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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Very nearly.
  5. 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.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    's it just me, or are the delays increasing in duration as time goes on?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    This seems... how do you say... doomed to fail?
  8. 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.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    They passed the Point of No Return a long time ago with this sorry mess...
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't this almost literally the start of an episode of Red Dwarf? EDIT: Yup... S5E3 "Terrorform".
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Started Aho-Girl today, and it's been a good laugh thus far. It's got the same sort of manic energy I fondly remember from the Excel Saga anime.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that was certainly a thing that happened. Gekijouban Youjo Senki is a real trip. It feels a little scattered thanks to falling at kind of an awkward point in the story of the novels, but the story mercifully cuts some of the creepier moments (like the paedophile Russian government official who is obsessed with capturing Tanya) in favor of focusing on the Eastern Front and the introduction of Mary Sioux as Being X's new puppet in the Great War to try and force Tanya into a corner. The animation was generally excellent, barring one REALLY jarring moment of conspicuous CG where the 203rd's mages are briefly animated as fully 3D characters instead of 2D that's really awkwardly out of place. The action sequences were beautifully done all throughout the movie, and it REALLY drew a line under how massively overpowered Mary is thanks to having given in completely to Being X's brainwashing. The final dogfight between Tanya and Mary is a little hard to watch given how almost literally cutthroat its fighting was. There's even a fakeout ending where it looks like Tanya has finally secured her much-coveted rear echelon position after a dramatic speech about the horrors of total warfare... only for her crowing about her victory to be almost immediately shot down one jump cut later when she's informed she's being given command of a new combined arms unit.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I've just queued up the Youjo Senki movie on a lark... the series was good, albeit too short, so I've got high hopes for this one.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    NICE. Really, that there was a complete non sequitur posted in this thread by accident and we literally couldn't tell if it was relevant to the comic or not says all that needs to be said about the horrid quality and "throw everything at the wall to see what sticks" approach Titan took with its Robotech alterniverse story.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    So... I've started to work my way through my anime backlog now that the winter holidays are upon us. My first port of call was 2017's Saiyuki Reload BLAST. I have to admit I was pretty surprised to see the series was only twelve episodes. The first adaptation of Kazuya Minekura's manga (Gensomaden Saiyuki) had a fifty episode run, Saiyuki Reload got twenty-five, and Saiyuki Reload Gunlock got 26. Except for a few weird moments of low quality (one of which ended up in the OP!) the animation quality is pretty good and the voice actors playing the Sanzo party knocked it out of the park as usual. The self-aware humor gets a little old after a bit, thanks to Hakkai lampshading over and over how the yokai after the bounty on Sanzo seem to have all of two lines. The backgrounds are lavishly detailed with appropriate style given that the Sanzo party is close to India, and the character drama's as good as ever including a few really outstanding and slightly painful-to-watch moments. The one downside is that BLAST took three episodes for a flashback to the events of Saiyuki Gaiden... which feels unnecessary since the flashback was to the same events already flashed back to in the original Gensomaden Saiyuki series. All that's really changed, except for some color schemes, was that the full rape-y subtext of Li Touten and Nataku's relationship isn't glossed over this time around.
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