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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Solid and mostly united? I dunno... Star Wars fans already had a LOT to bicker about from the old Expanded Universe, and that was before the prequel trilogy came along and we got the first round of "RUINED FOREVER" complaining. (Not saying the complaining was necessarily even unreasonable, just that it occurred.) Woah... I admit I was expecting some negative reviews after the handpicked Hollywood yes-men audience had some dissenters who refused to rave about it, but I was unprepared for the savage beating it received from the top critics. Only 14 of the 37 to chime in so far had favorable opinions of the movie. Some of the criticisms that really stand out are things like "may it be the last episode of a saga that should've ended long ago.", "In its anxiety not to offend, it comes off more like fanfiction than the creation of actual professional filmmakers. A bot would be able to pull off a more surprising movie.", and "Rather than making a movie some people might love, Abrams tried to make a movie no one would hate, and as a result, you don't feel much of anything at all.".
  2. Seto Kaiba
    So, I did some digging into my own question during an especially dull teleconference with Turin... and the fuss about George Lucas having been "banned" from the premiere of Rise of Skywalker seems to be pure conjecture on the part of overworked YouTube hack brigade. George Lucas didn't attend the premiere of Rise of Skywalker, and it isn't clear if he was invited or not, but they've jumped headlong to the worst/most controversial possible conclusion as is their custom. Considering what George's previous "unfettered" story ideas were like... this can only be taken as one of the vanishingly rare good decisions Disney made in the development and production of what otherwise seems set to be a criminally bad travesty of a film. When half your handpicked Hollywood premiere audience of yes men can't bring themselves to effusively praise the film, you're in for a critical beating.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    So, in all likelihood, the leaks really were Disney market research and not the worst NDA enforcement job in human history. Delightful. Any truth to what Doomcock is shrilling about, about George Lucas supposedly not being allowed to attend the premiere?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Good, bad, or ugly? My money's on "ugly".
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Eech... it looks like Wave really didn't do justice to Kazutaka Miyatake's design for the Marauder suit. IIRC Miyatake originally drew it for Hayakawa's translation of the novel, then used it in DAICON III and DAICON IV before it was polished further and used in Studio Nue's unauthorized 1988 Starship Troopers OVA. Studio Nue's 1988 Starship Troopers OVA is easily the most faithful film adaptation of Heinlein's original novel by a significant margin... which is a double-edged sword, in that Miyatake did a pretty good job turning the descriptions of the Marauder into something the animators could use and that the story's boring as f*ck for the most part.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    More likely as a nod to the course correction he's attempting to make from The Last Jedi's massive f*cking-up of the story back towards his original, f*cked-up story. We've seen Kylo and Rey destroying some kind of actual goddamn shrine to Darth Vader's melted helmet, so it's safe to assume General Hux has confiscated Kylo Ren's collection of The Cure albums and he's back to pretending he's something that could be mistaken for an aspiring Sith Lord... in bad light... at 200 paces... in a thick London fog... while wearing sunglasses.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    It had a goofy-ass voice changer when it appeared intact in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi... so presumably there's some electronics in there. If he went to the care of repairing the helmet in a way that deliberately drew attention to the repair as an artistic statement (as described in my last post), he probably replaced or at least repaired any electronics in there. He is Han Solo's kid, so he's probably not bad at fixing things. Growing up around a rustbucket like the Millennium Falcon probably offered a LOT of opportunity to practice.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Darth Vader always had a subtle Japanese aesthetic to his armor... and this is kind of a nod to that. Kylo Ren repaired his broken helmet, kintsukuroi-style. Rather ironic for a man who was saying, as recently as the last movie, to let the past die and kill it if you have to. Kylo's gone and pulled a 180 philosophically by repairing his helmet using a method that symbolically respects the history of the object by treating its breakage as an event in its history and not the end of its history. In short, he's suddenly celebrating the past instead of letting it go and killing it if he has to.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    More or less. As I see it, most of the creative problems plaguing the Terminator franchise stem from the inability of its writers to establish a consistent stance on whether or not you can actually change the future/past using time travel. Each new film's writing problems stem from reversing course on the previous film's stance... except Salvation, which didn't bother with time travel. Can you change the future? The franchise's answers are (in order): No, Yes, No, Who Cares?, Holy Cr@p Yes, and No in that order. Genisys and its planned sequels were a soft reboot that would, according to the screenwriters, have revealed that you absolutely CAN change the past using time travel... but you can't change YOUR past. It's a Zero Time Dilemma-style scenario where you create another alternate timeline every time you try. The goal was to both start fresh AND explain away all the problems in previous films by establishing that they occurred in separate alternate timelines... and Genisys's soft reboot timeline was a product of interference from multiple efforts on Skynet and the Resistance's part to change or preserve history that warped history into something none of the time travellers recognize thanks to the butterfly effect of so much time travel abuse.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Give it an issue or two for the sales to slip a little further... then I'm sure we'll see all manner of faces traced from double peace sign ahegao hentai.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Almost certainly not. When Robotech was new and at the apex of its popularity, it never achieved more than unremarkable middle-of-the-pack ratings as a serialized kids show and its merchandise line was largely a flop. Its fanbase has been shrinking ever since thanks to Harmony Gold's repeated failures to get an animated continuation to the series produced, the initially poor and consistently declining quality of its licensed merchandise, and the infighting in the fandom itself. With no signs of any future developments of any appreciable merit, that steady downward trend is unlikely to ever reverse itself. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that much of what remains of Robotech's brand awareness is because of the legal problems its existence causes for more successful properties like Transformers, Macross, and MechWarrior, not because anything it does "creatively" attracts attention. There are, in all likelihood, more Macross fans in Japan alone than there are Robotech fans worldwide. (Really, that Robotech is now double-branding most of its merchandise with the Macross title and logo should tell you all you need to know on that score.) Well, perhaps if you're looking exclusively at strictly legitimate channels. Macross shows have done a roaring trade on the internet via fansubs and bootleg DVDs and Blu-rays with subtitles. Macross Zero did a lot to build awareness thanks to how damn pretty it was, and interest in the franchise really exploded when Macross Frontier hit fansubs in '08. We're talking millions of downloads of individual English subtitled releases on a weekly basis, and that's not counting other languages. Macross's shows do account for only a fraction of its total output though, so even if the shows were ALL licensed we'd still be able to say the majority of Macross content was still for Japanese audiences only. Considering that a Robotech live action movie would be unable to use the vast majority of the content of the Robotech TV show... isn't that a self-answering silly question? It'd have to be Robotech in name only to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, definitely planning to avoid the Christmas rush and depending on how bad bad is when the reviews drop I'll either wait until mid-January or February or I'll wait until it lands with an audible splat on streaming services midway through 2020 like I did for Solo: a Star Wars Story.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    As with their other "new" designs, it's just borrowed from somewhere else. It's a lightly tweaked version of the earliest concept version of the Legioss back when it was still called the Vector, when MOSPEADA was under development as Descent Soldier Vector. Personally, I think it's fugly. Other way around... this panel says that Dana's being blamed for forcibly redirecting funding from development of the Alpha Fighter prototype1 to the YF-42. This might look like a throwaway line, but this is Titan Comics doing some expert-tier trolling of die-hard Robotech fans. If the Robotech RPG fan community hadn't basically imploded once Palladium Books got the rights, there would be actual fights going on over that one panel. Like, actual flame wars and threats of violence from those two-and-a-half sentences. The suggestion that the mecha of Robotech's Macross Saga are superior to the mecha of Robotech's other two sagas is a genuine berserk button for die-hard Robotech fans... especially fans who play the Robotech RPG. It's a more reliable way to start a fight than saying "Roll for initiative", thanks to the point technically being true in the 2nd Edition Robotech RPG. (Even after a massive NERF, the VF-1 is still basically as good as the game's massively buffed Alpha, and only got better after the setting changed and all the Macross mecha became invisible to the Invid because they don't use magic flower fuel.) 1. Presumably the Robotech-exclusive VF-X-6 Genia is the same as in From the Stars. 2. Macross's VF-X-4. Par for the course... Robotech won't be happy until the metaphorical bar is being used for a limbo contest in Satan's wine cellar. Really, I'd thought their point was that it sucks to be in the Robotech universe, period. They literally started with a stable time loop of Forever War where humanity was repeatedly genocided by various aliens only to die horribly trying to go back into the past and stop it all from happening over and over again and in so doing start the loop of death and horror all over again. Now they've added space zombies to the mix.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Not quite... trademarks are on a "use it or lose it" basis, so if HG were to stop releasing Robotech merch to keep that trademark alive they wouldn't be able to renew it.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    A little from Column A, a little from Column B. I haven't seen the latest leaks, but I have to admit I'd have agreed with the theory that Rey intends to either adopt the name Skywalker or turn it into a title for her new Jedi order because she hero-worships the original trilogy cast regardless of any leaks. Her whole character arc is about looking for her identity.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, they're totally setting Rey up to claim the name as her own... that fits perfectly with the Mary Sue development they've given her.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, pretty much. Big West is entirely content to sit back and watch Harmony Gold's Robotech franchise sink from a distance. It's not like they need to bother with dubs of Macross since the majority of anime fans prefer subs anyway. They can just mass-market Macross Blu-rays from Japan with official multilingual subtitles and knock off for lunch. Of course... but the Harmony Gold Robotech creative staff lost touch with objective reality and started to believe their own hype back when Carl Macek was still running things, and the ascended fanboys who replaced him have been drinking his Kool-Aid for years. It's not surprising they're clueless enough to actually believe Robotech is a viable property or that they're going to be gatekeepers to Macross in the west. As above, Harmony Gold's real problem there is that the Robotech franchise's staff are all ascended fanboys... they simply don't have a realistic outlook, because they've spent so long immersed in Harmony Gold's blatant lies about Robotech and its supposed standing in the industry. Just a few posts ago we got to see a great example of that mindset, when someone tried to argue that Robotech's value was more than just Macross despite the entire history of the franchise and virtually its entire merchandise line is an irrefutable argument to the contrary. Robotech would probably have folded back at any of a dozen points in its history if not for its own delusions of grandeur. It took repeated (and hilarious) professional and public humiliation for Harmony Gold's management to finally rein in Yune Quixote and stop the waste of time and money that was attempting to develop continuations for Robotech's animated series. Personally, I'm inclined to suspect that the adoption of the original Macross logo and name for their latest line of merchandise was something done over the objections of Robotech's creative staff, rather than something they initiated. I think the back-to-back failures of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, Robotech Academy, and Robotech RPG Tactics convinced the management at HG to stop taking the Robotech creative staff's advice seriously. After all, it was the Robotech creative staff who had the brilliant idea to court disaster by attempting to troll Macross fans on the Kickstarter they were attempting to use to finance their new series development. Switching to attempting to court Macross fans with Macross-branded Hong Kong bootleg merchandise feels like the kind of tone-deaf reaction you'd get from senior management. Any way you shake it, Robotech is f*cked. It's only a matter of time before the brand is simply no longer turning enough of a profit for HG to justify keeping the lights on in the Robotech division. Macross is coming for them, and they know it. Whether they'll try to go down with the ship or they'll bow out and try to tell off remaining assets remains to be seen, but the end is close and getting closer still with every trademark victory for Big West.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Luke works for Microsoft?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    "The End of an Error" would have been punchier and just as true.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I don't have the free time to take on another fan project. I'm only barely keeping up with the development of a website for my Macross translation work, and my day job leaves me with very little free time as it is. I'm also not much of a writer when it comes to prose, I'm more of a researcher.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well, your OC is supposed to be 15. He and Klan would both be high school age, so he could be enrolled at Mihoshi Academy with the other principal characters of Macross Frontier sans Ranka and Nanase who go to a private all-girls school instead. If he's in the space navigation major at Mihoshi Academy he'd be in a position to be around people who are around Klan a lot like Michael Blanc.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    If anything, the fact that George Lucas was able to succeed with the prequel trilogy despite f*cking it up pretty hard was probably what convinced Disney that Star Wars fans would buy any damn thing they bothered to slap the Star Wars name on regardless of quality. Killing Yuenglings instead of Younglings sounds like a good place to start? Considering that what George has revealed about his own plans for a sequel trilogy are, if anything, worse than anything Disney came up with... I think it's pretty safe to say he'd likely ignore or dismiss anyone who told him he was f*cking up. Anyone out there wanna put up their hand and say Osmosis Jones would've been better with midichlorians?
  23. Seto Kaiba
    ... what, the internet wants people to get out there and start murdering younglings?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It'd be more complicated, I'm not sure if it'd necessarily be easier. Enforcement of more localized, transient intellectual property rights like trademarks can be a bit fraught when international trade agreements are concerned. Oh, they're still making a profit on it. Not much of one, mind you... but since all they do is re-release the same old show over and over, their production expenses were amortized ages ago and the take is practically pure profit. The reason they're so determined to hang onto the Super Dimension Fortress Macross rights is that that's the ONLY part of Robotech which is still able to turn a profit. That's why I think their planned endgame for Robotech is to transition to being an intermediary for the release of Macross in the west. They've been steadily Macross-izing Robotech in several different ways and minimizing the importance and relevance of the other two-thirds of the show while chasing Macross Saga merchandise profits. It's like they're preparing to write Robotech off as "American Macross" the way StarBlazers is just "American Yamato" in exchange for a share of the licensing royalties. I suspect Big West won't play ball, and HG'll have to fall back on trying to inflate the price of the rights to turn the maximum one-time profit divesting themselves of Super Dimension Fortress Macross (and Robotech) instead of simply letting the license expire. (Like extortion, but technically legal.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Bokura wa Minna Kawai-sou is pretty good stuff... sadly it's really short, though the ending isn't much different from how the manga ended. (Sadly, the pun in the title doesn't translate well... kind of like the lolicon trio joke in Macross.)
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