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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Finally drawing close to the end of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part V: Golden Wind. This is surprisingly dark for a Jojo season. Darker, perhaps, than all of them save perhaps Phantom Blood... and only then because Dio racked up such a huge body count as a vampire in 19th century England. Passione is, if anything, even more unhinged than you'd expect a mafia full of Stand users to be. It's started to feel like Jojo has begun to run out of ways to keep the whole concept of Stands fresh though. The story's kind of forgotten about the consequences of using Gold Experience for healing that were elaborated upon early on, so as it ends up forced into the role of the party healer more and more it feels less and less distinct from Josuke's Crazy Diamond in Diamond is Unbreakable. Gold Experience's power is so broken that Giorno's been hit with The Worf Effect several fights in a row so that other Bucciarati Squad members with less overpowered Stands can contribute at all (like Narancia's Aerosmith and Mista's Sex Pistols). The only new concepts we've really gotten Stand-wise in this arc so far are the worn Stands like Ghiaccio's White Album and that horribly broken autonomous immortal Stand Notorious BIG, and so far those are one-shot villain Stands.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I'd beg to differ on First Contact's behalf. Star Trek: First Contact was 50% terrible space!zombie movie with Star Trek characters, but it was also 50% a genuine Star Trek time travel plot about humanity's first first contact and the creation of warp drive with some decent character drama about Zefram Cochrane floundering in the gap between his real self and what the crew who only know him from what history books say about his future self think he is. That's 49% more Star Trek than Star Trek '09 was. Star Trek '09 was more like the Futurama Star Trek episode, a non-Star Trek plot starring a complete idiot loaded with a bunch of in-jokes and references to Star Trek's original series. Star Trek: Into Darkness was just a mistake, start-to-finish. Trying to remake one of the most celebrated Star Trek films - Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan - would've been a mistake even with the best staff available because of how iconic it is. It was like announcing plans to remake Casablanca or The Princess Bride. If you saw Star Trek: Nemesis, then you didn't miss much. Star Trek: Beyond isn't a flat-out remake of Star Trek: Nemesis, but it was certainly copying its homework. That, good sir, is the very definition of "damned by faint praise".
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Apparently, yes. But just think of all the wonderful memes we wouldn't have if the prequel trilogy hadn't been written by someone almost totally unaware of how human beings speak and interact...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    That's not a filmography, that's a suicide note. I'll admit, I am flat surprised that they were able to find someone (or several someones) clueless enough to agree to finance a fourth installment in J.J. Abrams's unsuccessful attempt to hard reboot the Star Trek franchise. That it's a terrible idea should've been glaringly obvious given that none of the three existing J.J. Abrams Star Trek films was an unqualified success. Both Star Trek '09 and Star Trek: Into Darkness fell so far short of Paramount's earnings projections that they barely managed to turn a profit at all, and Star Trek: Beyond flopped at the box office and finished over $50M short of breaking even. That should've been warning enough, never Netflix and Amazon both reportedly suffering buyer's remorse over bankrolling their respective Star Trek streaming shows or the licensees largely refusing to touch J.J.-Trek unless forced to and reportedly opting to pass on both Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard due to the J.J.-Trek aesthetic being a massive no-sell condition for many Star Trek fans. The only explanation I can think of - besides Springtime for Hitler - is that someone's got the rose tinted glasses on. I think it was Bojack Horseman that noted that when you look at a person (or thing) through rose-tinted glasses all the red flags just look like flags. Another J.J.-Trek film is a red flag factory on a scale not normally seen outside the PRC.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Certainly an understandable feeling... he's basically the sequel trilogy's low rent Han Solo replacement, but he has none of Han's redeeming traits. He's just another underdeveloped character who happens to be a gung-ho moron. Admittedly he would've had fewer opportunities to play the fool if his commanding officer(s) had kept him on a shorter leash or at least not been obstructive beyond reason the way Holdo was. I can think of a few, but they're mainly villain protagonists or reformed villains. No, it's just mean to compare a character who actually did something useful (that Ewok) to a character who embodies a plot tumor (Rose). (And it's all tongue in cheek anyway.) Cassian is pretty clear that he's no hero, though because of Jyn Erso he gradually becomes more heroic as the movie progresses.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Kill it with fire.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Because summary execution is the Empire's (and First Order's) schtick... it's a bad guy thing. The heros in melodramas like Star Wars are supposed to be above that kind of petty and vengeful behavior. If they execute someone, it'll only be after due process has run its course in the appropriate court. Poe Dameron's essentially off the hook because the entire command structure of the Resistance was wiped out except for Leia, who's in rough shape, so he's the highest ranking officer left standing. It strikes me as unlikely that he'd obligingly jump in front of a firing squad by giving the order to convene his own court martial, or convene those which might lead to his own by court martialing Finn and Rose for their AWOL adventure that ultimately accomplished nothing except vandalizing a casino and getting practically 99% of the Resistance killed.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Sorry, linear time has a strict No Refunds policy.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I meant in terms of her significance to the plot, as the one who introduces the Rebellion to the plucky locals of isolated moon X who ultimately turn the tide in the Rebellion's favor. Isn't it rather insensitive to insinuate that a non-human character who is clearly sentient, albeit from a primitive culture, whose people helped fight the Empire is nothing more than a pet?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Isn't a likely explanation that Finn's new bestie is literally the biggest loudmouth jackass in the entire Resistance?
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That's the new girl, Jannah. She's one of the locals from the moon/planet where the Death Star II wreckage crashed. If this is a remake of Return of the Jedi, I guess she's like that one Ewok who takes a shine to Leia.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The Last Jedi was pretty clear that Rose's objection to the casino's racetrack was due to the abusive treatment of the animals by the casino's handlers, not the use of animals in general. Presumably Rose would not object to a working animal that was well-treated and properly cared for. (This, of course, mirrors real world attitudes once abuses of animals at race tracks became known... though racehorses were typically pretty well-treated because of how difficult it is to breed them, how delicate a horse's health is in general, and how sensitive their performance ability is to health problems. To me, the film's treatment of those racing animals mirrors a lot of real world treatment of greyhounds bred to race. Because they breed in numbers, grow quickly, and have a relatively short window of athletic viability, racing dogs are often not well-kept and have to cope with cramped and unhygenic living conditions, substandard food, and a lack of medical treatment. I've seen this firsthand, and briefly fostered a greyhound that'd been abused by its handler at a racetrack in Florida shortly after Florida banned dog racing a year ago. That difference in treatment of the animals is why horse racing is still very much legal in most places while dog racing is increasingly banned.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    According to my friends and one family member who work in the Ford Product Development Center: They're not thinking... like, at all. Because Jim Hackett is a drooling idiot who's destroying the company from the inside-out with his incompetent efforts to reorganize Ford Motor. OR They've forgotten the important lesson about brand dilution that the Porsche Cayenne taught the industry, and genuinely believe a "premium" SUV is a good idea that won't hurt the Mustang line's image. My own suspicion, based on my own experiences at Ford and FCA, is that Ford has lately come to the unavoidable realization that the current administration's efforts to roll back the Obama-era CAFE requirements, emissions regulations, and abolish CARB are going to be reversed in fairly short order. There's no way Ford's truck-heavy lineup can keep pace with tightening government fuel efficiency and emissions requirements around the world, and Ford lags well behind other major automakers in development and deployment of hybrid and full-electric powertrain technologies. I strongly suspect this ill-advised branding choice was an attempt to work around the public perception that hybrid and electric cars offer more anemic performance than conventional ones, by rebadging what was almost certainly intended to be a BEV variant of the 4th Gen Ford Escape to associate it with Mustang's reputation for high performance and escape association with the Ford Escape's poorly-received 2nd and 3rd Gen Hybrid variants. I'm also inclined to suspect Ford's choice of a C2 SUV to launch their next-gen electrification architecture is an attempt to get out ahead of its rivals by launching a fully-electric SUV while Jeep is still ramping up its Hybrid and full electric lineup Segrio teased shortly before his passing. Yeah, that's what they said too. I've been hearing what a turd this design was for a while now, and after clapping eyes on the un-camo'd version I have to admit they undersold the design's ugliness.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    If it's any consolation, there's been a fair bit of circumstantial evidence that her role has been minimized in response to the backlash against her plot tumor in The Last Jedi. My guess would be the studio felt they couldn't outright get rid of Rose for much the same reason Star Trek: Voyager ended up abandoning its plans to off Harry Kim... despite the character's unpopularity with general audiences, outside circumstances involving race-representation and fear of backlash make separating them from the cast politically difficult. *looks at literally millennia-long history of cavalry warfare here on Earth* Hey, low-tech worked for the Ewoks, right? I'd expect nothing less than an entire short story devoted to explaining their backstory, motivations, favorite food, mother's maiden name, and the symbolic significance of the last four digits of their social security numbers. The clone army was a Chekhov's Gun... you don't put that gun on the mantle and not take it down and fire it sometime. That said, the whole reason for the clone army is a single throwaway line in A New Hope about Luke's father having fought in the Clone Wars. Most would rank a dramatic reading of the phone book by Gilbert Gottfried and Fran Drescher higher than The Last Jedi. Comparisons to The Last Jedi are the new "still a better love story than Twilight". If you've heard anything about Lucas's plans for the sequel trilogy, what we got from Abrams and Johnson actually sounds less stupid. (George reportedly wanted Star Wars VII thru IX to be basically a trilogy version of Fantastic Voyage about the midichlorians.) Star Wars wasn't so much between a rock and a hard place as it was between Jar-Jar Abrams's dumpster fire and Lucas's tire fire.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Oddly, that was actually answered... in part in The Phantom Menace, and more fully in Attack of the Clones. The Republic had been at peace for nearly a millennium by the time the Clone Wars started. It didn't have a centralized military force, and hadn't had one at any point in living memory. Obi-wan was being entirely literal when he told Luke the Jedi were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. The next best thing they had, as far as I can find, was a group that answered to the Republic's judiciary called the Judicials, who were basically the space highway patrol (one of their ships was the one that delivered Qui-Gon and Obi-wan to the Trade Federation ship in The Phantom Menace). Individual planets had militias or organized defense forces, but there was no military answering to the Senate directly. As Mace Windu put it, "You must realize there aren't enough Jedi to protect the Republic. We are keepers of the peace, not soldiers." Any port in a storm, right? Probably? A quick skim of the character summary for the guy who authorized the creation of the clone army tells me the Jedi Master responsible ("Sifo-Dyas") was apparently kicked out of the Jedi Counsel because he foresaw the war and argued vehemently for the creation of an army necessary to defend the Republic. (Then went AWOL and commissioned said army.) The Jedi Counsel probably saw that as "OK, *sshole had a point."
  16. Seto Kaiba
    All told, I think the oft-returned-to point about The Force Awakens is that it's an OK film on its own... until you notice that it's just J.J. Abrams trying to pass off a cosmetically overhauled SparkNotes version of A New Hope as an original movie. Its perceived quality is all borrowed gloss from the iconic original Star Wars trilogy, tarted up a bit with expensive CGI. I'm not sure if it'd be better or worse if you took the Star Wars title and associations away from it. Examining The Force Awakens's original elements on their own, it's painfully obvious how underdeveloped every part of it was. It's all flash and no substance, and if they hadn't spent so much money on VFX the whole affair would feel more like a Star Wars mockbuster than a legitimate installment in the franchise with its shoddy dollar store knockoff versions of the first trilogy's cast and factions. The Last Jedi was Disney's almost understandable overreaction to the entirely justified accusations that they'd tried to pass a ridiculously underthought sh*tty remake of A New Hope off as a new movie. They got royally reamed for their unoriginality, so they tried to mix it up as much as possible and subvert expectations... which blew up in their faces when they tried to make steak with the fandom's sacred cows. The Rise of Skywalker seems set to be a The Force Awakens style terribly underthought remake of Return of the Jedi, complete with imitation brand Luke (Rey, who is only marginally less unoriginal than the EU's Luuke Skywalker) and imitation brand Darth Vader (Kylo Ren) killing Palpatine off (again).
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, no... that's why the problem is the filmmakers who, like the makers of Terminator: Dark Fate and the Charlie's Angels reboot, prioritized inserting their personal political agenda into the Star Wars sequel trilogy over engaging with its audience and telling a compelling story. (I'm not saying films have to, or even should, be apolitical... but for f*ck's sake, if you're going to make a movie a vehicle for a political message at least try to do it with some subtlety and grace. As Star Trek demonstrates, you can work a blunt political message into a story so completely that nobody will even think to question it... but if you beat the audience and your story to death with it, it's not going to be well-received. You have to be a REALLY good filmmaker to attack your audience and have them thank you for it, and like it or not the Disney Star Wars staff are NOT good filmmakers.) That was what the trilogy that Rian Johnson, and later Benioff and Weiss, were supposed to head up was reportedly about... before their respective failures got them politely invited to leave.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I think the sentiment expressed was that they'd like to hear something besides complaints about the sequel trilogy, since that's about all that passes for discussion of them is people saying how much the new films suck. Phantom Menace was followed by a passable movie (Attack of the Clones) and then an actually pretty good movie (Revenge of the Sith), plus they had Ewan McGregor and Samuel L. Jackson. It was an upward trend. The sequel trilogy's kind of doing the opposite. It had a bad movie (The Force Awakens), a movie that Star Wars fans want to have the filmmakers crucified for (The Last Jedi) and which totally derailed the entire plot by killing the big bad a movie early without so much as a by-your-leave, and now we're looking down the barrel of a conclusion (Rise of Skywalker) that's been reworked so much in a futile bid to please everyone that it's all but guaranteed to please nobody and outrage the fans further. Star Wars might survive this, but it'll be one of those persistent vegitative state ethical quandries. Anyhoo, I'm rather excited to see Jar-Jar Abrams fly this one into the ground so hard it contravenes strategic arms limitation treaties. Esp. with the movie's politics hanging over its head like the Sword of Damocles, and similarly politicized cinema like Terminator: Dark Fate and Charlie's Angels flopping at the box office.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    No dice, he already promised not to destroy the Earth by flood. If even a tenth of the test screening leaks are true, this'll be the Star Wars franchise's Hindenburg.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I'm looking forward to the reactions from the Star Wars fans when the movie finally drops. It's not often you get an opportunity to see wailing and gnashing of teeth on a biblical scale, y'know?
  21. Seto Kaiba
    HG tried to "Macross-ize" Genesis Climber MOSPEADA with Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles... and it went over like a lead balloon. Let's see if trying to "Macross-ize" Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross goes any better for them, considering it's even less popular with Robotech fans than MOSPEADA was.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, that's also where the laughs basically become stale... because the series has exactly one joke from that point on: Kazuma's desire to avoid doing any actual work bites him in the arse.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    For the most part, it is... the FTC's not going to take 99.9999999% of complaints under consideration, they're going to go after the worst offenders and make an example of them. The algorithm's really not all that inscrutable... it's just that, like any other heuristics-based detection software, it takes a little while for its analysis criteria to stabilize as it grows its sample dataset. One of my favorite analogies for this kind of thing relates to autocorrect, likening it to a little elf living inside your phone who is very helpful but also quite drunk and needs some time to sober up. That's (mostly) unrelated. YouTube's started doing the same thing Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have recently started doing... identifying the hijacked, bot, and troll accounts on their services and removing them. In their case, I don't think it's so much the Russian troll farms and other malicious foreign actors so much as it is the pay-for-likes, pay-for-subs, and pay-for-views bot farms used to artificially inflate subscriber counts. Like the last few YouTube "crises", the content creators I've seen complaining about this are mainly the shills and gutter snipes trying to work their personal extreme political agendas into everything... the kind of people who would absolutely pay for subs to make themselves and their views seem more legitimate.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    One of the nicer things about this spate of Isekai light novel adaptations is that they're sticking fairly close to the source material... warts and all. I kinda hope the movie is where they stop with Konosuba... because that's about where Kazuma falls into character stasis and every bit of development he gets in any given volume is undone by the start of the next.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Looks more like E.T. in a wig.
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