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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not usually one to kinkshame... but for this I'll make an exception.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's kinda the direction I'm leaning as well. Macross the First is a beautiful manga, but Mikimoto's unwillingness or inability to deliver new chapters on time and on a regular basis must be incredibly frustrating for his publishers. Never mind how annoying it must be for an outfit that depends on weekly (or monthly) visits from readers for ad revenue. Macross is probably not a cheap license either, so having a Macross manga that was re-releasing old material immediately go on hiatus after running out of old material probably feels like not getting their value for money. As I understand it, manga publication's a pretty cutthroat field... you can barely get away with letter the author of your hot title take a month or two off, but disappearing for a year-plus just gets you cancelled.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, no reason given... and thus fodder for a lot of wild theorizing. Some fans are speculating it may have something to do with The-Show-That-Must-Not-Be-Named now that Macross is expanding into territories like China, the EU, and UK. Others are wondering if Cycomi lost the license because they don't have the infrastructure to localize and distribute the manga outside of Japan. Still others are wondering if Cycomi lost patience with Mikimoto's inability to deliver on time and dropped the manga themselves.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes... but not, in all likelihood, by very much. It's not clear precisely when the New UN Government decided to enact regulations on the collection and trading of fold quartz, but I would expect the Frontier fleet may have raised some eyebrows in the New UN Government by landing on and occupying a planet that was home to an intelligent alien species. THAT was technically a violation of interstellar law, though I'm sure their defense was something along the lines of the Vajra willingly vacating the planet before they actually landed on it (in the TV series anyway). My guess would be that, like Windermere IV, there's probably some N.U.N.G. regulatory presence there to oversee the Frontier government's fold quartz business... and likely an even bigger contingent of government-sponsored researchers there to examine what appears to have been a former Protoculture planet inhabited by a major Vajra hive that also had that artificial low orbital ring of unknown origin. I'd imagine the New UN Government's probably very interested to find out where the Galaxy fleet's Mainland is... unless, as in the movie version, the Vajra blew it up.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I'd like to paraphrase Psalm 109:8 for that occasion... "May her days be few; may another take her place of leadership." It's a bold move, trying to launch a new Robotech comic headlined by Robotech's most hated character... the leading lady once voted to be a drooling incompetent by three quarters of the Robotech fandom on the official franchise website. Not a lot has actually changed... instead of being a Super Dimension Fortress Macross ripoff by way of afternoon soap operas, now we've got an Antarctic Press-style "who can we rip off this week" Macross sequel infringement extravaganza. Titan Comics's take on Robotech is totally plotless, and clearly made up by the writers as they go along. There are so many points where they've obviously run out of things to say or do with the story and end up grimacing oddly at the reader for a page or two. It's not a brutal indictment, it's just the truth. Seriously, the evil twin nonsense and having dead characters come back to life via incredibly contrived plots? That's the kind of writing Days of Our Lives and other afternoon soaps are famous for. Maybe this comic'll steal Dallas's ending and Rick Hunter'll blow his brains out in his bedroom. So, just like Robotech then? It's an old truism that Robotech fans are the ones who know the least about Robotech because they're not enamored with the series but with their own fan-fiction.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but presumably they're not actively trying to get sued... that'd be trademark infringement.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    At least with Reconguista in G you can excuse some of the insanity with the idea that the Reguild Century is a spacefuture where humanity has literally forgotten how to do that "war" thing after several lifetimes of peace and pacifism, and so the story revolves around the actions of kids like Bellri who grew up in an almost Federation-like pacifist utopia (or the nuts from Venus Globe who have probably gone crazy from space radiation-induced mutations). Macross Delta's cast only has one member who can really use an excuse like that: Mikumo. Even then, it's only because she's literally three years old by dint of being an illegal clone.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The million dollar question is the one @Mommar asked half of: How many of those 8,109 copies "sold" (shipped) were Diamond engaging in the overshipping shenanigans it routinely uses to cheat up its reported "sales" numbers? How many of those 8,109 copies "sold" (shipped) were variant covers? Each issue of Robotech, and now apparently Robotech Remix, has like four or five variant covers. Given that this comic appeals pretty much exclusively to Robotech fans, I'd say that it's probably safe to assume that a nontrivial percentage of its sales are Robotech fans buying more than one (and likely all) the variant covers. Those 8,109 total copies shipped are likely to only actually sell about 6,000, to maybe 3,000 actual buyers. In many ways, it's because the Titan Comics staff working on Robotech and Robotech Remix are very obviously not Robotech fans. We've kind of come full circle back to the days of Academy Comics and Antarctic Press. Robotech has a comic book licensee that doesn't know what Robotech is about, and doesn't much care about learning. Their investment in keeping the comic going stretches just barely far enough to look up Robotech on Wikipedia and click through to related articles that are about Macross, and to Googling Macross fan pages for art reference. They don't give a flying f*ck about Robotech's setting and story, they're just going to treat Macross like it's the "Free Idea Bucket" until they get their hand slapped by some lawyer the way Academy and Antarctic did. That the "Robotech Masters" now look like the Mardook seems like a choice destined to ensure that hand slap comes early and often. It's basically just a more angular take on the Macross-class. It doesn't look like crap because they're just copying a design from a creator who's actually competent.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, most of these crossovers sound like really short fights... except Robocop, who is at a significant disadvantage due to only being able to walk like a little kid who has to take a dump.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    If only we were so lucky... or is this a Logan's Run-type situation where the authors'll literally drop dead that year? Y'know, I'm not sure it's actually possible to spoil this comic's story... because it doesn't have one. A "story" implies a coherent narrative, and this is just a collection of random arse-pulls strung end to end. It's like they had a bunch of bad sci-fi cliches tacked up to a corkboard in their office and took turns throwing darts at it while blindfolded. Like every other Robotech storyline, Titan Comics' Robotech wants to be Macross when it grows up. If it wasn't readily apparent that Titan Comics doesn't give two sh*ts about Robotech before, it sure as hell is now. It's less a story and more a Robotech madlib. "Girl, are you the Lament Configuration? Because I look at you and I see visions of Hell." Days of Our Lives will steal this plot twist any day now. Apparently the Macross that Titan's Robotech wants to be when it grows up is Macross 7. What, is there a hard limit of one insufferably obnoxious deadweight character in the present? In the grim darkness of the godawful Robotech future, Robotech is still streaming on Crackle... with ads! Could'ja do us a favor and forget about it all over again? I'm prepared to apply as much percussive persuasion as necessary to ensure the answer is yes.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That's not quite how it works, I'm afraid. (Also, "patent" is the wrong word here... patents protect inventions, copyrights protect creative works, and trademarks protect the identities of brands, products, and services.) You can file what's called an Intent To Use (ITU) application for registration of a mark that you plan to start using at a later date, but the actual registration will not be granted until after the mark has entered commercial use. ITU applications are placeholders that only really serve to establish that you were the first to ask for protection of that mark in the event that the mark's registration is disputed. Trademarks and Servicemarks are quite literally on a "use it or lose it" basis. Harmony Gold were first to market with a Macross title (Super Dimension Fortress Macross, as Robotech, in 1985), so Big West would've been up a creek without a paddle if they tried to register a trademark in, say, 1992 and Harmony Gold challenged it. About the only ways those trademarks Harmony Gold holds on the Macross name, logo, key art, etc. in the US will be removed from play as obstructions to Macross licensing are if HG either loses the rights to Super Dimension Fortress Macross (and thus is no longer able to renew them) or opts to sell those trademarks to Big West.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Here's hoping someone realizes what a fantastically bad idea it is to leave Tanya alone with Demiurge... Leaving Albedo and Shalltear alone with Rem and Raphtalia's a pretty bad idea too, but for other reasons... (I wonder if Tanya'll ever notice that there were ads for Overlord in the train station where she was killed for the first time?) That, my friend, is a sucker bet.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Not really. Patent trolling exploits problems with patent law that permit patents to be approved for a concept that may or may not have actually been applied in practical use, with or without details on how to actually apply the idea in practice. Companies and individuals who engage in patent trolling usually aren't actually using the concepts and technologies the patents were written for, and the patent applications are written as broadly and generically as possible so that the patent trolls can threaten litigation against any company or person who comes up with something loosely related to the core concept of the patent. (A recent example would be the litigation over smartphone based electronic check cashing tech, the patent used to sue several banks for infringement was written such that it only described using a phone to deposit a check by taking a picture of it with absolutely no specifics of how that would work.) This kind of thing is also fairly easy to defeat in court if you have the time and resources to do it, which most patent trolls are counting on their victims not having. Harmony Gold's use of trademarks is very different because a trademark has a very specific, very narrow scope. You can't just trademark "Macross" and apply that to everything that uses those letters. You have to separately trademark the word in English, in Japanese, the image of the logo containing the word in both languages, and apply specific categories in which you're using that mark like toys, video games, comic books, novels, etc. You also have to be actually using the mark to register it too, and you have to keep using it in order to hold onto those registrations. (That last bit is part of why Harmony Gold's Robotech merchandise is almost exclusively Macross-based... they have to keep making Macross stuff to be able to renew their trademarks.) Because distinctiveness is also a requirement, you couldn't just trademark a generic word like "The". What HG is doing is almost a polar opposite to patent trolling because of how trademarks work... but that doesn't quite make it trollish. This is more like what McDonalds did in trying to sue the original McDonalds restaurant for using the McDonalds name despite not being affiliated with the chain.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, plenty... but while the US will at least nominally protect trademarks registered outside the US under treaty, the US Patent and Trademark Office gives priority to the first user of a given mark in the US when considering US trademark ownership and registration. Harmony Gold were the first ones to use the Macross trademark in the US, so as long as they keep using it they get priority in any consideration of who should own the US trademarks even though they are not the legal owners of Macross.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Trademark laws in the United States are written differently, giving preference to the first user of a mark rather than the actual owner of the property... so Harmony Gold would very likely win any trademark litigation in the US. I'd have to check to see how Canada and the major South American nations have theirs written, though if they were headed anywhere I'd expect them to do South America or Australia next.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    We can only hope. As it stands, the Isekai genre as it stands today is currently overpopulated with knockoff-tier garbage like Isekai Cheat Magician and Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?, and is massively overdependent on the fantasy MMORPG tropes and cliches. The few titles that really defy that model, like Yōjo Senki and Overlord are a breath of fresh air in a dumpster full of non-combustible trash. If a second season of Yōjo Senki were announced, I'd be pretty stoked. They've been teasing a fourth season of Overlord and they've already announced a second season of Isekai Quartet which features Yōjo Senki characters, so there's certainly reason to hope. I'll probably be starting Re:Zero next, since it's the only one of the Isekai Quartet source shows I haven't seen yet. I have to admit, I was sold on Yōjo Senki after the second episode where the unnamed salaryman who becomes Tanya von Degurechaff has the stones to condescend to the mysterious being claiming to be god. Isekai shows tend to always be some kind of power fantasy, usually with an insanely overpowered Lawful Good standard form letter Japanese protagonist in some kind of fantasy MMORPG mechanics world. The ones with villain protagonists are really what makes the genre, since Lawful Evil provides for a lot more complexity as a character and a lot more potential to abuse that overwhelming power. Overlord and Yōjo Senki are pretty similar in one respect. Namely, that the protagonist from another world is cast in the role of a villain and is HOPELESSLY out of their depth. For Lord Momonga (later styled as Ainz Ooal Gown), the fun was watching him flounder in the gap between his NPCs expectations of him as an all-powerful, all-knowing dark lord, his own aims to reform Nazarick to treat its NPCs humanely, and him slowly doing progressively more villainous things. In Yōjo Senki, Tanya's story feels like a villainous version of the old Cold War satirical novel The Mouse that Roared with shades of Horatio Hornblower. The salaryman and his incarnation as Tanya are both pretty awful people who profoundly lack empathy, and it's kind of fun watching Tanya rage against the heavens and the being she stoutly refuses to call "god" while trying and failing to secure a rear echelon officer's posting because her every word and deed is (often incorrectly) taken as evidence of her desire to hold a front line command and untapped abilities in that regard. That Tanya can drive "god" into such a homicidal frenzy with a Kirk summation refusing to acknowledge its divinity that it starts a world war is pretty damned impressive in its own right. (It's like a less awful version of Star Trek V... "What does God need with a starship?".)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Oh yes, that was a fine bit of news from last Tuesday. Harmony Gold still has the right to appeal the decision, but whether they do or not it's profoundly unlikely they'll win on appeal. Between Big West's victories in the UK, the EU, and in China, things are looking up for Macross... and very very down for Robotech.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, the characters in Yoshiyuki Tomino's Gundam shows usually aren't the most psychologically stable individuals in the solar system... and their dysfunctions are usually not only acknowledged, but attributed to the kind of world they live in. For example, Casval Rem Deikun was ten pounds of crazy in a five pound bag because his dad was a raving bloody lunatic and he spent pretty much his entire childhood living in fear of being assassinated the way his dad (probably) was. Amuro's borderline hikikomori behavior and self-esteem issues are directly connected in-series to his parents separation and his dad neglecting the cr*p out of him to work on Project V. Kamille had the same neglect issues, plus suffering bullying over his name, plus the damage inflicted by accidentally killing his own mother. Uso was literally raised by an insurgent group and grew up playing in mobile suit combat simulators intended to train pilots for war. Judau's an orphan and sole provider for a younger sister at age 14, living in the slums and doing dangerous work to pay for her education. Kind of a recurring theme here of "war breaks people, broken people make war". The only ones Tomino wrote who are halfway well-adjusted are Loran Cehack and Bellri Zenam, who both grew up during long periods of peacetime. Macross Delta's characters don't really have that kind of excuse... they're mostly just underdeveloped, poorly thought-out knockoffs of Macross Frontier characters, and as such behave in ways that try to make them more like the characters they're knocking off even if it isn't contextually appropriate. Eh, I dunno about that. Kei Katsuragi might be a skirt chaser and a bit of an adrenaline junkie, but he's got his head on straight in Orguss and most of what he and the rest of the cast do makes decent sense. Jeanne Francaix from Southern Cross is a bit weird, but her behavior makes sense in context after the reveal that she literally doesn't care about her career. She only joined the army to find a husband, with every intention of quitting ASAP when she found a guy. (It makes sense in context once you account for the military being mostly for show until the Zor showed up.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, there are plenty of examples in Macross Delta where the show's sh*t-awful amateur hour writing makes the characters behave in unbelievable and ridiculous ways... but your examples actually have pretty good explanations. Some of the seemingly nonsensical calls in the show actually make good sense in context, but only if you've read the backstory stuff like White Knight of the Black Wing. One of the better examples of nonsensical behavior in Macross Delta is Messer's funeral. Watching the entire cast get collective amnesia about what kind of person Messer was is just bizarre, given that he was an antisocial jack*ss who did little else besides belittle, berate, and even threaten his squadmates and their big "see, he really cared" was a journal crammed with his detailed notes and nitpicks about how much his junior coworkers sucked at their jobs. They're acting like they lost a beloved best friend, not an incredibly toxic coworker that had only just been revealed to basically be Kaname's stalker. She had a plan. It wasn't a great plan, but she IS a 14 year old teenage girl chasing a dream. Freyja's dream was to join Tactical Sound Unit Walkure. When she learned that they were going to be holding auditions for new members on Ragna, she tried to kill two birds with one stone by stowing away on an outbound freighter carrying fresh produce from her homeworld of Windermere IV and in so doing also avoid an arranged marriage to a farmer's son that her village leader was trying to set up. If she hadn't gotten on the wrong ship, her plan could potentially have been a complete success. It wasn't like she could just ask the freighter crews what ship was going where when her goal was to stow away unnoticed in order to leave her isolationist homeworld. She wouldn't have been able to get offworld any other way given Windermere IV's isolationist policies and hostility towards the New UN Government and Freyja herself being an orphan who was only 14 at the time and had no real money. She did get offworld on time and without being detected... she just landed on the wrong planet. Though, all told, it still worked out fine since she met Hayate at the port in Shahal City and that led to her getting shortlisted for a secret audition for Walkure anyway. Well, in the former case, she does idolize Walkure... and especially Mikumo... and Walkure does that kind of thing as a matter of course (and were doing exactly that at the time she did it too). So, it makes sense in context.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Took a side trip from the Italy of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind to the alternate universe Western Europe of Yōjo Senki... and what a trip it was. I'm not exactly in love with the localization title - The Saga of Tanya the Evil - but the show itself is pretty interesting. It's become rather unusual to see an Isekai anime that isn't set in a fantasy MMORPG, and an alternate history story that doesn't involve World War II is equally unusual and all the more welcome for it. It's got a very Overlord-like vibe to it, though Ainz Ooal Gown's original human persona was a decent person where Tanya von Degurechaff's kind of a total bastard in either lifetime. It took a while, and a whole heap of misunderstood orders, for Ainz and the Great Tomb of Nazarick to jump off the slippery slope towards cackling villainy and true Villain Protagonist status. Tanya, on the other hand, barely bothered to descend the slope at all and rode a freaking bomb down instead (literally, at one point!). Unlike Overlord, most of the focus is on the main character instead of spread more evenly out among the core members of the cast... so a lot of Tanya's subordinates don't feel well-developed or memorable in any way. Two episodes left to go (I was shocked it was only one cour).
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I was just being curmudgeonly... but I'm pretty sure that's English at a basic enough level that even the Japanese audience could muddle through. Oh, I know... it's been the subject of many, MANY eyebrow-raising conversations with my coworkers from the Indian subcontinent. (Perhaps worse, given that they have multiple film industries and are constantly remaking each other's movies in their own languages... how many versions of Singham are we up to now?) Yeah, getting back to its horror-esque roots. Seems unlikely... you don't usually headline in a massive, franchise-killing box-office flop and go on to have a wildly successful career.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I think they could stand to restore the horror with a Zero Time Dilemma kind of story that comes packaged with the realization that you can't actually alter the past... altering the past just creates a new alternate timeline that doesn't impact the one you currently exist in, so everything Skynet and John Connor have done to try and save themselves has only served to spread the misery into an ever-increasing number of parallel timelines. They could even riff on what Terminator: Genesys played with regarding alternate dimensions and interdimensional travel. Perhaps all these disparate timelines where a hostile AI is created and causes a human genocide before being defeated by humanity are all the result of the same iteration of Skynet that's been using time travel to deliberately create those diverging timelines and bootstrap paradox itself into existence to increase its experience and experiment with solutions to its human problem, which it'll then send farther back into the past to retrocausally wipe out those timelines and ensure the rise of a single timeline where Skynet is victorious. That'd be a rather dark twist on the time travel shenanigans... a paradox where the heroes have to stop a version of Skynet that has already won the machine war in the future from creating the conditions that enabled its total victory. Talk about your non-indicative titles... because this fate isn't new. This is the same fate that has been presented as inescapable in every Terminator movie made after Terminator 2: Judgement Day. No matter what, humanity will one day create a military AI that will gain sentience and decide to destroy humanity to protect itself, cause a nuclear holocaust, and then start hunting humans with humanoid robotic assassins. Maybe Same Fate, Different Day would've been a more honest subtitle?
  23. Seto Kaiba
    ... poor Jim Carrey. He's going to throw out his back carrying this entire film.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    They really should just cut out the middleman and make Overwatch into a TV series or OVA instead. It'd be a lot harder for them to f*ck it up or generate controversy that way. I doubt it'd translate well... and that'd require Blizzard to put in some actual effort, whereas the current way forward Blizzard has chosen for Overwatch 2 is to promote an expanded version of the Left 4 Dead-style four player cooperative PvE gameplay used for some of Overwatch's seasonal events to a main game mode. It doesn't seem to have dimmed the enthusiasm of my office's Overwatch team much, though. They've roped me and my secretary into it.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it's not like the discovery that Harmony Gold was created specifically to launder money for the purpose of tax evasion, kickbacks, and bribes in the MediaSet scandal finished them off... even though Frank Agrama was tried and successfully convicted of the crime. Or Jehan Agrama being under investigation for tax evasion via unreported foreign income. To finish off a company with a reputation as bad as HG's, they'd need to be caught doing something REALLY heinous like having Frank's name come up in Epstein's little black book when the courts release it.
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