Seto Kaiba
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One of the bigger, more problematic plot holes in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek bastardization that will only get worse as time goes on is that Starfleet crossed the Godzilla Threshold more or less right off the bat for reasons unclear in Star Trek '09. Even the USS Kelvin, a ship constructed before the timeline diverged from the main Star Trek timeline, is absolutely colossal by the standards of the period. The Constitution-class was Starfleet's biggest, fastest, most advanced, most powerful starship class for almost half a century until the Excelsior-class was introduced in the 2280s. The USS Kelvin, according to the special features on the Star Trek '09 Blu-ray, is almost 60% larger than the Constitution-class and has not quite twice the crew of the USS Enterprise... and she's supposed to just be one of Starfleet's scoutships. The Kelvin is dwarfed in turn by the alternate universe Constitution-class, which is larger than a prime timeline Sovereign-class ship and is armed to a similarly heavy extent. Unless I missed something, it's only the Federation who benefitted from detailed scans of the 24th century Romulan mining ship (with Borg technology). That'd make the Enterprise a proper bloody dreadnought by the standards of the day. What possible threat can the other major powers in that part of the galaxy possibly pose when the Federation's rocking that future tech that puts them half a century or more ahead of the hostile powers in their neck of the woods? The Romulan ship from "Balance of Terror" wouldn't be much of a threat to the Enterprise-E. The only way to credibly threaten the Enterprise was to bring a ship from the late 24th century, then an even bigger and more advanced version of itself, and then an entire functioning armada of ships from a much more advanced (but extinct) civilization. You can't have every movie feature a new apocalyptic threat to the entire Federation, it loses most of its sting in consecutive uses like that. Who's left who can threaten them, unless they steal a plot from the Star Trek relaunch and have the Federation's enemies team up and form their space Warsaw Pact (the Typhon Pact) a century and a half early. Depending on which version of its development history you ascribe to, the Miranda-class is potentially over 130 years old...
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... and people wonder why Cycomi apparently dropped Macross the First. Mikimoto-sensei must be a Douglas Adams fan. Mr. Adams once opined "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
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I'm not sure where you're getting that, to be honest. Of the five new Starfleet starship designs that debuted in Star Trek: First Contact, the Sovereign-class is the only one described as having been redesigned in any way in response to the ongoing Borg threat after the Battle of Wolf 359. Even then, there's no description of the design changes being specifically anti-Borg countermeasures. It's just described as a general expansion of the ship's offensive and defensive systems. None of them were developed as warships, but rather as multi-mission explorers (Sovereign-class, Akira-class), utility transport ships (Saber-class), and border patrol ships (Akira-class, Norway-class, Steamrunner-class). None of them, save the multi-mission explorers, overlapped roles with other new classes like the Intrepid-class long-range exploration/survey ships. They were, instead, replacements for older models of ship used for border patrols and general duty like the Constellation-class, the Miranda-class, and Excelsior-class. They weren't built to fight the Borg or even redesigned to fight the Borg specifically. They were just shootier than previous generations of Starfleet ships because the Federation had more belligerent neighbors in the second half of the 24th century than it was used to having. Starfleet, as so many episodes and movies insist, are not soldiers (most of the time). They're explorers. Their ships are built to explore, for science and for diplomacy. That they're so heavily armed is just an acknowledgement of the reality that not everybody they meet is friendly (and that the Federation's philosophy of mutual cooperation is vastly superior to the Federation's rivals policies of conquest). That's why J.J.-Trek is such an affront to the Star Trek name. He tried to reinvent Star Trek to make Starfleet into the Federation Army so he could focus on ray gun battles, explosions, and lensflares... because diplomacy doesn't make for exciting action sequences full of special effects the way fights do.
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Ruse or not, it's still a massive plot problem caused by trying to write a Star Trek action story. The more action-ized Star Trek gets, the bigger and more glaring the plot holes become. That's why news of a fourth J.J.-Trek movie is so disappointing... they embody that very problem. The more action-ized Star Trek tries to be, the more they end up sacrificing its soul and its quality. Like the last few episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise, it was such a mess that the relaunch novels could only shake their heads and take cheap shots at it for the entertainment of fans. The Borg apparently didn't assimilate their time travel tech, it was given to them by a faction in the Temporal Cold War, and was apparently confiscated after they failed given that the Borg never used it again and had never used it before that point.
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So, I did some checking into this, and that statement seems to be based on the fan assumption that the Defiant was the only prototype built and not anything in the episodes cited. The only source I could actually find alleging the Defiant-class was actually put into production was an AOL Chat with Ron Moore from 1997, and I'm not sure how official that'd be considered given that it wasn't an official interview or anything. (Granted, Starfleet absolutely IS stupid enough to engage in No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup, but they have had moments of Reality Ensues where multiple prototypes of ships were acknowledged to be present and actively tested on, like the Vesta and Luna classes, the Yellowstone-class runabouts, the NX warp 5 testbeds, etc.) Was that ever in any doubt? The man himself complains to Worf about how wasted he was on the Enterprise-D just standing around in a transporter room waiting for something to break down, and he does things that'd make even Scotty's eyes cross... like turning an unviable prototype into one of the meanest ships in the fleet, and making a Cardassian space station's systems play nice with grafted-in Federation and Bajoran technology. (One has to wonder how Sisko, and not O'Brien, ended up posted to the Utopia Planitia yards on Mars.) Starfleet had the Borg cube essentially swinging wild for the entire time it took the Enterprise to warp all the way from the Romulan Neutral Zone. Depending on the writer, that's either most of a day or several days. So, I did some checking into this as well and while I distinctly remember hearing the Akira-class was designed to fight the Borg, I'd never heard it of any of the other original designs used in the film (e.g. the Sovereign-class, Steamrunner-class, Saber-class, and Norway-class). I wasn't able to turn up any statements to the effect that any of them had been built to be "Borg killers" in official material. Most of them lack any kind of official development history, but the ones that do have one mentioned in expanded universe material are weirdly consistent in being said to have been on the drawing board before Wolf 359, several (e.g. the Steamrunner, Saber, Akira) are implied or outright stated to have been developed as a response to the Federation's border conflict with the Cardassian Union as upgunned patrol and utility ships to police the Cardassian border. The closest I was able to find to a ship designed to fight the Borg (besides the Defiant) was a mention that the Sovereign-class was reworked while still on the drawing board to increase its combat performance after the Battle of Wolf 359 (but not specifically to make it an anti-Borg warship). TL;DR, the Defiant is basically the one and only time Starfleet set out to build a dedicated warship... their fleet is made up almost exclusively of (well-armed) exploration, patrol, and utility ships.
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Later incidents in the Dominion War proved that the Galaxy-class was more than the equal of practically any hostile warship. The USS Odyssey still massively outgunned the Jem'Hadar ships attacking it despite being outnumbered three to one, and would very likely have won that engagement without breaking a sweat if it'd had shields able to deflect phased polaron beam fire at the time. Starfleet's engineers plugged that hole in their defenses in short order... it's not a representative sample. Because the objective wasn't to defeat the Dominion fleet, it was to break through it and recapture Deep Space Nine. Sisko slowly fed his forces into the grinder trying to provoke the Cardassians into opening a hole in the Dominion formation he could fly through. Did they, though? Or are those other Defiant-class ships prototypes that Starfleet dug out of mothballs like the USS Defiant herself? Speaking as a design engineer, you usually don't build just one prototype if you can help it because every breakdown means losing test time and you're SOL if that one prototype breaks down. Something the scope of a Galaxy-class is so big and expensive that a single prototype is the only practical method, but the Defiant-class is pretty small and would be a lot easier to build multiples of to test (esp. if the ship were to be tested in live fire testing given its role as a warship). So far, the only enemy that's ever been acknowleged as prompting the Federation to consider a dedicated warship design was the Borg... and Starfleet backed away from that in favor of improving its tactics. As noted by First Contact's creators, Starfleet's main problem at Wolf 359 was trying to fight the Borg in orderly battle formations and standard maneuvers, allowing the Borg to make use of Picard's knowledge to turn the engagement into a shooting gallery. Starfleet had all but deadlocked the Borg by using the chaotic battle plan they used in First Contact until the Enterprise showed up and finished the job. Even century-old ships can still kick ass and take names if updated properly by Starfleet. Even in the noticeably more militant, xenophobic J.J.-Trek Federation, Starfleet's multi-mission explorers seem to be the shootiest things they've got, by dint of being able to redirect all that extra power from things like science labs and elaborate sensor arrays to weapons and shields, likely giving them an advantage over ships built without that kind of excess output in mind. The stupidly fanfic-y USS Vengeance wasn't a warship per se, she was an instrument of genocide... meant to launch a preemptive decapitation strike against the Klingon Empire using advanced weapons that could engage from beyond the range of any Klingon retaliation. It's basically Admiral Marcus's My First Death Star.
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Still psyched for this one. This is the first anime title I've seen make the jump to 3D that actually still looks good.
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Needing "more ships" isn't the same thing as needing "warships". It's seldom directly acknowledged, but one thing Star Trek has been pretty consistent about since its earliest days is that most of the ships Starfleet uses for missions of peaceful space exploration and diplomacy are so heavily armed and armored that they're equal or superior to the dedicated warships of the Federation's enemies in a stand-up fight. Every now and then, a new alien species of the week will note that the Starfleet ship visiting them is suspiciously well-armed for a ship on a mission of peaceful exploration. TNG made a lot of it implicitly, with almost every belligerent confrontation with a major hostile power (Romulans, Cardassians, etc.) involving the Enterprise up against two or more of the latest, best warships the hostile power in question has. Voyager hung a lampshade on it several times early on, with the Kazon considering the lightly armed (by Federation standards) science ship to be almost stupidly overpowered. Deep Space Nine had a moment during the Dominion War where the USS Defiant was stopped in its tracks by an almost century-old Excelsior-class ship (USS Lakota) that'd been upgraded with the latest Starfleet weapons updates... a purpose-built anti-Borg warship stonewalled by a eighty-year-old multi-mission explorer that had just come from the refitters that was nevertheless able to fight it on an even footing (and was actually winning until the Lakota's captain stood down). The only time Starfleet main line ships have ever been depicted as unequal to the task of handling enemy warships was Star Trek: Enterprise, before the NX-01 Enterprise was upgraded with phase cannons and photon(ic) torpedoes.
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Quidditch troopers? Nay, those are Adidas Troopers... Sith gopniks! Turns out Palpatine's actually Russian... we'll see him in the Death Star II's throne room, slav squatting, and he'll greet Rey with "You underestimate the power of the Dark Side, сука блять." Hey, a laser sword is a fine thing but some asses cry out for a cap. -
To be fair, the biggest shooting mistake is Abrams's presence (and involvement). Into Darkness's writers left Admiral Marcus holding onto the idiot ball with both hands, both feet, his teeth, and a rope made from his own intestines. He literally found the greatest, most destructive despot of the Eugenics Wars and decided "So what if he's smarter, stronger, faster, more durable, and a master manipulator? I'll defrost his *ss and force him to work for us developing weapons and espionage technology for our secret plan to start an interstellar war. After all, giving an unstable genius with a messiah complex and near-unlimited access to our resources reason to hold a massive grudge against me and the Federation can't possibly cause problems, right?" So yeah, Marcus WAS that dumb... and he'd somehow made it all the way to Admiral. We can only assume Starfleet gave him a really excellent nanny who kept him from running with scissors and eating too many crayons. That kind of insane writing is all over the J.J.-verse Star Trek stuff... like the Jellyfish (Spock's ship with the red matter) being "their fastest ship"... capable of a whopping Warp 8. Did they f*cking forget that practically every Starfleet ship to appear since 1987 could go faster than Warp 9? When has that ever happened, though? Today: "Hello IT have you tried turning it off and on again?" Star Trek: "Hello Engineering have you tried reconfiguring the primary power coupling?"
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This was probably the worst moment of "did not do research" in all of J.J.-Trek, IMO. James T. Kirk goes crawling around inside the (stupidly massive) matter/antimatter reaction chamber of the Enterprise's warp core. Never mind that the dilithium crystals that moderate the reaction are MIA, or that matter and antimatter injectors have tolerances measured in microns, warp cores get hot. Like, unreasonably hot. 2.5 million Kelvin hot during cold starts, and 2 TRILLION Kelvin at the reaction site. You're not gonna have time to worry about dying from radiation exposure, because just opening the reaction chamber hatch of a core that's not properly shut down will vaporize you and everything around you. Kirk is two feet from the plasma stream when he kicks the injectors back into alignment. The only way to recover Kirk's body from THAT would be with a vacuum pump... but fortunately for our hero, convection is so utterly out to lunch that he manages to not even get burned.
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Really, the USS Vengeance itself shows how low the standard of writing on J.J.-Trek is... and is a pretty damned strong argument against making a fourth J.J.-Trek movie. The USS Vengeance is an idea straight out of the very worst sh*t-tier fan fiction. She's a massively upscaled version of Starfleet's best class of starships (the Constitution-class), she's got an all-black paintjob (for maximum edginess), she's several times faster, more agile, more heavily armed, more heavily armored, she's got new weapons the Constitution-class didn't get, she's heavily automated so one character can run the entire ship, and she was built in super-secret by the Federation's super-secret elite intelligence agency for a super-secret mission. She's unbeatable in a one-on-one fight. All it's missing for maximum cringe is for its executive officer to be an anthropomorphized character from My Little Pony that's in love with its commanding officer, who uses Japanese honorifics in English conversation (fedora and katana optional). The design itself isn't bad... because it's just a 5/1 scale Connie... but everything to do with it in the story is eye-rollingly stupid. I'd heard the original plan for J.J.-Trek 4 (AKA Star Trek XIV) was set to be a time travel plot not entirely dissimilar to Star Trek IV, though featuring Kirk going back in time to meet his own father. Sadly, it's rather unlikely that George Kirk would give Jim a "the reason you suck" speech, so now we can only wait and see what kind of cringe awaits us.
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IIRC, doesn't Anson Mount kind of not get on with the current crop of Star Trek showrunners? I know he's said that he'd be open to discussing more involvement if it were someone else in charge, and he'd expressed frustration with the show's tendency to have shooting sessions run weeks over schedule. Granted, he was easily the best thing about Star Trek: Discovery's second season. The potential was always going to be squandered... because the inclusion of Captain Christopher Pike and the original USS Enterprise were a bait-and-switch band-aid meant to make the series appeal to Star Trek fans after season one failed to meet Netflix's expectations. (In hindsight, the showrunners probably wish Jason Isaacs hadn't shot off his mouth about it not needing Star Trek fans to succeed after season two fell so flat Netflix almost refused to fund season three at all and did refuse to fund Star Trek: Picard.) If anything, having the Enterprise show up and seeing what Discovery could have been just made Discovery look that much more substandard. Next to the USS Enterprise, its much better-looking uniforms, and its actually-likable characters, the USS Discovery looked like a hot mess and its crew like a bunch of unprofessional antisocial Starfleet rejects in cheap pajamas. The good stuff had to stay offscreen as much as possible or audiences would never be able to take Discovery's original content seriously. (Which just highlights that the real squandered potential was that Star Trek: Discovery didn't use those vastly superior TOS-like designs from the word go. How much easier would the Star Trek: Discovery series gone down with fans if it actually looked like classic Star Trek, albeit more cosmetically advanced?) There are two "Short Treks" and one or two episodes right at the start of Star Trek: Discovery season two that actually feel like real, honest-to-goodness Star Trek. Unfortunately, that doesn't last and the show quickly falls back into the stupidly grimdark nonsense of the previous season with a touch of Hideo Kojima-grade incomprehensible BS. Among casual viewers, I think it might've gone over a little better than the hilariously narmy schtick of Spock screaming in rage over Khan indirectly killing someone he didn't even like. Among Star Trek fans, I think the scene would still be poorly regarded because it's a very poor knockoff of one of the most iconic scenes in classic Star Trek. This kind of lazy writing is, unfortunately, a hallmark of J.J.-Trek and properties derived from it like Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard. Ironically, that's kind of how they tried to advertise the film... and the studio admits that it wasn't all that successful at getting attention that way. Khan has name recognition even outside the Star Trek fandom, thanks to Ricardo Montalban and the aforementioned iconic scenes from Star Trek II that even non-fans know from parodies and memes. You can't shortcut right into the action the way they wanted to if your villain is an unintroduced new character nobody's ever heard of before. You'd have to take time to actually introduce them, build them up as a threat, etc. Outside of the jokes about his name and his involvement in The Hobbit and Marvel movies, Cumberbatch isn't really much of a draw in film. He's just another mumbly Brit who's only entertaining when he's going full ham or engaging in Mr. Bean-esque rubber-faced buffoonery. That whole part of the film just wasn't thought out at all... from its connections to Section 31, to its alleged secret status despite Admiral Marcus keeping a model of it on his desk in Starfleet Headquarters, to the idea that the ship would be inconspicuous and impossible to trace back to the Federation despite being obvious at a glance it's a Federation ship that some edgelord painted black and carved a giant Starfleet delta into the saucer section of. It's all just silly.
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Eh... putting aside my dislike of Kingdom Hearts, I don't think Hikaru Utada is stylistically a good fit for Macross. Macross's music tends to be more uptempo, bouncy pop music with the occasional sad song thrown in. The obvious exceptions being Fire Bomber, which was uptempo rock music and the occasional ballad, and Sharon Apple's more experimental pop style that was achieved by having virtually every track be by a different artist. Hikaru Utada's style, or at least the parts of it I've been most exposed to, are almost exclusively slow, sad songs, most of which sound the same. Not really a great fit, in my opinion. That kind of cameo is also pretty expensive, and even well-funded anime productions are still running on a razor-thin margin. If they're going to do something like that, I'd rather see a collection of previous Macross vocalists collaborate on a show's opening, like what was done in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part IV: Diamond is Unbreakable with the UNITS version of Great Days.
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I know the feeling. I wasn't ready to believe it was actually Tesla's real design until I looked up the presentation and discovered it wasn't an elaborate prank. Entertainingly enough, it already doesn't live up to the Elongated Muskrat's promises... while bragging about how bulletproof it is, they managed to break its windows during the demo complete with a "oh my f*cking god" from the Muskrat himself. Quite a few auto engineers out here are talking about investigating whether we can buy Tesla a gift license to AutoCAD or 3DS MAX so they can design something that doesn't look like it's from a late 90's console video game.
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I'm sure this'll be a very unpopular opinion, but I think Quentin Tarantino is probably the single most overrated filmmaker in Hollywood. His school of filmmaking relies too much on style-over-substance minimalist storytelling freighted with over-the-top effects-heavy action sequences. It's something that demonstrably just doesn't work in Star Trek, as evidenced by the slow decline of Star Trek: Voyager's ratings as the series gradually shifted its focus to more action-heavy episodes, the decline of Star Trek's film franchise as First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis increasingly leaned on action sequences, the continued ratings slide of Star Trek: Enterprise, the first two J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot films barely breaking even, Star Trek: Beyond finishing well in the red, and Star Trek: Discovery falling flat with Star Trek fans. So we're left to wonder why Star Trek's producers are so determined to stick with an approach that demonstrably does not work... especially when fan projects are eating their lunch by showing that fans vastly prefer Star Trek that keeps to the spirit of the original. Isn't the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?
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"Dark" and "absurd" are exactly why Quentin Tarantino should never be allowed within five hundred yards of a Star Trek project. Both J.J-Trek and Star Trek: Discovery tried very hard to be "dark", and came off as pretty absurd in the process, but all that darkness accomplished at the end of the day was to leave the audience suspecting the writers and showrunners were a bit dim.
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Ford: Let's ruin an iconic brand with an ugly AF electric SUV. Tesla: HOLD. MY. BEER. Look at this f*cking thing. It looks like a graphical glitch in a twenty year old video game. It's like we found a glitch in The Matrix and the textures failed to load on a low-poly collision detection model.
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What Current Anime Are You Watching Version v4.0
Seto Kaiba replied to wolfx's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
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. -
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".
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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...
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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.
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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.
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Kill it with fire.