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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Started watching some of this season's other offerings after getting caught up on Attack on Titan and Jujutsu Kaisen. Honestly, the way they're handled now in Attack on Titan's final season, the titans come off more as Evangelion-esque mecha rather than the anthropomorphic eldritch abominations they were before the timeskip. Eren's repeated emergences from the Attack Titan's body in mid-fight to talk to people, complete with hydraulic-sounding steam noises and the head slumping forward really just makes it look and sound like he's disembarking from one of Full Metal Panic!'s arm slaves. It makes them so much less interesting and intimidating that the titan fights no longer have any real weight to them... especially now that Eren can spam-summon his own titan half a dozen times or so in a single fight. Armor Shop for Ladies & Gentlemen deserves special mention as one of the shortest anime series I've ever encountered. The individual episodes are not quite four minutes long, and that includes the credits. It's an adaptation of a 4koma series, and it can best be described as a kind of horrid abomination-against-nature cross between Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-san and Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time. An unemployed guy named Kautz discovers an armorer's shop that exclusively sells fetish-y chainmail bikini-type armor (the owner's preference... or should we say fetish?) and discovers it's basically bankrupt and, out of exasperation, accidentally volunteers to do their accounting because the owner's a moron who runs the shop at a loss in order in order to perv on the few female customers they get and his beautiful female assistant is too dim to see the problem there. It doesn't bring anything to the table except PG-13 fanservice under a looser interpretation of the word "armor" than Tomb Raider's usage of the word "tomb" and a feeling that the production group's families probably ask them when they're going to get a real job at every opportunity.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    As a cargo pilot for SMS's parent company Bilra Transport, it seems somewhat unlikely they let him bring his monkey model VF-19 on cargo runs. ... but yes, they absolutely wouldn't want his help. The last time he poked his oar in and tried to solve a problem himself, he caused a government crackdown on arms exports, incurred massive losses for both Shinsei Industry and General Galaxy, derailed unmanned fighter development, and directly or indirectly caused the loss of three next-generation prototypes.1 The price tag on his particular brand of help is just too damn high, and Brisingr's already a poor region of the galaxy. 1. The YF-21 No.2, the AIF-X-9, and Neo Glaug.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    They have one of those... her name is Elma Hoyly. Yes... the loli from Macross Dynamite 7. She's a research biologist working on biological fold waves at Xaos. She was apparently a student of Dr. Lawrence's. Yes... that's her piloting a replica VF-19改 in 2062. Yes... she's still a bit hung-up on Basara. Medically speaking, there's no accounting for taste. No further questions. Probably, yeah... Luca Angeloni's family owns Legodt & Angeloni Industries (LAI). He's set for life. He was only in SMS's Skull Platoon because his family wanted someone there to represent their interests in the field testing of the VF-25 they codeveloped with Shinsei Industry. Smart money says it's Bogue Con-vaart. The smart thing to do would have been to have Keith defect and take up Messer's VF-31 in the series, but that's a huge missed opportunity.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    He's here to publish artbooks and chew bubblegum... but he lives in Japan's strategic bubblegum reserve, so we're in for a bit of a wait.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Tell that to the English... and anyone making jokes about the American deep south. Albus Dumbledore's brother Aberforth is introduced to the reader via a hidden-in-plain-sight joke about Scotsmen and bestiality. (For bonus points, he's even depicted wearing a kilt when he appears in the movie series, in line with that old gag about how Scots wear kilts 'because zippers scare the sheep".) The thing about Umbridge and the centaurs isn't terribly subtle either. Centaurs were super rapey in classical mythology, perhaps most famously documented in the final deed of the Greek mythical hero Heracles who was killed by the blood of a centaur named Nessus after killing him for trying to rape his wife. A woman being dragged off by a centaur means one and only one thing. There are a fair few bits of other off-color humor and mature references in Harry Potter, and they're not even particularly subtle. Just imagine the outcry when the oblivious general public sees HBO adapt that stuff too.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    A lot of kid's media includes some hidden-in-plain-sight humor or subtext for the benefit/enjoyment of parents. J.K. Rowling's been put on the spot a few times WRT Aberforth's arrest for "inappropriate charms on a goat" and had to check the age of the requester before answering.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    "Network that turned celebrated novel series A Song of Fire and Ice into a small screen pop culture phenomenon and then screwed it up so badly that all interest in the series and franchise vanished practically overnight expresses interest in adapting celebrated novel series Harry Potter for television." ... ... ... Am I the only one who looked a this and immediately thought "So THAT'S what a red flag factory looks like?". Between the cack-handed incompetence at HBO that murdered Game of Thrones in its sleep and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling having spent the last decade or coming unglued in an attempt to keep herself and her cash cow relevant via Twitter, this feels like something that can only end poorly. Especially if J.K. Rowling is allowed to have any creative control over its writers. It's one thing for Albus Dumbledore to allegedly be gay, but can you imagine the mess they'll create if they start including her Twitter comments in the series? There are a few in-jokes in the novels themselves that flew under the radar with her publisher but could cause havoc if HBO actually explored them, like the implication that Aberforth was arrested and tried for bestiality or that Professor Umbridge was raped by centaurs. Throw her comments from Twitter in the mix and we'll be hearing about how Neville had lice, how Hagrid was all about autoerotic asyphxiation, and how wizards used to just sh*t on the floor wherever they were standing and magic it away. (That last one isn't a joke, by the way... she actually said that.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Really, that the New UN Government worlds of the Brisingr Alliance decided to trust Xaos and Walkure again is proof that something ALREADY went horribly wrong. Never mind that their incompetence and refusal to work with the New UN Forces was what allowed Windermere to conquer the Brisingr cluster in the first place, their leaders are very literally interstellar criminals. Especially Lady M, who Windermere outed as engaging in illegal cloning in violation of interstellar law in the last movie.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's possible, I guess... though it's worth remembering that exactly zero of Delta Flight's VF-31s are production aircraft. Each and every one of them is a one-of-a-kind Ace Custom made by applying extensive aftermarket modifications to a trial production VF-31A Kairos. So if Xaos Valkyrie Works has modded Chuck's VF-31 custom Siegfried to be more like a RVF then it's just another layer of customization on what was already an extensively customized VF. The ones on the nose are polarized covers for a variety of sensors, similar to the ones on the VF-25. Now that'd be amusing... if Windermere's little stunt finally got the central New UN Forces' attention and they've come to stomp the planet flat.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    There was never anything stopping him from carrying one... the VF-31's LU-18A beam gunpod can be mounted on a centerline hardpoint or the ordnance container. It looks like they've remodeled the head of Chuck's VF-31 to make it more like Luca's RVF-25. (On the VF-31A, there is fold carbon installed where the Siegfried custom type has fold quartz.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I really wish people would stop saying this... if it's not a giant technorganic bug, space flower, anatomical abomination, or piece of flying coral it doesn't really have "Protoculture vibes". It has serious General Galaxy vibes. It's worth remembering that quantity doesn't necessarily mean "more powerful". The YF-29 has about 1/3 as many missiles as the VF-25 w/ Armored Pack or 1/4 as many as the VF-31 w/ Armored Pack, and yet it'd easily wreck both because it's armed with MDE weapons and has much higher performance. This is a Macross Delta feature, after all, and Delta has largely retreated from the "uber-powerful super prototype" Gundam-esque schtick that the Frontier movies and 30 played with back towards the baseline set for the 5th Generation by the trial production VF-25. Given that this apparent drone has markings in the same style as Xaos's VF-31s and shares Chuck's color scheme, I suspect Chuck has gained an AI wingman or two like Luca had in the Macross Frontier series. It's possible they just replaced the forward-swept winglets on his existing VF-31E with production parts. It would be an improvement over the VF-31's gunpod, since the Draken III's had beam grenade mode. It is occasionally useful... if you want "my hovercraft is full of eels" style gag translations. All in all, this trailer is well-composed but there's really nothing interesting going on here.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, it's still 機動戦士ガンダム 閃光のハサウェイ.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness, while Tilly is absolutely the USS Discovery's chief screw-up officer she's far from the only one with amazing talent to do the worst thing possible in any situation. She's got Burnham with her, after all. After Tilly's amazing performance in her first command situation, who else would they possibly turn to? It takes a special kind of Starfleet officer to bungle a command situation so completely that Starfleet's most valuable starship falls into enemy hands with such breathtaking speed and ease that veteran Orion space pirates are initially convinced it must be a trap and then left utterly befuddled that it wasn't. Fleet Admiral Vance needs to Tenchi Muyou! GXP this hot mess and find a way to weaponize Tilly's monumental incompetence the way the Galaxy Police and Jurai royal family had weaponized Seina Yamada's impossible, physics-defyingly bad luck. Tilly's such a walking disasterpiece that they could send her back in time to be used as a Borg invasion deterrent. She'd be the first thing since the Kazon that'd make the collective decide assimilation wasn't worth the effort. Not out of thin air... out of the number 2, ironically enough.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sure the Eldian Empire in Attack on Titan makes the worst human rights of the Soviet Union look like a goddamn garden party by comparison.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Not just a major power... THE major power. Given the alleged scarcity of dilithium and its alleged indispensability in warp drives, the Federation now has every other galactic power over a barrel. Everyone else is scrounging for scraps to keep what few ships they have running while the Federation now has the reserves to dictate who gets to have interstellar capability.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely against Discovery. Say what you will about Voyager, but its crew actually got along pretty easily with the sole exception of psychopathic murderer Lon Suder and borg drone Seven of Nine. Discovery's crew all treat each other the way Seven of Nine treats Harry. Sneering contempt. We shouldn't expect Discovery to be anything but unapologetically bad. The worst part is that Discovery's showrunners are aware of at least some of the show's problems... but their efforts to address some of those issues only result in them digging a deeper hole for themselves. One thing @BlackRose pointed out to me while we were working on the next PI's work plan is that the ending of Discovery's 3rd season has effectively upset the apple cart in the interstellar political scene. The Federation has an effective near-monopoly on dilithium now, the all-important glowing rocks needed to make interstellar travel work. A monopoly on the dilithium supply means that the Federation can dictate terms to ANYONE. They get to decide who can sustain an interstellar civilization and who can't.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    No, it's a reference to the plot development in Attack on Titan's last two story arcs. Its author was already known to have some... questionable... views and sensibilities given who some of the characters are based on. The story arcs that followed the time skip changed the setting considerably in a way that can only be described as "putting on the Reich".
  18. Seto Kaiba
    So... any artistically-minded soul want to photoshop Mikimoto's head onto Duke Nukem's body?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, no problem. Unlike the start of Discovery's second season when Captain Pike took over, there really isn't a moment in Discovery's third season that actually feels like Star Trek. A lot of the time, what it really feels like is Star Wars. Booker feels like another poorly developed ersatz Han Solo ala Dash Rendar. He's the rogueish loner cargo ship captain running cargo out of various seedy and lawless spaceports, who later ends up on the run from that crime syndicate (which, in this case, is also the closest there is to the government) as the result of a falling out over some cargo. His ship even bears more than a passing resemblance to the Millennium Falcon or Outrider. Osyraa's basically a mix of Jabba the Hutt and Darth Vader, being the leader of the crime syndicate he used to work for and is on the run from, running an oppressive regime that profits from slave labor, indentured servitude, and extortion while oppressing basically everyone from the comfort of a large gray wedge-shaped space battleship. Like Han, the catalyst for Booker's transformation into an idealistic believer in La Resistance (in this case, the Federation) is meeting the True Believer girl of his dreams as she champions its cause and getting wrapped up in her agenda ending with him signing on himself after their first major victory. Yeah, there really aren't any moments like that in Discovery. There are some insincere "heartfelt" reunion moments like when Burnham finally catches up to the Discovery at the end of episode 3x02, but even three seasons in there's no sense of the crew coming together as a family. The closest they get is Saru's staff dinner, which ends in everyone storming out on him (and Georgiou stealing the wine on the way out). The crew of the Discovery just don't like each other personally or professionally, unlike the tightly-knit crews of the Enterprise, Enterprise-D, Deep Space 9, Voyager, and NX-01 Enterprise.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    There have been no new or noteworthy developments since that thread was locked. Harmony Gold USA still holds (under license) the "rest-of-world" distribution and merchandising rights to Super Dimension Fortress Macross and "rest-of-world" merchandising rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love?, and is still using registered trademarks on the Macross title, logos, and key art in various markets in a bid to keep legitimate Macross licensing botted up so they won't have to compete with it. They've lost, or are in the process of losing, their trademarks in the United Kingdom, European Union, and People's Repubic of China, and Big West is in the process of releasing all of Macross in China. Unfortunately, because US Trademark law is written differently, Big West cannot challenge the trademarks which Harmony Gold registered in the US the same way so the licensing deadlock in the west will continue. (The loss of these trademarks isn't really much of a blow to Robotech or Harmony Gold, as their own disclosures in court while disputing Big West's applications to register Macross's trademarks in the European Union revealed the European market for Robotech is basically nonexistent.) In terms of news that isn't noteworthy, the only quasi-recent development is what @Einherjar has already acknowledged. Namely, that the sequel to Titan Comics' widely-panned loose adaptation of Robotech's Macross Saga - which bore the uninspiring title of Robotech Remix - has seemingly become the latest Robotech property to take on Robotech's traditional "not cancelled, honest!" status for prematurely cancelled works. Publication of the monthly series ended without any notice - even to Titan's distributor - after the release of its fourth issue in January 2020. Titan Comics kept silent about it until months later, when they attempted to lay blame for the "delay" on the UK's COVID-19 lockdown even though the book had missed the release dates for multiple issues before the lockdown began. Speculation about the book's actual fate has been minimal, with most fans assuming that it was cancelled due to low sales. Basically, selling and reselling the streaming rights is pure profit... the production costs were amortized decades ago. It's not much, and it's definitely not honest work, but it is a tiny stream of supplementary income. The same deal with the ultra-low volume or print-on-demand collectibles that are about all the Robotech brand has left in terms of merchandising. Harmony Gold itself will claim that Robotech Academy is still under development (it isn't, according to the studio that did it) and that the live action movie is being fast-tracked (it isn't) to become a tentpole franchise for Sony Pictures (it isn't). Most fans suspect that Harmony Gold is holding out hope that Big West will want to distribute Macross in the US badly enough to either buy out their license for a king's ransom or pay them royalties for the use of the Macross name and logos that HG trademarked in the US.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that was a fun trip down the Wikipedia rabbit hole... You have an excellent and well-made point about the enduring nature of piracy in specific regions... and it's not at all unreasonable that space piracy would be an enduring problem on the periphery of Federation space and outside of it, given the number of species that aren't quite sold on Federation values like the Orions and Nausicaans. I suppose a better way to frame my grievance with Discovery's new 32nd century setting WRT the Orions would be that they too are victims of this bizarre form of "setting stasis". We're 1,035 years into the future from Earth's first (depicted) contact with the Orions in Star Trek: Enterprise's fourth season and they seem to exist exclusively in the context of piratical, slave-trading crime syndicates. Discovery S3's writers dithered a bit mid-season about whether the diminished Federation's main antagonists - the Emerald Chain - were a government or not. They were initially introduced as an Orion-Andorian alliance, and subsequently zig-zagged between that and "it's just an Orion crime syndicate" in subsequent episodes as they depicted the Andorians as just hired (or coerced) muscle and went on to depict it was increasingly villainous and seemingly exclusively Orion-led. It lurched back towards "alliance" for a spell in the season finale when Osyraa proposed her truce and presented herself as a government official, but the writers walked that all the way back towards "crime syndicate" very quickly. (Presumably it had something to do with the implications of Burnham gunning down the Emerald Chain's leader... which would be a diplomatic catastrophe unless she were a crime syndicate leader nobody would miss, and whose syndicate would fall apart due to infighting without her.) The canonicity of Lower Decks is dubious, but that offers the ONLY instance of an Orion who isn't a crime syndicate member... who, in a rare moment of self-awareness, actually gets a little offended at being stereotyped as a space pirate.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    All told, it wasn't just stagnant... it was almost like a different timeline where the events and advances made in other Star Trek shows largely never happened. There are nods to them, like the USS Nog, the Voyager-J, and Picard's recording of Spock's speech on Romulan reunification, but that just serves to make the prominent absences and plot holes weirder than they would otherwise be. Of course, the oversights and research failures weren't restricted to Discovery. Lower Decks still has the Borg around long after Janeway destroyed their transwarp network and Picard has the explicitly-destroyed transwarp network still being used. I'm not so sure... there's not a lot in the timeline between 2379 and the mid-27th century, but once you get to the mid-26th century you're into the Temporal Cold War era established by Enterprise but referencing events in TNG and other shows. From there, the Temporal Cold War era kind of dominates things until the late 31st century.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    That, in and of itself, is kind of emblematic of how Discovery's writers don't seem to have had any real ideas for advancing the Star Trek setting. The USS Discovery might've traveled forward into the 32nd century, but literally all that accomplished was to better-justify the set design looking far too advanced for the period it was originally intended for. Everything else either stayed the same or got worse. 930 years have passed and everyone is still using conventional matter/antimatter reactors moderated with refined dilithium to power conventional warp drives, despite better alternatives for both having been available for over eight centuries. Replicated food is still somehow "bad" or worse than "real" food despite being indistinguishable down to the molecular level, despite replicator technology despite eight and a half centuries of technological advancement. The Orion piracy problem that Earth Starfleet was dealing with in the 2150s is still a problem a thousand years later. The Discovery's spore drive is still a unique and impossible-to-replicate drive system 930 years after it was trialed (despite tech that does the same job better having been discovered over eight centuries ago and put into service six centuries ago). Discovery has been updated, technologically, but nothing functional changed internally or externally except the interface for the spore drive and the addition of a cloaking device. It seems like the only thing that changed was the year on the calendar.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Quite the opposite! In an unusual twist, Vance actually called Osyraa out as a spoiled, entitled, elitist, hypocritical space Karen precisely because she doesn't eat sh*t. As bizarre and implausible as it sounds, the very 32nd century cosmopolitan Osyraa apparently doesn't know how replicators work. Replicators were far and away the most economical and accessible source for all kinds of basic needs... including food and clothing. Osyraa would have to be living in obscene luxury if she never eats replicated food even aboard Viridian and never wears replicated clothing. That would mean that she's carrying massive stocks of natural foodstuffs and water, that she's got one or more private chefs working for her to prepare that food for her on-demand, and that her clothes are all individually tailored for her. When much of former Federation, even the parts that are now Emerald Chain territory, is still struggling with basic necessities, Osyraa is living like Louis XVI right before the French Revolution. Holodecks must work differently in the 32nd century, since when they were invented they used replicator technology heavily to create anything that might be worn, eaten, or otherwise inert matter that might leave the bounds of the holomatrix. I'd assume programmable matter must be involved now though that raises some awkward questions about whether that's something that can be safely eaten, drunk, or inhaled. Yeah, Fleet Admiral Vance was set to be the Reasonable Authority Figure in Star Trek: Discovery until he mysteriously developed a blind spot regarding Burnham's insubordination and chronic reg-breaking about two-thirds of the way through the season. That he allowed Burnham to be promoted to command the Discovery is difficult to swallow, even if he did effectively demote the ship to a glorified freighter.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    ... well, maybe Georgiou and Tilly, but that'd just steal the remaining 40-something votes Burnham got. ... oh god, you're right. This series DOES resemble one of the Star Trek novels penned by Shatner. Did he have a writing credit on this turd, or is this just an unfortunate coincidence? (Specifically, The Return... where Shatner un-kills Kirk after the events of Star Trek: Generations and has him not only defeat every major member of the TNG crew including Worf and Data, but also briefly captains a Defiant-class USS Enterprise, defeats a secret Borg-Romulan alliance, and dies destroying the entire Borg collective after sucker-punching Picard.)
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