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Seto Kaiba

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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, a level 3 chemsuit just isn't flash enough... This is absolutely what the discerning gentleman will be wearing this plague season.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I've almost finished Yahari Ore no Seishun Rabukome wa Machigatteiru... I found it pretty dull, for the most part. It's a lot like Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dō Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui! but the social ineptitude-induced cringe response is treated as a source of cheap drama instead of a source of cheap laughs. It seems to be heading towards an unearned happy ending where Hachiman's status as a Jerk with a Heart of Also Jerk is somehow recast as Jerk with a Heart of Gold without him actually changing at all. That said, it comes nowhere close to the level of misery porn now embodied by Attack on Titan. I got caught up on that manga the other day while I was waiting for an automated task to finish at work and damn if it isn't bleak as hell. The protagonist has achieved a level of nationalist, xenophobic, genocidal prick that would make even Hitler tell him to tone it the hell down and his rival isn't any better... they literally get into a big argument over which one of them has a more appropriate target for genocide. Even the reveal of the origin of the Titans ended up as an unexplained copout.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    A good long road trip in mixed driving conditions... like a freeway through a rural area.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... credit where credit is due, a large portion of the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter's success was a double handful of big spenders and the high cost of entry for a tabletop game. It also helped that you had BattleTech fans getting in on that to get miniatures for the Unseen. Similarly - credit where it's due - the Robotech Academy Kickstarter tanked in no small part because it offended the nostalgia of Robotech fans by 1. being yet another story set around the Sentinels period without actually being a resolution of Robotech II: the Sentinels, 2. blatantly attempting to surf Carl Macek's coffin to fully-funded status while using his corpse as a human shield against criticism, and 3. sporting even worse animation than the failed and much-maligned Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles OVA. It was a triple-threat of Do Not Want for nostalgia-driven Robotech fans. Titan's Robotech comic seems to be in similar straits to RPG Tactics... it's an ugly mess and almost nobody seems to have anything nice to say about it, but it's limping along thanks to some die-hards who are digging deep to Collect Them All even though they'll be worth less than their cover price in a couple years. Knowing the guy in question, I'm pretty sure it's not just that he's a bad typist...
  5. Seto Kaiba
    So... Star Trek: Picard is trying to be intellectual today. Episode 7's title is Nepenthe, the mythical medicine from The Odyssey that cures your sorrows by making you forget them using laser-guided amnesia. I think after this season is over, we'll all be wanting a serving to forget this awful mess of a show. The Good The Bad The Ugly
  6. Seto Kaiba
    ... marrying or even dating Worf is a serious occupational hazard in Star Trek. The guy's had two legal wives murdered, and in the relaunch novelverse just dating him was as sure a death sentence as putting on a red shirt to beam down with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. At least one of his girlfriends got vaporized by a Breen commando unit.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    After seven seasons and three movies of "Will they or won't they?", a lot of fans would be depressed as hell if it turned out Riker and Troi didn't have a happy marriage.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    For many of them, it's a matter of having interacted with them in a discussion/debate setting for years. Over 15 years in a few cases. You don't talk to someone for that long and not end up learning at least a little bit about who they are and what their lives are like. For Robotech fans in general? No. For Robotech's most "devout", fanatical, vocal fans? Probably, yeah. This is part of why I was somewhat hesitant to actually mention it... that people might think I was implying that. I am not. We'd have ended up here anyway if I'd just flatly denied that a lot of Robotech's most vocal fans don't have the discretionary income to blow on multiple DVD re-releases of the series and collectibles. I know a few who were quite salty about not being able to afford to pledge for Cap's Southern Cross kit proposal. (For what little it's worth, the Robotech fans I would rate as among the worst and most detrimental to their fandom are a pack of academics who seem to have been men on a mission to misinform.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Riker's got a kid too, huh? So does this mean we're gonna see Dad!Riker wandering around his space cabin in cargo shorts, sandals with socks, and a fanny pack? Given how depressing Star Trek: Picard is, I have to wonder if we'll find out Will Riker's accidental twin Thomas died in a Cardassian prison or something. Or maybe the trauma will just get sillier and we'll find out Will Riker was hounded out of Starfleet by a malfunctioning replicator that wouldn't stop putting horseradish on his prime rib.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not, IMO... there isn't that much fold quartz in the body of your average Vajra and it's mostly the small, low-quality stuff that the Frontier fleet was using to manufacture MDE munitions. There is one very brief scene in Macross Frontier Ep16 "Ranka Attack" @1:15 where we see a pair of SMS VF-25s (Alto's VF-25F and a Brownie) towing four strung-together Vajra general soldier corpses towards the Frontier fleet. The larger, higher-purity fold quartz crystals are only present in more advanced Vajra forms and probably get damaged often during combat given that they're situated near center mass. Well, we know the Zentradi don't really give a damn about recovering destroyed assets... as the galaxy is strewn with debris fields made up of Zentradi wreckage. The New UN Forces are presumably a bit more inclined to recover lost assets, though that presumably depends on whether it is economical or safe to do so. We see a few NUNS ships in Macross Frontier that would absolutely NOT be safe to attempt to salvage because they'd become Vajra nests. There's an account in Master File of an emigrant fleet self-destructing any ships that were too damaged or too slow to escape an attacking Zentradi main fleet using dimension eaters to prevent the Zentradi from studying them. A lot of the time when a mecha or ship is lost onscreen, it goes kaboom in a pretty spectacular fashion so recovery isn't an option... like when Luca's RVF-25 had to be abandoned inside a Vajra ship which was then blown to bits by the Macross Quarter's main gun.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    As noted on previous occasions, you are... unusual... in that respect.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Is that a spoiler for tonight's? If so, you've made me sad.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Strategic Military Services' parent company Bilra Transport had what you'd call a controlling interest in the Frontier Government thanks to having sponsored the fleet's mission to the galactic core... for Richard Bilra, everything the fleet went through was about gaining access to huge amounts of fold quartz so that he could make his dream of overcoming fold faults a reality. Of course, New UN Government regulations on the mining and sale of fold quartz probably greatly inconvenienced his plans there... in the name of not having planet-killing fold bombs proliferating like mad.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK, we've never been told what the New UN Government calls the former Vajra hive planet that the Macross Frontier emigrant fleet landed on. At the very least, it probably has an itemization code like M55NGC6909 AKA "Messiah 025", the planet where the VF-25 was flight-tested for the first time. If the Vajra had a name for it, the only people who'd know would be Ranka Lee and Sheryl Nome, and they apparently aren't talking. Given how much fold quartz was on that planet, I'd be prepared to bet someone tried to name it "Paydirt". A VERY large, VERY old Vajra nest which is home to that Vajra swarm's queen that's absolutely packed with fold quartz.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    "We're doomed." - C-3PO Sounds like the best they came hope for is that The Rise of Skywalker will have lowered their audience's standards significantly. *looks at the high regard fans seem to hold Knights of the Old Republic in* ... yup, they're doomed.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, this is a problem that Robotech has been grappling with for a long time now... and something that Titan's Remix plays with in one of its more self-aware moments by taking cheap shots at the Legioss (RT: Alpha) being nowhere near a capable fighter compared to the VF-1 or VF-4. It's had an impact on the RPG, it caused a lot of grumbling when they instituted an official canon in their reboot, and even spawned conspiracy theories about merchandising.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    This.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    None yet. It's on my to-do list, but it'll be literal years before my group gets to it.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it's not even necessarily the R-word itself. It's that that franchise and its fanbase have devolved into cringe comedy.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I can grab some snapshots of the art for you when I get home today, if you'd find it helpful.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    This is legitimately gorgeous. Have you consulted the Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Battroid Valkyrie book for further detail on the control grips? Some of those contours are actually meant to be buttons.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The key difference being that those 40+ year old lifers are Robotech's only fans. Other franchises, like Macross, have been continually bringing in new fans by releasing steady streams of new material. The closest Robotech got to bringing in new fans was when old fans from the 80's rediscovered the series during the brief renaissance the franchise experienced as part of Harmony Gold's efforts to reboot and retool Robotech into a proper bloody anime franchise. Those same fans abandoned it again shortly thereafter, accompanied by a lot of others, when Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles laid a massive egg and Harmony Gold decided criticism of it was verboten. It was all downhill for Robotech after the TV series completed its first broadcast run. While you're (mostly) not wrong in general terms, the problem is that it IS Robotech... so those fans: Are obsessed, not "loyal"... and their obsession is rooted entirely in their nostalgia for the Robotech series. Are blinded by their nostalgia... to the extent that they will reject anything that doesn't fit with their nostalgic memories and headcanon of the Robotech series. If the franchise stops pandering to that nostalgia or tries to develop in any way they feel disrespects their (often inaccurate) memories of it, they will reject it with disgust. Often aren't actually established in a career or otherwise lack disposable income. This is the genesis of the Catch-22 that ensures any effort to continue Robotech is doomed. Robotech's fandom is too small for Harmony Gold to sustain development of new media for a fans-only audience, and Robotech's fans aren't interested in anything that doesn't pander to them directly. Robotech is too obscure and too hated to trade on its reputation for the sake of gaining a new audience, and anything they might do to get the attention of a new audience is doomed to fail because they don't understand their market and their fans (who also don't understand the genre) will pan that effort to attract a new audience for "disrespecting" the series. Consequently, everything needs to be made as cheaply as it can possibly be in order to turn any kind of a profit from a small and shrinking fanbase, which further ensures that it won't attract a new audience because it all looks like arse thanks to having been made so cheaply.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there's one cause for optimism... item 4 under "Fiction" shows that at least they've realized they have to have an actual ending. The whole new trilogy kind of showed that they'd forgotten that. The story ended in Return of the Jedi and then it just kind of forgot to stop... requiring all kinds of convoluted nonsense to justify why they didn't stop.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Most unusually for Macross, it does seem like a throwaway design. There's no line art for it in This is Animation Special: Macross Plus or This is Animation: the Select Macross Plus Movie Edition and it's not covered even in technical publications like Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur. Unlikely, IMO... the VF-17 Nightmare was already in its third year of frontline service when Project Super Nova was going on. If anything, it'd probably have had to be developed from the VF-17's beam adapter.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It doesn't really seem powerful enough to inflict meaningful damage on a ship... my guess is it's meant for dealing with things like Armoreds.
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