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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's the thing with general rules like that in language... they're true until they're not. Or to put it another way, they're always someone demanding an exception. Japanese is far from the worst offender among the languages I've studied over the years. 😆 There's only one reading for ヴ on its own, and that's "vu". They spell the ship's name エヴナ (e-vu-na) consistently, both in the Macross the Ride Visual Book (see Vol.2 Pg18) and in the light novel itself. On that basis, I'm inclined to assume it probably isn't a spelling error. Especially since it's a rather niche kana in the first place. (Not to say they didn't make spelling errors... though they tended to make them in romanizing katakana rather than the katakana itself. I can't find anything for "Evuna", apart from a chain of Spanish tapas bars in England. "Evna", however, presents a bunch of different options the most likely of which seems to be the Oz connection.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    All the usual suspects, I see. Akira has hopefully been spared the fate of joining that particularly inauspicious brotherhood.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Give it time. Bandai Namco Filmworks has been picking over Gundam's light novels for material to adapt for a decade or so now and they've already adapted a few higher-profile manga titles into animation like Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin, Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt, and Mobile Suit Gundam-san. Eventually the light novel well will run dry and they'll start picking over the less-well received parts of their licensed manga catalog. Lots of fans are still holding out hope that, since we've seen Unicorn and Hathaway's Flash get animated, that Crossbone Gundam is next.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe? I think that may be more of a happy accident. None of the sources I've translated thus far have shed any light on the origin/meaning of the Nome family name. It's spelled ノーム, which is used for several different loanwords like Gnome, Noam, and Nome. The most likely explanation I can come up with for their family name is that it is meant to be the same as "gnome", a reference to the earth spirit//fairy of Renaissance folklore that the Nomes of The Wonderful World of Oz are named for. Not that the Nome family of Macross have any real resonance with the folkloric creatures the way Baum's Nomes do.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    May it stay that way. Hollywood's track record with anime is so bad that all I can do is celebrate the demise of a project like this. The odds of it being another dumpster fire like Cowboy Bebop, Dragonball Evolution, or Speed Racer are far higher than the odds of them producing anything watchable.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Not to mention the Nobel Gundam in Mobile Fighter G Gundam already totally looks the part of a magical girl-themed Gundam since its motif is sailor fuku... so much so that even the Gundam franchise itself has joked that it looks like Sailor Moon, and the high-mobility version from the manga is acknowledged to be based on Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon S. Woof... yeah, that Gundam ain't winning any beauty contests.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Already has done... Char has a magical girl transformation in GQuuuuuuX.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it should be pretty damn difficult for Bandai Namco Filmworks to screw up Hathaway's Flash Part II. After all, Hathaway's Flash is an adaptation of the vintage light novel by Yoshiyuki Tomino himself that was penned at the peak of the Universal Century. This isn't some half-assed fanservice-a-thon with an inconsequential plot like Unicorn or Phenix Hunt. This is a story written back when Gundam had a soul and a message.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Finally, some competent storytelling.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, making hyperdrives "speed of plot" engines really was the only way to go.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, GQuuuuuuX just barely tosses that nonsense in at the very end as a way to justify the Rose of Sharon peace-ing out. GQuuuuuuX is, in the main, a "fix fic" for Zeon glazers and Gihren's Greed fanboys who've spent literal decades arguing that the Federation are the real Bad Guys in Gundam and that the Universal Century would be a much less grim timeline if the Principality of Zeon had won the war. The whole "Char has a red RX-78 Gundam" schtick is literally straight out of one of the routes in Gihren's Greed. The Federation's practically absent from the main story because Zeon's power is unmatched, Zeon is protecting the autonomy of spacenoids, and Zeon's war crimes are dismissed out of hand. It even indulges in a bunch of Zeon fan memes like mass producing the Big Zam being a major key to Zeon's strength. At the end, when the dust settles... It's actually even more "by fans for fans" than you're giving it credit for. Her backstory in GQuuuuuuX is based on Tomino's novels like Secret Meeting - Amuro and Lalah, which do make it clear that Char and Lalah had an actual relationship and that Char was jealous of Amuro and Lalah's friendship. That's also where the idea that he found her in that high-class brothel and bought her freedom came from.
  12. Seto Kaiba
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't the RX-78-2 in Ready Player One a last minute licensing-induced plot substitution? IIRC, it was meant to be Ultraman but they couldn't get the rights. Anyway...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It's Khara. Lazy slop is pretty much a two-word summary of their entire original filmography. Did you SEE Rebuild? It's basically just Anno jerking himself off for three movies and change. It's a franchise series. Of course it was. They're literally listed in the credits. 🤣 It absolutely was fanservice. The 0 Gundam looks exactly like the RX-78-2, and its pilot is voiced by Tohru Furuya. There's no other word for that but fanservice. Especially since both Setsuna and Ribbons swap GN drives into older Gundams for their last fight instead of finishing with their season two upgrades.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    PHRASING! 🤣
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's framed in such a radically different context from the one in 00... I'd give it a pass easily. Rather than simply being a villain dusting off their old MS for fanservice's sake, this was... Besides, if we want to complain about the hero fighting an "evil" version of the RX-78, 00 was the THIRD time. It was done twice before in Zeta and 0083. Gundam has always liked to repeat itself.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, Khara leans extremely heavily on its legacy ties with Gainax - its soft reboot of Gainax's Neon Genesis Evangelion being most of its minimal self-produced output over its 19 years in operation - but a good amount of what that video samples from GunBuster to accuse GQuuuuuuX of copying was GunBuster copying Gundam in the first place! Khara's obnoxious self-indulgence and inability to establish a creative identity outside of Evangelion is certainly a problem...
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, this series was definitely meant to be this short. There's a lot they could have done with it, but most of what they did was screwing around to waste airtime because they didn't even have enough actual story to fill twelve episodes.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Have done... unfortunately I've come up dry. It's a loanword, so I'm kind of swinging for the fences no matter what. I've tried several common substitutions in case it's a typo, but no luck thus far. Since the other ship name references have all been folklore and fantasy, I bounced it off some friends with degrees in history and literature and they reckon it's probably meant to be the Oz reference we suspect it is. Evna in the Oz books is a beautiful seaside town in a land that sits on top of the underground mines and factories of the Nome King, while the Evna in the Macross light novel is a seaside resort ship with a hidden Galaxy corporation factory in the sublevels under the resort. (Possibly also a particularly smug in-universe authority figure making a tongue-in-cheek criticism of the Macross Galaxy fleet by comparing it to Oz and the Emerald City, a place of illusory wealth and mass delusion.) Alas, no... "bu" and "vu" are completely different kana.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well, GQuuuuuuX ended today. I'll say this for it. The ending is the best episode of the series. Still not great, but actually enjoyable to watch where a lot of the rest of the series has felt like a bit of a slog though filler. There's a fair amount of fanservice, multiple betrayals, and a proper explanation of WTH is actually going on with the universe.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    What "local threats", though? Who else is operating a Navy on these planets? Emigrant fleets are colonizing uninhabited planets. There are laws against colonizing planets that already have sentients living on them. The VF-4's Navy variant is said to be mainly an interceptor and anti-ship strike fighter. Whose ships is this thing made to attack when there's only one Navy anywhere? The VF-4's Navy variant is from a period when even emigrant planets were few and far between, well before the era when there was anti-government terrorism and civil wars amongst the emigrant governments. It feels like one of those details where the creators forgot that there really weren't any significant threats left planetside. The VA-3's an all-regime machine, not an atmosphere-optimized one. Also, the VF-5000 was developed to supplement/compensate for the VF-4's shortcomings as an atmospheric fighter and dogfighter not as a companion craft for the VA-3. Eh... it's not that surprising, really. The Macross Frontier fleet is more or less set up as a pre-First Space War theme park. The fleet recreates large portions of several famous cities or districts like San Francisco, Shibuya, Akihabara, Beijing... even things like period-correct cars are recreated (albeit with modern technology under the hood). Given that the fleet bothered to reproduce an old model air defense Destroid as cannon fodder and build up replicas of pre-war helicopters for a movie, it's not surprising they'd reproduce other period machines if they felt it was advantageous. They're really committed to the bit. It's absolutely ridiculous overkill for the purpose, though. A GU-15 or GU-17 against unarmed, unarmored Zentradi prisoners? That's like going deerhunting with a tank destroyer. That's about the level I'd expect in terms of capability... not actually viable on the battlefield, but adequate for bullying unarmed Zentradi inmates in the absence of newer dedicated machines that don't fit the fleet's visual aesthetic. An out-of-date model sold off as an unwanted asset by the military that eventually become purely decorative. Mind you, the way this is phrased it makes it sound like the prison was being attacked from the outside which is a bit silly given that fleet's only had chance encounters with rogue Zentradi and they were all fended off before threatening the environment ships. Maybe... though the branch seems to predate the existence of fighters which could quickly ascend to orbit from a planetary surface, and it also has the misfortune to come after the concept of "floating stands" (space airbases) in gensynchronous orbit as part of planetary defenses. Perhaps they're the aviation units left to man things like moon bases or satellite cities.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    "What about orbital progress assessments? Eadu research journals? We found TWO YEARS of Jedha working group printouts in your files!" - Director Krennic (to Dedra Meero) Based on Krennic's remarks to Meero in S2E11... at least two years. The way his accusatory rant to Meero in that episode is framed, starting with "Ghorman mining", it suggests that Meero was accidentally put on the distribution list for those other classified reports when she was officially read in on the Ghorman operation. Since we know she assumed control of Ghorman two years ago in 3BBY, and was put on the job three years ago in 4 BBY, that suggests a time period of 2-3 years.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It's not just one file. It's a bunch of them that she received over a period of years. That's a big part of why Director Krennic is so incredibly pissed at her. She was mistakenly copied on classified reports from his Jedha Working Group that she was not cleared to have for at least two entire years. That suggests the mistake was made somewhere around Ep4 "Ever Been to Ghorman?" and that she had been receiving classified files without authorization the entire rest of the series prior to her arrest in Ep11 "Who Else Knows?".
  24. Seto Kaiba
    This season is drawing to a close, and so too is the parade of forgettable nonsense that was my watch list. Of the twenty or so shows I gave a whirl, I don't think I found a single one besides The Apothecary Diaries that I'd say stood out in a positive way. There were a lot of mediocre shows like The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl, Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive?, and The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows that I'd call "watchable, but forgettable". So forgettable, in fact, that I actually had to look up Brilliant Healer's title because I couldn't ****ing remember it. 😆 Classic★Stars, however... that is easily the worst-written anime series I've seen in years. It's an excuse plot so thin you could be forgiven for missing its existence entirely that's serves only to justify a string of Macross Delta-esque virtual idol performances of j-pop, j-rock, and j-rap arrangements of public domain classical music. The story of Classic★Stars is an incoherent mess. The characters... exist, I guess. The animation is anywhere from passable to iffy. The music that's supposed to be the main attraction, however... well, it runs the gamut from the merely odd and out-of-place-sounding to the kind of bizarre sort of mess you'd expect from a music major's bar bet all the way out to the kind of auditory torture that makes you hope the vengeful ghosts of past classical composers visit the arranger's house A Christmas Carol-style to terrorize them into repentance and an immediate change of career. That this is apparently meant as promotional material for a pre-existing mixed media project is slightly baffling to me.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not, IMO. The titular character in L. Frank Baum's Ozma of Oz is a woman. Princess Ozma, ruler of the Land of Oz. There's only room for one princess in SMS Skull Platoon, and everyone knows that's Alto. 😜 Ozma Lee's name is probably a reference/homage... but not to L. Frank Baum's Oz series. He's probably named for the titular character in Osamu Tezuka's 1961-1964 sci-fi manga series Ozma Taichou (オズマ隊長, lit. Commanding Officer Ozma). The rest of his unit does insistently refer to him in exactly those terms.
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