Seto Kaiba

Started So I'm a Spider, So What? today, and after the first episode all I can say is my expectations of it are NOT high. This is basically just That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, but with humor more in line with God's Blessing on this Wonderful World. The constant attempts at self-aware humor are not helping matters either. EDIT: Finished all five currently-available episodes of So I'm a Spider, So What?, and my first impression was dead on. Five episodes and counting of the main character (who is nameless) engaging in skill bookkeeping without really knowing or caring what's going on. The only appreciable difference, apart from the protagonist being a spider instead of a slime, seems to be that the spider girl doesn't get the convenience of a start that lets her jump straight to a god-tier level of power right off the bat and has to work for it a little. At least she's a bit more likeable than the slime guy, whose reactions mostly came off as a form of dull surprise thanks to not having a face most of the time.

Lots of interest in posts from last August all of the sudden, so... LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN! The Robotech RPG 2nd Edition stuck much closer to the Macross OSM in that respect. All variants of the VF-1 except for the "VF-1R" - a post-war variant broadly analogous to Macross's VF-1X - were given exactly the same stats except for variant-specific hardware like the differing number of coaxial laser cannons on the monitor turret and the VF-1S's enhanced communication system. They also changed the way the Super Pack and Armored Pack stats worked, making them additional locational MDC. The improved post-war variant got 20% better armor and 25% higher top speeds, but was otherwise identical. More or less. The Robotech-ism in question - that the various variants of VF-1 Valkyrie from the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series all had different performance and different amounts of armor - was/is an idea they got from the game Robotech: Battlecry. It was something the developers did to pad the game out so the different models of VF-1 would play differently. The aforementioned "VF-1R" post-war variant was also something they came up with to pad the game out. There are variants of the VF-1 Valkyrie in Macross with differing levels of performance, but that's attributed to production block improvements that were applied equally to all VF-1 variants during mass production and new modernization variants introduced after mass production ended like the VF-1X or Master File's VF-1P. Like the 40% improvement in the maximum available engine output that occurred at Block 6 when overboost went from being double maximum power (200%) to double afterburner (240%), or the 30% improvement in maximum instantaneous thrust from the new model engine installed in the VF-1X+.

Eh... the writers at Palladium Books didn't intentionally change the physical dimensions for any of the ships or mecha in the Robotech RPG or Macross II RPG. The various disparities in their work vs. the OSM's official numbers are almost exclusively due to either guessing wildly in the absence of official information (due to laziness or scarcity) or working with official information from Robotech that already contained errors thanks to contributions by fan "experts" who often misrepresented their headcanon as official information. There's one very forgivable case in the Macross II RPG where they actually did do proper research but the source they found had a typo that they faithfully copied because it was the only source they had. They'd have to be several times their official size to accommodate the tens of thousands of crew and thousands of mecha the RPG claims they should have... because those crew are five times the size of a human in all respects, and their space and resource needs scale accordingly. Easier by far to keep the ships their official size and scale the crew and mecha complements down to match the numbers that can be extrapolated from the OSM. Not really, no... it'd just make the ships that much less efficient. Micloning the troops and storing them in cold sleep would likely increase, rather than decrease, the burden on a ship's resources. Not only are we talking about the additional space demands and energy/resource burdens to maintain a massive cold sleep system, we're also talking about the need for far more micloning systems and stored biomass to permit crew to repeatedly micloned and the additional energy/resource demands that imposes. All of their equipment would still be stored, as would all the rations and so on needed to sustain operations. All in all, it just slows down the ship's ability to respond to threats and greatly increases energy consumption snice you need to defrost and then enlarge crew to man the mecha and so on, with the potential medical consequences repeated cycles of cold sleep and micloning entail. Battle pods are already about as space-efficient as they're going to get, too. Disassembling them would just increase the amount of time it takes to get them battle-ready when the default "parked" posture of a Regult puts the "chin" between the feet, reducing the mecha's footprint considerably with the legs folded up against the body. That also adds the risk that equipment could malfunction as a result of being reassembled improperly or in great haste. The Mardook do have a slightly more space-efficient approach, since their off-duty Zentradi rest in pods that reinforce the Mardook's mind control instead of keeping them in bunk rooms and the like, but even that space savings isn't huge since the Mardook need special accommodation on their own ships due to being one-fifth the size of their Zentradi (and thus, prone to being stepped on).

One of the beautiful things about the progress the anime distribution industry in the west has made over the last thirty-plus years is that distributors are largely no longer censoring or bowdlerizing the anime they license... with the occasional rare exception for shows marketed exclusively to small children (e.g. Pokemon). That kind of thing was already on its way out when Macross II was being dubbed, since it was easier and cheaper to give the western viewers the same viewing experience as the original Japanese audience rather than indulging in costly (and often borderline xenophobic) editing practices to remove Japanese cultural references and the like. Audiences demanded an authentic viewing experience, so censorship's scope shrank until the only real censorship going on was the stuff intended for broadcast to meet American broadcast content standards. Being mostly direct-to-video, or now direct-to-streaming, anime is essentially exempt from that. Attack on Titan might see some light censorship when it airs on network television, but since it's already late night block fodder it's likely to be done with an extremely light hand. The gore would probably be considered more objectionable than the show's nationalistic themes on, say, [adult swim], since the Marleyans are not depicted as heroic or good... they're as evil as a nation of "Notzis" would be expected to be, even if the story rather unfortunately shows their bigotry towards Eldians is ultimately depicted as entirely justifiable. (The show's saving grace being, I suppose, that there are no good guys... everyone is an evil douchebag.)

Made it to episode 3, with fairly frequent stops to wish ill on the original author, publisher, and animation studio. At this point, I'd pay real money to go back in time and be a fly on the wall of Kodansha's offices when the editor Meguru Seto was working under asked them to explain why there's a voice in the protagonist's head telling him the easiest way to gain power is to sexually assault every woman around him. It didn't get removed, so that must've been one fantastically good explanation. Same goes for a minute or so earlier when he was sexually assaulted by his teacher. Even Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight didn't go that far into the realm of questionable content. I've not seen the English dub, but it's too bloody overt for anything short of total bowdlerization to hide it. The TV anime did tone down some of the more graphic content, but Marley's Nazi-esque nature and the loathing reminiscent of the most vehement antisemitism that the Attack on Titan world has for the Eldian people is on full display. We've already had the episode where Willy Tybur explains the true history of the world, touches on Eldian war crimes like the centuries of genocide that killed more than three times the modern world's total population, and calls for the world to declare a war of extermination against the last bastion of the Eldian Empire (Paradise). For their part, the Eldians who launch a sneak attack on Marley stop just short of "sieg heil" while celebrating their victory...

Giving the first episode a second try... I gave up in disgust around 15 minutes in on my first attempt. The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter is the kind of anime that people who find anime distasteful think all anime is like... a bunch of skeevy PG-13 fanservice wrapped in a paper thin excuse plot. Sometimes, it really sucks to be a completionist. I hate quitting a series before the end but this one is on course to join the list of shows I gave up on because my disgust outweighed my desire to see things through to the end.

General Galaxy's development of the YF-21 was assisted significantly by technological insights gleaned from some other projects the company was working on in parallel: Restoration and refurbishment of the captured Quimeliquola automated factory satellite. Development of a New UN Forces reproduction of the Quimeliquola Queadluun-Rau battle suit (that became the Queadluun-Rhea of Macross Frontier). That ended up inspiring the YF-21's Queadluun-like design, and it also adopted at least one system from the Queadluun-series battle suit: the Inertia Vector Control System. You could call it the Protoculture's economized version of the inertia capacitor technology that humanity would independently reinvent as the Inertia Store Converter adopted on 5th Gen VFs. Its capabilities were much less than the ISC since it used fold carbon instead of fold quartz, but as a result it could also be mass-produced even if it was very expensive to do so.

Well, it'll be nice to have more Macross Frontier, at least. For me, the short's likely to overshadow the movie it's alongside.

Giving The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter a whirl. So far? Not impressed. When it comes to fantasy anime these days, I'm starting to feel like even "generic fantasy" - a term which ought to be oxymoronic - doesn't begin to cover the lack of original thought. This is "Form Letter Fantasy", where you just fill in the blanks with proper nouns and everything's the f*cking same. In this case, I'm getting BAD vibes eerily reminiscent of Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight both in terms of the painfully dull premise and the increasingly skeevy emphasis on both fanservice and the protagonist's powers being fueled by jamming his tongue in the nearest girl's mouth. After all of about 11 minutes, it's also heading towards isekai protagonist w/ overwhelming power territory too in a worrying fanservice-friendly way. The new skills our boring fantasy protagonist acquires are fueled by "Life Points", which are replenished BY HEDONISM. I have a feeling I might not make it to the end of the episode before quitting in disgust.

Yup. Dunno if any other projects of his have been cancelled due to delays, but his latest artbook is now something like 3.5 years overdue. Well, it all depends on how tolerant your publisher is and how much industry cred you can bank on.

Started watching some of this season's other offerings after getting caught up on Attack on Titan and Jujutsu Kaisen. Honestly, the way they're handled now in Attack on Titan's final season, the titans come off more as Evangelion-esque mecha rather than the anthropomorphic eldritch abominations they were before the timeskip. Eren's repeated emergences from the Attack Titan's body in mid-fight to talk to people, complete with hydraulic-sounding steam noises and the head slumping forward really just makes it look and sound like he's disembarking from one of Full Metal Panic!'s arm slaves. It makes them so much less interesting and intimidating that the titan fights no longer have any real weight to them... especially now that Eren can spam-summon his own titan half a dozen times or so in a single fight. Armor Shop for Ladies & Gentlemen deserves special mention as one of the shortest anime series I've ever encountered. The individual episodes are not quite four minutes long, and that includes the credits. It's an adaptation of a 4koma series, and it can best be described as a kind of horrid abomination-against-nature cross between Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-san and Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time. An unemployed guy named Kautz discovers an armorer's shop that exclusively sells fetish-y chainmail bikini-type armor (the owner's preference... or should we say fetish?) and discovers it's basically bankrupt and, out of exasperation, accidentally volunteers to do their accounting because the owner's a moron who runs the shop at a loss in order in order to perv on the few female customers they get and his beautiful female assistant is too dim to see the problem there. It doesn't bring anything to the table except PG-13 fanservice under a looser interpretation of the word "armor" than Tomb Raider's usage of the word "tomb" and a feeling that the production group's families probably ask them when they're going to get a real job at every opportunity.

As a cargo pilot for SMS's parent company Bilra Transport, it seems somewhat unlikely they let him bring his monkey model VF-19 on cargo runs. ... but yes, they absolutely wouldn't want his help. The last time he poked his oar in and tried to solve a problem himself, he caused a government crackdown on arms exports, incurred massive losses for both Shinsei Industry and General Galaxy, derailed unmanned fighter development, and directly or indirectly caused the loss of three next-generation prototypes.1 The price tag on his particular brand of help is just too damn high, and Brisingr's already a poor region of the galaxy. 1. The YF-21 No.2, the AIF-X-9, and Neo Glaug.

They have one of those... her name is Elma Hoyly. Yes... the loli from Macross Dynamite 7. She's a research biologist working on biological fold waves at Xaos. She was apparently a student of Dr. Lawrence's. Yes... that's her piloting a replica VF-19改 in 2062. Yes... she's still a bit hung-up on Basara. Medically speaking, there's no accounting for taste. No further questions. Probably, yeah... Luca Angeloni's family owns Legodt & Angeloni Industries (LAI). He's set for life. He was only in SMS's Skull Platoon because his family wanted someone there to represent their interests in the field testing of the VF-25 they codeveloped with Shinsei Industry. Smart money says it's Bogue Con-vaart. The smart thing to do would have been to have Keith defect and take up Messer's VF-31 in the series, but that's a huge missed opportunity.

He's here to publish artbooks and chew bubblegum... but he lives in Japan's strategic bubblegum reserve, so we're in for a bit of a wait.

Tell that to the English... and anyone making jokes about the American deep south. Albus Dumbledore's brother Aberforth is introduced to the reader via a hidden-in-plain-sight joke about Scotsmen and bestiality. (For bonus points, he's even depicted wearing a kilt when he appears in the movie series, in line with that old gag about how Scots wear kilts 'because zippers scare the sheep".) The thing about Umbridge and the centaurs isn't terribly subtle either. Centaurs were super rapey in classical mythology, perhaps most famously documented in the final deed of the Greek mythical hero Heracles who was killed by the blood of a centaur named Nessus after killing him for trying to rape his wife. A woman being dragged off by a centaur means one and only one thing. There are a fair few bits of other off-color humor and mature references in Harry Potter, and they're not even particularly subtle. Just imagine the outcry when the oblivious general public sees HBO adapt that stuff too.

A lot of kid's media includes some hidden-in-plain-sight humor or subtext for the benefit/enjoyment of parents. J.K. Rowling's been put on the spot a few times WRT Aberforth's arrest for "inappropriate charms on a goat" and had to check the age of the requester before answering.

"Network that turned celebrated novel series A Song of Fire and Ice into a small screen pop culture phenomenon and then screwed it up so badly that all interest in the series and franchise vanished practically overnight expresses interest in adapting celebrated novel series Harry Potter for television." ... ... ... Am I the only one who looked a this and immediately thought "So THAT'S what a red flag factory looks like?". Between the cack-handed incompetence at HBO that murdered Game of Thrones in its sleep and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling having spent the last decade or coming unglued in an attempt to keep herself and her cash cow relevant via Twitter, this feels like something that can only end poorly. Especially if J.K. Rowling is allowed to have any creative control over its writers. It's one thing for Albus Dumbledore to allegedly be gay, but can you imagine the mess they'll create if they start including her Twitter comments in the series? There are a few in-jokes in the novels themselves that flew under the radar with her publisher but could cause havoc if HBO actually explored them, like the implication that Aberforth was arrested and tried for bestiality or that Professor Umbridge was raped by centaurs. Throw her comments from Twitter in the mix and we'll be hearing about how Neville had lice, how Hagrid was all about autoerotic asyphxiation, and how wizards used to just sh*t on the floor wherever they were standing and magic it away. (That last one isn't a joke, by the way... she actually said that.)

Really, that the New UN Government worlds of the Brisingr Alliance decided to trust Xaos and Walkure again is proof that something ALREADY went horribly wrong. Never mind that their incompetence and refusal to work with the New UN Forces was what allowed Windermere to conquer the Brisingr cluster in the first place, their leaders are very literally interstellar criminals. Especially Lady M, who Windermere outed as engaging in illegal cloning in violation of interstellar law in the last movie.

It's possible, I guess... though it's worth remembering that exactly zero of Delta Flight's VF-31s are production aircraft. Each and every one of them is a one-of-a-kind Ace Custom made by applying extensive aftermarket modifications to a trial production VF-31A Kairos. So if Xaos Valkyrie Works has modded Chuck's VF-31 custom Siegfried to be more like a RVF then it's just another layer of customization on what was already an extensively customized VF. The ones on the nose are polarized covers for a variety of sensors, similar to the ones on the VF-25. Now that'd be amusing... if Windermere's little stunt finally got the central New UN Forces' attention and they've come to stomp the planet flat.

There was never anything stopping him from carrying one... the VF-31's LU-18A beam gunpod can be mounted on a centerline hardpoint or the ordnance container. It looks like they've remodeled the head of Chuck's VF-31 to make it more like Luca's RVF-25. (On the VF-31A, there is fold carbon installed where the Siegfried custom type has fold quartz.)

I really wish people would stop saying this... if it's not a giant technorganic bug, space flower, anatomical abomination, or piece of flying coral it doesn't really have "Protoculture vibes". It has serious General Galaxy vibes. It's worth remembering that quantity doesn't necessarily mean "more powerful". The YF-29 has about 1/3 as many missiles as the VF-25 w/ Armored Pack or 1/4 as many as the VF-31 w/ Armored Pack, and yet it'd easily wreck both because it's armed with MDE weapons and has much higher performance. This is a Macross Delta feature, after all, and Delta has largely retreated from the "uber-powerful super prototype" Gundam-esque schtick that the Frontier movies and 30 played with back towards the baseline set for the 5th Generation by the trial production VF-25. Given that this apparent drone has markings in the same style as Xaos's VF-31s and shares Chuck's color scheme, I suspect Chuck has gained an AI wingman or two like Luca had in the Macross Frontier series. It's possible they just replaced the forward-swept winglets on his existing VF-31E with production parts. It would be an improvement over the VF-31's gunpod, since the Draken III's had beam grenade mode. It is occasionally useful... if you want "my hovercraft is full of eels" style gag translations. All in all, this trailer is well-composed but there's really nothing interesting going on here.

Nah, it's still 機動戦士ガンダム 閃光のハサウェイ.

In all fairness, while Tilly is absolutely the USS Discovery's chief screw-up officer she's far from the only one with amazing talent to do the worst thing possible in any situation. She's got Burnham with her, after all. After Tilly's amazing performance in her first command situation, who else would they possibly turn to? It takes a special kind of Starfleet officer to bungle a command situation so completely that Starfleet's most valuable starship falls into enemy hands with such breathtaking speed and ease that veteran Orion space pirates are initially convinced it must be a trap and then left utterly befuddled that it wasn't. Fleet Admiral Vance needs to Tenchi Muyou! GXP this hot mess and find a way to weaponize Tilly's monumental incompetence the way the Galaxy Police and Jurai royal family had weaponized Seina Yamada's impossible, physics-defyingly bad luck. Tilly's such a walking disasterpiece that they could send her back in time to be used as a Borg invasion deterrent. She'd be the first thing since the Kazon that'd make the collective decide assimilation wasn't worth the effort. Not out of thin air... out of the number 2, ironically enough.

Pretty sure the Eldian Empire in Attack on Titan makes the worst human rights of the Soviet Union look like a goddamn garden party by comparison.