Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    12929

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing can crop out the dead-eyed horror on the face of the reader though.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, the best thing it's spawned are the various episodes of other anime series (or manga chapters) that parody it. Even Kaguya Wants to be Confessed To! got in on it, with an argument over the best way to make fried rice that ended with all of the judges being entertainingly wrong.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    What, you didn't enjoy seeing the Elysion dry-hump a reused Island-1?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    A fair amount of this is available in the artbooks that are fairly easy to get 'hold of... @sketchley and @Gubaba are both excellent resources with their own websites showcasing their translations, and I'll be launching a new site of my own collating all of my own work in the near future. Enough to get by, though my vocabulary is horribly lopsided. (I could probably get decent marks in a class on nuclear physics, but don't ask me to teach a philosophy class or direct a light opera...) One of the problems with fansubs is the generally iffy quality depending on which group and how fast they were working. Plenty of them mistranslate the rank system used by the Spacy, get names and terms wrong, etc. The worst I've ever seen was a very old Macross 7 fansub that insistently translated "Planet Dance" as "Perry Stands" for fairly half the show. Kawamori's attitude is more that each series is an island unto itself, joined by only a "broad strokes" shared history. Some Macross publications, especially manga and novels, take a somewhat firmer attitude towards continuity but not by THAT much. On occasion, he's explained this attitude as seeing each Macross animated feature as a dramatization of a "true" Macross history. Basically, "canon" is a dirty word to Macross's creators. (DYRL?'s official status within the main Macross continuity is that of an in-universe film released in 2031.) Nah, it varies depending on the version of the story. DYRL? is treated in-universe as being (mostly) a historical docu-drama that was done for propaganda purposes on top of entertainment, to underscore the reality of the ongoing and serious threat the Zentradi pose. (Since the New UN Forces hadn't encountered the Supervision Army, the Meltrandi became a stand-in for them.) In the main/ongoing broad strokes continuity described by Macross Plus, Macross 7, Macross Zero, Macross Frontier, and Macross Delta, the Protoculture's split appears to have been along political lines (in what feels like a vague cold war allegory) with the female Zentradi being the aforementioned "better pilot" designed for the Zentradi forces to handle the Queadluun-Rau. Macross II: Lovers Again's parallel world continuity takes DYRL? as the more accurate of the two versions, so in that version they have separate Zentradi and Meltrandi forces who were created by the separate gender-factions of the Protoculture. Kawamori and co. seem to like the DYRL? designs more than the TV ones, so the DYRL? designs for a lot of Zentradi hardware replaced the TV ones in future works, so the female Zentradi who appear in Macross 7 (which treats the TV series as the more accurate) use Meltrandi ship designs and uniforms despite being treated as basically Zentradi special forces. In the TV version, the Zentradi were created for proxy warfare before the Protoculture began using fold navigation on a large scale... for war against what, we don't know. In the DYRL? version, the Protoculture created their giant clone armies for war against each other after their society split up into a purely male one and purely female one. Trying to equate the DYRL? and TV versions to each other is kind of a lose cause... they're two radically different takes on the Protoculture and backstory. Well, yes and no. DYRL? doesn't mention any other internal conflict in the Protoculture's civilization, but the war between the men and women in that version is very different from the Protoculture's civil war/Stellar Republic dissolution conflict/schism war from the TV version. The TV version of events basically has two wars back to back, one being a civil war fought within the Protoculture's Stellar Republic along political lines that flared up as the Stellar Republic overexpanded across the galaxy that didn't really have any significant consequences for the Protoculture that we know of, and then the war with the Protodeviln wherein both sides banded together against the Supervision Army and 85% of the Protoculture population was wiped out.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure what the f*ck I just watched... what was in the office water cooler when they were writing Lost Universe? Terrorism and sectarian violence on a planet where the two different religious camps are divided over whether chicken costumes or waist-length wigs with horns are holier? Feels like the entire episode was an excuse for a "does this remind you of anything" moment with Canal rummaging around in Nina's top.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It's convenient, but the Battle-class also serves as a bridge/control center for the docked emigrant ship while they're docked and they can share each other's power sources and have their fold systems networked together. Battle Galaxy is simply elsewhere during the events of Macross Frontier, so we don't know if it normally stays docked to the Mainland or not.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Sort of... the ancient Protoculture created the Zentradi for proxy warfare, but they didn't (directly) create the Supervision Army. The female Zentradi were a relatively late creation in the midst of the Protoculture's civil war that preceded the conflict between the Protoculture and the Protodeviln, a response to the Queadluun-series battle suits exceeding the endurance and piloting abilities of the existing Zentradi soldiers. Rather than water the Queadluun-series down, they simply built a better grade of pilot to match the standout performance of the Queadluuns. The Supervision Army was created by the Protodeviln, using the Protoculture and Zentradi they captured, spiritia-drained, and brainwashed on the planets they captured. This was elaborated on in considerable depth in Macross 7, when the Protodeviln were accidentally released on the galaxy again and used the captured inhabitants of the Varauta system as soldiers after spiritia-draining and brainwashing them. You might want to go back and rewatch that scene with Misa, because that's not what she says. After the ancient Protoculture developed the cloning technology that enabled them to reproduce asexually and the schism between male and female in their society heated up to the point of unresolvable hostility, the men and women of the Protoculture created armies of giant clone soldiers in their own image to do their fighting for them. The Protoculture were miclones, and the Zentradi and Meltrandi were giant, purpose-engineered clone soldiers derived from the Protoculture's genetic code just as they were in the TV series. As in the TV series, the clone armies were forbidden to interfere with miclones and forbidden anything related to culture to prevent them from losing combat effectiveness thinking about things outside their role. With anyone able to order either side's clone army to stand down and the destruction escalating out of control, the surviving Protoculture fled their collapsing civilization and made the attempt to start over elsewhere in the galaxy as a mixed-gender society. Earth was one such location, though the Protoculture colony there had to flee the planet and bury their city as the conflict between the Zentradi and Meltrandi expanded into that region of the galaxy. (Macross II: Lovers Again strongly implies the Mardook are the descendants of a group of Protoculture who fled the collapse of their civilization and were forced into a nomadic fleet-based existence to avoid the ever-moving fronts of the war between the Zentradi and Meltrandi.) Well, parts of it... they were forbidden to possess anything related to culture, so their historical information is mostly related to dry facts, military history, and records of old standing orders like "Don't interfere with miclone planets" and "Culture is bad for Zentradi". Hard to say... the Protoculture had to rescind the Zentradi's prime directive to not interfere with the Protoculture in order for them to effectively fight the Supervision Army, and the damage to their civilization was so massive that attempts to reinstate the directive after the Protodeviln were sealed were ineffective. Some fleets might honor a properly authentic order from a Protoculture source, others might not. Rescinding that directive was the only way for the Zentradi forces to properly fight the Supervision Army, given that its soldiers were a mix of brainwashed Protoculture and Zentradi who had been captured by the Protodeviln. The Protoculture didn't intentionally let the Zentradi slip the leash, but their civilization took such a beating in the war against the Protodeviln and their Supervision Army that over 85% of their population was exterminated before the war was even a year old. Due to breakdowns in the chain of command caused by such massive loss of life, attempts by those remaining Protoculture to reinstate the Zentradi's prime directives were ineffective and eventually the Protoculture disappeared and the Zentradi were left to their own devices and continued following the last authenticated orders they had... search out and destroy the Supervision Army. The question is more one of whether anyone in the Protoculture population had sufficient authority to order the Zentradi or Meltrandi to stand down... which would be why they left instead of simply ordering the forces fighting near Earth to bugger off. It's not like Joe or Jane Average off the street can walk up to a four star general and ask him to kindly take his (or her) war elsewhere with every expectation of being obeyed. Oddly, it seems to have never occurred to the Protoculture to rob their clone soldiers of the will to fight via culture shock... except for the Mardook, who came up with a way to use songs as battle drugs to control the fighting instincts of the Zentradi and Meltrandi. How effective the command to leave miclones/Protoculture alone remains seems to vary fleet-to-fleet in either setting. Macross II's timeline has several good examples of fleets that actually DID respect those orders once they had a decent suspicion what they were dealing with, like the Leplendis fleet in Macross: Eternal Love Song, who initially chased a Zentradi main fleet into the Sol system but left after their surveys of Earth suggested the populace was Protoculture. The Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class mothership in the TV series is noted in Macross Chronicle to have had accommodations for Protoculture miclones... a 250 square kilometer parkland that recreates the conditions of the Protoculture homeworld, for one. The Macross was originally a Supervision Army ship in the TV series version, so probably... given that the Supervision Army was a mix of Protoculture and Zentradi who were captured, spiritia-drained, and brainwashed. The DYRL? version was a Meltrandi ship, and they were exclusively giants, so probably not.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Or that its dock is hidden like the ones on the underside of the City-class.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Elsewhere.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    That's the Agrama family, not HG itself... they are not interchangeable.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Ah... that's profoundly unlikely. You see, you're still working from a false assumption. Specifically, you're assuming that Harmony Gold is actually taking Robotech seriously as a business proposition. Like I said earlier, Robotech isn't Harmony Gold's main business. It's barely a side business, and if we're being fair it's treated more like a hobby the company occasionally indulges in to bring in some small amount of additional income... like knitting mittens and hats to sell on Etsy or something. While part of Robotech's failure can certainly be attributed to it just being an unworkable concept for various legal and creative reasons, there are quite a lot of failures in Robotech's history that are at least as much a product of Harmony Gold simply not taking Robotech seriously as a business venture. It was only ever something they did on the side to make a quick buck here and there. If they'd taken it as seriously as they did their rental properties, Robotech might've actually achieved some measure of success... but they cut every corner possible, cheaped out everywhere they could, and generally did an astonishingly lazy and half-assed job of it. So it failed, and continues to fail. Their rental properties, where they actually try to do a good job because that's the income which keeps the lights on, are at least reasonably well-regarded. The idea that "the way a person does one thing is the way they do everything" assumes that everyone does EVERYTHING seriously with their full effort... which just obviously isn't true. Not s'much... his age made him eligible for a pre-existing amnesty law intended to reduce overcrowding in Italy's prisons. It wasn't something specific to him. Now there's an interesting prospect... maybe they did it bad on purpose.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    ... given that several of your questions are literally answered by dialog right in the film itself - and not obscure dialog either, but important scenes - we're left to wonder if you really have seen the film. "Captured" is a strong word... that Max was still in the airlock with Milia after fighting to a draw was probably the furthest thing from the crew's minds when they folded away from Earth to avoid imminent obliteration at the hands of the Boddole Zer main fleet. ... no. Just no. And Minmay didn't "seduce" Boddole Zer either. Boddole Zer interrogated her and Kaifun and discovered, based on prior findings from captured cultural artifacts like the Minmay doll seen earlier in the movie, that she had the necessary knowledge base to interpret the cultural relic he had in his possession (the memory tablet with the sheet music for Do You Remember Love?) which he believed (again, based on the effects her songs had on his troops) that it could be used to defeat the Meltrandi. As seen on several occasions in Macross, that doesn't take very long. No. Boddole Zer's own dialog in the film contradicts your assertion. ... he thought he needed the lyrics because his expert - Minmay - told him the song was incomplete without them. He knew exactly where she was, because his troops were the ones who returned her to the Macross. There was literally nowhere else for her to go. He didn't want to unnerve the Meltrandi, he wanted to make them lose their will to fight just like the songs of Minmay had done to his own troops. *frustratedly gestures at Minmay* Rocket science this ain't... he literally talks about what he learned from Minmay in the film. He'd seen what Minmay's song did to the troops under his command who were exposed to a Minmay doll. Boddole Zer thought humans were a leftover enclave of Protoculture... that much is made very clear in the story. While the Zentradi have a "we have reserves" mentality for sure, even Boddole Zer's own crew protested the decision to open fire on tens of thousands of his own ships for a shot at destroying the Laplamiz mobile fortress... there's "acceptable losses" and there's "vaporizing a significant chunk of your own fleet needlessly". He probably could've gotten away with it a lot more readily in the TV series version where his fleet hadn't already taken such a heavy beating in the war, but even the Boddole Zer mobile fortress was in rough shape in the movie. You'd see a lot fewer if you paid attention.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    No, Robotech has NEVER made "serious" money... it was a commercial failure even in the 80's. What kept it alive was that it didn't have to be making serious money because it wasn't income Harmony Gold actually needed to keep the lights on. This is one of the misconceptions we keep comin' back to... people think Robotech is Harmony Gold's main business, and that the company lives or dies by its success or failure. Robotech is, at best, a side business that Harmony Gold dabbles in. It's more like a company hobby if we're being honest. It's not the company's main business. They're a rental property management company that owns apartment buildings and a theater in LA. It's not the company's secondary business either. The film distribution business the company used to be so involved in is now more or less a joke since it was mainly for the money laundering that Frank Agrama got convicted of in Italy years ago. They are not going to be in any danger of going out of business if Robotech stops turning its minimal profit. It accounts for only a small fraction of the company's annual income, and would not be much missed in their financial outlook if management decided to shelve it once and for all. If it were to go under, odds are management would barely notice... the most obvious change would be that there would be fewer people attending the staff meetings once Tommy, Steve, and Kevin were let go. It's not the company's financials that are the big issue, it's the Agrama family's... and believe me, the IRS and Italian court system are way ahead of you on that one. And no, their behavior does NOT stay on the legal side of questionable, which is why Frank got convicted of tax evasion and Jehan got busted for undisclosed foreign income on her taxes.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    On MacrossWorld? I'd hope so. I'm gonna have to second @treatment and ask if you've possibly considered watching the film? On Milia's ship... the one that attacked the Macross and which they both boarded during their dogfight. Boddole Zer straight up answers this question in the movie... Minmay told him the song was missing its lyrics, and he'd seen how effective Minmay's songs were at throwing a scare into his troops and how effective the song without the lyrics was. Because it was only ever an alliance of convenience... the surviving humans had the knowledge of culture to reassemble the music and lyrics into the completed song, which could be used as a weapon against the Meltrandi. When the Meltrandi arrived before the song was reassembled, he opted to destroy it so it couldn't be used against his own forces if it fell into the Meltrandi's hands. No, Minmay's song was what persuaded the Zentradi and Meltrandi on both sides - after the battle had already been underway for a while - to team up to take down Boddole Zer's mobile fortress after he wiped out tens of thousands of his own ships to get a shot on the Laplamiz mobile fortress. No, this is all fairly obvious in the film. It feels like you're basing this on reading a Wikipedia page or the summary on MAHQ.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Not quite. If there was truly no money to be had in keeping Robotech on life support, Harmony Gold's management would've pulled the plug on it. The problem is that there's so little money to be made from Robotech that - even at the decidedly unimpressive apex of the brand's popularity - the potential return on investment was too small for many companies to be interested at all and too small for many of the smaller companies to justify the expense of giving it their A-game. Quality costs money, so as the franchise slipped further, its licensees had to cut more and more corners to turn a profit. Eventually quality slipped to the point that products wouldn't sell at all and Harmony Gold would revoke the license and find the next smalltime sucker. Eventually we'll hopefully reach the point where there isn't enough money in Robotech for anyone to be interested, but for now the brand still turns enough of a profit for these little indie one-man operations and toy bootleggers to profit.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Ugh... Isekai Hell is dragging on and on. To be frank, Isekai Cheat Magician has actually become the high point of this onslaught of bland, samey, trash with ridiculous excuse plots... if only because the series is so blatantly and unapologetically half-assed that it feels like a work of accidental parody instead of the series story it's trying so hard (and failing) to put on airs of being. I'm not sure what part of it was the best for accidental hilarity. Perhaps the big bad being so crudely drawn that he looked like his beard was made of blue-silver soap foam, or the "royal treasures" that looked for all the world like item line art from a late 80's NES game manual, or maybe how the animation quality keeps spiraling through the f*cking floor so the utterly generic protagonist's face is left to wander idly around the front of his skull like an ill-fitting mask and other characters periodically forgetting to have little details like mouths or eyes. Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? has reached the point where the villains seem to make far more sense than the protagonist... actively rebelling against a game that seems set up to squash any kind of individuality or independence out of kids who were more or less abducted into the game by their (often abusive) overbearing parents. I know it claims to be a parody of the overused incest fanservice in harem anime and games, but it spends so much time playing it absolutely razor-straight that is isn't really a parody. I'm legitimately rooting for the group of kids who rebelled against their parents and stormed that dungeon themselves. They should do an epilogue where it shows that all these kids turned into Norman freaking Bates after being smothered by their mothers for so long. Lost Universe continues to be excellent, if a little odd. It definitely has a very similar vibe to Slayers, though after seven episodes I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been much sign of an actual story arc. I started Saiyuki Reload: Blast as well, which is so far pretty standard Gensomaden Saiyuki fare but for the fact that the Sanzo party has finally made it so far west that they've left the cosmopolitan parts of Shangri-La behind.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it was an in-joke either... after all, 4,795,122 (the actual number cited in the series) is such a weirdly precise figure that there may have been some hidden in-joke or reference there that we just aren't getting. Perhaps less so for an alien race whose mastery of cloning technology enabled them to duplicate individuals down to the level of creating identical copies complete with all the skills, training, and memories of the original in a matter of hours... and the factor in that these people had facilities for such en masse cloning that they could field a clone army somewhere on the order of almost 4 trillion fighting men (and women). Humanity leveraged this ancient knowledge and technology to provide personnel for the early emigrant fleets... duplicating individuals with vital skills and training to provide for the various essential roles emigrant fleets needed without access to adequate levels of trained personnel. It's been confirmed that the Protoculture admired and imitated the Vajra, to the extent that quite a bit of their tech may be reverse-engineered or copied from Vajra biotechnology. From the sound of it, the goal of creating the sub-Protoculture species was to essentially prepare habitable planets for future Protoculture colonization. There hasn't really been any indication of the New UN Government's emigrant fleets having to "tiptoe between Zentradi patrols". The nature of traveling by space fold means that a chance meeting between two fleets is like hitting a grain of sand with another grain of sand from across a football field... while blindfolded. You have to get stupidly unlucky for that to happen. (It has happened in both timelines, but it requires apocalyptic levels of bad luck.) That said, the New UN Government has - at least by the time of Macross Delta - acquired a healthy sense of caution regarding surviving Protoculture constructs and structures. The remnants of the Protoculture civilization that have survived the ravages of time into the modern era have a distressing habit of turning out to be ancient doomsday weapons or the containment facilities for ancient doomsday weapons the Protoculture felt were too dangerous to keep around with distressing frequency. That their immediate reaction to finding out what was buried on Windermere IV was to try to drop a dimensional warhead on it and wipe it off the face of the universe before it could end all life in the galaxy shows that, if nothing else, the NUNS staff officers are the Only Sane Men in Macross Delta. The ancient Protoculture themselves seem to have started to understand that the stupidly dangerous sh*t they were burying everywhere was, in fact, stupidly dangerous late in the collapse of their civilization. On Uroboros, they installed self-replicating biotechnological insectoid killing machines all over hell's half-acre to keep the lookey-loos out, and in their final settlements in the Brisingr Cluster they dumped the dangerous stuff into another dimension entirely. The closest we're likely to get is probably Macross 30, which includes a LOT of messing around in Protoculture ruins.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    So, yeah... business as usual.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Not sure how you're determining that it was way too many to destroy the planet's surface... most of the fleet was actively bombarding the planet for a couple minutes and they still didn't get everyone. It might've been overkill if they still had thermonuclear reaction weapons in their arsenal, but they were doing it the hard way with their standard beam cannon turrets and the heavy converging beam cannons of their medium-scale gunboats. Considering the scale of the Zentradi forces and the war they'd been fighting for the last 500,000 years, the only reason it looks like overkill is because humanity put up much less of a fight than the Zentradi were used to or expecting. To Boddole Zer and his senior commanders, it likely looked like an entirely reasonable level of response to contain and annihilate an enemy base. (Macross 7 put a bit of perspective on Boddole Zer's response to the situation, via Exsedol's instinctive fear of the Protodeviln and how the effects of culture shock on the Zentradi may have looked like the Supervision Army's mind control.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yes. They basically referenced every Robotech property they could except for Robotech Academy.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    They're from the failed Robotech 3000 series concept.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    They already did a subs-only release of Delta, the first Delta movie, and the two Frontier movies.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Seems unlikely, given that most English language anime localization is done in the US.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    This is what, the second time they've done that? It's more merciful than what they did to her in the old Sentinels material, where she went from borderline stalking "Rick" at and after his wedding to being a homewrecker preying on his subordinates. It looks like the goal was exactly what we thought it was from the word go... to write the Masters Saga and New Generation out of existence so they could pursue a Macross-derivative ongoing story.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    As far as a smartarse answer to the original question goes... the size of Boddole Zer's fleet just goes to show Minmay's much better than Helen of Troy, right?
×
×
  • Create New...