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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Gene Roddenberry was a great idea man but not much of a writer. Like George Lucas, he needed a support staff to filter his ideas and convert them into something the audience would actually want to watch. Gene strongarmed his way into creative control using the few rights he retained to the property, and his weird restrictions on what the writers could and couldn't do drove a number of them to quit at the end of the first season. Roddenberry's lawyer was such a tyrant about it he was eventually banned from Paramount's premises after being caught making unauthorized edits to scripts. There's nothing about the definition of a utopia that requires an absence of all conflict...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That's why Star Trek stories are set out on the frontier... because the premise of Star Trek is that the future will be a better, brighter place where we will solve all of humanity's societal problems. Star Trek is an examination of our modern societal issues, which are projected onto various alien species or lost human colonies that Starfleet encounters to allow the audience to examine them from an outside perspective unhampered by the blind spots and biases we develop by living with those societal flaws all our lives. That the Federation is a utopia is the whole point of Star Trek. It's an aspiration for the future, and a way to point out where we're falling short right now. That wasn't the actual issue... the issue that had the writers livid with Roddenberry was that you need conflict to develop characters and Gene was adamant that the crew of this new starship Enterprise were simply too advanced and too professional to disagree on the best course of action or points of morality.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Does anyone still watch Game of Thrones? It seems like that fandom vanished off the face of the f*cking Earth after its final season.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Hmm... as someone who used to be in charge of maintaining and updating a fleet of over 150 prototype vehicles for a government project, being a crew chief would be my personal hell. Love: General Galaxy VF-171 Nightmare Plus. It's known to be a highly robust machine with performance that doesn't put excessive amounts of stress on its systems or its airframe, it'd be a nice and easy machine to maintain. Loathe: General Galaxy VF-9 Cutlass. The "origami Valkyrie" has an excessively complex transformation that would be an absolute nightmare to maintain the actuators on, and the -E variant has an acknowledged disquieting tendency to spontaneously explode.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's how they've been hyping it... whether it'll actually turn out that way is another matter entirely. Remember, they made a similar pitch with Star Trek: Discovery season two and that turned into an even bigger dumpster fire than season one. I'm inclined to suspect it would have been well-received. Remember, between the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek: Discovery we had the three terrible action-ized Star Trek movies by Jar-Jar Abrams that were already making people nostalgic for real Star Trek. Discovery was always going to fail. Partly because it's following in the aesthetic and thematic footsteps of those terrible soft reboot movies, and partly because it was so preoccupied with trying to be Game of Space Thrones that it became unwatchable for a lot of the same reasons Game of Thrones did. That, I would point out, is thematically incompatible with Star Trek as a whole. The entire premise there is that humanity is fundamentally Better Than That.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there is a nonzero probability that you may be in luck then... ViacomCBS and Secret Hideout are currently trying very hard to distract shareholders and viewers alike from the disastrously bad viewership numbers Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard are getting, as well as from the distinctly frosty reception Lower Decks is currently getting, with news of their latest Star Trek: Discovery side story proposal: Strange New Worlds. It's a way for them to reuse the art assets, sets, etc. made for Discovery for another show, but they're talking it up as a return to classic form with a more episodic format and the classic optimism of real Star Trek. It's supposedly set to feature Anson Mount returning as Captain Christopher Pike on the USS Enterprise.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, letting Gene off the leash in the development and first season production of Star Trek: the Next Generation was definitely a mistake. Natasha Yar's character basically came about because Gene wouldn't stop perving on Jenette Goldstein's character Vasquez in Aliens. He was so taken with the idea of a macho latina marine that that's basically all the original version of Yar's character - named Macha Hernandez - was. Her only other character trait was hero-worshiping Picard and Riker. She didn't really get any better fleshed-out in development, except in that her hero worship of Picard and Riker was generalized into a PSA about how awesome the Federation is and once they cast Denise Crosby she got rewritten into a Ukrainian to better fit her looks. Adding Worf basically made her post as security chief redundant anyway. That's why the writers didn't know what to do with her, and why they were planning to write her out of the series even before Denise Crosby announced she was going to quit. The Maquis were a pretty interesting addition to the setting, IMO... though a rebellion made up of folks who mainly adhered to Federation standards was never going to be much of a success against a brutal regime like the Cardassian Union. (That they borrowed the name of the dubiously effective French resistance was intentional.) Well, description of the Federation economy has been necessarily vague since throwaway remarks by various writers don't often line up... but from the outset they were consistent on the note that the Federation's utopian civilization had effectively eliminated contemporary human failings like hunger, disease, war, homelessness, etc. and created a society where all people were able to contribute and lead rich, full lives. Putting some of the pieces together, the post-scarcity New World Economy that's described appears to have had what amounts to universal basic income and housing, provided for by the ubiquitous matter synthesizers and the replicators that replaced them. Even an unemployed person could still have a roof over their head, fresh and healthy food to eat, free access to medical care and education, etc., while those who wanted more out of life had to work. Since most material possessions became essentially worthless when synthesizer or replicator tech could duplicate almost anything with ease, it would've been fairly easy to refocus humanity's competitive energy into how much you can contribute to society. They make a lot of noise about that aspect of it in TNG, DS9, and VOY, that the focus is on self-improvement and betterment of society. Living on a place like Janus VI as a miner would be pretty hefty bragging rights in that regard, given how the planet's resources are said to be able to provide for the energy needs of dozens of other worlds. Now you're contradicting yourself... it's not a "thin veneer" if it's a concrete reality that those people were raised in, accustomed to, and want to perpetuate, and point to as a beacon of hope for the greater galaxy.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek: Picard, being set principally outside Federation territory, absolutely did not need to sh*t all over the Federation and Starfleet the way it did. It was completely unnecessary to the story, and it didn't make a lick of sense when examined in any kind of depth or context. Of course, a lot of what went into Star Trek: Picard's story was absurd, hopelessly out of character, or completely pointless attempts at cheap drama... which is probably why the series lost more than half of its audience in the space of a single season. The writing was just that bad and the audience knew it. As noted in my previous post, that assertion doesn't tally with the fact that we've seen on many occasions that Federation citizens living out on its frontiers or beyond its borders still hold the same high-minded ideals even without the comforts of the Federation's developed worlds. (Taken to some pretty extreme places in TAS with people like Carter Winston, a wildly successful trader who kept giving away his fortune to help Federation colonies in need.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, that's probably true... it doesn't actually change the result, but it would materially change every other aspect of the story because the characters were likable enough for the audience to get invested in them and their adventure. Even if the ending is a literal deus ex machina where the power of god kills the Nazis because they're too damn stupid to know what they're doing, it wouldn't be as meaningful if Indy weren't there to make it feel like a win for the good guys and the climax to a fun, high-stakes adventure. One of the main problems with all of the new Star Trek produced under Kurtzman's leadership is that the characters are awful and unlikable people who hate each other with a passion. Picard is, in a way, even worse than Discovery in that there's really no reason for these characters to be as sh*tty as they are. Especially Raffi, who is a drug-abusing waster who somehow contrives to blame Jean-Luc Picard for her being kicked out of Starfleet... even though his presence was apparently all that was keeping her from an involuntary discharge as it was. It's so stupidly hypocritical of her. How dare the famous Jean-Luc Picard let the consequences of her sh*tty life choices catch up with her!
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Not really, no... By in large, when we've seen the antics of various disreputable or outright criminal individuals like Harcourt Fenton Mudd, Cyrano Jones, Kivas Fajo, "Ardra", etc. they're either operating outside of Federation space or on the very fringes of it. The reason they're out there on the periphery of Federation territory to begin with is that they're wanted by other, less humane governments (like the Klingons) and the Federation Starfleet's highly principled officers don't shoot to kill even if you shoot first, and the justice system there is vastly more forgiving and humane than what many of the Federation's neighbors have to offer. That wholesome, advanced attitude is what we see out on the frontier, where all the real (meaning pre-Kurtzman) Star Trek shows are set... where all the problems aren't solved yet. We've never really gotten a good look at the Federation's core worlds, except to hear them described as "paradise". Even the Maquis, Federation settlers living a hard life on undeveloped worlds in the demilitarized zone separating Cardassian and Federation space, are shown to be generally principled people who just want to be left alone to live their lives in peace. Their style of terrorism is pretty toothless until Eddington loses the plot and even he goes to great lengths to ensure there's little to no loss of life even as he's deploying chemical weapons on a planetary scale. That's how stupidly advanced and high-minded the Federation is... even when its citizens turn to honest-to-goodness terrorism they refuse to actually hurt anyone if it can be avoided. Bajor's basically the Federation frontier planet we see the most of, and while it starts out troubled it goes from a recently occupied world used to violent oppression and equally violent resistance to a basically utopian society in the space of just a couple of years with the Federation's help. The Federation's principles and high standard of living are no simple veneer, that was the reality of daily life in the Federation until Kurtzman decided it wasn't gritty enough for his tastes. That's the essence of the whole speech Sisko gives in "The Maquis" that has him lay out the fact that life in the Federation is paradise because the problems of society are solved already... it's only out on the frontier where people are living rough and still getting society set up that there are still unsolved problems, which is the whole reason the Federation fails to really relate to the Maquis and understand their grievances, because the problems the Maquis were dealing with were alien concepts to the vast majority of the Federation populace. Kurtzman's cack-handed attempt to turn Star Trek into Star Wars aside, what we're seeing in Picard is non-Federation civilian life... all but the first few episodes take place outside of Federation space. These interstellar sh*tholes like Freecloud or the Romulan refugee planets are outside the Federation's borders and governed by someone else... which makes the show's whole argument against the Federation particularly incongruous. The problem with that ending is it comes out of nowhere with no build-up... the Federation just decides, offscreen, that it really ought to do the thing it's supposed to be all about, seemingly independently of anything Picard has said or done in the entirety of the season. It's very much a deus ex machina ending, albeit different from the rather more literal one that Sutra tried to bring about seemingly for shiggles and because every Soong-type android is obliged by law to have an evil twin.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    So when its first season ends it'll have lost only 49% of the audience it started the season with? I have to admit, I didn't expect Picard to do well from the outset, but I never expected it'd be the franchise's all-time worst performer in terms of viewer retention by almost a factor of 3. It lost 30% of its audience in the space of just the first five episodes, and 50% by its season finale. I'm floored. That puts Picard's first season roughly on par with the Voyager or Enterprise's losses over their entire seven or four season runs if you discount the series openers. Wow. Just... wow. I think there's an excellent argument for Patrick Stewart's reluctance to return for season two of his series being motivated by the audience's hatred of the show.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    A bit, yes... one has to wonder if he's having a case of "that sounded cooler in my head" when it came to the direction Star Trek: Picard ultimately took. Alternatively, maybe there's some truth to the rumor that Star Trek: Picard's first season was supposed to end with Jean-Luc Picard dying and subsequently carry on without him and it fell victim to the panicky course-corrections that beset much of the season's second half. Neither of those things is all that odd in the broader context of the clusterf*ck Secret Hideout has turned Star Trek into. CBS put a lot of its eggs in the Star Trek: Discovery basket when they sank ~$250 million into its development and made it the flagship of their unasked-for streaming service. They're not going to let Discovery die until it's either made back that investment - which ain't happening with the show's near-total lack of merchandising support - or Netflix calls CBS's bluff and makes the show's third budget cut a total one. CBS's finances are in the toilet in the wake of their re-merger with Viacom. They literally can't afford to post a $200 million loss on what was supposed to be a sure thing. The shareholders will eat them alive if they do. (One has to wonder how much truth there is in the claims from inside CBS that part of Picard's budget was redirected to Discovery's third season after Netflix slashed Discovery's budget for the second time.) Strange New Worlds might have been pitched as a Star Trek: Discovery spinoff... but what it is is damage control. It's the concept of a bottle episode taken to its logical extreme. An entire series of bottle episodes made with the already developed and paid-for art assets, sets, props, costumes, and effects developed at great expense for the unsuccessful Star Trek: Discovery series. The goal is obvious: create a new Star Trek series that fans might actually watch without spending any more money on development, so that any profit made from it repays the massive investment CBS made in developing Discovery. Mind you, that's assuming ViacomCBS can find someone willing to put up a production budget for Strange New Worlds. They've kind of poisoned the well twice over, possibly thrice now that Star Trek: Lower Decks has come out to surprisingly little fanfare and quite a bit of carping. Discovery performed so poorly that Netflix took a hard pass on Star Trek: Picard, and there have been reports that Amazon Prime is similarly unhappy with how Star Trek: Picard fared. Nickelodeon may be joining that unhappy club if Lower Decks doesn't improve considerably in the near future.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That is what a number of different entertainment news outlets are reporting... that Patrick Stewart is reluctant to return to Star Trek: Picard for a second season because he's unhappy with the show's reception and with the treatment of his character in the previous season. Ironically, in a better-written Star Trek show, what happened to Picard could be the basis for a very interesting story. Since Picard was unconscious when his brain was scanned into Soong's golem, we don't know if he actually had continuity of consciousness or not during the transfer. That leaves open the interesting question of whether this android is still the real Jean-Luc Picard or if Jean-Luc Picard is dead and what Soong did was make a copy of his memories and personality. Would Federation law legally consider him to be the same Jean-Luc Picard or a new instance of Jean-Luc Picard like what happened with the transporter duplicate of Will Riker? Really, you guys are just mincing words here... the point is that, regardless of how you want to classify it, Star Trek was always political and always pushing a "social justice" agenda. It just usually did a much better job of working that job into its narrative in the past instead of bludgeoning its audience across the head with it. Recent Trek also has the problem of its writers being massive hypocrites about its message too, like This is it, precisely. This is why new Trek tests so poorly with general audiences and long-time fans. It's the polar opposite of what we expect from Star Trek.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Nobody knows... but the likely explanation is that it was a last-ditch attempt to fix what they'd broken and achieve their societal ambition before going extinct, or perhaps to find a way to haul themselves back from the brink of extinction. Either way, they never activated it so they may have been afraid of the same "your head a'splode" consequences that humanity was when they discovered the damned thing. "What, this? No no no... this is my healing shiv. Sterile, you know?"
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Safe bet they did... in Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa, we see a Zentradi mobile fortress that was destroyed by the Vajra. It's mentioned in a few places - most notably in a discussion of fold faults - that the Zentradi tend to ignore anything that can't be neatly pigeonholed into the categories of "enemy" or "ally". They knew fold faults were a thing, but they didn't think too hard about them because they didn't fit the "is it an enemy" mindset.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The ancient Protoculture did acquire the ability to technologically synthesize fold quartz, an advancement they definitely developed based on their findings from their long-term study of the Vajra's biology and bio-technology. If the diagram of the ruins in the Brisingr cluster shows what it appears to show, the ruins on any given planet are just the tip of the iceberg covering a massive network of fold quartz "roots" that span the better part of a hemisphere. Admittedly, poking around in Protoculture ruins has proven to be a decidedly unhealthy pastime given how often said ruins seem to be concealing or sealing stupidly dangerous tech that the Protoculture created and almost immediately regretted... like the Protodeviln, the time-traveling Fold Evil, or a means for galaxy-wide mind control that could accidentally kill all sentient life in the galaxy by burning out their brains. Hunting the Vajra isn't exactly safe either, given that the bugs know how to shoot back and are REALLY good at it. Not quite... what Grace was getting at was that the ancient Protoculture studied the Vajra extensively, based a fair bit of their advanced technology on what they learned from their analysis of the Vajra's biology and biotechnology, and came to revere them for possessing a perfectly harmonious society devoid of internal strife. There's never been a suggestion that the Protoculture dabbled in transhumanism. The Birdhuman in Macross Zero is a Protoculture construct - a biotechnological mecha - that the Protoculture made in the image of a Vajra queen. The Protoculture left it behind on Earth to monitor humanity's development and, if necessary, exterminate the human species if they failed to become a harmonious society before acquiring space travel. The Mayan priestesses were created with fold song abilities to maintain it and activate it if necessary, and apparently activated it once in the distant past before aborting the activation through having it detach its own head. The delta wave system in the Brisingr cluster is pretty definitely a Protoculture effort to imitate the Vajra's hive mind tho. Nah, the official timeline and the Macross 7 series point to the genesis of the Protoculture's civil war being socio-political. Except in DYRL?, where the civil war was caused by social issues stemming from the segregation of men and women after cloning replaced biological reproduction. The Protoculture didn't create the delta wave system in the Brisingr globular cluster until their civilization was already basically gone. The Brisingr globular cluster is reckoned to be the Protoculture's last bastion before they went extinct.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    All the fans have really asked for is for Star Trek to actually BE Star Trek... an optimistic look at the future. Even Patrick Stewart, who turned Star Trek: Picard into his personal political soapbox, seems to be having buyer's remorse when it comes to the current state of the franchise. Word is he's unhappy with how the series turned out and how it was received, and is reluctant to return for a second season.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, it's easy to miss... that bit only really comes in at the very end of the series. The Protoculture ruins in the Brisingr globular cluster were built specifically to be a massive fold wave amplifier that could broadcast biological fold wave emissions from fold songs to the entire galaxy, in order to link the minds of humanoids into a collective consciousness. Yeah... it had a strong first half, but kind of fell apart after the heroes very clearly lost the damn war halfway into the series and the conclusion was just ripping off Macross Frontier.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    One of the problems with CBS/ViacomCBS is that they've announced a lot of projects that don't seem to actually be approved or funded. Strange New Worlds seems to be in the same limbo state as other pitches like the untitled Section 31 series that was to star Michelle Yeoh, the Starfleet Academy series, and the Khan miniseries. I think Strange New Worlds has a much better chance of getting made than the others, though, since the casting, set design, etc. are already done. It's practically an entire series of bottle shows, which is appealing to the cash-strapped ViacomCBS and it's at least nominally giving the fans what they want... Star Trek that actually looks and feels like a Star Trek series. I think it's probably a bitter pill for ViacomCBS and especially Secret Hideout, since the warm reception the Strange New Worlds pitch got is a stark contrast to how a lot of fans greeted Discovery, Picard, and now Lower Decks.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Let us speak of that no further... for politeness's sake. Pretty screwed... but, luckily, actually doing that is impossible without incredible levels of mechanical amplification that are only possible with the most advanced overtechnology that the ancient Protoculture could muster. The Delta Wave System the Protoculture built for that purpose was so massive that the individual amplifiers/resonators occupied a significant portion of the crust of multiple planets in the Brisingr globular cluster and the completed resonator was nearly a thousand light years across. The whole thing depended on the Star Shrine on Ragna, and that was taken out of action in the Macross Delta series shortly after being activated, so actually Var-ing the entire galaxy or even a small portion of it wouldn't be possible anymore. Ideally... but it's probably impossible. For one, the ultra-high purity fold quartz necessary to produce the fold wave amplifiers that the Tactical Sound Units use is prohibitively expensive due to its scarcity. You either have to dig it out of Protoculture ruins or hunt Vajra semi-queens for it, and neither of those things is what you'd call a healthy lifestyle choice. For two, individuals who have fold receptors and are able to activate them and produce sufficiently powerful fold waves to have an effect are vanishingly rare. Xaos is an interstellar megacorp and despite holding frequent open auditions for Tactical Sound Unit membership they've only been able to turn up about 10 people with usably-strong fold receptors in the eight billion-strong population of the Brisingr globular cluster: the three members of Tactical Sound Unit Thrones and the seven members of Tactical Sound Unit Walkure. Two members of Walkure quit due to stress, one only joined under duress (Reina was given a choice between prison or service), and of the two that were actually powerful enough that they could manage the weaponized Var syndrome on their own (Mikumo and Freyja) only one was actually recruited while the other was a weaponized clone of a Protoculture bio-android. One person out of eight billion was a powerful-enough fold singer to actually combat Var syndrome. Yup... the biological fold waves in fold song that trigger or alleviate Var syndrome only have a short range unless mechanically amplified. Heinz used the shrine aboard the Sigur Berrentzs and various other mechanical aids to amplify his fold songs enough to reach the other worlds in the Brisingr globular cluster. Even then, he was only able to reach one planet at a time and the effort involved was such a strain on him that it significantly shortened his lifespan by depleting his runes to the point he was bedridden by the story's end. (Fun fact, there's a Macross VF-X2 reference in the additional equipment that Berger Stone mentions. Part of the amplification system that the Epsilon Foundation provided was Die Zauberflöte - the fold quartz-based communications system created by the Critical Path Corporation as the basis for the Sound Jamming System in Macross VF-X2.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Over the last few years, there's been a sharp increase in that kind of thing... it's an extension of the same attempt to control the conversation about their work that led the studios to buy out many of the major entertainment news websites and turn them into self-hagiographic propaganda outlets. Bad reviews hurt the bottom line directly, especially now that subscription-based streaming services are such a big part of the entertainment landscape and everyone's trying to launch their own with just a handful of "flagship" titles. Entertainingly, CBS can't seem to make its usual argument that the critics are racist sexist trolls work for Lower Decks the way they thought it did for Picard. The criticism's all focused on how derivative it is of Rick and Morty and how forced the humor is, instead of having anything to do with the characters.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Which means there's no reason to get the ADV version... because the English dub is freaking awful.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    None that I've seen... it's only been about four years since the last re-release of Macross Plus: Movie Edition on Blu-ray.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    We're all kinda hoping that the success of the Macross Delta releases with the official English subs is going to lead to the next round of re-releases will have official subs. Well, the quality on the Blu-rays is at least as good if not better than the DVDs most of the time... but admittedly if you want English subs it's usually a one-horse race for any given title except Super Dimension Fortress Macross. For that one, IIRC the Animeigo release is generally preferred.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Are you sure? There's some uncertainty on that point.
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