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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... that's the conclusion that the Star Trek fanbase reached after Star Trek: Discovery came out and revealed itself to be an atrocious mess almost entirely unlike the Star Trek fans had known and loved for six previous TV series and ten feature films. CBS (or as viewers have it, "See? BS!") is adamant that what they call Star Trek's "Prime" universe is the same universe and timeline that all pre-Abrams Star Trek works belong to. It's one of many failed efforts to make Star Trek: Discovery more palatable to fans, after fans were rejecting the series before it even aired because of the obvious continuity-f*ckery. Much like how Paramount had to do an awful lot of backpedaling after fans picked up on their intention of treating Star Trek 2009 as a franchise reboot and rushed to insist it was just an alternate universe story in the hopes of not losing their audience. So, at the very least, the official line is that the "Prime" universe is the official canon one of old. They've written a number of their tie-ins for Star Trek: Discovery on the basis of that as well, like having some members of Discovery's crew involved in the arrest of Governor Kodos ("the Executioner") from TOS. Bringing in the Enterprise along with Captain Pike, Number One, and Spock was a move intended to reinforce that line as well. Its cup already runneth over with stupid fanfic-y bullsh*t. I think the best example is right in the trailer, with career stoic Seven of Nine blasting away with a phaser rifle in each hand like she's assimilated the memories of John f*cking Rambo. An isolationist, regressive Federation ripe for all kinds of gritty edgelord bullsh*t narratives? A bunch of main characters "going rogue". Patrick Stewart's said he's got political motivations for setting the story up this way, but TBH the point he's trying to make the what they did with the setting are headed in two completely different directions.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Thought the last news we'd heard was that they were going all the way back to the foundation of the Jedi order?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Other than the Macross-7, no... it's too blurry to read the names. They're probably later (4th or 5th Gen) fleets if they've got names instead of just numbers though. There are a LOT of the New Macross-class emigrant ships. At least 29 of them given that 29 was the highest-mentioned number for one in an official Macross production (Macross the Musiculture, a stage musical).
  4. Seto Kaiba
    One thing I've always suspected is that the VF-4 would be pretty amazing at extreme high-altitude interception. It's got the engine power to climb like a beast as soon as it gets up to a speed suitable for turning the ramjets on, and it can swap from those to the rockets when it gets above the atmospheric service limitation. According to the available original line art, yes. According to Variable Fighter Master File, yes. According to the various model kits made over the years, yes. How many? Well, that's a matter of opinion. Depending on which source you consult, the VF-4 Lightning III has either six or eight underwing pylon stations. The line art shows eight, two inboard and two outboard of the engine nacelle on either side of the aircraft. Master File also shows eight (two inboard two outboard) in most configurations. Many of the model kits only show six, usually two outboard and one inboard. Master File's version and the old line art differ on one key point... the Musasiya line art sheets show the inboard pylons in a side-by-side layout with all eight pylons in one row, where Master File shows the inboard pair as fore and aft stations equidistant from the centerline and nacelle.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    For what it's worth, it doesn't seem to have stopped the New UN Forces from using the VF-4 in atmosphere enough to justify at least two atmosphere-specific variants... the VF-4D and VF-4S, both used by the Navy.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    YMMV, I guess... I found God's Blessing on this Wonderful World! pretty insufferable after about the seventh volume, just because character development seems to have become utterly nonexistent. Kazuma's always back to being a NEET by the start of the next volume. I've generally enjoyed Crawl up! Nyaruko-san. Saiyuki's a long one, kind of a show for people who are more into character drama than anything. A very unfaithful/irreverent version of the old novel Journey to the West, where a very dysfunctional version of Genjo/Xuanzang's party are sent to the west to put a stop to an attempt to resurrect the ox demon king rather than to collect scriptures. (It's more popular with women, I think, owing to all four members being fairly pretty dysfunctional men with a modest amount of very tame yaoi fangirl bait thrown in.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Sadly, having read the light novels for The Rising of the Shield Hero, they've more or less exhausted the good material in the series already. It's kind of the same problem that God's Blessing on this Wonderful World! has, where after they get past the initial bit of character development the series becomes a one trick pony. I'm mostly catching up on old stuff like Crawl up! Nyaruko-san!, Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches, Saiyuki Reload Blast, and Aldnoah.Zero.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    This season really feels like a weak one. It kind of says it all that one of the few titles to stand out among the dross this season is Nekopara, an anime adaptation of a pornographic visual novel about bestiality. Yes, you read that right. They decided to make an anime out of a visual novel about a guy who couldn't keep his d*ck out of the family pets. So far, all that's really caught my interest for reasons that don't cause dry heaving are Isekai Quartet 2, which seems to exist mostly to drum up interest for new seasons of the shows it crosses over (Re:Zero is getting another season in April, we've been promised another season of The Rising of the Shield Hero, and possibly Overlord), the remake of Sorcerous Stabber Orphen (just to see how they'll f*ck it up), A Destructive God Sits Next to Me (just to see how cringey it'll be), and a fairly cute romcom I found called Science Fell In Love, So I Tried to Prove It about two socially awkward research students who are into each other but so completely obsessed with the scientific method that they keep missing the point and trying to analyze their mutual attraction scientifically instead of acting on it.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I can almost hear it begging for a merciful death.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    "Glutton for punishment" doesn't cover it... that's full-on cenobite.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Exactly. I said as much a few posts back. Star Trek: Picard is an attempt to lure Star Trek fans who'd abandoned the franchise after J.J.-Trek and Star Trek: Discovery, because it turns out Jason Isaacs was dead wrong when he boasted that Star Trek: Discovery didn't need the Star Trek fanbase to be a success. Merchandise isn't selling anymore, because casual audiences don't buy expensive collectibles. Star Trek: Picard is a bait-and-switch attempt to lure fans back to the franchise with the promise of familiar faces and names (many of which have been indicated to be glorified cameos) in the hopes that new Trek will grow on them like a parasitic fungus and they'll stick around instead of being repulsed.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    We've already heard from CBS and the showrunners that it's building on the events of Star Trek: Countdown, the limited comic series that was the launching point for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek soft reboot alternate universe. We know from the leaks that Star Trek: Picard has Star Trek: Discovery visual aesthetics, and we know from the showrunners that they intend to do references to Star Trek: Discovery in Star Trek: Picard and vice versa. It's allegedly Prime Universe, but it's in the same twisted version of the Prime Star Trek universe that the Star Trek: Discovery series belongs to.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for the VF-4A Lightning III doesn't specify. Mind you, it doesn't actually say the VF-4's atmospheric flight characteristics are necessarily worse than the VF-1's. Just that it's not better than the VF-1 in that respect. The nuance I get from it, and connected remarks about the VF-5000, is that the VF-4's largely space-focused aerodynamic design resulted in a fighter with high stability in atmospheric flight. Since fighters derive a fair amount of their maneuverability from being unstable-by-design, its greater stability made it less agile than the less stable VF-1 and VF-5000. It's very good at high altitudes and it'll blow the VF-1 into the weeds in terms of acceleration and straight-line speed, but it won't turn as tightly as the VF-1 or VF-5000 can. Some of what I've read about the VF-4's atmospheric-duty variants (mainly the VF-4D) was that because of those aerodynamic shortcomings as a fighter it was sidelined from air superiority roles into an interceptor and surface attacker role instead.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... from everything that we've heard directly from people involved in the production, Star Trek: Picard is shaping up to be a gritty, action-oriented, dystopian TNG fanfic. More his inner John McClane... not that Insurrection didn't have some weirdly Die Hard-y vibes to it already.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that was pretty forced... especially the incredibly weak attempt to build up the girl who looks like Mecha Freeza into an actual character right before killing her off. Based on what's said in Patrick Stewart's interview with Variety, it sounds like Star Trek: Picard is going to be similarly acrimonious since Patrick Stewart is apparently channeling his own dissatisfaction with British politics into the plot so the Federation is turning isolationist and a man who was formerly a model statesman and so on is commenting on how he's going to be dropping F-bombs...
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that old gag where the sneeze comes out as a word instead of a sneeze sound effect... she caught a cold in the episode in question, and every sneeze comes out as the name of a mecha from Macross. Her exclamations of pain whenever she got stabbed with a fork in the first season and a good portion of season two were the names of Mobile Suits from Mobile Suit Gundam's Universal Century timeline. The pop culture gag density isn't as high as Excel Saga's, but they really lay on the Gundam, Macross, and Kamen Rider references pretty heavily... along with the entire thing being one massive weird take on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. (The episode in question, S2-10, has them beat a Mi-go invasion of Earth with a pop ballad, Macross style, which presumably justifies all the Macross references.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Crawl up! Nyaruko-san's writers seem to really like Macross. They've been averaging 1-2 references to it an episode in the second season. Nyaruko's rant about aliens with weaksauce weaknesses brings up a few different kaiju, the aliens from Mars Attacks, and the Zentradi losing their will to fight when they heard music for the first time. (Hell, her sneezes are her listing mecha from the series... Phalanx, Valkyrie, Armored, Super, Fire, Work-type, and VF-1. Her last sneeze is "Big West". The narrator even says "Deculture" at the end...)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    For what it's worth, when my dad introduced me to Star Trek: the Animated Series via bootleg VHS tapes he scored at a convention my gut reaction was that TAS did a pretty good job replicating the lighthearted space adventure feel of many of the Pocket Books novels that I read as a kid. It didn't have a lot of the high-handed moralizing or social allegory, it was mostly just new, lighthearted space adventures with the crew of the USS Enterprise. That sense of fun is something I kind of miss in Star Trek these days. Even if the actors didn't always get on, the characters of the various previous generations of Star Trek shows always felt like they enjoyed their jobs and each other's company. They could be just as entertaining f*cking around on the ship as they could in life-threatening space adventures. They got along well enough for them to tease each other and play pranks. They could have a laugh on the job, y'know? You don't really get that lighthearted and entertaining camaraderie in J.J.-Trek or Star Trek: Discovery and I doubt we'll see any of it in Picard. In J.J.-Trek, despite how Spock Prime harps on how never were there truer friends than Jim Kirk and Spock, everyone on the crew of the Enterprise seems to hate Kirk. Spock loathes him and (correctly) thinks he's an impulsive moron, Uhura thinks he's a dimwitted jock (and she's right), Pike thinks he's too rough around the edges to be useful, and Scotty, Chekhov, and Sulu seem to just tolerate him as duty requires. It's even worse in Star Trek: Discovery. The characters in STD HATE each other. The only one in the cast who had a sense of humor was Georgeau Prime. Everyone seems to dislike Burnham - and understandably so given that she's a bigot and incredibly manipulative - but Saru is especially vocal about it, everyone's wary of Lorca because he's so obviously evil, Stamets is just rude and dismissive to everyone, Culber is passive-aggressive as f*ck, Voq/Tyler is even more racist than the main character is and only really gets along with Lorca, Spock rips into several different people, and Tilly is so obnoxious that she was assigned to double accommodations and couldn't keep a roommate. There's no sense that these people are having fun or enjoy each other's company. In most cases, they seem to loathe each other. The only one who doesn't react with hostility even if treated with it is Discovery's Captain Pike. They're miserable all the time, and watching them feels miserable.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That's a little surprising... we'll see how long he's able to stay away from the Star Wars franchise's guaranteed payday.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe they'll try to reinvent it midway through or something. From the sound of it, Viacom-CBS's board is watching Star Trek: Picard like a hawk in the hopes that this particularly odious brand of Star Trek will stand the test of time or at least fail to mortally offend fans. They could find themselves with a rethink forced on them by poor viewership like what happened in Discovery in the gap between season one and two. Yeah... that's the lingering taint of Jar-Jar Abrams and Bad Reboot. None of them really understood what it was about the series that made Star Trek a cultural icon, and Abrams himself was vocally proud of that fact. They looked at Star Trek and saw the potential to turn the preeminent work of popular high-concept sci-fi into a soulless and generic Star Wars knockoff. IMO, that was only exacerbated by Star Trek: Discovery's showrunners wanting the series to be Game of Space Thrones. It had to be grimdark, gritty, action-intensive, and packed to the gills with expensive visual effects. They just couldn't live with themselves if they didn't have a grimdark setting, so season three is f*cking with the timeline by having the Federation not exist anymore in the 32nd century so they can reinvent it in their own dystopian image. Now Star Trek: Picard seems set to sh*t all over the Federation of Picard's era, complete with the same shenanigans that ultimately ruined Voyager by making the plot center around the Borg and hamfisted hypocritical rhetoric like what nearly tanked Discovery at the end of its first season.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    ... really? TrekNews ranked "11:59" as one of the ten best episodes of Star Trek: Voyager? Are they trolling? Most Star Trek fansites and fan groups have consistently ranked that episode as the single worst episode in Voyager's entire run or at least one of the worst. Hey now, they had some good ones... and a lot of mediocre ones, but mostly because they kept trying to develop the lamest parts of the cast like Kes, Neelix, and the eternal milquetoast Harry Kim. It didn't really start going downhill until they made the Borg into the main antagonist of the series and traded Kes in on Barbie of Borg in the hopes that a well-filled catsuit would be a workable substitute for a personality. To be fair, isn't that basically what half of TOS and most of the first season of TNG was? The Federation starship Enterprise flying from planet to planet passing high-handed moral judgement on the locals? Are we using #woke ironically or unironically here? That is to say, are we using it to refer to actual progressive stances or the fake progressive "I'm taking a stand to be seen on Instagram" nonsense infesting Discovery, the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and so many other recent pieces of painful filmmaking? That Star Trek: Picard is going to be a total sh*tshow is pretty much a foregone conclusion.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The production values were low, but it wasn't THAT bad. It's certainly much more watchable than anything from J.J.-Trek or the current pack of rejects and throwbacks running Star Trek at CBS. Every Star Trek series has a few dud episodes like "Spock's Brain", "Code of Honor", "Move Along Home", "11:59", the entirety of Star Trek: Enterprise Season 3, every episode of Star Trek: Discovery, etc., TAS just had more freedom to explore the campy side of TOS. Even brilliant writers like Larry Niven occasionally throw a dud out the door. Its main problem is that TOS-style camp and the Scooby-Doo era animation hasn't aged well.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    ... I hate myself for saying this, but the thing that had every faction in the Robotech TV series chasing the ship that was rebuilt into the SDF-1 was a device called the "protoculture matrix". ... considering the quality of the story was already shopping for basement apartments in the Mariana Trench, that's impressive in its own right.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Matters of individual taste aside, I'm not sure why anyone on the studio side of things would even be willing to entertain the idea of a fourth J.J.-Trek movie... or why CBS is so wedded to the J.J.-Trek aesthetic when it demonstrably doesn't sell. Star Trek: Into Darkness and Star Trek: Beyond both underperformed at the box office, and Beyond is reported to have finished around $50 million in the red when all was said and done, which was enough to convince the film's investors to pack it in. Add in that the studio is obligated by contract to offer Pine, Quinto, and other key cast members a significant raise, and the whole thing screams "losing prospect" from a financial standpoint. Add in the fact that many Star Trek fans really don't like J.J.-Trek overall, and I'm surprised they're bothering with story treatments. Come to that, with as much dissatisfaction as the Star Trek fandom has with the aesthetic choices in J.J.-Trek, I'm kind of amazed CBS is doubling down on it for Star Trek: Picard when it's been cited as a reason for slow or nonexistent sales of Star Trek: Discovery merchandise. Maybe they know something I don't (well, there's an excellent chance of that actually), but it seems like a rather risky strategy to me.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe they'll give him his own movie or series on Disney+. Finn: a Friendzone Story.
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