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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... Lower Decks does nothing for me, TBH. It's a step in the right direction in terms of its visual aesthetic and lighter tone, but it feels like it has all the same problems plaguing the other new Star Trek shows. Beckett Mariner is just Michael Burnham again, but this time her sociopathy and Mary Sue qualities are played for laughs instead of drama. They stuck with the idea that the future is bigoted as all get-out, with the whole premise of the show being that Starfleet officers discriminate against and look down on their own juniors. The in-jokes and references are nice, but the show spends too much time trying to be Star Trek by way of Rick and Morty and ends up more as Red Dwarf by way of a bad Adam Sandler movie. I kinda can't unsee the Red Dwarf comparison now that I've made it... Boimler basically IS Arnold Rimmer, and Beckett's basically girl Lister. The jokes themselves and situational humor are occasionally funny, but it feels like they too-often succumb to that Rick and Morty thing where they flog a joke to death to fill airtime. It's entertaining enough to watch once, but I don't think I'd rewatch it at any point.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    *sigh* No, it's not an epic fail... the industry professionals know their business and you don't. Like a lot of TV, anime operates on fairly thin profit margins. They develop new programming based on the preferences and desires of their target demographic in their primary market. That's how you maximize your chances of success and attract advertising and merchandising partners to your production. For anime, that's the audience in the Japanese domestic market. For American shows, it's the continental US audience. If you go chasing nonexistent or minimal periphery viewer demographics the way Southern Cross's creators did in '84 or Star Trek's current showrunners did, you run the very serious risk of not only failing to pick up viewers from the viewer demographic you were chasing, but also alienating your primary demographic. Lose too many viewers, and your show gets cancelled. Fail too often, and you're out of a job. It's almost unheard-of for a periphery demographic to turn out in such strength it can become the new primary demographic for a show the way it did for, say, The Big O. Anime is kind of screwed coming and going in that respect since a lot of it airs late at night in time slots that the advertisers aren't exactly queueing up for, while in the west its only real mechanism for profit is streaming and home video rights since TV networks don't carry much anime and animation in general is still very much stereotyped as "for kids". It's very rare for an anime series to be given proper merchandising support outside the Japanese market. As it is, anime does fine in western markets without having to make any real concessions at all for western audiences.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It'll pop up on Mandarake and other reseller sites from time to time at a reasonable price... just don't humor that insane eBay seller who wants almost three hundred dollars for it.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Some of it, at least, like the ejection seat diagram seems to be based on materials published in Sky Angels.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... Entertainment Archive Alpha: Genesis Climber MOSPEADA File is a bigger book than the previous MOSPEADA: Complete Art Works book. I think it's one standard paper size bigger in terms of what it was printed on. The first forty or so actual pages of the book - discounting the introduction and table of contents - are color pages devoted to MOSPEADA's toys and model kits. There's a ~11 page article on Genesis Breaker with the same art we've seen in various promotional materials elsewhere. That's followed by the color art pages for all of the show's mecha lineart, and the print quality is NOTICEABLY inferior to the MOSPEADA: Complete Art Works book. I'm baffled as to why the color art is all noticeably yellow-tinged. It's not yellowing of the original art, which would be uneven, they're like tinted yellow for some reason. There's a little more text on them in MOSPEADA File but art itself is printed at just about the same size as in the Complete Art Works book. The line art section has the same weird yellowing problem on its color sections, and the art is printed slightly smaller than it'd been previously in Complete Art Works (apparently to fit eight model sheets onto a page?). Some of the black and white lineart looks inexplicably dirtier in this new book too, and the art shows signs of someone inexpertly photoshopping inventory numbers and other markings off the art that were present in the previous book. Some of the art is helpfully printed in larger sizes than the Complete Art Works book, which makes reading the text handwritten on it easier, but the actual print quality still feels inferior with the uncleaned black specks on many of the pieces. The one advantage MOSPEADA File has is that a lot of art that was previously printed at index card size or smaller in the episode-specific section of Complete Art Works is reprinted larger in this book like Rainy Boy's bike and those of the various motorcycle gangs. The stats are unhelpfully scattered around the sections, mixed with the various normal commentary instead of being called out in specific blocks for easy reference. At the very end it has slightly more preproduction material than Complete Art Works did, but it's nothing new if you've seen the Imai Files. All told, I would say Complete Art Works is probably the better reference book and better quality book overall... but the MOSPEADA File book does have size going for it in terms of the readability of its line art. It's somewhat perplexing that the character bios got left out entirely though.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I've never seen them before. The 4:3 aspect ratio and unevenness of the images makes me suspect these are screen captures taken from an old VHS tape.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    My copy rolled in a few moments ago, so I will review it shortly and post a review/comparison for you.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Even if they weren't, the domestic audience for anime is so much bigger than the international audience for anime that they'd still focus on the domestic audience's wants. Rare is the day that a western audience's preferences are accounted for. The last time I recall that actually happening was when The Big O turned out to be huge in America while its reception in Japan was only lukewarm, and its second season ended up coproduced by Americans for an American audience. That was twenty years ago. Didn't Titan have at least one self-confessed Macross fan on staff for that one? They're also pretty clearly borrowing from Macross II rather than do Southern Cross.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Generally, when "western audiences" or "western markets" is used, it usually means one of two things: The Anglophone audience (North America, UK, Australia) OR Western Europe, the Americas, and Australia A lot of anime distribution in those regions flows through distributors based in the United States to their subsidiaries/sublicensees/distribution partners in the various regions.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, that's not crazy... that's objective reality. Macross 7 was a smash hit in Japan. It was the right show at the right time, and did extremely well in its initial broadcast run and in subsequent airings. Even now, more than twenty years after its debut, Macross 7 is still getting referenced on a regular basis in non-Macross anime and manga. Macross Plus was "also present". It's only really in the west where Macross Plus was well-received, like its predecessor Macross II, though Japanese audiences did warm to it a bit back in the 25th-30th anniversary when it was buoyed by Macross Frontier's popularity. (It's no accident that, in Macross sequels and spinoffs, Macross 7 references are EVERYWHERE while Macross Plus references are few and far between.) It'll be interesting to see if Macross Delta can make an enduring impact the way Macross 7 did, or if it'll be overshadowed by its predecessor Macross Frontier.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The Entertainment Archive Genesis Climber MOSPEADA File? Neither book was particularly expensive... the new one is less than $30 US (not counting shipping).
  12. Seto Kaiba
    So... current season stuff. Tonikaku Kawaii, localized as Tonikawa: Over the Moon for You, is apparently having its anime adaptation produced by Crunchyroll itself and marketed as a "Crunchyroll Original". I got all of about twenty seconds into the episode when my monitor lizard decided she wanted to take a dump the size of a birthday cake and had to be dissuaded from doing so on the kitchen floor. All told, fun and a little unconventional... it's odd to see a Japanese romcom where the male lead is so forward about things, a little too much so in Nasa's case. I look forward to seeing more, and really want an explanation for this bizarre premise.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Mob Psycho 100 tonight... not bad, but really not great IMO. It doesn't leave as strong an impression as One Punch Man did. The anarchic comedy is there, but Mob is hard to relate to because he's so deadpan almost all the time and, well, literally goes from 0-100 with little to no middle ground. Reigen's a lot of fun, mostly because he's a decent person but behaves like a wildly irresponsible jackass to the disappointment and frustration of everyone around him. Crunchyroll has dropped the first episodes of I'm Standing on a Million Lives, Iwakakeru - Sport Climbing Girls, and Tonikawa: Over the Moon for You, so those are next up for me.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Mission 3 feels the most like classic Dirty Pair... though I have to admit Mission 1's opening song is just an incredible earworm.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    All told, the ancient Protoculture's story was about a rather different kind of hubris. The Protoculture were absolutely the masters of what they created. It feels more like a Cold War allegory, since the two rival Protoculture factions/governments were so invested in the differences in their ideologies that they achieved mutually-assured destruction rather than accept that they were more alike than different and resolve their differences through mutual understanding and communication. To an engineer, though, the Protoculture's story reads a lot more like "we, as a civilization, never invented the FMEA".
  16. Seto Kaiba
    A fair point, I was just saying it's a missed opportunity to earn some nerd cred for their show from the Star Trek fans they're trying to attract back to the franchise after the net losses of the last two seasons.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The "air" date for Discovery's 3rd season feels like a bit of a missed opportunity in hindsight... if it dropped on Sunday the 11th they would be debuting it on Federation Day, but it's dropping on the 15th. (Federation Day being the anniversary of the Federation's founding, October 11th being the date as per materials created for Star Trek: Generations.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    More like a fundamental necessity of having been designed to be non-autonomous. One can only assume the ancient Protoculture were smarting a bit after their previous two brilliant ideas for fully autonomous living weapons ended up running out of control and left what little remained of their civilization fleeing for its collective life. Of course, it was only that one specific thing they seem to have learned from and they kept building stupidly dangerous sh*t and having to build increasingly complex containment structures to safeguard the brainchildren of their reckless idiocy from anyone who'd stumble on their handiwork after they were gone. Even with the Birdhuman requiring a flesh and blood pilot whom its onboard AI could interrogate about the current state of affairs on Earth, it still nearly destroyed the planet due to a premature activation that was only halted by it decapitating itself at some point in ancient history and again when Sara Nome woke it up in 2008.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Nope... that's a bio-technological construct the ancient Protoculture left behind on Earth to monitor humanity's development in their absence, and destroy them in the event that they developed into a warlike race and acquired the technology for space travel. It's been said that the Protoculture based its design on the Vajra Queen's form. It had an onboard AI, but was dependent on the engineered fold song abilities of the Mayan islander priestesses for maintenance and needed a pilot in order to operate. That and the Fold Evil in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy seem to be further developments of the same organic technology that went into the Evil-series bioweapons that became the Protodeviln. (One of the lessons learned seems to have been "make sure that thing requires a pilot to operate".)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... that'd be up to the writers of future Macross works. Defining "extinct" kind of changes the answer a bit when it comes to the Protoculture. Super Dimension Fortress Macross presented the Protoculture only in vague terms, as the Zentradi's long-vanished creators who had probably also created humanity. Macross: Do You Remember Love? put a different spin on things by revealing that the Zentradi (and Meltrandi) were Protoculture clones who had been genetically modified for use as a giant clone army. That would technically mean the Protoculture are arguably the most populous species in the galaxy in purely genetic terms, though their culture and society's long-since extinct since that stuff was all forbidden to the Zentradi. (Macross Chronicle's Protoculture worldguide sheet broadly supports the Zentradi's genetic template as being derived from the Protoculture's.) Macross 7 kind of drew a line under the idea that the Protoculture were largely wiped out in their civil war, and slowly went extinct hundreds of thousands of years before humanity emerged on the interstellar stage. Macross Frontier and Macross Delta have both generally supported that line, with the Brisingr globular cluster supposedly being the Protoculture's last enclave before they died out in the distant past. The Supervision Army is also still around, though it is not clear if that force still contains brainwashed Protoculture or is now made up exclusively of brainwashed Zentradi. Macross II: Lovers Again was the only story that toyed with the idea they might still be around in some fashion. The Mardook were strongly implied, but never explicitly stated, to be the descendants of a group of Protoculture who fled the collapse of their civilization like the ones who'd settled on Earth in the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie. Unlike the Protoculture in the main Macross timeline who seem to have generally regretted their actions in destroying galactic civilization and turning loose two unstoppable clone armies and being content to hide out in increasingly remote places to avoid the wrath of their creations, the Mardook decided to be a bit more proactive about protecting their culture by destroying anything that would threaten it... including other cultures that might contaminate it (hence their war on Earth).
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, I hadn't heard they were going back to finish up adapting the manga. I guess ending on "Welcome to our Xcution" was kind of a weird story arc to finish on... though I'm not sure adapting the "Thousand Year Blood War" arc is necessarily a kindness since that was Tite Kubo trying to kill off the manga in a way that prevented sequels so he could move on from it. He became a big fan of the audience punch in that part. I'm about halfway into Mob Psycho 100's second season. It's still not great, IMO, but it's pretty good. Feels a bit scattered, changing gears twice already from their usual exorcisms to hunting urban legends to dealing with problematic psychics again.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I finished the first season of Mob Psycho 100 a moment ago... kind of a weird genre shift it goes through, from a sort of slice of life about painfully introverted Mob to fighting a frankly ridiculous organization of evil psychics who never grew out of their 2nd year middle school syndrome. Not a bad show, overall, but IMO not as good or as compelling as One Punch Man. A solid 7/10 at the very least.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I recall reading something to that effect, yeah. That kind of thing is fairly typical in cases like this, though. Like how FASA ignored YEARS of cease and desist notices before things finally boiled over in a lawsuit that nearly cost them their entire BattleTech franchise.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Too late, they already did... the Robotech Masters chucked the Southern Cross designs completely for something that looks like the Great Value version of Mardook or DYRL Zentradi gear. The thirst is real. You can't deny, that was a weapons-grade outfit... the Mardook probably had a high incidence of neck-strain injuries from heads turning all the time.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Very probably, yeah... given that CBS did at one point admit to access and copying in some of their filings. They argued that it was de minimis access and copying, though (i.e. too trivial an amount to merit consideration). I gave the game in question a whirl, and in my estimation they're not as similar as some of the articles make it out to be. There are a number of superficial/aesthetic similarities in terms of character art and the bare fact of a giant blue tardigrade that travels instantly through time and space, but it's mostly just at that superficial level. So, in all fairness, I can kind of see the case for arguing de minimis access and copying. They didn't have anything about an extradimensional plane of fungal life in Tardigrades the way they do in Star Trek: Discovery... the tardigrade in Discovery's more like a Navigator from Dune than the tardigrade in Tardigrades in terms of how it's used. Since there is at least some evidence to suggest Tardigrades may have inspired Discovery's first season, it would've been polite to throw him a bone and maybe a modest royalty check... but corporations seldom concern themselves with that kind of thing when IP rights are involved.
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