Seto Kaiba

How many volumes is that? Ten? Eleven?

Eh... yeah, they definitely flubbed the "big reveal" and left it feeling like a non-event. It kind of comes out of nowhere and ultimately doesn't mean anything, but it doesn't help that the main character receives this supposedly game-changing news with the precisely the same level of urgency, gravitas, or interest than he receives any other piece of news. It's rather difficult to remain invested in the story's big moment when the main character isn't. Ah, yes... I needed to watch that latest episode. Monster Girl Doctor at least did a better job of building up to its climax than The Misfit of Demon King Academy did, but not by much. Despite the dragon-loli in question's status as the lynchpin holding the town's mixed human-monster government together, there's very little urgency surrounding the supposedly life-saving surgery they're trying to talk her into having done. Instead, we get the better part of an episode devoted to some cheap drama and a girl's night out spent mainly talking about how they're all in love with the completely oblivious main character. I'm thinking about starting Re:Zero, though from what I've heard and read about it I suspect I'll find the main character rather obnoxious.

It's not official art... but the design itself is from the series. I guess someone at Udon figured that they needed a cutaway for the cover because they'd already used the VF-1 GERWALK official one for the cover of the previous volume. Well, you get what you pay for... and Udon is very definitely doing these Robotech art books on the cheap. I expect the artist who drew it probably wasn't even familiar with the design. He/she was likely just given a silhouette and told "fill this with mechanical junk".

8.55m/855cm has the most official support. That figure comes from the official biographical data that was published in a few different books that came out shortly after the series finished its initial broadcast run in 1983. Best Hit Series: Macross Graffiti has the most succinct version, packaged in a neat little data block on each character's bio page that contains their birthplace, age, height, weight, and the measurements of the women. Milia's data block on page 31 of Best Hit Series: Macross Graffiti indicates she was born in a Zentradi clone synthesis system, that she is 15, 8.55m tall, and a robust six and a quarter tonnes in her usual form with petite measurements of B415 W290 H420. Her miclone data from after the timeskip is also given, at which point she is 17 years old, 171cm tall, weighing a dainty 50kg, and measuring an eye-catching B83, W58, H84. (For those who don't do metric, that's 33-23-33... she's a petite little unrivaled engine of death and destruction.) Or is it? The direct source is likely the liner notes that Egan Loo compiled for the Animeigo remastered DVD release of Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Given the way he formatted it, I strongly suspect Egan Loo got it from Best Hit Series: Macross Graffiti.

Did some catching up after work last night... The Misfit of Demon King Academy is feeling more and more like a HEAVILY compressed adaptation. They tried to have a climactic battle between the demon and human academy students, and the whole thing felt like they'd tried to compress an entire volume (or more) of light novel into two episodes. I feel like there should've been a lot more exposition going on, and probably was in its original format. It's still pretty disappointing as a series because there's zero dramatic tension. Nothing is ever at stake because the main character is a boring invincible hero. This feels like it could've been a compelling series despite the fact that death is VERY cheap with ubiquitous, consequence-free resurrection magic if not for the fact that the protagonist already knows everything better than everyone else and is so powerful he can beat the combined power of ten million people with nothing but an eight person cheering section (no really, this is a thing that happens in the story). He's a textbook Mary Sue and that's just killing the rest of the story.

A lot of people don't give that one a fair shake because of how iconic the original Dirty Pair was... but IMO it was actually pretty good. Not great, but enjoyable enough that I didn't feel like I'd wasted my time watching it. (I also really like the first OP, Limitless Answer.) Patlabor's pretty damn great... the only real problem with it is that they reuse plots A LOT. Like, you'll see the same plot about the SV2 crew fighting a kaiju like four times including the movie. The Type-98AV Labor is one of the most beautifully detailed works of mechanical design ever created. It's a labor (lol) of love rivaling Shoji Kawamori's VF-1 Valkyrie or Yoshiyuki Tomino's RX-78 Gundam, design-wise.

That price is in Hong Kong dollars, right? Even for $80 US, that seems like a pretty iffy-quality figure.

Considering that the Robotech Masters Saga was essentially where Robotech tried to set up the foundations of a coherent original setting, albeit in a halfhearted and embarrassingly inconsistent way, being ratings-conscious was probably somewhat detrimental to the viewers since there wouldn't have been any real clue as to how they went from a desolate and barren planet to an overgrown one so quickly. Keep your expectations for this one low... by which I mean, "lower than the previous volume". Harmony Gold never did manage to get their hands on any proper information about Southern Cross in the last 35 years. For the most part, it's because there's simply no proper info to find no matter how thorough your search. Southern Cross's creators don't seem to have ever compiled anything like the detailed official setting material we're used to seeing from its contemporaries. I'm not sure if it's because Ammonite and the other teams taking creative leadership of the series just didn't have time with the show's rushed development after its late change of genres to mecha and/or its premature termination, or if they just didn't care. To a lesser extent, it's because Harmony Gold was never willing to actually pay anyone to do the research properly and instead relied on fan volunteers who weren't really equipped to do the necessary research and substituted their own headcanon. A lot of the contents of this book are, like the previous volume, going to be copypasta from the old robotech.com Infopedia section... which was rife with errors both factual and typographical. If they consulted the usual suspects, this'll be more someone's Robotech fanfic than a reference of any kind.

That might actually be better... no offense to SEGA and Phantasy Star Crew, but going from the appropriately science fantasy-friendly backdrops of Naverius, Ambduskia, and Wopal to the planet of feudal Japanese cliches was a bit of a weird thematic jump. Doubly so since Dark Falz Gemini doesn't really fit the theme either with the toy-based gimmicks and an ending that isn't even on the same planet. I'll bump it up the queue then. I've been somewhat hesitant about watching it because of how ridiculously narmy the whole plot of Episode IV has been so far. It went full shonen anime, but with a dub that would've been terrible even by 90's standards. I played the first couple chapters on a Discord stream and my friends and I basically kept up a running MST3K-style commentary that was WAY more entertaining than the actual plot. The last bit I did in-game was the Episode IV boss fight with Esca Falz Mother, which I found amusing familiar since the design was based very heavily on the third/final form of Dark Falz from Phantasy Star Online episode 1. Kind of a pain in the butt as a solo Techter/Force. Yeah... no kidding. The dub is a real ear-bleeder.

If anything, the epic crash-and-burn failure of Harmony Gold's rebooted Robotech has actually been a good thing for Southern Cross fans... at least in the short term. When Harmony Gold tried to relaunch Robotech and establish it as a credible anime property in the early 2000s, they secured licensing deals with actual professional toy companies that were too put off by Southern Cross's unpopularity with Robotech fans to give any serious consideration to making Southern Cross merchandise. Robotech's own creative staff didn't want to reference Southern Cross in new works for much the same reason. Now that Robotech has fallen on its hardest times yet, with all current and future development cancelled, all of their cautious professional merchandising partners have been replaced by small-time indie outfits willing to actually take a risk on Southern Cross for ultra-low volume collectibles. It only took 36 years and three separate total failures, but someone's finally developing Southern Cross merchandise seriously. How successful it'll be remains to be seen, given how the merchandise in question has gotten mixed/poor reviews, but it's more than Southern Cross has ever gotten before. Udon is even attempting to put together a Southern Cross artbook, though the content will mostly be reprints from the old Robotech official website. And just think... that was Southern Cross's best reception. There are overseas markets in SE Asia where they straight-up dropped the Robotech Masters Saga and went straight from the Macross Saga to the New Generation Saga.

Nope, they do mention the QF-2200 series and the Superbird lifting body aircraft the Ghost was based on but it's separate from these remarks about the QF-3000's alleged combined-cycle conventional engine that somehow works in space. It appears to be an honest goof on the part of the writers.

As we've noted on several previous occasions, your personal preferences are rather unconventional and at odds with the overwhelming majority of viewers. The whole reason for this thread is that there's very little love for the series because of how poorly it's been received by audiences worldwide. (I'm not saying you're wrong to be passionate about it, just that we should keep a realistic perspective.)

Expecting corporations to exhibit the same level of moral behavior as a socially-conscious person on the street is definitely optimistic to say the least. Like so many other corporations, what they care about is profit first and very little else second. That's why practically every country has so many laws and regulations to police various abusive behaviors corporations engage in. It's not at all surprising Disney went chasing after ticket sales in the People's Republic of China. It's a BIG audience. What IS surprising is that they did such a poor job of it. Disney's original animated Mulan was extremely well-received in China, reportedly to the point where it caused some serious consternation over how westerners could create a better Chinese movie than China's own filmmakers. This live action remake seems to be universally poorly received. Taking out the actual message of Mulan's folktale in favor of making her an aloof superhuman Chosen One with magic powers with a rabid obsession with honor seems to have kind of killed it for Chinese audiences at least as much as the movie's collaboration with the Chinese propaganda organizations did in the west.

As I understand it, a big part of the reason for that is that what we got when the North American launch of Phantasy Star Online 2 hit was a somewhat cut-down version of the Story Missions that removed the need to actually unlock new content via the Matter Board and took out some of the multiple-choice content to streamline the story. I'm kinda reluctant to watch the Episode 4 prequel because of how absurdly meta the Episode 4 story got/is getting. SEGA did a bit too much patting themselves on the back about their game's popularity in Japan there. The high school series is also available officially on Crunchyroll, for those who have memberships there. IIRC, you can find the protagonist from the Episode 4 prequel anime in the Shopping Area of the Arks Ship Lobby down near where Patty and Tia are. He's one of the NPCs which dispenses quests, and looks for all the world like the Hunter/Fighter protagonist from the game's OPs. Tie-ins, y'know. As I've noted previously, Monster Girl Doctor does A LOT of copying from Daily Life with Monster Girls... to the level I'd call straight-up plagiarism. There's a more robust backstory in Monster Girl Doctor though, what with the idea that people always knew monsters were real and we're seeing the peace after generations of war as they try to live together. The plot in Daily Life with Monster Girls was a more transparent excuse plot where monsters always existed but were covered up by the government and now there's some government sponsored cohabitation to help get them adjusted to human society. Glenn has more of an excuse for his monster girl harem since he's a practicing physician for monsters and not just some unlucky guy a lazy government official keeps dumping problem cases on. The fanservice is basically the same between the two... though Daily Life with Monster Girls does a lot more of it. A lot of accidental partial nudity and accidental pervert moments from the protagonist (exacerbated by the jealous lamia's overreactions). A lot of it's even the same exact situations, like being forced to finger-bang a harpy because she's having problems laying an egg, dealing with an arachne who's into BDSM, a zombie girl who's falling apart but still can feel her disembodied body parts, a very clear fetish for comically large breasts, naughty tentacles wearing people out and leaving them in puddles of slime, etc. It's definitely less creepy than Eromanga Sensei, since at least in those two everyone's an adult, but it's still really incredibly blatantly all about the fanservice.... which is what takes me right out of it. I don't mind fanservice, but if it's the show's raison d'ê·re it's rather difficult for me to enjoy the story.

Got caught up on Monster Girl Doctor while I was working last night... and any pretense that the series isn't just a slightly less explicit version of Daily Life with Monster Girls has flown right out the goddamn window and landed the series in cringey-to-watch territory. They still occasionally try to keep up the medical pretense of the whole show, but it's devolved to being mostly just an excuse plot to justify fanservice as of about episode 10. If they left out the fanservice it might actually be a pretty good series. Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time has turned out to be even worse than predicted. It's a one-joke ecchi comedy series that really is just Double Standard: Female-on-Male Rape: the Series. I'm giving serious thought to booking whoever wrote it a one-way ticket on a SpaceX flight into the sun. The Misfit of Demon King Academy continues to be a snore. It's an overpowered Isekai-style protagonist run riot in a non-Isekai setting. There are no stakes, because the protagonist is Superman levels of stupidly overpowered and can stomp on everybody and anybody without any kind of consequences or taking any actual risks. On the plus side, my watch party group has decided to start Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood now that we've finished Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, since most of 'em haven't seen it before. We got about six episodes in, and they're loving it... and despite several discussions of the merits or lack thereof of the English dub we've managed to avoid having to discuss Edward's VA's sexual harassment scandals.

... I therefore choose to believe some poor Protoculture woman was fed up with women's clothes not having adequate pockets and resolved to engineer a species for which that would never be an issue. Must've been a lot, since all that stuff actually gets mentioned right in the OVA itself. Basara's "borrowed" VT-1C gets destroyed just by getting too close to the whales in the first episode, and in the second a badly injured (and unconscious) Basara gets lectured by Elma about how there's so much bacteria because of the whales that he could easily catch a lethal infection and die since he's not immunized against them. (The OVA also seemed to lean towards Zola having a minimal human presence because the system itself had been discovered and contacted by an emigrant fleet in the not-too-distant past, as a way of explaining the weird disparity in the planet's tech level with its early 20th century tech being native and the advanced stuff being largely exports from New UN Gov't worlds.)

Well, I am slightly disappointed in the QF-3000 section of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1S Roy Focker Special. Despite correctly describing the QF-3000 as using the initial-type FF-1999 thermonuclear reaction turbine engine in several previous volumes, this book inexplicably describes it as being powered by a combined-cycle conventional jet engine that is set up to operate as a turbine engine, ramjet, scramjet, and rocket motor burning jet fuel and when necessary carrying onboard oxidiser. Talk about a critical research failure, esp. after spending so much ink in the VF-0 book about how VF-0s were retrofitted with the FF-1999 engine to conduct space testing.

Sorry it took so long. They cut my staff at my day job, so these days I've got so much nonsense going in parallel that it feels like I've got an attention deficit disorder going on. It's possible that it's in one of the previous books in a section I haven't gotten to yet. That's a LOT of ground to cover. I only did the very specific engine sections of those three books because the differences between the three engines listed in the block list of the VF-1 Vol.1 Master File was something that'd been bugging the hell out of me since the series started. (Doubly so since I noticed a number of our T/W ratios on M3 were wrong given that Block 6's upgrades improved the VF-1's maximum engine output from 200 to 240%, as seen on the throttle lever markings in the official line art.) It wouldn't be the first time... like the aforementioned gaffe in the VF-19 book where the fuel described is inexplicably changed to a mixture of deuterium and helium-3 (as in Gundam's Minovsky reactors) instead of the hydrogen slush fuel mentioned everywhere else.

That's the first sentence of the first paragraph under the header "Development of the FF-3000" on page 058 of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah. I'm fairly sure what that says is that the FF-2200/FF-2550 series thermonuclear turbine engines which were developed for use on the VF-19 and VF-22 saw widespread use as 3rd Generation thermonuclear turbine engines. You're a more proficient translator than I am, so if I've got it wrong I welcome the opportunity to learn. (One thing to note WRT the above statement about the FF-2200/FF-2550 series being mentioned in connection with the VF-22 is that Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur has a brief section at the bottom of page 057 where it's mentioned that the YF-21's (and VF-22's) FF-2450B engines can be considered a tuned-up/production-ized derivative of the FF-2200B series engine that was used on the initial spec YF-19 before being abandoned for the FF-2500 series engines it had in Macross Plus. Apparently the implication here is that both Project Super Nova prototypes originally used the FF-2200B series engine in initial testing, and that the FF-2450B is considered to be part of the FF-2200B series.)

Isn't that basically what Lower Decks is shooting for when it's not trying desperately to be Rick and Morty?

... no comment. I've been trying to forget it for a while... it wasn't very good. They could always take the "Threshold" approach, where a future series very definitively established that That Never Happened, It'd Just Be Stupid If It Did. Or the ENT Relaunch approach, where the whole thing is dismissed as an obviously fake cover story for something else entirely... hopefully something less stupid than Charles Tucker III going to Romulus to sabotage their Warp 7 program as a Section 31 spy.

Dude, look at what you're replying to before you hit reply... that post you quoted is over eleven years old at this point. While it is essentially true that merchandising is the primary means by which studios to profit from the anime they produce, the rest of what you said is incorrect. Southern Cross was a flop because its ratings were in the toilet. The show's poor ratings performance was why there was no merchandise, not the other way around. It was so poorly received that it was earmarked for a premature ending barely 1/3 of the way into its planned broadcast run. Its failure is usually attributed to its heavily derivative and poorly developed story, its generally unlikable protagonist, and at least partly to trying to market a mecha series to a then-nonexistant female audience. There was actually a fair amount of merchandise being developed for Southern Cross, and several of the show's licensees did make it far enough to actually release Southern Cross goods before the show was cancelled. The reason so little merchandise was made before the show's cancellation was that the show's development was so rushed and disorganized that the final designs and even its title weren't set until shortly before the start of production. That left the merchandising partners little time to develop the branded merchandise for the series before it went to air. It didn't help that several of the licensees were also working on products for Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? at the same time, but the biggest problem was that development of Southern Cross merchandise started very late. Much of that merchandise was still on the drawing board when the show's ratings came back and it became apparent Southern Cross was a flop. A few products that were far enough along to be released were - several kits, a few apparel items, etc. - and the rest were quietly abandoned as licensees cut their losses. Imai Kagaku's planned model kits of the Spartas and several other mecha were among the cancelled projects.

Not specifically Star Trek's Federation, but close enough... it was one of several sci-fi series concepts Roddenberry pitched around the time Star Trek's original series was being developed. It's also the entire premise of Star Trek: Discovery's third season, in which the Discovery and Mary Sue Burnham have jumped into a distant future where the Federation apparently no longer exists and is now going to be re-founded by the worst crew Starfleet has ever had. (Even though previous shows established that the Federation was still very much around at that time... which IMO confirms that STD has always been a bad future alternate reality.)

Yup... and this all started because Paramount made a hilariously ill-advised decision to try to reboot Star Trek and entrusted it to the famously inept J.J. Abrams, who wasn't interested at all in Star Trek or making a Star Trek movie. He wanted to make Star Wars, so he tried to turn Star Trek into Star Wars. Specifically, he tried to make Star Trek into a bad remake of Episode IV, with a Romulan Death Star destroying the peaceful/defenseless planet Vulcan and then Earth as a stand-in for Yavin IV. (Whether this is necessarily any more palatable in hindsight than his attempting to pass a bad remake of Episode IV off as Episode VII is up for debate.) Really, it isn't... that allegorical writing style works just fine today and is still widely used in many different genres of storytelling. Star Trek's problem today is that the showrunners and writers currently working on it were/are so caught up in trying to make Star Trek the next Game of Thrones that they've never really stopped to think about why either of those things was popular. They were initially convinced that all they had to do was spend big on special effects and set design and fill it with dark, depressing, violent content, and that'd bring everyone and their dog to CBS All Access. That didn't work, because the story they wrote was a steaming pile of incoherent garbage and the characters were all written to be unlovable and unrelatable a-holes who hate themselves and each other. Then you had Star Trek: Picard, which still believed that what you needed to succeed was to spend your entire budget on special effects, but compounded that by trying to appeal to Twitter SJWs by repeatedly "humbling" Picard for the crime of being a white male and therefore privileged... in an explicitly postracial society where that privilege hasn't been a thing for hundreds of years. Consequently, the story was yet another steaming pile of incoherent garbage and the characters were a pack of utterly forgettable stock characters or cringeworthy racial stereotypes such as a cigar-chomping hispanic smuggler (because every hispanic is Cuban, right?), a "strong" black woman struggling with the loss of her job and substance abuse problems trying to go straight and get her family back (a racial stereotype if ever there was one), every character Zooey Deschanel has ever played, cringeworthy overly literal Space Ninja Legolas that absolutely sounded cooler in a writer's head, Great Value Benedict Cumberbatch, predatory femme fatale with vaguely incestuous overtones, and butch lesbian straw feminist Seven of Nine. Who are they writing this crap for anyway? Literally nobody asked for this. In short, the problem with Star Trek today is that it no longer has a message or a moral... it's just a bland, generic, lifeless cash-grab sequel that doesn't know what it wants to be other than "profitable". So it's a designed-by-committee mess that's hemorrhaging money because it has nothing to offer its audience besides substanceless VFX sequences and shallow, hypocritical virtue signaling. It's the same problem the Star Wars sequel trilogy had, embodied in its fullest by The Rise of Skywalker's committee-driven endless cycle of rewrites during production.

Eh... I don't mean to come off as confrontational, but if you came to a thread about a series that was so poorly received that it suffered a mass walkout of its franchise's merchandising partners before it ever aired, left its star openly reluctant to return for a second season, gave its financial backers buyer's remorse so severe they're talking about taking a loss on it and walking away after just one season, and was widely panned by the franchise's devoted fanbase, and were expecting positivity... well... that one might be on you. Just sayin'. To be brutally frank, I don't think there has been any increase in the average amount of vitriol involved in fandom-type discussions in general. That people are going to disagree, and sometimes vehemently so, is just part and parcel of being passionate about a subject. This isn't even confined to fandom, really. You get this all the time in academia too. Everyone bags on the lit majors as taking a soft option, but goddamn if there aren't some areas of that field that are more like a fight club than anything. There is, on the other hand, admittedly a marked increase in the negativity surrounding certain long-running franchises that have suffered under the hands of new creative teams who don't really understand what made those properties so successful and iconic in the first place. These new creatives are either deliberately hostile to the franchise's fans to no useful end, trying to pass virtue signaling off as a substitute for character and story development, or simply so beholden to the design-by-committee process that the end result is something fans and even general audiences found unpalatable. It's not that fans are shitting on things they supposedly like... they're expressing their understandable frustration that the owner(s) of the series they so love is letting someone crap on it on a professional basis, seemingly heedless to the fact that it's demonstrably hurting the franchise narratively and monetarily. For instance, I've been a lifelong Star Trek fan. Even when the franchise occasionally stumbled and released something less than great, I stuck with it because even those failures were true to the spirit of the series and enjoyable in their own way, whether it was watching Shatner go full ham in Star Trek V or seeing the creators discreetly bag on their own failures in-series like Voyager's "Threshold". Star Trek: Discovery's promotional materials left me feeling more than a little wary, given how blatant the virtue-signaling was and how the lead actress's own manic self-promotion ignored that Star Trek had already had both black and female leads (whose combined episode count makes up half the franchise). I gave it a fair shake, and was almost immediately put off by the blatant attempt to rewrite Star Trek's bright future into a dystopia. I probably could've forgiven that if the writing had been solid, though. I'll forgive a LOT if a show's writers can make me invested in the characters and their journey. Discovery couldn't get me engaged in the characters, because the characters were almost exclusively written to be blatantly horrible people who often made no secret of the fact that they despised each other. Starfleet's characteristic bonhomie was missing entirely, and in its place was a crew of miserable souls who were together against their will and took every opportunity to remind each other and the audience of that fact. It says a lot that the main character's one brief moment of self-awareness was wondering if she fit in too well in the mirror universe where everyone's a murderously xenophobic fascist. I stuck with it into season two because we were promised a return to form, and they actually had me on board for the first couple episodes where Anson Mount's Captain Pike briefly managed to bring back the spirit of high adventure. They lost me against almost as quickly when the show decided that the female cast should treat Starfleet legend Captain Pike like crap "because feminism" (which is not exactly what feminism is about) and then saw the plot devolve into a totally nonsensical action movie premise torn from the pages of a Terminator sequel/reboot. Until they banish Burnham, I'm not going to be able to watch Discovery anymore. I'm all for representation, but dear gods she's just an objectively awful human being. She's incredibly manipulative, disrespectful, unapologetically xenophobic, and the writers bend over backwards to try and force the audience to see her as heroic instead of for the shitty person she is. Star Trek: Picard kind of had me deeply concerned from the outset because of what'd happened with Discovery. I finished the first season, but promised myself I will never watch it ever again because the entire plot was nonsense. It was incoherent gibberish start-to-finish, and the fact that the show's entire plot seemed determined to unnecessarily "humble" someone who'd been essentially a paragon of Starfleet virtue for no reason apparent in the show itself (creator interviews explicitly indicate it's for him being a privileged white man, which makes less than zero sense in a postracial utopia like the Federation) just made it a miserable slog. Like Discovery, these characters were horrible people who didn't want to be there and that made it really impossible to like or sympathize with them. They're not relatable in any way, and in most cases their issues don't even make sense in context... like Raffi being upset about losing her Starfleet career as though it was a significant hardship on her, despite the fact that she lives in a post-scarcity society with universal basic income and universal housing, and the fact that all the family problems she blames on it were actually caused by her substance abuse problems and the ensuing paranoia. It says a lot that the Romulan super-secret police - the Zhat Vash - are arguably the actual heroes of the piece since they're the ones risking everything (sanity included) to try and prevent a galactic genocide while our protagonists are kind of aimlessly wandering the galaxy so Picard can be a sad old man until they bump into a pointlessly-evil android and hand her what she needs to obliterate all organic life in the galaxy. Even if the character writing were spectacular (and it was quite the opposite), I doubt I'd be able to get invested in it simply because the plot is an incoherent mess that doesn't make any sense in context. I haven't watched Lower Decks, and I don't think I ever will... fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. That adage doesn't contain a case statement for three or more times.