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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Sitting down to watch S3 Ep.3 "Shuttle to Kenfori".
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I'll admit, I have no idea what this is meant to mean. ๐Ÿค” Well, we know a bunch of the 90's Star Trek production staff were anime fans... they dropped a fair amount of references to Dirty Pair, a few lowkey references to Macross and used Japanese model kits in kitbashes fairly liberally, etc. It would not surprise me. Then again, considering Star Trek: Discovery's mirror universe arc(s), it would not surprise me if the current Gen X-heavy production staff are big fans of another and much darker sci-fi franchise with an even more profound fetish for gold leaf: Warhammer 40,000.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Crunchyroll has periodic sales, though it's anyone's guess when such a sale might happen aside from the usual times of year like Black Friday. Part of the "sale" was the membership discount, though. You can get that part anytime as long as you're a member, though the percentage depends on the type of membership you have.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Sounds like the unproduced Star Trek: Final Frontier would have been right up your alley then. The idea probably would have worked a lot better if it'd been set closer to the 24th century shows. There were just too many issues with trying it as far into the future as they did to the level that it became a certifiable Idiot Plot. I have to wonder what Starfleet Academy will do to justify its 32nd century setting besides being grim and boring and throwing a bunch of familiar 24th century enemy species into the background as Federation members. The writers seem to have forgotten that technology advanced a lot even in the 2370s of Voyager and Deep Space Nine. Voyager's doctor is teaching at the Academy, despite being a first-generation EMH whose software has been obsolete for 818 years. That's like going to a history class today and finding out your instructor is Geoffrey of Monmouth. Or someone from the 24th century rolling up to a computer science class to find the instructor is f***ing Clippy. (As much as I love Robert Picardo and his role as the Doctor... there are so many problems with the idea in this series.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, 900 years is a very long time indeed (for Humans) and things can change a lot in such a substantial period. That doesn't mean that what they did made sense, though. One of the many reasons fans hated it was that it didn't make sense in context or out. ๐Ÿ˜† Trying to launch a new story off a springboard made of pure idiocy and character shilling is probably not the best idea. Literally everything about the Burn is stupid. That's why, when the idea was originally pitched back in 2006 as the premise for a stand-alone animated series called Star Trek: Final Frontier it got no farther than a handful of rough story treatments and some concept art before CBS said "No thank you". Kurtzman et. al. actually managed to make the bad idea behind Final Frontier worse.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    You're not alone there. That Starfleet Academy is another unasked-for spinoff of Star Trek: Discovery is likely to make the series a hard sell for a lot of Star Trek fans. You'd think Discovery's status as the fandom's un-favorite and the lowest-rated Star Trek series of all time would given the network pause for thought even before their first spinoff of the series, Section 31, crashed and burned so hard it became the worst-reviewed Star Trek title of all time. Kurtzman keeps doubling down on his bad idea as if he hopes that if he just keeps pushing fans will come around and like it. That's the thing... it wasn't. Earth's role in the story is basically getting sh*t on for hoarding dilithium after the Burn and going isolationist because they assumed the Burn was an attack.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That's pretty on-brand for a TOS-era Klingon, mind you. This is one of the uniforms used in TOS. Gold and bronze - not counting epic quantities of skin bronzer - were pretty much half of the Klingons entire color palette in that era. The rest was black. Like Starfleet, the Imperial Klingon Defense Force must be updating its uniforms every so often as fashion evolves on the homeworld. The idea of a fashion-conscious Klingon is an inherently funny thought to me, but the sharp metallics do make them very visually distinct from the Starfleet officers in their bright primary colors. Then again, when it comes to makeup and sartorial choices I'll take the TOS Klingons and/or SNW Klingons over the STD Klingorcs 100 times out of 100 without question or hesitation. Hm... nah. I don't think she'll leave the Enterprise, retire from Starfleet, or fall victim to the Redshirt Occupational Hazard. What I think is going on here is that the writers and showrunners for Strange New Worlds sat up and said "Oh sh*t, we've got two whole seasons in the can already and we haven't done anything with one member of the main cast!" Literally every other main cast member has had an episode or multi-episode story arc devoted to fleshing them out as characters except Ortegas. Even new additions like Scotty and recurring guest characters like Pelia and Sam Kirk. Until this last two episodes, Ortegas's entire character could be summed up in her mantra "I'm Erica Ortegas, I fly the ship!". She's that underdeveloped. The PTSD from her near-death experience at the hands of the Gorn is a good opportunity to explore what makes her tick as a person and not just the redshirt who mans the helm. She's been nothing but flippant the entire series so far, so seeing her genuinely rattled should make for some good character development. Unlikely. A lot of people forget this because he's just so iconic as the Enterprise's helmsman, but Mr. Sulu was not the Enterprise's helmsman at the start of TOS. When he was first introduced in the show's second pilot "Where No Man Has Gone Before", Sulu was a science division department head serving under Spock. He doesn't swap his science blues out for the gold command division tunic and a seat at the helm until the show's first regular episode. (Because the show's writers realized there wouldn't really be a need for an astrophysicist every episode, but they did need a regular at the helm.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I kept my expectations low, and I am somehow still disappointed. After Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard spent literal years in a race to the bottom of the ratings to see who could dethrone Star Trek V: the Final Frontier as the franchise's lowest rated installment, only for Discovery's short-lived triumph to be eclipsed by the disaster that was Star Trek: Section 31, here's this hot mess to show that no matter how low the bar gets Alex Kurtzman still thinks he's at a limbo contest. My key takeaway from this trailer is that they're going to try to sell this one on the basis of fanservice... what with the lingering shots of the "James T. Kirk Pavilion" at Starfleet Academy, a presentation on "The Fate of Benjamin Sisko", Voyager's EMH Mark I, a female Jem'Hadar officer, and a wall full of the names of past characters and actors including a bunch of deep cuts and random choices like Alonzo Pressman (the evil admiral from "The Pegasus", Peter Preston (Scotty's nephew who dies in Wrath of Khan), Sito Jaxa (the one Bajoran ensign who dies in the TNG episode "Lower Decks"), and the like.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Seems like I was wise to drop Private Tutor to the Duke's Daughter when I did... the series is so lacking in plot that it's trying to fill airtime with a recap episode and audio commentary by the voice cast with only four episodes actually delivered. Kinda feel like if you have so little material you have to deliberately waste airtime in a one-cour series with a recap episode, your story's either too short to be worth adapting or you're doing something very wrong in the production process. Betrothed to My Sister's Ex remains absolutely a-goddamn-dorable as usual.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Hotel Inhumans is probably joining my drop list too... The Water Magician is doing exactly what I expected... Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant is warming to its boring, unimaginative theme... Dandadan is... still insane. This is the kind of series that makes you stop and check that someone hasn't put something in your drink... because it feels more like a hallucination than a story. Secrets of the Silent Witch has a good episode today.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That scheme looks pretty cool too.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    In Macross Zero Ep1, the ship's badge for the CVN-99 Asuka II seen on the back wall of the briefing room (@13:20) shows her affiliation is the UN Spacy rather than the UN Navy. Possibly/presumably because she was involved in the business of planetary defense and serving as both a mobile testbed for OTM and a training center for UN Spacy personnel who were learning the basics of Variable Fighter (and possibly Destroid) operations. The Destroids, like the Valkyries, may have been Spacy property used to train personnel in the basics before proper production models became available. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix does present an alternate version of the ship's badge that presents a UN Navy affiliation instead. Given that most later space warships opted for simpler and smaller beam and missile CIWS turrets, apparently not in a purely ship-based air defense context. The Destroids of the First Space War and original Macross series were built in expectation of use in a land war. The Defender was a self-propelled anti-aircraft gun that was meant to protect a larger mobile Destroid force from attack by aircraft. As it happened, the Zentradi didn't really do land wars in general so the Defenders on the ground never got to even see the enemy before being obliterated and the ones in space were stuck as overcomplicated CIWS turrets.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Modern military drone aircraft like the MQ-1 Predator or RQ-4 Global Hawk are remotely controlled in the most conventional sense. The plane has little-to-no autonomous function and virtually all aspects of flight are radio controlled from the ground by a crew of ~3 people (a pilot, a sensor operator, and a mission controller). Military-use drone aircraft in Macross are mostly computer-controlled. Rather than having a ground crew managing every aspect of the aircraft by remote control, most aspects of the drone's operation are instead managed by an onboard AI control system. By law, most unmanned fighters are restricted to semi-autonomous AI control. There is still some guidance and control provided by a ground crew in terms of identifying destinations, routes, mission parameters, target categories, permission to engage, etc. Some heavily restricted types are fully-autonomous, able to continue operating without human intervention or direction should control be cut off (or never received). In this case, though... I think what they're referring to is that the Cheyenne II's are being plugged into the ship's own air defense network and operating as an unmanned gun turret like a Phalanx CIWS. Feeding them target criteria and otherwise letting the onboard radar and control computers do all the heavy lifting.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Its Macross Chronicle Mechanic Sheet mentions that they can be/are remotely controlled from the warship side instead of manually operated.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I wouldn't mind seeing a version of that in the "Rim World Model" colors used for the VF-171s in Macross Delta either. It's close-ish to the standard CF khaki for the VF-25A but not all the way there.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Rhys Darby absolutely stole the show. That was wild.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Toss Solo Camping for Two on the trash fire too. The writing is so consistently bad that I'm vexed that Kodansha was willing to publish the original manga, never mind that an experienced studio like Synergy with actual credentials is wasting its time with it. (Even weirder that it's Synergy doing it... they normally do shounen anime. Their schtick for the longest time was Beyblade!)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    We need to see if someone can stealthily drop this on Bandai's desk... because I doubt we're the only ones who'd look at this and say "Take my money, Bandai!" In practice, you could say it's a typically polite Japanese way of saying "It's my story and I'll do what I want." ๐Ÿ˜† Kawamori's not going to let himself be locked into a single version of the narrative, even if official publications do generally preference the TV series version over movie versions for timelines and such. He'll pick whatever he thinks best fits the new story he's trying to tell and run with that.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, they've been mixing and matching versions of events and designs pretty much the entire time. Macross runs on Broad Strokes Continuity, which Kawamori has sometimes attempted to explain as all Macross titles being dramatizations that emphasize or deemphasize parts of an unseen "true" history or that they're all equally true. In practical terms, it just means Macross has a multiple choice approach to the past and that designs from all versions coexist so they can use whatever they feel best fits the new project they're working on. We saw a fair bit of this in Macross 7, where the in-universe Lynn Minmay Story special that Fire Bomber was hired to work on mixed and matched a DYRL Vrlitwhai and a TV Quamzin, and of course the in-story version of DYRL? having scenes that aren't in the real version like Max and Milia's wedding. It's very prominent in Macross Delta as well, where Berger Stone's historical summation shows things like the TV series ending of Frontier, but with Alto using the YF-29.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    "Yes." You see, we're dealing with a character who has a nickname that is a variant form of his given name. His given name is written ใƒŸใƒใ‚จใƒซ (Mihaeru) which is the katakana rendering of Mikhail or Michael. His nickname is ใƒŸใ‚ทใ‚งใƒซ (Misheru), the katakana rendering used for his name's French variant "Michel" (but also the feminine "Michelle"). Back when the series was being fansubbed, this naturally caused a great deal of confusion because his name was being pronounced inconsistently by different characters. Some fan subs went with the assumption that he was Russian based on the Russian sounding pronunciation of his given name and that his surname is spelled/pronounced "Buran" (ใƒ–ใƒฉใƒณ, Buran, which can also be used for the French "Blanc") like the Soviet spaceplane/space shuttle program. Some fans assumed he was French and that his nickname was his actual name, and rendered his name as Michel Blanc instead. Official materials (e.g. Macross Chronicle) and merchandise have since cleared the matter up, that his given name is meant to be written "Michael", that his surname is "Blanc", and that the French variant we hear "Michel" is an affectionate nickname. That's generally incorrect (see above). A lot of fans have guessed about what the nationality/ethnicity of his Human parents might be, but AFAIK there has been no official statement on the matter. The few books that do talk about his family generally stick to mentioning that he has Zentradi, Zolan, and Human ancestry. Sometimes they get as specific as to say the Zentradi is in his grandparents generation, but that's about as specific as they get.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    We don't know who became Michael's legal guardian after his sister passed in 2055. The most likely candidates to serve as Michael's legal guardians (or at least guarantors if he continues to live alone) are his friend Klan's parents. We don't know what his exact living conditions were, so it's hard to say how he would have lived after his sister's passing. There are (rare) circumstances under which a teenager can legally live alone in Japan, though these almost always require the consent of a parent or other legal guardian who serves as a signatory and guarantor for any contracts like apartment leases and such. IIRC, the most common such case is students from very remote rural areas being given permission to get a place closer to school... though staying with relatives or in a school dormitory is vastly more common. There are also very rare cases of minors living alone (with permission) either due to the child wanting more independence from very trusting parents or not getting along with their parents to the point that neither can stand to see the other, both of which are used in popular fiction far more commonly than they occur in reality. In Macross 7, Mylene Jenius is one such case of a minor (aged 14) living on her own with parental permission and support. Macross Frontier's Alto Saotome also started living alone at 16, renting an apartment in the Senzoku district of Island-1.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Detectives These Days Are Crazy! remains at least mildly diverting. It's more a sitcom/slice of life series about an unsuccessful detective and the weirdos around him than an actual detective series, but at least it's entertaining.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Seems like there's a real deep cut in the new season's second episode "Wedding Bell Blues".
  24. Seto Kaiba
    So... pretty much as a rule, when a habitable planet is located and colonized in Macross it's an emigrant fleet that found the planet and colonized it. That's what emigrant fleets do. It's kind of their entire thing, really. Those emigrant fleets raise, fund, and maintain their own local New UN Forces defense forces that protect them in transit as well as after they locate a planet and settle down. The size and composition of those forces varies wildly based on the generation of emigrant fleet and preferences of its government, but the vast majority of planets have at least a few New UN Spacy warships chilling out in orbit for defense. Most have dozens if not hundreds. Even New UN Government member worlds that weren't, strictly speaking, colonized by Humanity because they already had native sentient lifeforms have such defense forces, and some maintain additional paramilitary forces for law enforcement purposes like Zola's anti-poaching Zola Patrol and Uroboros's anti-piracy Hunter's Guild. Yeah, that's pretty much the rationale behind the Hunter's Guild on Uroboros. Though the Uroboros Hunter's Guild isn't a PMC, it's a licensing and regulatory body for freelance bounty hunters and similar... basically your standard JRPG Adventurer's Guild but dressed up in sci-fi suitable terms. 'course, it's worth noting that the emigrant fleet's/planet's government is already footing the bill to maintain the fleet's/planet's local New UN Forces. Of course. These PMCs are corporate subsidiaries that have to turn a profit in order to stay in business and often remain enmeshed in providing services to their parent companies. Mind you, because manpower is scarce and demand is high they do seem to be willing to take risks on people who have skills but also have problematic habits, personalities, or histories. This much is explicitly stated, and we of course do get examples to go with it. Even SMS, the top tier PMC, is hiring folks who got BCD'd out of the service and Xaos is even less choosy... hiring several characters who are described as lazy and guilty of chronic tardiness and absenteeism, a mentally unstable pilot, and a commander with a rather checkered past and a long history of losing battles. There's definitely an element of suspect judgement in some of their decisions, particularly Xaos's in Macross Delta. Such as allowing a new recruit to repeatedly blow off training without consequences and disable safety features in a training aircraft after skipping training on the ground, a rather heinous breach of common sense that nearly got their new recruit killed in the expensive and messy crash of a dedicated training aircraft. Well, yes... whether such wise leadership is actually available is another matter entirely. However, PMCs aren't being hired to take on Zentradi fleets on their own or anything like that. From what we see and what we're told, when they're not being hired by their parent company to protect its own assets and personnel they're providing support, training, and/or field testing services in support of the local New UN Forces. They're not a replacement for said local New UN Forces, merely a supplement to them.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Hundreds, not thousands. We don't have a firm size range, but the one branch fleet we have definite numbers for (Vrlitwhai's 67th branch fleet in the TV series) was implied to be on the large side for a branch fleet and consisted of 1,213 ships. Not that there's a huge amount of practical difference in being outnumbered hundreds to one as opposed to thousands to one in a stand-up fight. Indeed. Even in 2058, an armed confrontation with a branch fleet was Serious Business even for the largest and best-equipped emigrant fleets like Macross Frontier. The sort of emergency situation that results in a major mobilization of the New UN Forces and any supporting PMCs alongside them, as seen in Macross the Ride. The sort of affair that you dust off the Special Forces for. If we take Master File at its word (and a grain of salt is strongly encouraged) even the largest emigrant fleets are about 900 ships and a main fleet is the sort of thing where you're not just sending in the special forces... even a small main fleet of a few hundred thousand ships is a "get every fighter, every ship, and every reaction weapon that every planet and fleet in range can spare" sort of occasion. Like what the New UN Forces did in response to the main fleet that bombarded Spica III. Fewer than usual... those Logitech G815s hold up commendably well.
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