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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    With this many teasers, it kind of feels like the studio lacks confidence in the series and are concerned it'll be overshadowed by other high-profile streaming titles coming out this year.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Her scenes so far are just filler. It's a shame, really. Genevieve O'Reilly is wasted on this show and on Star Wars in general. If her character actually lived up to the promise of that speech she gives to Tay Kolma about having learned from Palpatine's methods and so on, she'd have been an amazing addition to the story. Instead she's stuck playing the role of the sheltered political idealist who can only clutch her pearls at the prospect of violence from the safety of her (sometimes literal) ivory tower while everyone around her just gets increasingly exasperated by how incredibly out-of-touch she is. Whether it's her own daughter, her friend and banker, or Luthen. This version of Mon Mothma feels like a Star Trek character who wandered into Star Wars by mistake.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, if they were going that route they'd have to title it something Star Wars: Not Fanwank For Once or Competent Writing: a Rare Star Wars Story. The other Disney+ Star Wars showrunners must be a bit embarrassed by how easily Tony Gilroy et. al. make their work look like high-budget fan films in comparison.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, Cassian's definitely the main character. Practically every significant event in the series is either centered around him specifically or a direct result of something he does... all leading inexorably towards his ultimate fate on the Rogue One mission to Scarif. Regardless, calling it Rebellion or similar would probably be seen as a bad idea for reasons related to brand confusion and distinctiveness. Disney+ already has a Star Wars series with the title of Star Wars: Rebels. Whoever is doing brand management at Disney LucasFilm would probably find those titles insufficiently distinct from one another and would be very much inclined to avoid any potential for audiences to mix up their eminently kid-friendly Star Wars cartoon about the early rebellion with a much darker and more violent Star Wars series about the "The Revolution will not be civilized" years of the rebellion meant for mature audiences. Resistance would've been a great title, but of course they'd already wasted that one twice over on the sequel trilogy and then on a mediocre and even more kid-friendly knockoff of Rebels that sets up parts of the sequel trilogy.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That bar is set so low that it's a trip hazard in Satan's wine cellar. Or the entire trilogy. It's not like the Canto Bight plot tumor in The Last Jedi is the only example of nonsensical writing in the sequels. He only comes off as weird because he's part of an idiot plot. On his own, he's a pretty straightforward character who's smart enough to know that the arms dealers are the only real winners since they're selling to both sides, and uninterested enough in galactic politics to not really care who wins as long as he gets to live his life. Probably a lot of folks in the galaxy like him.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Why wouldn't it be? Most of the Disney+ Star Wars originals have Protagonist Titles (e.g. Ahsoka, Obi-Wan Kenobi), and this series is about Cassian Andor's personal journey from his ordinary life as a disenfranchised Imperial citizen living on the fringes of Ferrix society to the jaded revolutionary he is when Jyn Erso encounters him in Rogue One. It's not an ensemble cast series like Rebels or Resistance, or an anthology series like the Tales of titles, so Andor makes the most sense as a title. The rest of the cast are all people who are, for one reason or another, caught up in the events of Cassian's life and are forever changed by them. Whether that's his neighbors from Ferrix (Bix, Brasso, Salman), the corpo-cops who tried and failed to arrest him (Karn and Mosk), the ISB agent who jumps to the right conclusion from wrong evidence she found of his thefts from a naval supply warehouse, the rebel spymaster planning to recruit him for the cause, or the failing politician secretly funding the rebellion who gains much needed breathing room because of a heist he pulls off. Calling it something like Cassian Andor and the Plot-Irrelevant Space W.A.S.P.s might be a bit on-the-nose, but too evocative of Harry Potter. I guess they could go the LN route and call it That Time I Tried to Go On The Run After Committing Double Homicide in Self-Defense, Got Rescued by a Rebel Leader, Falsely Imprisoned, and Become a Revolutionary Guerilla: My New Stressful Life Burning the Empire Down! or something to that effect. Borrowing from the original version of Maarva's speech and calling it F*** the Empire: a Star Wars Story might be a bit too much, and probably sets a very different expectation.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Initially, I wrote that I watched more of Classic Stars today. But that didn't feel right. I subjected myself to more of Classic Stars today... because this series is so inscruitable and is so bad with exposition that watching it is like wrestling with an octopus in a completely lightless room. You're never quite certain what the hell is going on or why, and the whole proceeding feels more than subtly wrong.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    She's supposed to be way more than just a figurehead, though... she's described as being one of the key founders of the Rebel Alliance and the commander-in-chief of the rebel forces during the war. 🤷‍♂️ Someone who commands respect and actual authority. The more I watch and read, the more it feels like Disney is walking back every positive aspect the character had piece by piece. She just feels unnecessary in Andor. Like she's only there because it's a story about the early rebellion and they felt they had to include her somehow because she's meant to be one of the rebellion's bigshots later on. Her segments of the story don't really connect to the rest of it in any meaningful way thus far. You could delete most of her scenes and there'd be no real impact to the plot. As beautifully composed as this whole wedding thing is, it's completely unnecessary to Cassian's story. Now that is an assessment I can agree with. That and Tony Gilroy's remarks about how she's really a well-meaning person at heart, but just doesn't realize or can't accept that she's fighting for a lost cause trying to fix the system from within because Palpatine et. al. do not care about the norms and mechanisms of the Republic's democratic system that she holds sacred.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the first three episodes of Andor S2 in my weekly watch group. It's good. It's real good. I am a bit disappointed, but not the least bit surprised, that Mon Mothma's part is once again a largely unnecessary sideshow about covering her own arse. All in all, a pretty damn great story. Between this, Rebels, Ahsoka, and The Mask of Fear, I'm really starting to think that Disney or someone in charge of the creative team (e.g. Filoni) has something against Mon Mothma as a character though.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the new episode of The Too-Perfect Saint today... the series as a whole is still a pretty unremarkable sort of otome anime. Not terrible, but very form letter. It's that weird kind of "my new perfect life" scenario you most often find in bad isekai titles. There's little sense of a plot or direction to the events thus far, since each episode after the first is mainly just a string of random encounters where people tell the newly arrived Lady Saint how amazing and wonderful and perfect she is for doing what she perceives as her normal workload.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Indeed, it does look familiar... because that is the box art for the Hasegawa 1/72 scale Macross Zero F-14A++ Super Tomcat kit by Tenjin Hidetaka. (It's also found on page 42 of Valkyries: Tenjin Hidetaka Art Works of Macross AKA Valkyries: First Sortie.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the new pilot that appears in the trailer does appear to be wearing something based on the standard OYW-era Earth Federation pilot suit.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It would not be the first time that happened... or even the first time that happened specifically to Char. Unlikely, IMO... those machines look like derivatives of the RX-78 Gundam. We know Zeon halted development of new mobile suits in order to reverse-engineer and replicate the captured RX-78-2 Gundam. The Federation, on the other hand, modified the design of the Guncannon for its main MS the RGM-79 Guncannon Light-type. We know what that machine looks like via the movie and Beginnings pamphlet.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Watching episode 3, and early on one of the secondary characters lampshades how stupid the show's name is. If nothing else, I feel a bit better about making fun of it since even the show's creators are backhandedly admitting it's kind of dumb. On the whole, GQuuuuuuX is still pretty damn boring. We finally get introduced to the Red Gundam's pilot. ... it's actually kind of crazy that this series is making me look back fondly at G-Witch of all things. Probably Zeon's next-gen MS based on reverse-engineering the stolen RX-78 Gundam. The one that de facto replaced the Gelgoog in this timeline.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Like Rogue One, it's a more mature kind of Star Wars story that eschews a lot of the inherently self-limiting concepts found elsewhere in the franchise. Aiming just for the hardcore fandom is a self-limiting strategy too... you have to try new things if you want to bring in new viewers, and the various tropes surrounding the Jedi and other Force users are so old and so well-trodden that they feel quite stale. My earnest hope is that Andor's second season will prove that Star Wars doesn't NEED the glowstick society to be embedded in every aspect of storytelling to succeed. It's a big galaxy, and the Jedi can't be involved in everything interesting or momentous going on. Andor was one of those few Disney+ titles that steadily gained viewers as it went, rather than losing them with each episode. With reviewers raving about it (a 98% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes so far), and the series being pretty favorably looked-upon in general, I have a good feeling about season two.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    General Hux wasn't a spy all along. He started leaking intelligence to the Resistance after the events of The Last Jedi because he hates Kylo Ren and Kylo Ren took over the First Order in The Last Jedi after he assassinated Supreme Leader Snoke. Like he tells the main characters, he doesn't really care who wins anymore he just needs Kylo Ren to lose. It's basically a lazy and less interesting version of ISB agent Kallus's defection to the Rebel Alliance that occurred in Rebels around the time work on The Rise of Skywalker started. He was the rebellion's man on the inside in Thrawn's organization, but unlike Hux his change of heart was more genuine and after being outed he escapes to work for the rebellion full-time. Seems like that's the idea... the great and feared Grand Admiral Thrawn dramatically returns and gets beaten into the ground like a tent peg, affirming the New Republic's existing belief that the remaining Imperials are no real threat.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Neat! Grabbed a couple copies today. Some of that art is new to me... mainly the ones that look like evolutions of the Armored Gerwalk from the original series concept art.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Witch Watch's 3rd episode has cemented my first impression of the series... it's basically a less-ecchi version of To Love Ru. Nico is just Lala if you substitute magic for alien tech... a pink haired girl with no common sense not-so-innocently cohabitating with the guy she wants to marry, and causing havoc each episode because her lack of common sense will inevitably drive her to turn a small problem into a huge one by supernatural means she doesn't fully understand or can't fully control. It's funny once or twice... but without another payoff (a decent joke, some ecchi, something) it quickly becomes frustrating esp. when the "solution" was obviously never fit for purpose in the first place. Morihito's straight man routine is practically the only thing keeping me watching. At 4 episodes, Catch Me at The Ballpark! is still a rather bland slice of life series. A good slice-of-life series should be mundane on some level since it's meant to be everyday life... but this series is mundane in a way that isn't interesting. It has no "hook". Nothing to get the audience engaged in the daily life of the characters. They're just ballpark staff doing ballpark staff things. There are a few interesting/amusing moments like the American player who's initially keen to return to the American leagues but decides to stay because he develops a crush on the gyaru vendor girl mid-game, or the ballpark announcer with a crush on one of the players who accidentally confesses in her banter while announcing the home team's starting lineup. Most of its is borderline white noise, though.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Indeed... it would not be unreasonable to assume Disney's three-at-a-time release plan for Andor's second season is built on understanding why that was a mistake. Still, Andor holds up REALLY well in rewatching. My folks enjoyed seeing it enough to ask me 'round tomorrow specifically for the next three. They're not even really that into Star Wars fans, but Andor seems to have really hooked them.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It works way better if you watch all three in one sitting, rather than the two and then one that Disney did on launch.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    For reasons of copyright and fair use laws, I don't think I can post the unedited originals publicly on my own site... but I can probably release the ensuing translations. I'd have to ask around to explore alternative options for the transcriptions.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I got my parents started watching Andor tonight after months of bending their ear about using those streaming services I pay for... They absolutely loved the first three episodes, and are keen to see more. 😁 I can hardly wait for S2.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Now, I can see one way out... but it's absolutely guaranteed to piss off the Thrawn glazers in the Star Wars fandom. Thrawn has to show up to do his very best Anavel Gato impression and then immediately and unceremoniously get his teeth kicked in by the New Republic. Despite the fans making him out to be a Tactical Genius and the most feared Imperial Admiral, he spends most of his screen time in Rebels catching L's and that doesn't seem to have changed much in Ahsoka. He just needs to catch an L of such magnitude that Gimlin, son of Gloin, would count it as two. If the great, feared Grand Admiral Thrawn goes down like an absolute chump (again) then it explains perfectly why the New Republic thought the First Order ain't sh*t until Starkiller Base took their capital and fleet off the map with one shot. Honestly? I disagree. General Hux might be a dork, and his forces might lose some high-profile engagements... but at the end of the day he's still winning at the strategic level through the entire sequel trilogy up to the point where he changes sides and dies. There's a good chance the Resistance would've lost if Hux hadn't turned traitor simply because he didn't like his new boss. Grand Admiral Thrawn, on the other hand, is oversold as this super-cool genius... but what little he makes in minor tactical gains using overwhelming force against Hera's tiny and under-equipped rebel cell is offset by the huge strategic losses he keeps taking. Hux might be an utterly unlikeable heel, but Thrawn is the king of the jobbers.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Today's haul... all four volumes of the Macross Frontier TV novelization, both volumes of the Macross Frontier movie novelization, both Macross Frontier short story collections, and both volumes of the Macross Delta novelization.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Quite a haul today... all four Macross Frontier TV novels, both Macross Frontier movie novels, both Macross Delta novels, and both Macross Frontier shortstory collections. Gonna get cracking on those over the next couple days and start digitizing them before the end of the quarter.
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