done to the Gorn.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Macross II: Lovers Again was another one where the members of the main cast in the military all use the same model. Possibly the most strict example, since the only "ace custom" variation is a special gunpod on Nex's machine rather than any performance differences. It is rather sad that we don't get to stick around and see emigrant governments actually adopt their respective 5th Generation machines, though they do get acknowledged here and there in novelizations and games and manga and the like. (It's also worth remembering that all of Macross runs on broad strokes continuity, so there isn't any such thing as "unambiguous" canon anyway.) There's definitely an element of "the hero must have a distinct machine" that I'm sure the toy partners enforce... though as of Absolute Live!!!!!! even they seem to be dialing it back somewhat and making the ace custom machines more closely resemble the production ones. (That might have something to do with fans thinking the VF-31A looks better, too.) That said, I think the tendency to have the protagonists equipped with the latest and greatest VF ahead of the actual military is pretty silly. It kind of worked in Frontier, because the story's theme was heavily about abuse of corporate power and influence and SMS's parent company more or less ruled the titular fleet indirectly through sheer financial power and even SMS's staff were in a way dehumanized as disposable. Delta doesn't do as good of a job with it, since the whole premise is lazily copied from Frontier even though Xaos is not anywhere near as wealthy or influential as SMS or its parent company. I get the feeling Macross's creators have started to cool on the idea of PMCs too, since the materials for the second movie increasingly depict Xaos as incompetent and other PMCs as criminal. Hopefully once we get away from PMC protagonists we'll see more mass production machines getting to shine. NGL, that kinda rocks. I'd buy that in a DX. We've gotten a couple New UN Forces color schemes for the VF-25 thus far. The two main ones that show up most often are essentially the same as Alto's VF-25F and the generic SMS VF-25A but with New UN Forces markings instead of SMS ones. There's also the unlockable New Game+ colors for Havamal in Macross 30.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I quite like this one. It feels like a very natural evolution of the pre-Federation Earth Cargo Service freighters from Star Trek: Enterprise and a nice sort of middle ground with the TOS/TAS-era Antares-type.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The amazing recycling technology that Humanity uses to make its emigrant fleets so efficient and long-term sustainable had to come from somewhere... and we know the New UN Gov't has put a lot into studying and restoring factory satellites. Maybe one use-case for the fold-capable factory satellites is to move them into the vicinity of old battlefields and have their robot ships hoover up the wreckage and debris in order to break down the composites, alloys, and organic compounds from ships, pods, and dead bodies into usable raw materials for the manufacture of fresh ships, pods, and soldiers to man them all. Perhaps that's where they got the technology they're using to recycle the bodies of the dead in Macross Frontier.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    We've already heard about it all the way back TOS's first season episode "The Menagerie", which recycled large chunks of the "The Cage" series pilot. We've also actually seen the training accident happen in Star Trek: Discovery's second season episode "Through the Valley of Shadows", thanks to some timey-wimey crystals that show Pike his future when he touches them. There was a reactor accident aboard a training ship full of cadets while he was aboard for an inspection tour, and he was near-fatally irradiated while trying to save as many cadets as he could in the ship's engine room. You can watch the series on other services... even YouTube's digital library service has it. Here's a clip from the episode of Star Trek: Discovery where the accident is shown.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The Water Magician is going where the vast majority of isekai stories have gone before. New Dandadan today too...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant seems to have run out of ideas a mere three episodes in. I'm tentatively moving this one to my "best skipped" pile. Picked up a new series, Solo Camping for Two, which I'll give a whirl later alongside Hotel Inhumans and Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Saw a news piece the other day which said that Strange New Worlds aims to end the series with the transfer of command from Captain Pike to Captain Kirk, essentially making a direct segue into TOS. I have to admit, I rather like the idea.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    If only the entire film were that campy, I might actually go and see in the theater. The worst thing they could possibly do with a Mortal Kombat movie would be try to take its premise seriously.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I can no longer tell if New Saga is just badly written or if it's actively taking the piss. I'm undecided as to whether that marks an improvement in its writing or not... the protagonist certainly seems to be about as bored with the business of becoming The Hero as I am of watching it, and is actively trying to speedrun the process to the point of rudeness.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    According to Exsedol (and Macross Chronicle), there are somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Main Fleets active in the galaxy c.2010. These fleets range in size from several hundred thousand to several million warships each. We don't know. Macross Chronicle describes the automated factory satellites as being supported by a fleet of robot ships that mine the necessary resources and warehouse satellites that store the raw material until the production lines need it. The Mechanic Sheet for the Factory Satellite seen in the SDF Macross TV series has a section that notes there are some factory satellites which are outfitted with their own fold systems, while others that are located in resource-rich areas lack them. The implication there seems to be that some factory satellites need to periodically relocate to obtain the resources they require to continue operating (and/or chase the fleets they're supporting), while others are so efficient and/or in such resource-rich environments that there is no realistic prospect of local resources running out during the facility's lifespan. Considering how resource-rich space actually is... it's unlikely the galaxy is in any danger of being picked clean by the Zentradi in any timescale Humans can comprehend. EDIT: Whether the Zentradi (and/or Supervision Army) recycle is another matter entirely. The Zentradi are known to have a rescue and recovery pod of sorts, and we've seen surprisingly little in the way of wreckage from Zentradi ships and mecha in later stories. If they're recovering and recycling corpses and battle pods and maybe even ships to reprocess the material that help the resource situation a bit too.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Can I get a blurry, out-of-focus picture of you to go with the photos of the other cryptids? (I joke, there are plenty of Gundam ZZ fans out there! It's not my favorite, but it's a worthy installment in the UC and in some ways a breath of fresh air after Tomino's relentlessly grim ending to Zeta. I picked those three in particular because they're usually held up as the most impactful... the OG series, the highest-rated series, and that one movie nobody ever stops referencing.) Yeah, that's a pretty reasonable assumption IMO. The NUNS Marines would probably be infantry stationed on the Spacy's warships as well as providing orbit-to-surface work. Kind of the whole "space marine" gimmick anyway. So, when you mentioned this it occurred to me to go look it up and see what the caption on the image had to say. For those interested, that picture can be found in the VF-1X/P section on page 090 of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2. All three pictures on that page, as well as the two pictures on the next page, appear to depict the same aircraft... a VF-1P Valkyrie with modex 406 and tailcode ZZ. The top image from page 091 shows it's attached to SVC-131, a Spacy composite squadron. The caption on the picture with the two Regults says that it's an aircraft of the Planet Zola Defense Forces, that the Regults it's flying next to are from the UN Spacy Marine Corps, and that both units are en route to a training area for joint exercises. (SVC-131 is presumably an aggressor squadron.) That would make for an interesting series... you could easily work some VF combat into that if there are rogue Zentradi nearby, or the planet is home to some large fauna that are potentially dangerous like on Gubaba's homeworld or the planet from Macross E. The Octos bis is perhaps a bit more explicable. Macross Chronicle notes that the factory producing the Octos for the Anti-Unification Alliance was found and pressed back into service by the UN Forces after the Unification Wars ended. They note that a further 28 Octos units were produced and delivered to the UN Forces before the line was destroyed in the First Space War. Presumably whichever one of the UN Forces defense contractors assumed control of the factory between the Unification Wars and First Space War was able to preserve the design the same way they preserved those of the destroids developed for the UN Forces. Given that Master File suggests both the VF-0 and SV-51 became "phantom" aircraft after the First Space War, presumably much less (or nothing) survived of the specifications or production lines for the VF-0 and SV-51. (Master File has a whole section devoted to Shinsei Industry having to essentially reverse-engineer the VF-0 back into existence based on the wreckage of several VF-0s that were shot down during Macross Zero that was found in a cargo container years after the First Space War. The same was presumably true for the SV-51.) I'm not sure I'd call it a natural resource, at least in the context Humanity and other species are finding it in... Protoculture ruins, old Vajra nests, and Vajra carcasses. Considering where fold quartz is typically found, and that the restrictions on the mining and trade in fold quartz seem to have come about as a result of the Vajra conflict, I'd expect there probably wasn't too much grumbling. The Vajra had all but effortlessly destroyed one of the wealthiest and most heavily armed emigrant fleets in existence, beat the snot out of another, and then attacked a bunch of New UN Government member worlds before the Galaxy fleet's conspirators were stopped. Nobody wants another war with the Vajra. The story of Macross Delta also mentions the New UN Gov't heavily restricts and regulates the mining and trading of fold quartz and banned the use of dimension bombs in war without New UN Gov't approval, suggesting there was probably broad consensus that fold quartz and weapons based on it needed to be tightly controlled to avoid disaster. (Leading right to Cromwell's discontent over the limits placed on the usage of such weapons and other potentially useful technology.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Turkey! Time to Strike is back... Wasn't this supposed to be a bowling anime?
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Topic aside, you should definitely give more of Gundam a whirl... some of mecha anime's greatest classics are in there. The original, Zeta, and Char's Counterattack for sure. WRT Gundam and the Super Prototypes trope, the original series may have more or less defined the trope but ironically almost no Gundam series actually USES it. The majority of Gundams in Gundam are basically bespoke ace custom machines rather than prototypes (super or otherwise) for any future machine or technology demonstrators. Macross thankfully treats its prototypes in a more realistic manner. The final prototype is usually identical to the initial mass production type, and the early prototypes for any given design are usually hacked-together and lower performance than the final model. (There is that weird corner case that is Macross Plus, though the performance difference there is more because two incredibly talented pilots turned unstable systems unsuitable for production into a sort of Disability Superpower.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, this is 100% what the Siegfrieds should have looked like the entire time. Those forward-swept winglets never did look quite right, and what a miss it was to not have the protagonists use a delta-wing VF in a series named Delta. They fixed it in the second movie with the VF-31AX Kairos Plus at least.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the latest episodes of Cultural Exchange with a Game Centre Girl, See You Tomorrow at the Food Court, and started a new series Ruri Rocks. Pretty happy with all three, TBH. Ah yes, the ever-present threat of magical bowling balls. How could I forget? 😆
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Macross 7 definitely works better as a weekly series. It's not something that benefits from watching multiple episodes in one sitting or a full-on marathon to get through it as quickly as possible. That slow burn start of very nearly 20 episodes is a pain in the butt, in no small part due to the early lack of musical variety, but it does a good job of getting all the main characters established before the plot proper kicks off with the creation of Sound Force. I'd actually recommend watching Macross Dynamite 7 and the Macross 7 movie The Galaxy is Calling Me!. They're much tighter, self-contained stories than the main series and some of what goes on there is a little bit important later on. At least in other side stories.
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