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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Some of it, at least, like the ejection seat diagram seems to be based on materials published in Sky Angels.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    My copy rolled in a few moments ago, so I will review it shortly and post a review/comparison for you.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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).
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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".
  23. 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.
  24. 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.)
  25. 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.
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