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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Fear of them collapsing into each other to form some kind of singularity of extremely insincere misplaced regret? Or concern that they might drown in a tidal wave of crocodile tears. Maybe Soong can build one with a bit of the original Picard's backbone?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well... Star Trek: Discovery's third season has started coming out and morbid curiosity led me to give its first episode a look. "That Hope is You, Part 1" unfortunately continues the Star Trek: Discovery tradition of "this show would be better off without the Star Trek name on it"... because the premise would be pretty interesting if the writers hadn't completely f*cked it up or failed to think it out properly. I know this is kind of damned-by-faint-praise, but Star Trek: Discovery's biggest problem right now is that it insists on pretending it's Star Trek. If they took the "Star Trek" out of the title and just presented it as an all-original sci-fi series called Discovery from season 3's start onward, it would be an engaging show that I might actually be willing to pay for a subscription to follow.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Quite true. IMO, Star Trek had/has a pretty sensible containment strategy in considering licensee-created "expanded universe" materials non-canon and having a single creative team running the show (literally) for much of the franchise's life. Not an airtight strategy by any means, but one that shielded the franchise from the kind of issues that its spiritual sibling Star Wars encountered with its pseudo-canon expanded universe. IIRC, killing off Data was something Brent Spiner wrote into Nemesis because he felt he was aging out of the role of the theoretically immortal and unaging Commander Data. Even today's VFX tech wasn't enough to convincingly de-age him back to even where he was when Nemesis was filmed. (Copying his mind into B4 was a way to bring him back later if he changed his mind.) Bringing Data back just to kill him again was a dick move on Picard's part. Killing off Picard and bringing him back to life as an android with artificially-implanted memories and emotions? That was a Philip K. Dick move. A lot of fans seem to feel that way about it. Most of its sins could've been forgiven if only the show hadn't been so damn determined to drag Starfleet Saint Jean-Luc Picard's name through the mud.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Basara had enough actual character traits that his lack of development was allowed to pass unremarked-upon... Mikumo was so underdeveloped they had to try to turn her lack of any character traits into a character trait.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the new Trek showrunners seem to disagree that there aren't many "real" retcons given the amount of time and effort spent explaining/justifying them in live segments, interviews, etc. (In all fairness, while Star Trek does not generally consider comics to be canon they made an exception for Countdown because it was done specifically to promote the movie and its lore was corroborated by creator interviews.) To be fair, it's not like there isn't a small solar system's worth of precedent for Starfleet keeping century-plus old ship classes in continuous service with regular upgrades. The Miranda-class and Excelsior-classes that were seen so often in the Dominion War were, respectively, at least 111 and 93 years old at the time the Dominion War ended in 2378. The tugs - semi-officially called Helios-class - being only marginally older than the Miranda-class (at least 121 years) isn't that unbelievable IMO. The other tug class we saw in shots of Mars, the Wallenberg-class, didn't appear in Discovery and might be new or at least newer. (Having old, decommissioned Starfleet shuttles be repurposed for civilian commuter use isn't all that hard to believe either.) If you'd cited an actual stable society, it would have been fine. Weimar Germany was a trashfire for the entirety of its short life... marked by the succession crisis after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and just kind of decided it was a republic, the creation of a national assembly and a new constitution, the hyperinflation of its currency, the burden of war reparations, two restructurings of its national debt, abandonment of territorial claims, the Great Depression, and violence from far-right political extremists. THAT'S NOT STABLE. J.J. Abrams' goal was to make Star Trek more like Star Wars in the hopes of increasing its mass market appeal so he could make the jump to Star Wars proper... so you could say it was willful stupidity.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Nobody is Lady M! (No really, that's their official position so far.) Also, you're missing a couple folks on your relationship chart there. Between Mao Nome and Lady M should be Dr. Elma Hoyly, who developed the fold wave amplifiers used by the Tactical Sound Units during her work with Tactical Sound Unit Thrones in the early 2060s (Macross E) based on the work of her mentor, Dr. Lawrence (from Macross Dynamite 7). Ivan Polivanov (also from Macross E) kind of belongs in the space between Grace O'Connor and Roid Brehm, as he was experimenting with using fold songs to manipulate living beings as weapons the way Grace'd tried with the Vajra.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well, no. First, I can't honestly recall a single instance of having seen a fan complain about that. Second, that wasn't from the novels. That was from Star Trek: Countdown. A (lamentably bad) four-issue limited comic that written as a prequel/tie-in to the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie. It was written to do all the backstory exposition the movie didn't do... like the details of Romulus's destruction, Nero's circumstances, how a civilian mining ship ended up covered in Borg tech, where the Narada and its crew were during the film's timeskip, etc..
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... which Wiki did you use? Memory Alpha is, AFAIK, more or less the go-to for Star Trek official setting materials. Memory Beta's good for the non-canon expanded universe stuff like novels, comics, etc. though it can be confusing to read since it doesn't separate the different takes on things into different articles. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Romulan_sun It's definitely not a great bit of writing... but the smartarse fan would note it's still not the worst writing Trek has ever had. That honor still debatably belongs to either "Code of Honor", "Threshold", "11:59", or Star Trek V. It does open up some rather unpleasant plot holes in Picard and in Star Trek '09 though. The three biggest plot holes are kind of intertwined... Why did Nero insist that the Federation "did nothing, and allowed [his] people to burn while their planet broke in half" after being transported to the Kelvin timeline, when Jean-Luc Picard successfully orchestrated the construction of a rescue fleet of unprecedented scale and the evacuation of countless Romulans to planets like Vashti? Why did the Romulan Star Empire even need the Federation's help with the evacuation if the supernova only threatened one star system? Why did losing only one star system, even if it was the capital, cause the entire Romulan Star Empire to collapse? The Abrams/Kurtzman-era Trek writers seem to rather consistently forget that antagonists like the Romulans and Klingons are every bit the interstellar achievers that the Federation is, and aren't limited to one homeworld. Discovery's first season rather perplexingly asserts that destroying Qo'noS would wipe out almost the entire Klingon species, and Picard's makes the loss of Romulus out to be enough to collapse the empire and reduce the remaining Romulans to near-powerless refugees.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Uh-huh. Sure. ... ... ... You... um... weren't a very good history student, were you? The Weimar Republic was about as far from stable as it was possible to get. It's like trying to compare a building made out of concrete to one made out of cake.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Macross 7 takes - no joke - about twenty episodes to actually get going properly. The pacing sucks, but once it gets going it's reasonably engaging.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    In the real world, stable societies are very slow to change for better or for worse. In pre-Abrams Star Trek, the United Federation of Planets was a very stable post-scarcity society. Altruism had become second nature to people who grew up in a civilizaton where everyone was treated with dignity and respect and everyone's needs were met. Everyone was fed, clothed, and housed. Everyone had unrestricted access to education, to medical care, and to entertainment. Everyone was able to contribute to society or even voluntarily abstain from doing so without restraint or penalty. Over two centuries of social progress don't suddenly come undone overnight even in a comparatively unstable society like our modern one, never mind an advanced civilizaton like the Federation's. Racism doesn't just suddenly become OK again in a society where it's been unacceptable for centuries. Substance abuse doesn't just suddenly become a thing again in a society that abhors it but treats it properly as a mental health issue instead of a crime and had long since invented non-habit forming, non-harmful alcohol substitutes that'd become the standard. Almost everything. The cause of the supernova was changed from a Tal Shiar screwup to unknown. The star that went supernova was changed from the remote Hobus system to Romulus's own star. The supernova event itself was changed from a sudden and unexpected event to something with enough lead time for a mass evacuation to be planned and carried out. The supernova explosion was changed from a galaxy-threatening, physics-defying event to a normal supernova that just destroyed the Romulan system. The Federation's role went from not providing any aid until it was too late to immediately constructing the biggest rescue armada ever constructed and carrying out a mass evacuation and resettlement of Romulus's populace until the evacuation fleet's ongoing construction was sabotaged by a secret organization inside the Tal Shiar. Data went from Captain of the Enterprise-E during the events of the supernova after being resurrected in B-4's body to being permanently dead and entirely uninvolved. The only aspects of it that didn't change were the bizarre insistence that destroying Romulus was the same as destroying the Romulan Empire even though they're an interstellar civilization on par with the Federation in every prior TV series, and Spock having disappeared while on a mission to save Romulus (kicking off the Kelvin timeline, though Spock's chosen method would have been just as deadly for Romulus as the supernova now that it was just a normal supernova). All in all, they managed to write around the problems with J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek movie in a way that was detrimental to both stories.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, while Star Trek does use that trope a fair bit its actual degree of usage is almost as oversold among fans as the "redshirts are doomed to die" meme. The actual number of cases of flag officers deliberately acting contrary to Federation law/ideals is pretty low. Seven if you count future!Janeway, who retrocausally doesn't exist... which was her entire plan. (The so-called "insane admirals" who didn't make the below list were omitted due to acting under alien influence, diagnosed mental illness, or simple incompetence.) Where Picard differs from those previous examples is in the fact that those previous antagonistic flag officers were always presented in a way that made it clear that what they were doing would be considered completely unacceptable by the rest of Starfleet, by the Federation Council, and by the general populace. They were always presented as Bad Guys who were brought to justice by the ideal-upholding Starfleet rank and file or at least killed by the injustice they'd perpetrated directly or indirectly. Only William Ross walked away with his rank and his freedom, though he was only an accessory to the crime not its architect. The best example of someone "defending" the Federation without upholding its ideals is Director Sloan of Section 31, who is undone by the two most idealistic members of Deep Space Nine's crew and kills himself in a bid to "protect them from themselves". The attitude we see from Starfleet in Star Trek: Picard is very much against the grain of what you'd expect from Star Trek. Eh... I don't know about that. I mean, Deep Space Nine did A LOT to emphasize that Starfleet and the Federation were NOT going to sacrifice or compromise their ideals in the name of victory over the Dominion and the protagonists were clearly shown to abhor the unlawful activities of Section 31. First Contact was pretty dark, but that was Picard up against his personal nemesis and a very personal set of psychological issues in a very confined space... and the Borg turned the lights out too. Insurrection made it really clear that the Federation Council had been kept in the dark about the real nature of Dougherty's plan and that heads would roll when they found out. Nemesis had the Federation jump at the chance to open friendly talks with the new head of the Romulan government (even if it was a trap), and ended with a relatively positive note with the Romulan military thanking the Enterprise crew for their help against Shinzon and sending over shuttles with additional medical personnel and supplies to assist in triage. Voyager ended with the implication that the two Janeways had destroyed the Borg collective or at least crippled it beyond repair, freeing billions of drones from the hive mind's control and destroyed the transwarp network. Some dark and depressing things happen, but even the TNG movies generally reaffirm that Starfleet and the Federation are committed 100% to their high-minded ideals when the dust settled in 2379 with the Borg comprehensively defeated, Shinzon thwarted, the Dominion War over, and so on and so forth. Picard - like most new Trek - had to do some pretty drastic and jarringly off-base things to make its darker, more depressing and dystopian story work. Retcons abounded, and no small number of plot holes were opened. They couldn't even make it work with the previously-established prime timeline plot that set up the failed soft reboot trilogy, and needed to retcon the cause and circumstances of Romulus's destruction (opening dozens more plot holes along the way). Consequently, this dark, defeatist vision of the Federation kinda comes out of nowhere for most fans. It comes off as excessively dark even compared to the rather action-heavy Relaunch Novelverse.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, it's a very poorly rendered model of the SDF-1 Macross (TV version). Because it was a bit of background decoration, they didn't fully model it... they just drew a vaguely rectilinear shape and then left most of the details in the texture they applied to the model. You can see the docking stations absolutely are present in the texture, they just weren't modeled. You can also clearly see the shape of the Prometheus textured onto the side of it complete with the red lower hull. http://www.macross2.net/m3/sdfmacross/macross/macross-side.gif
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Just finished the first three episodes of Jujutsu Kaisen... and while it feels very familiar for some very easy-to-identify reasons, I still had quite a bit of fun with it and have to say it's my top show of the season so far. Laying it out in plain language, Jujutsu Kaisen is a darker and more violent take on Bleach. Yuji Itadori is basically Ichigo Kurosaki, the 15 year old high school kid who's abnormally athletic/tough and winds up dragooned into the role of fighting supernatural threats after interfering in one such fight and taking vast supernatural power into himself. He's just a LOT less lucky about it since in his case it's curses rather than the restless dead and the power he absorbed was from an incredibly evil cursed person from 1,000 years ago. The rest of the cast are pretty much in the same mold, being very obvious parallels to Bleach characters in appearance and personality. Still, the story is different enough and the presentation fresh enough that it feels almost completely different.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Tonikaku Kawaii's kind of running out of steam as of its third episode. They've kind of flogged the "Oh, she's my wife" non sequiturs to death and moved on to the mostly dry well that is meta commentary and dick jokes. About half of the episode gets spent in a bathhouse, with both characters musing aloud on the many terrible anime cliches about bathhouse episodes and certain character archetypes. I'm Standing on 1,000,000 Lives isn't really doing much to impress either. As thin as the plot is, I'm left to wonder if this is another The Misfit of Demon King Academy or The Irregular at Magic High School where a plot-critical portion of the story was left out for whatever reason. Like, what the hell happened here that we changed gears from "standard isekai fantasy world" to "girl-on-girl locker room sexual assault"? I feel like I've missed some crucial connection here, or the author had an anyeurism and forgot he wasn't writing eroge. The assault victim gets added to their party too, with the predictable fussing. The new girl's an otaku too, so hey... meta jokes. OKAY YEAH IT GOT RAPEY AGAIN. WTF. How the hell does a writer boomerang back and forth between jokes and a scene implying child molestation?! On the long list of things that are not OK, that's pretty much at the top. I'm gonna start Jujutsu Kaisen, Burn the Witch, and Iwakakeru - Sport Climbing Girls tomorrow.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, Iron Blooded Orphans is hands-down the best Gundam series of the decade... it deviates enough from the standard Gundam setting and formula to feel fresh, the designs are very distinctive and striking, and the story gets away from the standard Gundam formulas for the most part. The one problem it has it that, in the Tomino's off his meds model, it's RELENTLESSLY dark. Do not get attached to ANYONE (well, you will anyway), because the series reaps a fearful tally. I didn't care for Thunderbolt... it has that feel of trying way too hard about it. It's about as grim as Iron Blooded Orphans, but it's hard to care about what happens to the cast since they're all underdeveloped caricatures who are competing to see who can be the biggest unlikable arsehole. It's also kind of pretentious about its choice in music too. Stargazer's a SEED series... that's all that really needs to be said about it.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Gave I'm Standing on 1 Million Lives a whirl last night in a Discord watch party. As it's an isekai series, my expectations were already pretty low so it didn't disappoint... but it definitely didn't exceed expectations either. It's your standard-issue "summoned into a Fantasy JRPG/MMO world" story, in every respect except two: the protagonist is underpowered instead of overpowered ala KonoSuba, and he's a bit of a sociopath who seems like he's actually enjoying being repeatedly pitched headlong into life or death combat. It reminds me a lot of Isekai Cheat Magician and other similarly low-effort trend-followers.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Hmmm... perhaps. Somewhat frustratingly, all we know about the VF-5 is that it existed and when, and that it was a low-cost (2nd Generation) VF made for emigrant use. It's said to be inspired by the Nothrop F-5E Tiger and Convair F2Y Sea Dart.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda snipped before the important bit, didn't you? Anyhoo, got some good details out of today's translation session that raise some interesting questions about VF service lifespans. Fighter aircraft in the real world are usually expected to have a usable service lifespan of between 30 and 40 years. There hasn't really been a definitive statement on how long a VF is expected to last in normal service in Macross, but there's been circumstantial evidence in a few stories like Macross 7 Trash and Macross the Ride that generally agrees with that 30-40 year service lifespan. The 37th large-scale long-distance emigrant fleet was using VF-4 Lightning III's as training aircraft in 2045-2046, which would be 33 years in service at that point in time. The Macross Frontier fleet was in the process of retiring its fleet of VF-11 Thunderbolts and selling them off in 2058, which would be the design's 29th year in service. One of the more unexpected tidbits that got pulled in in today's work was the date when the military started phasing out the VF-5. The VF-5 was one of those inexpensive postwar VFs which was run out to meet the needs of emigrant governments. It had a weirdly short service life. They started mass producing them in 2015, and started retiring them in 2029. That's only fourteen years, weirdly short by VF standards.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    My guess would be probably not a lot... it was a biweekly publication so it was produced on a fairly tight schedule, and Kawamori already had plenty of stuff on his plate when it was being published. Fans always oversell Kawamori's involvement in new Macross productions, as if the franchise were a one-man show instead of him just being a supervising director, contributing mechanical designer, and "the idea guy" who pitches the series concept. Like back when Macross Delta was airing and people were upset about the writing, folks on the boards here were blaming Kawamori for it even though he wrote exactly zero screenplays for the series. Some fans seem to think Kawamori gets around as much as Tom Clancey's name does... Rather more than circumstantial, I would say... like the Otona Anime #9 interview with Kawamori where he explicitly described changing the significance of Macross VF-X2's events to demote the coup attempt from the reason for the military and government decentralizing to just a symptom of it. All told, a lot of these errors look like the writers mixing up one VF for another (e.g. the VF-4 and VF-14) or just fat-fingering the number keys on their keyboard. It just means a bit more work for my group, since we're annotating our translations for use on the site we're developing.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It's only now that my group has started seriously translating all of Macross Chronicle that I'm starting to appreciate just how many little errors there are strewn around this book. There are a lot of instances where Shinsei Industry and General Galaxy are mentioned as developing particular models of VFs before they were founded... Shinsei Industry was created by the merger of Stonewell, Bellcom, and Shinnakasu in 2012 and General Galaxy by the merger of OTEC and several other manufacturers in 2017. There are also quite a few cases where the developer listed is just plain wrong, like listing the VF-4 as a General Galaxy product instead of a Stonewell/Bellcom product.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Just throwing out a fun little tidbit I found while I was working on a translation during tonight's stream session of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood... Macross Chronicle has the VF-1B down as an unofficial/informal designation for the so-called "half-S" retrofit where the Kyusei S-type monitor turret was installed on otherwise A-type spec airframes. That neatly clears up a conflict with Master File in which it listed a VF-1B as a pre-First Space War regional variant from Britain's "Devilland" corporation (bland name de Havilland Aircraft) in a similar vein to Japan's VF-1J.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    True, but regardless of which one (or combination thereof) was responsible, it's still weird and slightly upsetting that nobody seems to have reviewed a proof copy of this book before it went to market... the yellowness of the color art isn't subtle. It's eye-catching and looks really really bad.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Getting caught up on this season's new offerings... Tonikaku Kawaii's second episode is up... and I can tell I'm actually stoked for this because I can remember all of the characters names off the bat. All in all, still interested to see where this one's going but it made precious little progress towards wherever it's headed this time around.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    As I understand it, a "season" in television serials never had any real connection to the length of a calendar season and still doesn't. The length of the average TV "season" has been shrinking for a while now due to the pressure of so many competing networks, "premium" channels, and streaming services driving the cost of production sky high as studios push for higher quality content to attract and retain viewers. The length of the average season has basically been cut in half, and instead of your average studio funding the first half of a show's first season to see how it goes and then funding the second half if it takes off has kind of given way to just throwing twice the cash at half as many episodes to bump the visual quality up. So seasons are 10-13 episodes now instead of 26-39.
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