Seto Kaiba

To be fair, if a viewer felt the Kirk Summation of the week was aimed at them and found it insulting... then it was doing its job. The whole point of episodes like "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was to throw the sh*ttyness of certain types of human behavior into sharp relief, and in so doing encourage positive change. It was hamfisted as f*ck but boy did it work, and it was woven into the narrative well enough that it didn't feel like being preached at (most of the time). Gene Roddenberry took the same thinly disguised morality tale format that'd sold so well in westerns at the time and simply repurposed it for his sci-fi series. "Wagon train to the stars" indeed. I kinda have my doubts whether Star Trek: Picard can achieve that, given that Patrick Stewart seems to be aiming for nothing more sophisticated or morally complex than "Brexit is bad".

I'm about to take a whack at Interviews with Monster Girls. Seems like a harmless-enough slice of life-y comedy, quite unlike that other title Kodansha really seems to want people to think it's related to... Daily Life with Monster Girls... which is more or less pure fanservice.

That's one of the few shows I started that I just wasn't able to finish. It just feels... wrong. Like it's blatant lolicon fanservice to the extent that I was two or three episodes in and couldn't shake the feeling Chris Hansen was going to burst through my wall like the goddamn Kool-Aid Man.

The VF-25 technically had it first, since the VF-171EX was a mid-war development in the Vajra conflict.

Miniaturized pinpoint barrier systems were developed for Project Super Nova as one of the major requirements for a 4th Generation Main VF, so the first VFs to get them would be the YF-19 and YF-21 prototypes. Due to the New UN Forces' dropping the VF-19 and VF-22 from large-scale production, the first mass production VF to mount a pinpoint barrier was the VF-171 Nightmare Plus. The oldest VF we've seen mount a barrier system after they achieved production status was Mylene's VF-11MAXL Custom, which was built in 2045 (after the technology had reached a production level on the VF-19 and VF-22). The first VFs with both a pinpoint barrier AND an Armored Pack were the VF-25 and VF-171EX.

There's no denying TOS was campy as f*ck, but then consider when it was made. Despite its problematic production values, it was still a highly thought-of series that was one of the network's best-performing TV series in its programming block. TOS is a terrible show? Audiences certainly didn't think so. Yeah, Gene was... a character. Dude REALLY wanted to hire strippers as actresses, all of his story treatment descriptions of female characters are skeevy as hell and he often called for female characters to be played by actresses with "strip queen" builds. What he conceptualized as far as the bright future that Star Trek belonged to still struck a massive chord with viewers. In the middle of the Cold War, here was a show that dared to dream of a world where we'd put petty political pissing contests and other human evils like racism, sexism, religious discrimination, etc. behind us and created a mature society that was worthy of heading out to explore and settle the great wilderness of space. That belief that humans could be better than they are lasted until Star Trek: Discovery, which took a turn for the dystopian with a racist main character who wore her racism like a badge of honor and rampant sexism throughout the second season. That the bleak and hopeless tone seem to be continuing into Picard is an enormous negative for the series in my opinion.

Gencidas was one of two early concepts that evolved into the designs in Macross, the other was actually a powered suit that turned into a fighter. There's a use for a place to stick a high-gain camera cluster and a gun turret that can rotate independently of the direction of motion of the mecha. Depends on how you want to define "a slight edge"... the VF-25 should have slightly higher flight performance on account of having a marginally higher thrust-to-weight ratio, while the VF-31 has a more passively stealthy profile that tries to compensate for a loss of payload versatility with the ordnance container. Er... 2, 3, and 4 there are all the same thing actually. All told, I'd say the VF-31 is probably the better aircraft for cost performance whereas the VF-25 is probably a better overall performer due to being able to specialize at the expense of greater cost.

Er... they've kind of lost sight of what they were talking about. The "why it tanked" discussion was about Star Trek: Enterprise, which did tank and was cancelled after 4 seasons due to embarrassingly low ratings. @pengbuzz misaimed, and assumed it was about the currently-in-the-process-of-tanking Star Trek: Discovery that nearly didn't get funded for a third season because Netflix was not happy about constant budget overruns and lower than expected average viewership.

Granted, it's a fair question... but they do note back in Deep Space Nine that the Romulan Star Empire and Klingon Empire had both taken especially heavy losses during the Dominion War. The Romulans were already hurting even before the war started thanks to a Changeling impersonating Colonel Lovok of the Tal Shiar orchestrating that joint operation with the Obsidian Order that ended in the destruction of a joint Romulan-Cardassian fleet that crippled both the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order. Pile on top of that all their losses from the Dominion War, Shinzon's coup d'etat, and the inevitable dustup over who would lead the Empire in the wake of the self-declared Praetor having died after assassinating the Continuing Committee and the entire Senate. There was probably a very brief but very furious free-for-all over ownership of the Romulan government that did them no favors. The Romulans had less than eight years to pick up the pieces after Shinzon completely demolished their government and left the Empire rudderless and probably at war with parts of itself, it wouldn't be surprising if they didn't have the resources to consider an ambitious project like building a fleet capable of evacuating Romulus in one go. That's the million dollar plot hole... why were the Romulan fleet and Federation Starfleet not ALREADY hard at work evacuating the planet or at least preparing it for evacuation while the fleet of evacuation ships were being built at Utopia Planitia? Moreover, why was this evacuation fleet being built EXCLUSIVELY at Utopia Planitia? It's the Federation's second-oldest Starfleet shipyards after the San Francisco orbital yards, but it's not like it's the only high-capacity shipyard they have. There's like a dozen different ones in the Sol system alone that've been mentioned over the years, never mind others outside it like Deep Space 5, 40 Eridani A, Starbase 47, and Antares. It doesn't really make any sense that they'd put all their eggs in one basket the way they did. It really doesn't... the show is reaching REALLY hard to try and make Starfleet and the Federation into the a-holes for being unable to save Romulus after the fleet they bent over backwards to purpose-build for the job was destroyed out of the blue by a synthetic revolt, and it doesn't exactly seem unreasonable to ban the creation of artificial lifeforms when the ones they'd already made were apparently so put-out by their treatment that they launched a terrorist attack that left a planet uninhabitable, directly killed 90,000+ Federation citizens, and indirectly resulted in the deaths of almost a billion Romulans and undermined a major diplomatic move to solidify peaceful relations with the Romulan Star Empire. It's hardly unfair for the Federation Council to take a step back from that and say "maybe creating sentient beings with abilities far exceeding that of organic lifeforms in a lab is probably a bad idea". That it's a bad idea should've been pretty obvious considering Dr. Soong was murdered by one of his own creations and the whole "let's create superhumans in a lab" thing was kind of how the ball got rolling on the Eugenics Wars. It definitely doesn't quite scan with the idea that this wasn't something they could see coming a long way off... That said, 900 million people is a LOT of people... and Starfleet hasn't often been depicted as having a huge number of ships. The one and only time a defintite number was put to it was in a Discovery episode, which claimed Starfleet c.2257 operated over 7,000 ships of various classes. I'd assume that's counting small utility ships, border patrol craft, and other assorted odds and ends such as the unmanned cargo ships, otherwise it doesn't quite tally with other Star Trek shows that've pointed to Starfleet having several hundred to at most a thousand or so ships of the line. Most of them aren't very big either, being able to hold a few hundred people tops like the Miranda and Intrepid classes. It's only the really big ones, the Galaxy, Nebula, Sovereign, etc. that could handle 10,000 evacuees or so at a time. One would imagine they could've dug into the Starfleet surplus depots like the one they visited in the TNG "Unification" two-parter and given those ships skeleton crews to maximize Starfleet's evacuation potential... and the evacuation ships themselves were likely intended to operate with tiny crews or to be crewless like the robot transports that were all over TAS. Well, yeah... they're really REALLY forcing this dystopian thing on the show. If you sit down and look at it, Picard's grievances don't really make sense in context... unless there's something else we're not being told. Starfleet gave rescuing the Romulans a valiant try, but were undermined in their efforts by an unexpected third party's interference. Patrick Stewart is really trying to force this "the Federation is becoming isolationist" to fit his real world contemporary political views into it, but it doesn't tally with the story he's telling where Starfleet put a GARGANTUAN amount of effort into trying to save all the people on Romulus and failed because they were sabotaged by a third party rather than because they weren't trying. Nah, now it's more realistic! Uniforms come in two sizes: too big, and too small. Yeah, that's the main reason I don't like Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard. That aspirational future where we'd conquered things like bigotry and inequality and so on was what made Star Trek such a draw, and now that's going away in favor of "see the future? exactly the same sh*thole you're in now but with lasers".

That definitely seems to be what Picard was aiming for... the "big gesture" from the Federation that could've turned the Romulans from their oldest enemy to another close ally, esp. since relations had been warming ever since the Dominion War. I suspect they realized they can't exactly tie into a comic almost nobody read, and couldn't succinctly sum up various major plot points from it because those plot points belonged to Paramount before the re-merger. I don't see it. Vulcans and their relation to the Romulans plays way too much of a role in this scenario for them to write the Vulcans out. The whole reason Romulus went boom was that the red matter from Vulcan didn't get there in time because the Vulcans were uneasy with the prospect of letting such an obviously dangerous technology anywhere near their warlike cousins.

OK, upgrading from "mildly amused"... this is practically Lelouch Lamperouge: Relationship Councilor.

... what you're saying here doesn't make sense. Paramount and CBS were quite clear that the events of the reboot movies have no bearing or impact on the Prime universe and its timeline. The Prime timeline is, officially, the one that follows on from the eight TV series and ten original movies. Vulcan is very much present in those, well after the date of its destruction in the Kelvin timeline. There is no reason whatsoever to think that Vulcan doesn't exist now. The Kelvin timeline is, officially, its own entirely self-contained disaster zone completely separate from and very definitely not equal to the Prime universe setting. Events in it have no more bearing on the Prime universe than events in Star Wars do.

Started Ore wo Suki Nano wa Omae Dake ka yo today... and so far, I'm mildly amused. Amatsuyu's warped true self is a bit more entertaining than the usual kind, selfless, etc. harem protagonist, which is fitting given the faux-harem start of things.

That right there is what they call a "plot hole". The original reason the Romulans were depending on the Federation for a save was that the macguffin that created artificial black holes was owned by the Vulcan Science Academy, and they needed to use it to stop the supernova because it was a magical supernova that could somehow destroy the whole galaxy if not contained. That, of course, was stupid... if they're walking that sh*t back, I am 210% behind it. Even then, there was the nagging question of where the Romulan military was that they didn't attempt to evacuate the planets. Now that they seem to have changed this to an event that was less unexpected and had less widespread effects, it's even weirder that the Romulan military wasn't involved in large-scale evacuation operations... they did take a massive beating in the Dominion War twelve years earlier and were said to need decades to recover from it, as were the Klingons. I'd assume that Starfleet was probably too widely scattered on missions of exploration and border patrol to converge on Romulus in time without leaving key sectors under-defended or undefended, and press-ganging civilian freighters into service is probably illegal under Federation law. A lot of interstellar shipping seems to be done by Starfleet itself anyways... the privately owned freighters seem to be something of an exception or an eccentricity. That said, Starfleet probably didn't have a chance of evacuating even a fraction of the people on Romulus on their own power... most of their ships are nowhere near as big as a Galaxy-class, and the Galaxy-class's maximum emergency passenger capacity (incl. crew) was only 15,000. Starfleet would have needed (at typical crew sizes) approximately 100,000 Galaxy-class starships to evacuate Romulus. They built twelve, and no more than nine were still in service in 2387... and they're some of the very biggest Starfleet ships. Starfleet's also probably the most prolific shipbuilder of the major galactic powers, thanks to a multitude of major shipyards like Utopia Planitia, so they were probably the only ones with the capacity to build on that scale... and the Klingons certainly weren't about to take mercy on the Romulans. Mind you, it's also possible the Romulans needed Federation help because the military did a runner like their leaders did in Star Trek: Countdown before they were all murdered by Nero. Yeah, it was rather surprising - and more than slightly gratifying - that they've opted to largely ignore Star Trek: Countdown. Paramount and CBS's official stance on the Star Trek reboot films is that they take place in an alternate universe timeline that was created when the artificial black hole Spock created in the Prime universe to stop the Romulan supernova accidentally sent his and Nero's ships back in time to the early 23rd century. The so-called "Kelvin timeline" of the reboot films is an entirely self-contained alternate reality that is completely separate from the "Prime" timeline that contains all the Star Trek TV shows and the first ten Star Trek movies. None of the events in the reboot films occurred in the history of the Prime timeline. Vulcan is still very much around the 2399 of Star Trek: Picard.

It's more like Robotech cosplaying as Macross, because it wants to be "American Macross" when it grows up.

US courts have to uphold US laws, unless those laws can be proven to be unconstitutional. There's nothing unconstitutional about how US trademark laws are written. There's plenty about them that's paint-drinkingly stupid, but it's not unconstitutional for there to be stupid laws on the books... just frustrating. HG's main bulwark against a US challenge from Big West is the way US trademark law favors the first user of a mark rather than the owner of the property the mark is for. It's not a revelation, it's a very well known fact we've known for decades. It's something HG has itself cited in many of its lawsuits for trademark and copyright infringement against outfits like FASA, Catalyst Game Labs, etc. And no... it means nothing for US licensing, because trademark laws work slightly differently here.

I can't say that's been my experience with the fandom. Most of the fans I know are quite openminded and a good deal less cynical than I am, and looked forward to each new series with cautious optimism at worst. I've known only one such nitpicky trekkie, one of my college roommates, and he was still broadly supportive even of Enterprise. The only parts of it that really upset him were it breaking continuity in major ways like introducing the Borg and Ferengi centuries early with flimsy excuses like neither identifying their species. I remember him being quite cross about Phlox curing Borg Assimilation by late 24th century Borg on his own in a matter of hours where people from 200 years in the future couldn't manage. Pick any two random people off the street and they won't agree on everything... that's just humans being human. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was a very convention-defying Star Trek series. I mean, hell, it's set in a static location and dealt a LOT with topics like religious fundamentalism, war crimes, and other dark topics that would never have made it in other Trek. Instead of a crew of consummate professionals, its cast were a pack of weirdos and eccentrics kept in line by Sisko's force of will. It flirted with serialized storytelling where other Trek before and after was episodic only. It still maintained the optimistic spirit of Star Trek even while it was examining and partially deconstructing Gene's utopian ideals... but it was very much out of the usual Star Trek mold. Star Trek: Voyager, yeah... what got made was NOT what was planned. What the producers put together was the story of one little ship traveling home across a vast distance, and her crew making do and keeping it together as best they could being a mixture of Maquis terrorists and Starfleet officers. What the network twisted it into was TNG 2.0... with all the resource problems and moral dilemmas softened significantly in order to achieve a similar lightness of tone to Jean-Luc Picard's flying hotel from TNG. All that executive meddling made the cast quite upset, which is why Robert Beltran phoned it in so hard. He signed up to play Janeway's dramatic foil, not her doormat. When being TNG 2.0 proved to be too stale for the general audiences, they tried to spice it up with the Borg and so on, but all that really did was set off the Borg's badass decay until Janeway had made the Borg Queen her b*tch so often it was impossible to take them seriously.

So... first episode of Star Trek: Picard. Y'know, I really have to hand it to CBS. The All Access app has come a long way... it committed honorable suicide in an attempt to spare me the horrors of this awkward, stumbling mess of a pilot. Maybe Control isn't so bad. For what little it's worth, it's a slightly better start than Star Trek: Discovery... but only slightly. All in all, the production values feel a lot lower than what I would expect from a show that cost so much to produce. There are some bush league editing mistakes and loads and loads of scenes that were clearly shot against a green screen with the backgrounds none-too-skillfully composited in. I would not have credited the rumor that Star Trek: Discovery season 3 made off with a chunk of Picard's budget before watching it, but now I think they might be onto something. There is a scintilla of old Trek optimism here, but it's mostly buried under the woe-is-me start the show gets off to. The Good The Bad The Ugly

Personally, I think you do the fans a disservice by trying to pin this on them being "picky"... it really was the show NOBODY asked for. Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, the executive producers, didn't even want to make Star Trek: Enterprise. They wanted Star Trek to go on hiatus. They warned Paramount that general audiences were feeling the fatigue of fourteen straight years of Star Trek on TV, manifesting in the gradual decline of Star Trek: Voyager's ratings despite all corrective efforts, and that the best thing for Star Trek to do was to take a step back and let the air clear for a few years before launching a new series. Paramount ignored their advice and demanded they begin work on the series that became Star Trek: Enterprise. Thanks to Star Wars, entertainment's cup was running over with prequels at the time and general audiences saw Enterprise as just another bloody prequel and another bloody Star Trek show while fans were busy being upset about its potential for f*cking up as a prequel. Ratings continued to fall, and the viewers who stayed were the die-hard fans... it was the casual audience walking away from a premise that'd become old and a show that was increasingly incoherent as the network execs got more and more interference-minded trying to fix the ratings problem without acknowledging its origin. The network oversaturated the market with Star Trek, and then acted surprised when audiences turned their back on something they'd had too much of. What new fans? J.J. Abrams' Star Trek soft reboot didn't create any new fans. It was a forgettable trilogy of so-so popcorn movies that didn't leave a lasting impression because they were sci-fi/action movies so generic you could practically see the barcodes. Star Trek: Discovery got existing fans talking again, but it doesn't seem to be endearing itself to anyone if the absent merchandising is anything to go by. The old fans are a surprisingly easy-to-please bunch... that CBS can't please them is more a measure of their complete ineptitude than anything. They just want Star Trek to feel like it's Star Trek. They'll forgive a multitude of sins as long as the tone is right. The tone, specifically, of Gene Roddenberry's utopian vision of the future. A more hopeful future where humanity got its sh*t together and was able to not only live in peace with itself, but with its many alien neighbors. The reason Star Trek fans turned away from the reboot films and recent efforts like Discovery is that they're dystopian in nature. Bleak futures full of hate, fear, and senseless killing created because the showrunners wanted to fill screen time with expensive VFX spaceship battles and tense fight scenes. Its vision of the future isn't hopeful, it's the same sh*t we're living with right now... and the whole reason Star Trek struck the chord it did with audiences when it first debuted was that it defiantly declared we could be better than that as a species. You don't get that in new Trek. From what I've read, Michael Chabon seems to actually understand that reality to some extent. Fans will give Star Trek: Picard a shot because Jean-Luc Picard was a beacon of that optimistic future, but I suspect they'll turn away from it just as they did Discovery and the reboot films because they've indicated on no uncertain terms this is another sad, dark, and dystopian take on Star Trek's setting.

Y'know, it never really felt like a harem title when I was watching it. Normally, in a harem anime you expect to see one person being energetically pursued by a double handful of members of the opposite sex. Bokutachi wa Benkyō ga Dekinai's main cast never really took the initiative, virtually all of the progress anyone made was the result of a well-meaning third party poking their oar in. Furuhashi's the only one who really did anything of her own volition, and she was resolutely remaining a non-participant in any romantic shenanigans until the very end. Ogata's basically clueless about feelings in general, Takemoto's too shy to ever make a move on Nariyuki herself, Kirisu's too professional to cross that line, and Kominami just wants to watch Nariyuki squirm. It's more like everyone else in the story sees it as a harem story except the main cast, who are resolutely convinced they're living in a slice of life drama.

So I've finished Bokutachi wa Benkyō ga Dekinai, and I have to say I'm pretty disappointed. It started pretty strong, but it just kind of ran out of steam about five episodes into season two and never got back on the horse. The story got really repetitive, and you can only use a gag so many times before it stops being funny. Kinda bummed out that they never bothered to resolve the love quadrangle they had going on there either, despite deciding to jump forward to graduation and them all leaving for college.

I could see them transitioning from those to a single, global or near-global platform as they build awareness. Right now, their efforts to reclaim the trademarks and spread Macross to different markets are very piecemeal, so it makes sense to go with smaller local services instead.

We did watch this tripe. You were whining about not liking it when we discuss what a dumpster fire it is. The problem here is that the only way to convince CBS to course-correct is to vote with our wallets, and if we watch it on their proprietary dumpster fire then they already have our money and have no incentive to change. The most effective way to avoid rewarding them for producing garbage is to identify if a show is going to be bad in advance and then not reward their idiocy with subscription revenue. That means either wading through the bullshit from the CBS Ministry of Truth or tuning into the "naysayers", who these days seem to mostly just be surprisingly well-informed and frustrated fans rather than the raving loonies CBS would like to paint them as. Failing that, it's just word of mouth... and you were already complaining about that. (Guys like Doomcock and Nerdrotic as voices of comparative reason is a new and uncomfortable novelty...) Well, yeah... because the consumers were pretty clear they didn't want it before it was even made. Star Trek fans were quite vocal about a prequel series being a bad idea when UPN first floated its plans for Enterprise, and even members of the cast expressed disquiet with how the efforts to make the setting edgier would alienate devoted Trekkies. It tanked because it was a show nobody asked for, and the fans hated it because of all the liberties it took as a prequel. Star Trek: Discovery's in the same boat, though it may end up being Too Big To Fail thanks to CBS massively overspending on it in their desire to make it the next Game of Thrones.

That's not what I meant? What I was referring to was the fact that many of the "independent" entertainment news media outlets that provide the majority of the positive press for shows like Discovery are owned by the networks responsible for those shows. It's not news, it's an advertising puff piece thinly disguised as news. Like how ComicBook.com and the other sites that were dispensing all that fawning, gushing praise for Star Trek: Discovery and trying to paint criticism of the show as motivated by racism, sexism, etc. are - not coincidentally - owned by CBS. Essentially, what I said was that it's nice to know other people dislike the show when the network's news sockpuppet is busy trying to gaslight you into believing everyone thinks that its show is flawless.