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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    ... 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.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It's more like Robotech cosplaying as Macross, because it wants to be "American Macross" when it grows up.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    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
  8. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... when you see it, it's sometimes nice to know you're not going insane when the bought-and-paid-for entertainment media are busy gaslighting you on the studio's behalf or telling you you HAVE to like it or you're a racist, sexist, baby-eating nazi velociraptor thinly disguised as a human being. Unrelated: The latest round of leaks from the premiere are a pretty mixed, but mostly negative bag. I hope a lot of it isn't true, like the Rise of the Machines backstory.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I think the point you'll find a lot of us making is that if that's the only way for someone familiar with the franchise to enjoy the show, something is very badly wrong with the creative process. We'd like to go cherrypicking at cherry farms, not open landfills... you see? To be brutally frank, when it comes to new Star Trek it's more along the lines of "this show is so unapologetically awful and loathed so uniformly among the majority of fans that the assumption is that anyone seriously defending it is probably taking the piss". Yeah, that's about the shape of it. Star Trek: Picard is, on the face of it, a larger-scale version of the same bait-and-switch ploy that CBS tried and failed at in Star Trek: Discovery's second season with Christopher Pike, Spock, and the Enterprise. We all know how that showed promise for an episode or two, then immediately deteriorated into an even worse mess than the first season had been. When Star Trek: Picard was initially announced, we were immediately suspicious that this was another very poorly thought-out concept intended to bait fans back into the franchise not through quality storytelling or a return to the idealistic future that made Star Trek a cross-generational icon of sci-fi, but through a lazy attempt to manipulate us through our nostalgia for real Star Trek to get us to watch another poorly-conceived, bleak, dystopian attempt to turn Star Trek into a generic space war series. Every press piece and leak from the production has just further confirmed what we already suspected it'd be... with Patrick Stewart himself stepping up to administer the coup de grace by confirming that that was EXACTLY what it was going to be. At this point, CBS is so heavily invested in garbage Trek that we won't be free of it for a long time. They know it isn't popular, since they've seen Netflix take a hard pass on Star Trek: Picard and slash Star Trek: Discovery's budget due to the show underperforming worldwide, and they've seen their licensees complain about Star Trek: Discovery not selling worth a damn and also took a pass on the Star Trek: Picard license. CBS is never going to admit fault and try to course-correct though, because it foolishly allowed Star Trek: Discovery's showrunners to spend like mad on development with little oversight and allowed them to go even wilder with the money Netflix put up to do the production work. They've indirectedly indicated they're over a hundred million dollars upside-down on Discovery alone due to that overspending, and the only hope they have of ever recovering that investment is for the series to take off like mad, run for at least seven seasons, and make megabucks in merchandising the way TNG, DS9, and VOY did. Star Trek: Picard is their attempt to trick fans back on board in the hopes that they'll warm up to Star Trek: Discovery too in the process, so the merchandise will finally sell and they can start cleaning up that red ink. I suspect they'll continue doubling down on it until someone on the board yanks their leash and calls a halt to it or Star Trek goes bust again. My suspicion is they're going to be unsatisfied with Star Trek: Picard very quickly too, when it becomes obvious that this new and depressing Jean-Luc Picard isn't appealing to fans and that the other returning characters were glorified cameos. ... this sounds more like something only a replicator malfunction could produce.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    So, no surprises... the language is pretty much exactly as expected, Big West is asserting its rights as owner of the intellectual property and franchise, and Harmony Gold's pro forma appeal of the registration is not going to go anywhere.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Bokutachi wa Benkyō ga Dekinai got stale surprisingly fast. At a bit less than halfway into the second season, the plots of individual episodes have become so repetitive that even the show's characters have not only started to notice but actively predict what's going to happen. The episode I just finished was a rote copy of a season one episode. Like, every single plot point repeated verbatim... and Nariyuki acknowledges it. The first half of the same episode was another recycled plot involving an accidental inappropriate clothing gift.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't Vader's a competely different ace/custom model?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC that's basically the first thing that's ever said about them in A New Hope. (Just checked, yes... Obi-wan says it right after they come out of hyperspace in the Alderaan system.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, considering how many "worthy foe" and "not so different" moments Picard had with various Romulan leaders over the years he seems like the kind of person they might actually respect... except for that whole "quit Starfleet to become ambassador to Vulcan" thing.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... what I was trying to illustrate there is that really, any way you shake it, the biggest problem with trying to fit Discovery into Star Trek isn't anything to do with continuity. The biggest problem - and the reason Discovery can never be Star Trek - is that it's so fundamentally at odds with the ethics, morals, and values underpinning Gene Roddenberry's vision of a brighter future that every previous Star Trek work is built on that all we can do is marvel at how horrible it is. Instead of rebuking racism, sexism, and xenophobia, it practically puts them on pedistals and tries to make virtues of them. Even if we look at it as in-universe fiction, that's still grounds for a HUGE "What the f*ck?!". The problem is, the more you think about it, the more it becomes evident it's a "square peg, no hole" problem.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I'm not sure that's actually better... it might actually be worse. I mean, if we assume that Star Trek: Discovery was a work of in-universe fiction then we're left with the awkward question of when this was written and for whom. Never mind all of the blatant historical inaccuracies like technology that wouldn't be available for another hundred years or the Klingons launching an invasion that history says never happened, what about the story as a whole frankly oozing racism and xenophobia towards the Klingon Empire? Discovery not only gets most of the Klingon religion and culture wrong, it basically depicts the entire Klingon species as half-bestial cannibalistic thugs who cheerfully betray oaths at the drop of a hat. Then there's all the rampant misandry, the blatant disrespect towards one two of Starfleet's greatest heroes and one of the greatest Federation diplomats who ever lived, and Starfleet turning a blind eye to - or even rewarding - massive breaches of ethics like the indefinite detention and torture of a newly encountered lifeform to power an experimental stardrive or an attempted genocide on the Klingon homeworld. When would there have been an audience for this kind of thing, in-universe? Star Trek: Discovery would basically be an ultranationalist, xenophobic, sexist work of fiction. This is like a Federation version of the Turner Diaries. It only narrowly averts that course at the very end of the first season when Burnham has a change of heart about attempting to blow Qo'nos the f*ck up. Starfleet didn't tolerate racism, even towards the citizens of hostile powers, way back in 2266 during the height of the Klingon Cold War and the renewal of tensions with the Romulan Star Empire. Kirk himself snapped one young Lieutenant back for voicing racist sentiments about the Romulans way back then, and even Kirk's own sentiments about the Klingons in 2293 (Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country) were explicitly handled as values dissonance and grounds for repeated "what the hell, hero?" moments, with the only people who shared those views being the film's antagonists. It certainly wouldn't fly later on in the 24th century of Picard, Sisko, and Janeway. I'm sure Star Trek: Picard, which is from the same pack of cack-handed twits, will be freighted with all kinds of unfortunate implications... though they seem to have left fly with a few right off the bat like the indefinite detention and inhumane medical experiments on captured Borg, and so on, and Starfleet having essentially left the Romulans to die in the events which kicked off the Kelvin timeline.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's one reason that video piracy is on the rise again... now that every content creator is trying to launch their own dedicated streaming service, the streaming market's so fragmented that the cost to the consumer is growing exponentially. So many of these junk streaming services like CBS All Access, Disney+, and HBO Now are propped up by a single big-budget show that emphatically isn't worth the monthly subscription cost, but they're counting on devoted fans to prop up what would otherwise be an unsustainable business model. I tried CBS All Access, and found it so offensively bad in terms of service quality that I dropped it pretty much right away. With the current state of Star Trek as a new breed of mindless trash TV, I'm not sure I'll even bother to pirate Star Trek: Picard. The entire premise sounds f*cking awful, and it's building off material we already know is awful.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Will such a thing exist? The Amazon-owned media are already going hard and fast attacking Star Trek fans for not being keyed up about Star Trek: Picard. It's a similar version of the trick Disney tried with The Last Jedi, trying to brand critics as racists and sexists.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes and no. CBS got Netflix to fund production of Star Trek: Discovery in exchange for the exclusive rest-of-world distribution rights to the series. So Netflix carries the series practically everywhere except the United States, where it's only available through CBS's proprietary CBS All Access streaming service. Netflix's discontent with the sluggish viewership numbers of the series in overseas markets and CBS's own exaggerations of viewership and CBS All Access subscription numbers were a big part of what prompted Netflix to consider withdrawing from funding the series last year, and the reduced budget for season three. (CBS reportedly resorted to threatening to sue Netflix if it withdrew from funding the series, claiming that by backing out Netflix would be responsible for CBS's lost investment in developing the series.) CBS struck a similar deal with Amazon to get Star Trek: Picard funded. Amazon Prime carries it in most markets, but US customers have to have a CBS All Access subscription to view the series. Mind you, some feature content is missing in select markets. The "Short Treks" are apparently only available in select markets outside the US due to low interest (according to CBS).
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