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Seto Kaiba

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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Hey now, he'd been doing it for two and a half movies already... it was WAY too late in the game to change his character.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Hey now, I compared JJ-Trek to terminal radiation poisoning... it's every bit as painful, unpleasant, and incurable as the inoperable Stage 4 brain cancer that is CBS's disgustingly racist and regressive take on Star Trek, but in different ways. There is, however, an extra-special place in the deepest, darkest, foulest oubliette in the bowels of Hell for the cretins responsible for Star Trek: Into Darkness's butchering Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan and one of the most powerful and iconic Star Trek scenes. May they rot there for all eternity, enduring thrice-hourly rectal probings with jumbo pineapples covered in carpet tacks, rock salt, and drain cleaner.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, Star Trek: Picard is an entirely different and rather more embarrassingly pathetic sort of project. Instead of being an attempt to recapture the spirit of the "good old days" to mine the pockets of the terminally nostalgic, Star Trek: Picard is more along the lines of damage control. Star Trek: Discovery was not well-received by the Star Trek fandom, and it didn't live up to Jason Isaacs boasts that it didn't need the existing Star Trek fandom. CBS tried to lure Star Trek fans to Discovery using the promise of the Enterprise, Captain Pike, Spock, etc., but the resulting bait-and-switch and the idiot plot that resulted from it did more harm than good. Since most fans didn't like Mirror!Georgeau and thus aren't too keen on the idea of a Section 31 series, the brain trust at CBS are trying to lure Star Trek fans back to the franchise by drawing on the goodwill of previous shows using Jean-Luc Picard's name and cameo appearances by noteworthy characters of past shows like Will Riker, Deanna Troi, Data, and Seven. It's long since been confirmed that Star Trek: Picard is going to be more of the same action-ized tripe we got in Discovery, but the creative staff at CBS are hoping the familiar name and face will keep Star Trek fans watching and maybe even buying the merch that Star Trek: Discovery just couldn't sell. (Whether they'll actually have anything remains to be seen, since there were reports of licensee mass walkouts over the design works, citing the lack of sales of Discovery merch.) Ech... no thanks. If it's a choice between those two I'd rather have nothing at all. It's like being asked if you'd rather have Stage 4 inoperable brain cancer or terminal radiation poisioning. If the choice is between a badly-written, badly-acted, badly-shot story that sh*ts all over Star Trek and its legacy, a badly-written, badly-acted, badly-shot story that sh*ts all over Star Trek and its legacy in a slightly different way, or nothing at all... then "nothing at all" is absolutely the best choice.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Sheryl Nome was deliberately infected with the V-type bacterium by Grace O'Connor at some point between the death of her parents in the implant legalization riots in Macross Galaxy in 2048 and her case being documented for a scholarly journal publication about the disease in 2053. Grace deliberately infected Sheryl with the V-type bacterium as the 9th subject in Project Fairy (which is why Grace calls her Fairy 9), the Galaxy fleet's effort to artificially reproduce the fold song abilities documented in their original subject (Ranka Mei, code-named "Little Queen", later known as Ranka Lee after being adopted by NUNS pilot Ozma Lee) that could be used to control the Vajra. Nope... we see a damaged picture of him in the 13th episode of the Macross Frontier TV series, but that's all we really get. He's a tall bloke who is probably human, given that Ranka's green hair apparently comes from her mother's side (he's blonde). I'm inclined to suspect "universe" was a mistranslation. At the end of Macross Frontier, it's strongly implied that the Vajra are travelling to another galaxy to mate and mingle with the Vajra living there. There are still Vajra encountered in our galaxy after that point in time, like the ones found on the planet Uroboros in 2060 in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy and the one that was captured by Epsilon Foundation subsidiary Zelgaar Heavy Industries and transported to planet Pipure in 2062 for use in their research into weaponizing fold songs in Macross Delta Gaiden: Macross E. Both are connected by the ancient Protoculture. The Protoculture created the tribe on the island of Mayan to maintain the biotechnological Birdman weapon they left behind on Earth as a precautionary measure in the event that humanity developed the necessary technology for interplanetary or interstellar travel before resolving its internal differences so they wouldn't repeat the Protoculture's mistakes. It appears that this probably happened very near the end of the Protoculture's existence, shortly before they went extinct. The prevailing theory about the Brisingr globular cluster's high concentration of Protoculture ruins was that it was one of the last enclaves of the ancient Protoculture, the last major stronghold of the Protoculture's civilization before they went extinct. Roid believed that Windermere IV was the Protoculture's final homeworld, and that the native Windermereans were created with their natural fold wave abilities to be the Protoculture's true heirs and successors. (It seems more likely, with benefit of hindsight, that they were actually made to run the Delta Wave System the Protoculture built throughout the Brisingr cluster in an attempt to finally bring peace to the galaxy.) The Windermereans believe "Rudanjal Rom Mayan" means something like "in the name of the true king". Whether it actually means that is open to debate, but the word "Mayan" is definitely connected to two groups of comparatively primitive people created by the Protoculture to guard and maintain ancient superweapons the Protoculture created and buried there. Considering how dangerous most buried Protoculture inventions are, I'd entertain the theory that it actually meant "DO NOT TOUCH".
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Dude, I don't think the Spoiler tag is necessary... you can't exactly spoil a plot that's completely incoherent at best and downright incomprehensible at worst. Given what we saw in the previous iteration of the time loop, it appears that Zor's battlefortress probably only existed in the original timeline that accidentally created the time loop in the first place. In this - and apparently every - iteration of the time loop, the ship that crashed on Earth in 1999 was actually the SDF-3 from the previous time loop iteration which was sent back in time by accident or design and subsequently mistaken for an alien ship until it was thoroughly examined. All told, it feels like they stole the plot from the David Mack Star Trek novel Section 31: Disavowed... which had a similar sort of time loop story involving the Breen attempting to steal a wormhole-drive prototype from the Mirror Universe only to accidentally crash it on a remote planet in the past in the prime universe where they would later discover the wreckage that clued them into that technology's existence and prompted their attempt to steal one in the first place.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I've spent some time catching up on my backlog... this week it's Crawl Up! Nyaruko-san. It's... odd. Odder than I was prepared for, and that's saying something. It's a H.P. Lovecraft-inspired harem comedy. Let that sink in for a second. It's a raunchy romcom based on H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. That description itself feels like a cosmic horror. The premise is that apparently H.P. Lovecraft was simply a mortal who was in on the coverup of alien life, and modeled his Cthulhu mythos on very real alien lifeforms who come to Earth to indulge in its pop culture. One very average young Japanese boy named Mahiro is nearly abducted by a Night Gaunt and is rescued by a young girl who professes to be none other than the dark god Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, who is really a space cop out to bust an eldritch pop culture smuggling ring. He quickly assembles a small collection of equally eldritch spongers and freeloaders at his home, including a Cthuga and Hastur, the King in Yellow. So a very befuddled boy is stuck in a weird soft of bisexual love quadrangle with Nyarlathotep in the guise of a young silver-haired girl and Hastur in the guise of a young blonde boy both want to jump his bones, and Cthuga has a single-target sexuality wanting to sexually assault Nyarlathotep. It's a setup that gets forgotten about 80% of the time, making it feel a LOT like Excel Saga with them constantly parodying other shows. They drop a lot of references to Call of Cthulhu too. It's such a weird premise that I couldn't not watch, and it's proven to be pretty entertaining if only for Mahiro being a dangerously genre savvy thot slayer who uses every underhanded trick in the book to avoid being cornered by "Nyaruko". Well THAT was unexpected... the 11th episode of the first season more or less opened on a Macross reference.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    It's pretty consistently referred to as a booby trap... even by the Zentradi, who warn Misa in Ep30 that the derelict Supervision Army ship they stumble across may also be booby trapped.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    That's probably what they hope it'll do... though I suspect it's more an expression of Harmony Gold's desire to shift public perception of Robotech away from the unflattering reality and towards what they aspire to have Robotech seen as: "American Macross". They've been trying very hard to court Macross fans over the last few years, double-branding all their merch as both Robotech and Super Dimension Fortress Macross. How many people do you need to constitute a "following"? Because, as far as I've seen, there is precisely one Japanese Robotech fan: yui1107. (She mostly just vandalizes Japanese Wikipedia pages for Macross, Southern Cross, or MOSPEADA with Robotech information and spreads borderline unintelligible misinformation using the more gullible and desperate members of the Robotech fandom.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Very nearly.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Robotech's version is a little different... you get to choose any two from: Fast Cheap Complete Quality is never an option when it's Robotech. Instead, it's whether or not they actually manage to finish what they've started... which they almost never do. (Admittedly a lot of the time it isn't up to them whether or not they finish, the poor quality of their work speaks for itself in the sales numbers and the plug gets pulled anyway.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    's it just me, or are the delays increasing in duration as time goes on?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    This seems... how do you say... doomed to fail?
  13. Seto Kaiba
    What a shame that whatever Faustian covenant they sealed to improve the art was paid for with further deterioration of the writing. It went from Ed Wood levels of awful to Uwe Boll levels of awful.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    They passed the Point of No Return a long time ago with this sorry mess...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Offhand, I don't recall any recent discussions of which release had more accurate subtitles... the last major home video release of Super Dimension Fortress Macross outside of Japan was fourteen years ago, after all. Absolute literal accuracy often makes for a very awkward-sounding translation, and as such most generally consider the "best" translation to be the ones that effectively balance being faithful to the substance of the original dialog with localization tweaks to make the dialog flow naturally in the target language. Otherwise you end up with a grammatical nightmare like the Studio Khara-supplied translation used in Netflix's Neon Genesis Evangelion that flows as naturally as a river of bricks. At least three... the hilariously awful and mercifully incomplete Streamline Pictures subtitles that were produced for the 1994 Robotech "Perfect Collection" double feature VHS set that was canned after eight volumes (16 episodes), the excellent subs-only AnimEigo DVD release from 2001/2002, and the 2006 ADV Films dub/sub DVD release with the lamentably bad dub of the series. AFAIK, the Lionsgate release just reused the ADV Films subs/dub as-is... that's the version you watched. "Comfort woman" was a translation error. The term used in Japanese (慰問部隊 imon-butai, lit. "Comfort Unit" or "Comfort Corps") doesn't refer to "comfort women" (慰安婦 ianfu), but rather was a term for hired entertainers like musicians who were paid to entertain the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy troops during World War II. Kind of like their version of the USO shows. (The US National Archives has some records that indicate some members of the imon-butai in occupied territory were locals conscripted into service rather than volunteers though, which would probably go a ways towards explaining why Minmay's Chinese father Linn Pao-chun is so upset by the similarity he sees there.) My recommendation would be the old AnimEigo 9-volume DVD set. It lacks the godawful ADV dub, and has overall the highest quality restoration job.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    That was because Star Wars started more or less in medias res, and relevant exposition was given as the story progressed to establish the why of anything that needed explaining... like Obi-wan explaining who the Jedi Knights were and the nature of the Force while teaching Luke, or his backhanded explanation that Vader was a Jedi who fell to the dark side. Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi had a lot of that kind of exposition, but it's largely absent from Jar-Jar Abrams' The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker because Jar-Jar was focused on nothing but getting as many special effects-heavy action sequences as possible into the film's two hour runtime.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That's Bad Robot's bad habit... they're all about flash over substance, so when they're working on an established property they try to further reduce the already-minimal screen time they're willing to spend on exposition by displacing anything more than the absolute bare minimum necessary to understand the story into secondary material. J.J. Abrams' soft reboot of Star Trek from back in '09 suffered from this lazy storytelling too. Every detail about the events leading up to the destruction of Romulus, why Nero blames Spock and the Federation, why the Narada looks like a Lovecraftian porcupine, and how the parallel universe the film (later films) was set in came to be was displaced into a limited comic series nobody read... so half or more of the plot devolved into unexplained nonsense. Star Trek: Discovery suffered from this to an extent as well. Half the cast was so underdeveloped that if you wanted to know anything about them, you'd better have read the tie-in novels.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Aho-Girl was too damn short. I know I bag on the half-length shows a LOT because one-cour run of 12 minute episodes feels too insubstantial for there to be any real character development, but Aho-Girl turned out to be the exception that tests the rule. It was a surprising amount of fun to watch. It definitely had that same kind of slightly manic energy as Excel Saga, as if Il Palazzo had been taken over by one of the most savage thot slayers in anime. They even managed some pretty good character development in those twelve short episodes that genuinely left me wanting a bit more.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    FWIW, there is a nontrivial disparity between the "Verified" reviews and "Unverified" ones... to the tune of about 8%. With or without, it's still broadly positive. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Disney and Kathleen Kennedy were so desperate to put one in the wins column after Solo and The Last Jedi that they paid bot farms to spam positive reviews, even though The Rise of Skywalker was "Too Big to Fail" as the culmination of decades of Star Wars's cultural Stockholm syndrome. Not much, really. You can buy hundreds of Likes for your social media platform of choice from bot farms in China, Russia, or the Middle East by the hundred for about the cost of lunch for one at McDonalds. It's a well-known bad habit of studios to do things like spending their own money to buy out entire showings of their own films to boost their opening weekend numbers, because a theater full of no-shows still counts as tickets sold. It wouldn't be a significant spend for any studio to add, on top of that, bot farm reviews from "Verified" viewers by supplying bot farms with the ticket info for those no-show screenings.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    As a brief addendum, the one time we see them up close in the Macross M3 opening their interior appears to be in the same plane as the rest of the Megaroad-class ship's instead of being perpendicular as we'd expect if they were ARMD-class ships.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Pick up a double feature... go see Cats first, then no matter how bad you feel The Rise of Skywalker was it'll seem like solid gold by comparison.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I don't think they've ever actually identified the structures on the sides of the Megaroad-class as standalone ARMD-class carriers. They appear to be built into the superstructure of the Megaroad-class ship. I do recall reading that ARMD-09 Midway, ARMD-10 Haruna, and ARMD-11 Kiev were a part of the Megaroad-01's escort detail though.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't this almost literally the start of an episode of Red Dwarf? EDIT: Yup... S5E3 "Terrorform".
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Aho-Girl was a pretty enjoyable watch. Akuru's a walking thot slayer meme, and he does a great job as the straight man in Yoshiko's nonsense. I wish it'd had more than twelve episodes.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Given how manners-obsessed Japanese corporate culture can be... I have to wonder if that rant'll come back to bite him in the arse one day.
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