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Seto Kaiba

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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't this almost literally the start of an episode of Red Dwarf? EDIT: Yup... S5E3 "Terrorform".
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Really, seeing it all distilled into a handful of sentence fragments really throws the cr*p quality of the writing at Titan into sharp relief. When they're not just stealing ideas from existing franchises, they're throwing out random Days of our Lives-esque nonsense to fill pages.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    To kill it.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Just let it die. Kill it if you have to... goodness knows J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson tried.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Ouch... lol. Hey, we were working on making it better, by moving its engineering activities the f*ck out of Italy.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a29655638/fiat-chrysler-psa-peugeot-citroen-merger-cars/ Well, as of today, it looks like the merger is officially on between Fiat-Chrysler and Peugeot. We got the email statements from Mike Manley and John Elkann this morning, and it looks like Peugeot's Carlos Tavares is set to head up the combined company when the dust settles.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It was inevitable. Like most corporate think tanks, Disney's Star Wars brain trust is so afraid of how negative feedback will reflect on them personally in the eyes of their superiors that they pathologically overreact to the slightest criticisms while chasing an unachievable 100% approval rating. They were so preoccupied with trying to take every last piece of criticism they received for The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi on board that, in their minds, the project's goal invisibly shifted from making an engaging story to silencing their detractors. They tried to please everyone, so they pleased noone.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Solid and mostly united? I dunno... Star Wars fans already had a LOT to bicker about from the old Expanded Universe, and that was before the prequel trilogy came along and we got the first round of "RUINED FOREVER" complaining. (Not saying the complaining was necessarily even unreasonable, just that it occurred.) Woah... I admit I was expecting some negative reviews after the handpicked Hollywood yes-men audience had some dissenters who refused to rave about it, but I was unprepared for the savage beating it received from the top critics. Only 14 of the 37 to chime in so far had favorable opinions of the movie. Some of the criticisms that really stand out are things like "may it be the last episode of a saga that should've ended long ago.", "In its anxiety not to offend, it comes off more like fanfiction than the creation of actual professional filmmakers. A bot would be able to pull off a more surprising movie.", and "Rather than making a movie some people might love, Abrams tried to make a movie no one would hate, and as a result, you don't feel much of anything at all.".
  23. Seto Kaiba
    So, I did some digging into my own question during an especially dull teleconference with Turin... and the fuss about George Lucas having been "banned" from the premiere of Rise of Skywalker seems to be pure conjecture on the part of overworked YouTube hack brigade. George Lucas didn't attend the premiere of Rise of Skywalker, and it isn't clear if he was invited or not, but they've jumped headlong to the worst/most controversial possible conclusion as is their custom. Considering what George's previous "unfettered" story ideas were like... this can only be taken as one of the vanishingly rare good decisions Disney made in the development and production of what otherwise seems set to be a criminally bad travesty of a film. When half your handpicked Hollywood premiere audience of yes men can't bring themselves to effusively praise the film, you're in for a critical beating.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    So, in all likelihood, the leaks really were Disney market research and not the worst NDA enforcement job in human history. Delightful. Any truth to what Doomcock is shrilling about, about George Lucas supposedly not being allowed to attend the premiere?
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Good, bad, or ugly? My money's on "ugly".
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