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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yet here we are, talking about it. ๐Ÿ˜† Given that several news outlets that interviewed Stealth director Rob Cohen reported that he cited Macross as an inspiration for the film we can tentatively toss it on the pile of awful anime adaptations too. It makes for an excellent example of what happens when a creative tries to rework an anime title for "western sensibilities" and ultimately ends up removing everything that made the original enjoyable or distinctive in the first place. It's a safe bet a similar fate would have befallen Akira, had Warner Bros not finally given up on it and let the license expire. Just imagine... Akira, but Neo Tokyo is never named and is filmed in Toronto, the biker gangs aren't present at all, the Akira Project is instead being run by terrorists or Evil Russians because the military can't be vilified, Kaneda's played by Daniel Radcliffe with a spray-on tan and 30 minute subplot devoted to explaining he was adopted by Japanese immigrants, and Tetsuo's played by Chris Pratt or Jack Black because casting one of them is practically mandatory right now.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, there are two... Doom (2005) and Doom: Annihilation (2019). The first one was supposed to be an adaptation of Doom 3, but ultimately deviated from it so much in development that by the time it went into production it was essentially a totally unrelated work that was just borrowing the Doom name. The second one was a very loose adaptation of Doom 3 on a hilariously tiny budget that was still bordering on in-name-only status. A deep sense of foreboding is the appropriate reaction to the announcement of a Hollywood anime adaptation. Reasons vary, as you'd expect. The most commonly given reasons come down to trying to broaden the appeal of the movie. Anime may be more mainstream now than it was even ten years ago, but it's still not something that's widely accepted. Premises get made more generic and "accessible", plots are streamlined and simplified, potentially controversial characters and situations wind up removed, and so on. By the time they're done cutting and streamlining and simplifying they've often removed most of the original work's personality. Then, of course, they sometimes have to make concessions for casting decisions too. For instance, Ghost in the Shell cast Scarlett Johansson for her star power and ability to fill out a catsuit... then had to essentially center the entire plot on deflecting accusations of racism and whitewashing for casting a white woman to play a Japanese woman living and working in Japan. If the studios had their way with Akira, it's likely the only thing left of the original when the dust settled would've been Kaneda's iconic bike. They kind of already did... like twenty years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_(film) It's basically Macross Plus with the serial numbers filed off.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Probably inadvisable. There's a reason one of the five main types of Irish folk song is "The fae are back on their bullsh*t and I got bamboozled". ๐Ÿคฃ Seems like it'd be in poor taste to name a resort ship meant for tourism after a magical island that you can't leave without recreating the "He chose poorly" scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Doubly so if the scholars are correct and Emhain is an cognate of what's now called Avalon in Arthurian mythos. Avalon isn't a place of bounty for living souls to visit, it's a place for the dead and dying and not somewhere people generally come back from. Then again, naming a resort ship with an underground factory after a beautiful seaside town in a kingdom ruled by underground by a power-hungry technocrat is a bit on the nose too.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I'd argue that One Piece is proof that it is possible for there to be such thing as a western anime adaptation that respects the source material. It's very much the exception that tests the rule that western anime adaptations are awful. Of course, it was always going to have issues because One Piece is so incredibly weird that there were always going to have to be some significant compromises to make it work with living actors. About the best we can reasonably hope for from Hollywood is something like Alita: Battle Angel which plays fast and loose with the original story in order to essentially speedrun the most iconic moments in a single two-hour span. You only get that if there are superfans involved, though. The far more likely fate is a western "creative" trying to give their own new interpretation of the work and turning it into a dumpster fire that proves they missed the point completely. Akira would probably have ended up a generic sci-fi monster movie like what they did to Doom twice.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I searched on both the likely romanizations and the kana string itself for quite a while. Not a string with a lot of plausible results, though... unless Ukyo Kodachi is really into tapas. Emhain Abhlach (pronounced Ah-win) is certainly an alternative, though not one I'm sure fits the story... or the kana if we're being honest. It is a mythical island paradise... but in keeping with the usual themes of magical and otherworldly locales in Irish mythology and folklore, it's one of those places where Time Works Differently and You Can't Go Home Again. Emhain Abhlach is your standard Land of Plenty and Ease where mortal wealth is so abundant to have lost all value, with abundant food and water that needs no human labor to cultivate or maintain, and of course a population of... how can we put this politely?... "welcoming" women. The catch being that, when you leave, you discover that you've been gone for hundreds of years and will instantly age those hundreds of years the minute you get off the boat. It doesn't seem to have any meaningful connection to the tropically-themed ocean resort ship in Macross the Ride. That's the one I hit on as a likely suspect. Evna is a beautiful town near the Nonestic Sea in the Land of Ev, which is under the corrupt influence of a malevolent industrial capitalist autocrat (the Nome King) who rules his domain through an industrial monopoly, treats his own people as borderline slave labor, and actively conspires to oppress people in other lands. The resort ship Evna belongs to the Macross Galaxy fleet, and has a Galaxy corporation secret factory in its sublevels, meaning it's a beautiful seaside community ruled from underground by malevolent industrial capitalist autocrats (the cyber-nobles) who treat their own people as slave labor and want to oppress other nations similarly. Some commentary from Kodachi would be nice.
  6. 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. ๐Ÿ˜† There's only one reading for ใƒด on its own, and that's "vu". They spell the ship's name ใ‚จใƒดใƒŠ (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.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    All the usual suspects, I see. Akira has hopefully been spared the fate of joining that particularly inauspicious brotherhood.
  8. 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.
  9. 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 ใƒŽใƒผใƒ , 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Already has done... Char has a magical girl transformation in GQuuuuuuX.
  13. 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.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Finally, some competent storytelling.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, making hyperdrives "speed of plot" engines really was the only way to go.
  16. 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.
  17. Seto Kaiba
  18. 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...
  19. 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. ๐Ÿคฃ 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.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    PHRASING! ๐Ÿคฃ
  21. 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.
  22. 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...
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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