Seto Kaiba

Can we appreciate for a moment their commitment to the "We're pirates, but in space!" bit here? Our boy Wolfman is wearing what appears to be a brace of laser flintlocks across his chest. Laser. Flintlocks. This is a setting where laser guns hold hundreds of shots and have detachable magazines. Wolfman is lugging around a bunch of extra and unnecessary guns styled after firearms that are tens of thousands of years obsolete purely for aesthetic purposes. That is commitment to the bit, and no mistake. Someone get this canine a bicorn hat and a jolly roger, stat!

It's an interesting title to say the least. I'm quite fond of the alternate history it presents, a world where "sufficiently analyzed magic" became practical technology in the early 20th century and events are slowly building towards world war. It's one of the top titles in its genre for good reason. It's a shame that so little of the light novel has been adapted thus far. A second season was announced back in 2021, but there's been radio silence about it from Studio NUT ever since, so all we have right now is the 12 episode first season and the "special episode" (plus a compilation movie). If you take a liking to it, there is a passable English translation of the original light novel by Yen Press available in both realbook and ebook form. Thirteen volumes out so far, with a fourteenth due out in June. Success inspires copycats, and they did REALLY abuse the hell out of the premise. IMO, the only ones in that genre really worth bothering with are the subversions of that "introvert fantasy" that drives most of the genre. Not coincidentally, the major successes in the genre are almost all hard subversions of the formula where the protagonists either suffer a Reality Ensues, are Blessed with Suck, or end up in something approaching an ironic personal hell.

Three Body Universe is a Chinese company that was set up to own and manage the intellectual property rights to Liu Cixin's 2006/2008 science fiction novel Three Body Problem , overseeing the various adaptations thereof incl. the 2023 Chinese TV series and 2024 Netflix series. If he's making an announcement in partnership with Three Body Universe, it's not a Macross announcement. The book that Kawamori is holding is a copy of one of the books in that trilogy... I can't read it clearly enough to tell which one. Looks like it might be the third one, Death's End.

Looking at the Crunchyroll Winter 2025 lineup... and a LOT of it is overly long title isekai or isekai-adjacent trash. The season's highlights look to be mainly continuing shows from the Autumn 2024 lineup like Dragon Ball DAIMA and a handful of new seasons of existing shows like Solo Leveling, Dr. STONE, Blue Exorcist, Unnamed Memory, and Re:Zero. The only new title that really stands out is a new AQUARION series, Myth of Emotion. It's gonna be a lean season good for catching up on backlogs.

Oh, I was under no illusions to the contrary. Like I said earlier, Star Wars is a franchise renowned for its groundbreaking visual effects work... not for the quality of its writing. One thing I've had to accept as my friends twist my arm into watching more Star Wars is that the amount of fanservice in any given story is never going to be less than "excessive". Too many of the showrunners and creatives working on Star Wars projects are longtime fans for there to be any other outcome. The only real question in any new Star Wars title is whether the kudzu-like tangle of cameos, easter eggs, and references will overwhelm the story or just infest every corner of the scenery like porgs. Compare Rebels to Andor. Andor's showrunner is a non-fan and the show's emphasis on telling a compelling story reflects that. The excessive fanservice is still there, but it's been confined to the set dressing and a few minor in-jokes. Every curio on display in Luthen's shop on Coruscant is an easter egg referencing a previous Star Wars title, but they have no bearing on the story besides being Mon Mothma's excuse to visit Luthen being her husband's hobby of collecting antiques. Rebels, on the other hand, bogs down in its fanservice with distressing frequency. Ezra's pretty much the only all-original character in the show. Kanan, Hera, and Sabine are all closely related to characters from The Clone Wars, Zeb and Chopper are recycled designs from early Star Wars concept art, etc. In the course of their adventures, they encounter almost the entire OT cast plus a bunch of other people from past titles including: And a bunch of those have actual relevance to the story... which makes it a tangled ****ing mess at best, and gives the impression that this vast galaxy is so small that everybody knows everybody like the Republic were a town with a population of 200 not a million-plus star system polity with a population of a hundred quadrillion. That's why the Glup Shitto jokes are a thing and will never not be a valid way to mock the fanbase. Looking back, I almost feel like the backlash against Star Trek: Discovery for Michael Burnham being frontloaded as Sarek's foster daughter and Spock's secret sister was unduly harsh when Star Wars gets a free pass for doing the same and worse to most of its key characters. Skeleton Crew is, thus far, at least a passable young adult "space adventure" story in the Star Wars universe. It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's eminently watchable and thus far its story isn't bogged down by a bunch of continuity with other shows. That's more than I can say for most Star Wars Disney+ originals.

Eh... maybe! I'm trying to keep my expectations reasonable and realistic. This is a franchise known and loved for its groundbreaking visual effects work, not its writing. 😅 Of course, what I want to see from Star Wars is also rather different from what the real Star Wars fans want to see from Star Wars. I look at Star Wars and I see this huge sci-fi/sci-fantasy setting that's almost completely unexplored because the almost nobody involved with it can seem to conceive of a story that doesn't involve the Jedi and isn't within two degrees of separation from the original trilogy. Skeleton Crew is, at the very least, scratching that itch to see more of the galaxy and the people who live in it without the reductive, morally simplistic, one-dimensional writing that inevitably accompanies the members of the Glowstick Society. This franchise absolutely CAN produce compelling original narratives with nuanced characters and more moral complexity than "Sainthood vs. Baby-Eating" as we saw in Andor and The Mandalorian. It just almost always chooses NOT to because too many of its creatives are longtime fans and lightsaber fetishists unwilling or unable to step outside their Jedi-Sith fan fiction comfort zone. The franchise is just going to keep stagnating as long as the people running it refuse to stop mindlessly recapitulating the same tired stories and focus more on telling new and exciting stories than on trying to break the continuity nod and easter egg density records.

Apparently it stands for Modern Formula. The "Ghost" part is, at least initially, presented as a sort of acknowledgement of the motorsport's anachronistic nature as a gas-only street race in an age of self-driving electric cars.

Nah, it'd probably actually have been better as a movie. It's a heavily serialized story, so it already basically has the flow of a movie. I think we'd probably have gotten a bit tighter narrative with fewer digressions if they were building towards a 90-120 minute movie instead of an eight episode TV series. The biggest problem with the most recent episode is that they had a good concept for At Achrann, but they failed to integrate it into the overarching narrative smoothly. So it's an interesting built of worldbuilding that comes off feeling like an optional sidequest because there was really nothing stopping the kids from skipping it entirely. Even with the not-great fourth episode, I'd still rank this head and shoulders above many other Disney+ Star Wars originals like Ahsoka, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett, The Acolyte, and so on. Skeleton Crew is out there putting in the work to be its own original story in the Star Wars universe, and that's worth something. IMO, it's worth a lot more than another lazy Skywalker Saga spinoff like Obi-Wan Kenobi or The Book of Boba Fett or a lazy spinoff of a spinoff like Ahsoka or Bad Batch.

There is not an exhaustive list of all emigrant fleets and when they were launched in official media. Such information is typically only available for fleets which figure prominently into the story of one or more Macross titles, such as Megaroad-04, Megaroad-13, Macross-1, Macross-7, Macross Frontier, and Macross-29.

New episode's out... "Can't Say I Remember No At Attin". I have to say, I love how even the recap can't resist reminding us how dirty and rundown the ship is... every time it jumps to lightspeed it leaves behind a cloud of brown grit. All in all, "Can't Say I Remember No At Attin" is a pretty weak installment. Around half the episode is devoted to an extended digression from the plot that doesn't add anything to the story, meaningful or otherwise. It's inconsequential and doesn't affect the ending in any way.

Generative AI has a long way to go indeed... preferably in the direction of "away". 🤮

Running up against the end of the season, it's been a mixed bag but one with far more gems than I'd dared hope. For me, this season's standouts are Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions, MF Ghost season two, and Yakuza Fiance. Having a grand time with all three of them. MF Ghost is everything you could ask for from a sequel to Initial D and even at the end of the second season it only feels like the series is just getting started. Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions is still a great detective series even if the protagonist Toto gets sh*t on a lot by basically everyone. Yakuza Fiance is a romance/romcom that really is working with all the baggage that crime dramas so often forget about, and the overall effect is fantastic. As a Reincarnated Aristocrat has kind of fallen off, to my great dismay. Now that the war has begun in earnest, Ars is just kind of... around? He's not really doing anything, he just kind of exists in the vicinity of events and so much of the story is just "we're planning around their plan that they will plan around our plan" repeated over and over again. The very many twists don't really feel adequately foreshadowed or explained. 365 Days to the Wedding remains a serviceable, if frustrating, 6/10 romance comedy. It's not a bad story, but it's frequently a tedious story when so many scenes are just the two main characters staring off into space like they can't remember if they turned off the stove before leaving home. They're so awkward and socially withdrawn that it's hard to buy that they're employed as travel agents, a job that requires a lot of talking to people, never mind that they're faking a marriage convincingly enough to fool their superiors. Lotta shovelware-grade titles in this season too, though: Let this Grieving Soul Retire is tedious at best, and more regularly nigh-unwatchable. It's basically just a j-fantasy version of The Flashman Papers but nowhere near as well-written or interesting. The protagonist Krai is an unrepentant scumbag who doesn't really do anything, he's just sort of around while things happen. The Healer Who Was Banished From His Party is just the most generic kind of isekai-adjacent j-fantasy garbage imaginable. There is not a single original thought on display anywhere in this series. This feels like a bargain bin mockbuster version of basically any "adventurer" j-fantasy or isekai story. Mecha-Ude is, if anything, a bit worse. It's a total cliche storm written by a staffer who once worked on .hack// (not as a writer, mind you). It's clear that its creator is a huge shounen anime fan who is absolutely not clear on how to make a shounen anime story work. They know what they like, and peppered their Kickstarter-funded series with all their favorite tropes, but they have just no clue how to make it work together as a story. It has that same knockoff brand energy that Mighty No.9 does. Blue Exorcist's latest season is very much in "Why are you here?" territory. The manga's way past its relevance, and the anime's story is at the point where the manga jumped the shark by going all-in on edgy darkness. The story is just a mess. I'll Become a Villainess Who Goes Down in History is... well... it's watching someone with a terrible case of chuunibyou that is played absolutely straight instead of being used for comedy. It's pulling out every otome game isekai cliche it can at every opportunity, to the point that its sheer repetitiveness is unintentionally funny. It actually has a not-terrible and actually unique premise hiding under the trash, but it's so underexplored that it might as well not be there. It's like the writers are counting on this thing getting three seasons minimum. A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School is a terribly low-effort "token normal at a school for the fantastic/supernatural" series. A lot of its humor comes from its protagonist being a total loser and being bullied by his own students, but it's so wrapped up in explaining to the audience what each kind of yokai is that it kind of forgets it's meant to be telling a story half the time. The Stories of Girls Who Couldn't Be Magicians is, ironically, almost totally bereft of an actual story. Its interesting and charming art style is completely wasted on characters who don't really DO anything. There's no sense that they're involved in the plot at all, since they just go about their day, stumble into trouble, and someone else usually fixes whatever went wrong before they can even figure it out. Acro Trip has one joke, and flogged it so hard it wore out. The premise was initially fun, that being a magical girl fangirl who gets dragooned into villainy so that her favorite magical girl doesn't end up without a villain to fight, but it never really goes anywhere with that premise because the villain she's working with is so astonishingly inept that he's never really progressed past grade school pranks like flipping doormats. Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister wants to be a harem comedy so badly. It just doesn't know how. Or why. Or where it is. The premise is an old standard "You have to marry one of these girls because Family Obligations" and it just rolls with all the standard-issue jokes and setups. It's serviceable, but it's so form letter that it almost feels like the original author was being forced to write it. Oh, absolutely it's a suspicious-sounding title... but the series is actually a squeaky-clean drama about loss trauma and domestic abuse. (It's a reincarnation thing. The reincarnation of the protagonist's wife, who died in a car accident, strongarms her way back into his life to get him to move on and become a better person.)

Whatever it is that the Old Republic hid on At Attin - or hid At Attin to hide from the rest of the galaxy - it's almost certainly WAY older than any of Palpatine's schemes. Which potentially puts some really weird space magic bullsh*t on the table for whoever finds it. The thing with Disney Villain Death as a trope is that, as long as you don't see the dead body, it's used to leave the door open for characters to come back later. Palpatine's return is a lot harder to accept than those other examples because the circumstances of his death aren't something you can plausibly survive. Getting thrown down one of Star Wars's trademark bottomless pits is, by all indications, eminently survivable with main cast plot armor. Still being aboard the space station said bottomless pit was on when it was vaporized in a massive reaction explosion is not plausibly survivable. Everything past the point of announcing he had returned "somehow" was frantic backpedaling to come up with some kind of sane explanation for why he isn't deader than dead.

That'd be odd, for sure. It's easy to see why someone might want to hide a planet that was manufacturing a clone army, but why would they want to hide an apparently peaceful planet populated by clones? I talked to a friend of mine who's a big Star Wars fan and they said something in passing that I think might make this a much odder puzzle and might lend some credence to what @jvmacross is saying about it tying into Palpatine's return. That level of writing flies now. Disney villain death being a thing and all, it's mostly just the lack of any buildup. He comes out of nowhere, quite possibly literally, to become the big bad because the studio didn't want to have Kylo Ren be irredeemable.

Always, but go on... 🤣 Eh... if it doesn't contribute to, or act against, his return in any way does it really lead to it? The whole timeline grinds to a screeching halt with The Rise of Skywalker because Disney has no idea how to make the tangled wreckage of the story go forward, but that doesn't mean everything has to lead inexorably to it. As a franchise, Star Wars is all but incapable of resisting the urge to tie everything into everything else these days. Even Skeleton Crew isn't exempt from having to have a ridiculous number of continuity nods, easter eggs, and tie-ins. It's why one of the pirates Mando didn't kill on Nevarro is part of the pirate crew in this series, why the two planets SM-33 names when asked about At Attin are planets that figured prominently in other shows (Atollon, the location of Chopper Base in Rebels and Aldhani, the location of the Imperial garrison Cassian Andor robs), why Jod Na Nawood's alias is the name of a pirate from a Star Wars comic from the 70's, etc. Kh'ymm spent the best part of an episode building up the mystery of At Attin as a grand conspiracy by the Old Republic to safeguard something of such vast importance or value that keeping it safe merited cutting off all contact with, and deleting all records of, nine entire planets. Eight of which have apparently since been destroyed. Last time something was important enough to merit deleting a planet from galactic records in order to hide the secret on it (the Republic clone army on Kamino), it led directly to the Clone Wars and the rise of the Empire.

Nah. Skeleton Crew is a totally unforeshadowed side story. Whatever the big secret behind At Attin and the other lost treasure planets of the Old Republic is, it's inevitably going to remain a nothingburger in the grand scheme of things to avoid shaking up the setting of the sequel trilogy. If the secret IS something with potentially setting-shaking implications, it'll either remain secret or basically be ignored going forward. (Basically, it's the Star Wars version of Laplace's Box from Gundam Unicorn. A big important macguffin for its story that turns out to not matter at all in the long run.) That said, if it was something worth forcing multiple planets to go off the grid for decades if not centuries... it must be something pretty important.

Quite a few of those bells and whistles would be difficult to replicate on a scale model like that... the slats, the double-slotted fowler flaps, the ruddervators, the wingtip verniers used for attitude control, the boundary layer control system, etc. The dorsal sub-intakes do remain open in flight. Like most things on the VF-1's design they fulfill multiple purposes but the two main ones are serving as an intake for the VF-1's boundary layer control system (which is used for laminar flow control to reduce parasitic drag and minimum airspeed and increase the usable angle of attack the aircraft) and as an inlet for one of the Valkyrie's heat exchangers that's used to vent waste heat in atmospheric flight. The sub-intake is shuttered in Battroid mode and in space flight, since heat can be exhausted from the exchanger directly upwards and there's no air for passive cooling in space. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie volumes 1 and 2 describe another use case for the intakes specific to Valkyries operating in space. Essentially, the intakes don't serve any functional purpose on their own in space but they are a substantial cavity in the airframe in close proximity to the engines... making them an ideal place to install an optional set of propellant tanks. The intake spaces are filled in with a set of soft plastic fuel bladders containing supplemental propellant to extend the Valkyrie's range in space. Master File also asserts that later models, like the VF-19 and VF-25, would go on to add more functionality to the sub-intakes including: As an inlet for a Slush and Liquid Air Cycle System (SLACS), a system which allows a VF to harvest propellant from atmospheric gases in flight via compression and cooling of air passing through the sub-intake. As an intake for airflow to be used in blowing Flow Control on the aircraft's control surfaces (incl. both the wing and tail). As a supplemental propulsion system, turning the heat exchanger in the sub-intake into a de facto engine nozzle to provide thrust in GERWALK mode. (It's implied this is part of why the VF-25 and VF-31 don't have a visible large engine nozzle for forward thurst in GERWALK mode.) There can't be very many fans out there who have access to a wind tunnel... and fewer still who have access to one meant for scale aircraft testing. I'd assume I'm one of very few who has access to a wind tunnel at all, and that's a MGP system meant for automobiles.

With enough thrust, anything can be made to fly. Flying well or controllably or stably... now that's another matter. Can it fly? Yes. Absolutely it can. It's actually got almost 18% more wing area to play with than other fighters in its size class (e.g. the F-16). Its aerodynamics are reasonably good, though like the YF-23 it uses a combination of a V-tail and thrust vectoring in place of elevators. Not counting overboost, its engine power is very close to that of the F-22 Raptor while weighing 11 metric tons less at standard takeoff weight. It's not going to be super stable, as noted in Macross Delta by Mirage Jenius, but that's partly intentional since high mobility and instability are essentially two sides of the same coin (and are why digital flight control systems exist to take some of the burden of maintaining stable flight off the pilot). People have modeled them in immersive flight sims and they DO fly... though not well. Without the various technological cheats (all of which exist in the real world) that the VF-1 uses to fly well, the end result tends to be somewhat uninspiring. Most "realistic" sims have limited or no support for thrust vectoring or ruddervators (being designed around the needs of more conventional civilian aircraft) and often don't bother at all with unglamorous or highly specialized systems like blown flaps or boundary layer control or strictly experimental ones like vortex flow control. Both Western and Japanese fans have built and flown model VF-1s as well, though a consistent theme is that they typically don't even try to do the ruddervators or thrust vectoring and instead use the beavertail as an ad hoc elevator to achieve more traditional attitude control.

You really have to hand it to Spaceballs... Mel Brooks figured out what the crux of future Star Wars storytelling was going to be as far back as 1987. "Evil will always triumph because Good is dumb." Between Andor, Rebels, and Rogue One, there's a definite recurring theme of the Rebellion's successes being in spite of its leaders rather than because of them. Mon Mothma's the poster child for this. Her role is almost always to be the "leader" who is against taking action and who the protagonists have to either ignore or change the mind of before they can get on with the plan that saves the day and nets a big win for the Rebellion. The one time she actually advocated action was to order the Rebel fleet into the trap the Emperor had set for it at Endor. The same ineffectual career politician whose delicate sensibilities were a massive millstone around the Rebellion's neck went on to be the Supreme Chancellor of the New Republic for all but the last six years of its 30 year existence. Small wonder the New Republic was a pangalactic joke with decision-adverse leadership like that. This episode... pretty meh IMO. The escape is nowhere near as exciting as I'd expected, and the whole mystery of "What is At Attin and why was it hidden from the Republic?" is the kind of mystery where it's really easy to end up with an unsatisfying answer.

It's just the narrative cost of doing business. The New Republic has to be incompetent in order to keep the setting action/adventure-friendly for future stories. If they ever actually succeeded at restoring peace, justice, and good governance to the galaxy in a lasting fashion the setting would lose its action-friendly set pieces and it would be The End. Skeleton Crew shows us a perfect example of what the Star Wars galaxy looks like when it's not constantly on the brink of war with itself: At-Attin. It's neat and clean and safe and the population's only real worries are the little day-to-day troubles like work meetings or grades at school. A nice place to actually live in, but boring if you're looking for adventure.

Hell, go big or go home... a Joytoy Imperator Titan at 1/18 scale would be 3.1m (10'2"). Who wouldn't want to build an extension on their house to house a 1/18 scale version of the infamous Heresy-era Imperator Dies Irae?

There are just too many streaming services nowadays... with every major network having to have its own, they've reinvented the same problem that their broadcast/cable network channels had in that none of them have more than one or two shows that are actually worth watching at any given time. Value-for-money in Disney+ is pretty heavily dependent on being invested in Star Wars and/or having kids. For a while, The Mandalorian justified that expense... not sure if Skeleton Crew is up to that challenge yet but it definitely feels more up to it than most of the previous work. Paramount+... eh... their main draw was, until recently, the one thing they were screwing up the hardest. He was so surprised you gave him full-blown soap opera amnesia about it. 🤣

I'd put most of the Disney+ Star Wars originals in that broad but unremarkable category myself. I've seen a few titles I'd call genuine stinkers (e.g. The Acolyte, The Book of Boba Fett) but most of them were reasonably entertaining even if they weren't especially memorable. The one impression of these shows that's really stuck with me is that the quality of the writing tends to improve as the narrative distance from the Skywalker Saga increases. It's one reason I actually have kind of a good feeling about Skeleton Crew. It seems like it's going to be an adventure in the Star Wars universe more than it is a Star Wars story... the New Republic and First Order are distant concerns at best, the Jedi are a myth, and it's more interested in exploring just how weird, wild, and wonderful the universe can be. That's the kind of premise that can get me excited. But I recognize that I'm thoroughly atypical in that.

It's a bit early to be passing judgement on the series as a whole, isn't it? We're only 25% of the way in. (Though that hasn't stopped some folks involved with the production from talking about wanting to do a second season.) With six episodes left and the story only just kicking off in earnest at the end of the second episode, this could still fall basically anywhere on the critical spectrum. Even if all they manage is to tell a fun-but-forgettable space adventure story Skeleton Crew will still stand head, shoulders, knees, toes, several Imperial megastructures, and a few galactic radii above the likes of The Acolyte.

First Astartes, then the Knights... Joytoy Warlord titan engine when? 🤣 (In the same 1/18 scale, a Warlord titan would be 1.82m tall.)