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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yup. Nah, Jedi would probably have LOTS of experience fighting against a foe with superior skill and/or experience by training with their instructors and masters and peers in the Jedi temple(s). The problem I see, which got the Khofar taskforce mulched by Smilo Ren and probably accounts for every other case of the Sith beating superior numbers of Jedi too, is that Jedi train against Jedi. Their experience is all fighting opponents who have the same reserved, defense-oriented, unaggressive fighting style they do so. So when someone like Smilo Ren comes at them with a heart full of murder and holding nothing back they're completely out of their depth. (You can tell in Revenge of the Sith that even though the Jedi knew they were coming to arrest a Sith Lord they did NOT expect that old man to screech like a banshee and do a 720 in midair right into a stab.) Yeah, the "Sol Patrol" were expecting Marquess of Queensbury rules and Qimir delivered a back alley brawl.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... maybe. Considering they sent four Jedi (a Master, two Knights, and a Padawan) just to surveil some witches on Brendok, that Green Karen sent just eight Jedi (two Masters, five Knights, and a Padawan) to Khofar to deal with an assassin who'd not only killed a Jedi Master in close combat without a lightsaber but also proven skillful enough to escape capture by another Jedi Master and a half dozen other Jedi on Olega feels like an inadequate response. Especially given that she and the other Masters were entertaining the theory Mae'd been trained by a Jedi splinter group with an unknown number of members. They would've had nine if Qimir hadn't already killed Kelnacca, but he apparently didn't even put up a proper fight. I think The Acolyte's fifth episode is itself a pretty good argument against the idea that they underpowered the Jedi and overpowered Smilo Ren. He himself points out that what makes the difference between them is adherance to rules. The Jedi learn to fight by training against other Jedi, so their experience with fighting other lightsaber users is limited entirely to other people who also follow the Jedi order's rules and philosophy. Their style is very uniform and restrained and they're clearly being cautious not just because Qimir was an unknown quantity but because there are a bunch of them all in the same fight and they don't want to risk hurting each other. Qimir, on the other hand, is not fighting with such restrictions. He's swinging for the fences because he's been placed in a target-rich environment with no friendlies to worry about hurting and because he has no reason to honor the Jedi's conservative code duello or restrain himself from just going straight for the kill. He doesn't have to abstain from using tactics and techniques that the Jedi may consider too lethal, too underhanded, or too cruel to train in. Jecki and Sol both manage to put Qimir on the defensive when they start attacking aggressively. Jecki manages to force him to give ground and lands the first real hit on him by breaking his helmet with her lightsaber hilt. He has to resort to that second hidden lightsaber to take her out and regain the initiative before Master Sol can reenter the fight. It is probably one of the most overused and misused criticisms in fiction, yeah. Related criticisms were bad enough that Mike Godwin coined Godwin's Second Law in 2022.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    From what I've seen on social media - and oh what a mistake social media feels like these days - the "Mary Sue" contingent are already at least partly up in arms over the series in response to Mae easily killing a Jedi Master in the first episode and outwitting the Jedi at every turn until episode 5. The one thing that seems to be staying their hands is that the online response to the series is already overwhelmingly negative in most of the fan spaces I've peeked into. That said, the Mary Sue accusations seem to be almost par for the course these days when a series tries to bring more female viewers into majority-male fandoms by giving the new installment a female protagonist. We've seen this happen so much lately that well-defined patterns have emerged. Quite a bit of it is simply gatekeeping and misogyny, but IMO it's rare for the accusations to be completely unfounded because the writers are stuck trying to avoid offending a bunch of different groups and end up leaning on the tropes common to girls young adult fiction to sell the characters. This tends to lead to writing hypercompetent protagonists who have to constantly establish their credentials surpass those of other characters to avoid accusations of Chickification, who have to have traumatic backstories involving the loss of their family coupled with a special upbringing that justifies their hypercompetence, and who are either not allowed to show any vulnerability at all or have to flip-flop between "badass action girl" and "fragile flower" with little to no middle ground. The only part of the girls young adult fiction formula they tend to miss is being a self-depricating pretty girl who describes herself as plain and uninteresting but nevertheless has a bunch of hot boys fighting over her. Star Trek and Star Wars both hit this hard in the last decade with Discovery's Michael Burnham, Picard's version of Seven of Nine, Lower Decks's Beckett Mariner, Disney-era Ahsoka Tano, the sequel trilogy's Rey, and now Mae. That need to have the character constantly assert dominance or behave in a situationally inappropriate manner to prove they're a "strong female character" seems to be what drives a LOT of the toxic "Mary Sue" accusations. In all fairness, those are actually the same goal... "Get revenge". Maul wanted revenge on Obi-Wan for his defeat and bisection in The Phantom Menace, and the reason he spent so much time building up a power base in the criminal underworld was partly to lay traps for Obi-Wan and partly prepwork for his plan to take revenge on his old master, Darth Sideous for abandoning him. Mae is also seemingly motivated entirely by her desire for revenge. Her first attempted murder is to take revenge for Osha "abandoning" their family to join the Jedi. She spends the events of the in-series present day seeking revenge against the four Jedi who were once stationed on Brendok because she blames them for the deaths of her family. Then, once she learns Osha is still alive and still loyal to the Jedi, she either switches back to her original motive of wanting revenge because Osha chose the Jedi over her or is going with a combination of her earlier two motives for revenge. It seems increasingly likely that, in the end, she'll be seeking revenge against Qimir and/or Qimir's master for having pulled the strings behind her birth and the destruction of the coven on Brendok. I guess she's technically closer to Maul's brother Savage Opress then... since her motive seems to be pure mistreatment-induced revenge. (Or at least revenge for what she herself perceives as "mistreatment".) Yup... but that was a painfully low bar to clear.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Up to now, she really has been written as a crazy person so it wouldn't exactly be out of character. Not to mention Star Wars is a setting that runs on very basic moral absolutes and loves to play with the idea that evil makes you crazy... and not only has she been trained to use the dark side, the power of the witches she trained in before that is also dark side. Looking at it, her arc feels a lot like Darth Maul's in The Clone Wars, what with her insane desire for revenge and occasional flip-flopping of priorities, her obsession with a sibling, etc.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Kind of, yeah? Mae hated the Jedi enough that she attempted to murder her own sister at the age of like 8 years old to prevent her from going with them. Then when she thought her sister had died during the incident on Brendok she hated the Jedi enough to sign on with Smilo Ren and plan the murders of all four Jedi who were involved and actually kill two of them directly or indirectly. She hesitated and even decided to turn herself in once she learned that her sister was still alive, but that resolve to turn herself in seems to have been very short-lived because she immediately resists being arrested for the murders she was planning to turn herself in for and then mood swings all the way back to murderously violent once she learns that her sister still sides with the Jedi and seemingly decides to go finish doing the murders she had previously decided to stop doing and turn herself in for. As unstable as she is, it seems really on brand for her to murder Sol and then attempt to do in her master as well. Up to now, basically her only response to anything that makes her angry is violence. But for one or two small childhood scuffles we could say that her only response to things that make her angry is attempted murder. No, but with that reaction maybe I should send them my CV...🤪
  6. Seto Kaiba
    If he is one, then he has to fit into the chain somewhere unless he was a failed apprentice who died before he could usurp his master's position. Based on a quick Google search and one of the last episodes of The Clone Wars, Darth Bane established the Rule of Two about 900 years before the events of The Acolyte... or approximately a thousand years before the events of The Phantom Menace. It's possible he's Darth Plagueis's master, the information I found says that Darth Plagueis was born somewhere around the time this show is set. If we assume the oldest age that's presented for him, he would be about 15 years old at the time this is set. Yeah, I'm kind of guessing that Mae is going to kill Sol and then rebel against her master and get killed. Either that or she'll kill him and steal his identity. We'll be careful not to microwave you then. If the Jedi were being practical about it, why would they not flood the zone with sheer weight of numbers? They're chasing a serial killer who has been hunting Jedi Masters. One who they suspect is a former Jedi themselves, or at the very least someone who has been trained by a rogue Jedi. They outnumber the target thousands to one. The only thing stopping them from going in there with overwhelming force is their own overconfidence. After all, green Karen wanted to make an example of the offender. Ironically, as the movies show us, the smartest thing to do would probably have been to flood the zone with regular soldiers with rapid fire rifles and just let them gun him down en masse.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Did we ever have characters worth rooting for, though? The Jedi, according to their nature, are all flat characters and far too bland to be likeable. Osha is essentially a spectator who's been largely uninvolved in the actual story so far. Mae's a mood-swinging psycho who treats murder as a one-size-fits-all solution to her life's problems. Qimir's basically the only one with any kind of nuance to his performance despite being a card-carrying villain. (I mean, I'm rooting for Qimir, but that's mostly a function of Manny Jacinto delivering the only halfway-believable performance in the series while everyone else's stiff acting feels like the entire cast is coming down off of dental anesthetic.) Even if they have redeeming qualities, I still won't care if they all die. Andor showed us Star Wars is better without the Jedi anyway.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Which is almost certainly not going to appease the fans who've been complaining about the continuity issue... I get the feeling nothing would appease that lot, TBH. Mind you, the continuity snarl is the least of The Acolyte's problems at this point... with audience review scores continuing to trend downward instead of rebounding, I think the showrunners probably are feeling less invested in "the power of many" now. (Or is it actually the Power of Manny... since Manny Jacinto is carrying this series?)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well, finished Viral Hit and Mysterious Disappearances today. Viral Hit ended up being one of the more bizarre things I've seen. I started watching it because its premise was so out there I just had to give it a look out of sheer curiosity, and it did not disappoint. Mysterious Disappearances... well... if you're all about girls with great big... tracts of land... then this is the show for you. None of the characters are in any way likeable and the story reminds me of nothing quite so much as Ghost Stories without the gag dub. If it ever gets released on home video, I suspect it'll need a Ghost Stories-esque gag dub to be actually watchable.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    He's the only one in the show with an actual nuanced personality... it kind of makes him the obvious choice for a favorite character. Considering what happened to most of them in short order, that may be very fortunate indeed. I can only imagine the fans who were shilling for Yord or Jecki on social media are very upset indeed that they both got and in a particularly undignified fashion.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Considering most of Disney Star Wars's dumbest ideas seem to revolve around character backstories and family connections... I can think of a few contenders for "dumbest idea from writers who think they're clever" in the context of The Acolyte: Qimir is Ren, the founder of the Knights of Ren, on a mission to create The Chosen One in order to destroy or corrupt them and avert the Prophecy. Qimir is a young Darth Plagueis the Wise. Qimir is the apprentice Darth Plagueis the Wise had before Palpatine. Mae and Osha are one of Darth Plagueis's experiments in using the Force to create life and HE burned the coven's fortress down to avoid having his work fall into the Jedi's hands. Qimir isn't actually a Sith Lord at all, just a mentally ill fallen Jedi using the Sith's reputation for shock value and possibly being treated as a useful idiot and diversion by the Sith Lords active in the period. Qimir has multiple personality disorder and Smilo Ren is an alternate personality of his, justifying why they're the same person AND why Qimir talks about the master like a separate person. Qimir is Master Sol's long lost brother. Qimir and The Stranger are actually twins, like Osha and Mae. Qimir's actual name is literally The Stranger, like how several other characters (e.g. Savage Opress, Moralo Eval, Cad Bane) have shockingly on-the-nose names. Indara, Torbin, Kelnacca, and Sol are all secretly Dark Jedi plotting to corrupt the order from within and Qimir is a loyal Jedi Knight playing the Sith Lord in order to wipe them out without arousing suspicion at the council's request. Qimir is a hitman the Jedi Council hired to assassinate the four masters before they could reveal what the Council really ordered them to do on Brendok. That there's another Sith Lord in the picture somewhere is a virtual certainty, since SOP for them seems to be the apprentice cultivating an apprentice to help them overthrow the master and become the master... lather, rinse, repeat until Return of the Jedi. Jeez... when the kids said "stranger danger!" they weren't kidding.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That's definitely a bit morbid... but to each their own.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It would be nice if she remembered that a good portion of her audience isn't, and took the time to explain these things within the context of the story when they become important. Not that I mind looking things up, but some folks don't want to go to the trouble and I can't blame them. Having just finished The Clone Wars and recently rewatched the prequels, this seems to be a relatively common problem with the writing in Star Wars. The Jedi seem to hold the idiot ball rather a lot, and frequently forget that they have various powers in order to preserve the drama in the story.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... so it's basically anti-beam asbestos. I guess that explains why Smilo Ren's helmet broke so easily too, if the material itself is inherently prone to brittle fracture.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That part definitely feels like a callback (or call forward?) to stories like The Clone Wars, which I'm still watching in parallel. The Acolyte seems to be an outgrowth of the worldview of The Clone Wars, where the Jedi were depicted as a stodgy and dogmatic group who you could call Lawful Good but who were often more preoccupied with being Lawful than Good. We never get to hear much about their many rules and traditions, but it's implied there are a LOT of them and that Jedi who rebel against those rules without crossing too many lines tend to be sidelined and passed over for promotion like Qui-Gon Jinn. Dark side users like the Witches and the few Sith apprentices were very much in Chaotic Evil territory with heavy emphasis on Chaotic and a villainous "Rules for thee but nor for me" mindset. (I just got to an episode last night that seems to indicate the Sith were so bad at rules that they basically wiped themselves out and saved the Jedi the trouble, except for one guy who instituted the "one teacher one student" policy.) Seems that way. It's apparently the central mystery to the story... what drove Mae so absolutely mad that she decided to devote her life to revenge-by-murder. Would've been nice if they'd explained that in the series... just having Smilo Ren randomly no-selling lightsabers and blasters like that came out of nowhere for the characters and audience alike. I'm definitely a bit curious why such an obviously useful thing isn't more prevalent.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Are they not supposed to be that way? Nothing about it seemed particularly off to me, I was more concerned by how plain most of them look... but I am surely no connoisseur.
  17. Seto Kaiba
  18. Seto Kaiba
    All right, it is 9pm on Tuesday and I am ready to be underwhelmed by a whole new episode of The Acolyte. They really think they're clever doing this opposites thing... Lost/Found, Revenge/Justice, Day, and now Night. ... aaaaaaaand there it is. He said the thing. All in all, significantly better than the previous episodes... low bar to clear that that is. Most of the improvement is that most of the episode is spent on something other than Mae's quest and the Jedi. The lightsaber fight feels oddly jumbled and doesn't feel like it has a consistent style, but it's still a huge improvement over the actual story. I hope the health plan is good, because Manny Jacinto's going to put his back out carrying the episode and likely the rest of the series.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, that's a draft cover for the fifth book. Notice the year on the cover says "20xx". Granted, there is kind of a sixth book... really a "0th" book... which is the original "Sky Angels" VF-1 tech manual doujinshi that Masahiro Chiba published back in 1984 and which Variable Fighter Master File is a spiritual successor to.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Only a few titles left in this season before Summer 2024's simulcast schedule starts... Tadaima, Okaeri... ugh. Just... ugh. I wanna strangle whoever wrote the ad copy for this, because they advertised it like a slice of life series about a gay couple struggling to find acceptance in modern Japan, which would have been both thought-provoking and interesting, but it's actually a very bland slice of life series wrapped around the author's mpreg fetish and unfortunate dialog choices make it accidentally extra-cringeworthy in English because it ends up borrowing terms that are normally in the realm of incel podcasters. Editors exist to keep ideas like Tadaima, Okaeri from seeing print. Clearly someone was asleep at the switch. Chillin' in Another World with Level 2 Super Cheat Powers remained light and insubstantial to the very end. It's cute, it's occasionally funny, but it doesn't do anything unique or take its story anywhere interesting. It's clearly leaning VERY hard on the "Waifu" angle for Rys. It's a solid 6/10 series that's the very picture of that eminently watchable series that gets viewers because it airs between two popular shows and not on its own merits. As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World also ended. The season finale was a joke-heavy episode that was very clearly done to set up a season two... which makes it fortunate that it's actually getting one. I enjoyed this one for its unconventional take on the painfully overdone isekai genre, though this title is definitely not for everyone and definitely won't satisfy viewers who expect isekai to be more action-focused. I'm looking forward to season two. It made me wish they'd get off the dime and produce another season of Ascendance of a Bookworm.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Watching a few more shows limp across the finish line... but also some new offerings entering the field. Code Geass: Roze of the Recapture has started streaming on Hulu. I gave that one a watch earlier today, and while it is animated exactly as well as you'd expect from true veteran studios Sunrise and CLAMP, it suffers from a punishing lack of originality throughout every aspect of its execution. HIGHSPEED Etoile is limping into its final episode, and the writers are going all-in on letting Rin have that unearned win. She's just magically racing like a top-tier pro after being complete dogsh*t all series, and everyone's acting like this is completely expected. A lightning strike conveniently knocks out all of the cars and shuts down the course so that Rin's able to get a free head start because the pit crews have to change tires manually. Her support AI comes back on line just in time to help her win the race against a driver who's actually racing on skill. It's been a while since this series has properly disgusted me, but as endings go this one is thoroughly disgusting. I can usually find something praiseworthy in almost any series, but this... this is just all bad all the way through to the extent that it's actually a little worrying. They even try to end on a title drop for maximum cringe. Astro Note's final episode leans heavily back into the first episode's retro late 70's/early 80's sci-fi anime aesthetic with an alien king threatening to destroy Earth and the main characters facing off against them in a giant robot that looks like the lovechild of a Gundam and Ideon. As a parody goes, it's not bad, but it comes out of nowhere and it doesn't really add anything to the story except explaining maybe the first two minutes of the first episode. So Mira et. al. kill the alien king and the series jumps right back to business as usual like they didn't just turn the boarding house into a giant robot and kill thousands of people. I had fairly high hopes for this one at the outset, but it turned out to be a pretty mediocre series. Vampire Dormitory rushes to its end with a continued escalation of its plot's Unfortunate Implications. We've gone from abusive relationship territory all the way to the border of rape-by-deception. That's pretty creepy in any context, but in what's ostensibly a romance story that's just off-putting. An amnesiac, gender-swapped Mito is going to marry that dhampir guy who forcibly changed her gender and seemingly wiped her memory and Ruka's just going to let it happen... so we get to see the start of a vampire gay wedding (in a church no less!) until Mito finds (s)he is unable to go through with the vows because their memory is returning. Then Ruka crashes the ceremony, taking this well into daytime soap opera territory and thankfully negating the Unfortunate Implications... at least until he realizes Mito's a chick, which he takes surprisingly well all things considered. She's going to keep up the sweet polly oliver routine in order ot keep living in the boys dorm at school... and then the bloom filter's turned up to 11. All in all, better than I thought it'd be... but it does suffer from multiple bouts of Unfortunate Implications that take the romance story in fridge horror directions.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Earnings reports are required by law to be accurate because those are statements of financial condition provided to shareholders. Layoffs, unfortunately, are often unconnected to a company's profitability. It's become a very popular practice for companies to lay off staff as a way of reducing short-term costs in order to pump up the share price of the company's stock after a stock buyback or just a particularly good year. (Since many executives are paid in stock and stock options, well... you can guess why.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Looking at Hasbro's published earnings reports, I'm not sure that's necessarily accurate. In absolute terms, it does appear to be the case that Disney-era Star Wars merchandise does not sell in the same volumes that pre-Disney merchandise did. Hasbro has credited their Star Wars lines with buoying the company in otherwise lean sales periods at least twice to date. Diamond Select Toys has publicly commented that demand for merch from the sequel trilogy is noticeably lower than that of the prequel and original trilogies but that sales are otherwise satisfyingly strong. Independent and chain retailers who've weighed in on the issue have pointed to a few different causes. The main one being simple oversaturation of the market. The release of a new Star Wars title used to be an occasion. It was an infrequent but major event that would drive a huge spike in demand for Star Wars merch of all kinds before tapering off to a respectable but low level of demand between releases. Several retailers made the point that Disney is not giving Star Wars audiences that break between releases to create that sense of occasion for a new release. IMO, they have a point there... Disney had a new movie every year from 2015 to 2019, and a new TV series every year from 2019 to present. They've also credited overzealous ordering with a lot of merch ending up clearanced. Ordering like those demand spikes they were accustomed to are still happening has led to substantial overstock situations from around the time of The Last Jedi onwards. (There was also one strange account from a Kalamazoo toy store owner who asserted that there was diminished interest in Grogu merch around the time of The Mandalorian S2 when it became harder to overlook that the cute baby was actually 50+ years old.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It looks like Nintendo added another Nintendo Switch Online virtual console to the Expansion Pack today. It's a second Nintendo 64 virtual console app specifically for M-rated games. Right now, it has only two games: Perfect Dark and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Watched a pair of episodes of The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio. It remains my standout for the season. There's some truly fine character drama there, and the depiction of the stress and toxic work conditions involved in the voice actor and idol industries is unflinching. Also enjoying the new season of Demon Slayer. I'm not sure what it is about this series, but it's really grown on me... possibly how it depends far more on the strength of its story and character development than on fanservice.
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