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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.)
  3. 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.
  4. 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).
  5. 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.
  6. 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?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    ... poor Jim Carrey. He's going to throw out his back carrying this entire film.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Seems unlikely. Harmony Gold USA is a pathetically small-time outfit whose one and only "marketable" property is an incredibly obscure piece of 80's esoterica that was a commercial flop even when it was new. They are emphatically NOT trading on their credibility. What little they manage to do involves collaborating with washed-up companies that are slumming hard just to keep the lights on (e.g. Netter Digital, World Events Productions, Vicious Cycle Software), similarly forgettable small-time and "indie" operators who are desperate for work (e.g. Palladium Books, Lucky Chicken Games, Big Blue Bubble, Strange Machine Games, Academy Comics, Antarctic Press, etc.), bootleggers (e.g. MAAS Toys), rank amateurs (Creavision), and the rare actually-competent company that nevertheless can't do a good job due to budgetary or creative constraints (e.g. Tatsunoko Pro, DR MOVIE). If fiascos like the Robotech RPG Tactics scam didn't sink them, it's likely no amount of bad press will... short of discovering they're laundering money for terrorists or something.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Unsurprising, to say the least... esp. given that both sides in Vic Mignogna's lawsuits against Funimation have alleged that the corporate culture there was/is pretty awful. I've heard that since most anime voice acting is done on a low-paying, non-union basis, it's extremely competitive and hostile to newcomers. It makes you wonder how much money Harmony Gold paid for third-rate reporting like Den of Geek to plug this license change as a forerunner to exciting things for the coming-never live action movie.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Given recent announcements about Robotech moving back to Funimation, it'll presumably land on Funimation's in-house streaming service FunimationNow sooner or later. How so? Production wrapped on Harmony Gold's sh*tty Macross dub almost fifteen years ago. Vic's dismissal from Funimation's stable of voice actors after Sony HR's investigation of the many sexual harassment claims against him shouldn't have any bearing on Funimation's use (under license) of the Super Dimension Fortress Macross dub audio that Harmony Gold paid for back in 2005. Even in the unlikely event that Vic is entitled to residuals from the distribution of the dub, Funimation could easily demand that that money owed go immediately towards the significant ($176k+) sum Vic is going to end up owing Funimation as a result of their legal entitlement to recover court costs and attorney's fees from him under the terms of the TCPA. It's not like there's going to be a public outcry over Funimation not recasting and re-recording Vic's dialog from an obscure dub of Macross that was poorly regarded even when it was new. What little fuss there's been has been about the recasting of Broly in current and future Dragon Ball Z releases or the (discredited) claims from Vic's supporters that were echoed in Vic's lawsuits that false accusations were made out of professional jealousy.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    One of the biggest problems with the Terminator film franchise is that the titular evil killer robot has suffered some truly epic badass decay. The T-800 in the original was a hugely terrifying threat capable of invoking a horror genre experience because it was a veritable juggernaut... this implacable engine of murder that just wouldn't stop coming. Terminator 2: Judgement Day sucked most of the threat out of the Terminators by having domesticated one to serve as John Connor's new bodyguard, and subsequent films have all but completely completely neutered their ability to frighten because these resistance T-800s are always standing between the Connors and Skynet's shiniest new toy. All they can really do anymore is startle because they're no longer seemingly unstoppable killing machines after Sarah spent so much time proving they're eminently killable. Dark Fate is kind of the worst offender in a way, since a distraught Sarah Connor has spent her free time spawncamping Skynet's Terminator spawn points and apparently not one of them managed to survive an ambush by one pissed off suburban mother. It really sucks all of the menace out of them. They're less invincible engines of death and destruction and more a really REALLY aggressive door to door campaign. "Have you heard the good news of our AI lord and savior Legion?" Terminator desperately needs to do for the Terminators what Alien: Isolation did for the xenomorph... to get back to basics and remind itself and us all why the T-800 was literally the stuff of nightmares instead of just being a punchup between two people who can't act playing nice safe roles as emotionless robots.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I know I'll probably get tarred and feathered for saying it, but Alien* and Predator are right up there with Terminator in terms of being iconic 80's sci-fi/horror/action properties to wind up saddled with a raft of categorically unnecessary bad sequels that diminish an amazing original film. Terminator, sadly, was hit the hardest by the unnecessary sequel baseball bat... to the point that the last one had to resort to multiverse theory to explain the constant retcons. It was enough to keep me out of the theater when Dark Fate dropped. Sounds like a lot of people had that reaction after Rise of the Machines, Salvation, and Genesys, with Dark Fate apparently set to finish well in the red, kill any sequel plans, and probably trigger another do-over a few years down the road. * Yes, I know Alien actually came out in Autumn 1979, but it's close enough.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like someone stuck Sovereign-class warp nacelles onto the Shepherd-class CG model for the USS Gagarin from Star Trek: Discovery... and that mostly looked like someone had turned the Centaur-type CG model from DS9 upside-down. Starfleet designs got WEIRD after the Expanded Universe stuff started having Starfleet adopt quantum slipstream drives. Both of these are pretty freaking ugly, though.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Twenty episodes in, and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part V: Golden Wind is still a pretty wild ride. I feel like it's officially hit its first real speed bump with...
  17. Seto Kaiba
    No, the Macross Grasion was another Macross Two-Thirds-class1 ship owned and operated by Xaos like the Macross Elysion. Macross Grasion and Macross Megasion were both presumably used the same way Macross Elysion was, serving as the headquarters and mothership for a regional branch of Xaos's PMC division. Emigrant fleets were initially escorted by regular warships and Macross-class mass production ships (SDFNs), and later fleets used the larger Battle-class. 1. The class has no official name thus far, leaving Variable Fighter Master File's name for it as the only one yet offered. Similarly, the Aether and Hemera have only been given a class name in that same Master File, as the Enterprise-class.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    You're not wrong. Well, we've got about 52 days until we find out...
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Disney Star Wars just reeks of designed-by-committee. A lot of its creative problems in The Force Awakens are pretty obviously a result of trying to play it as safe as possible where the problems in The Last Jedi were overreactions to fan criticisms of The Force Awakens made by the same completely clueless think tank. Somehow, the idea of wanting Star Wars to head back to safe territory where nobody could conceivably screw it up and the idea of handing control over it back to Jar-Jar Abrams feels like Disney's working at cross-purposes here. I doubt anything leaked will make it into the final film... didn't Disney more or less admit the leaks were market research and the feedback they were getting was pretty awful?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, the same could've been said of George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry at a number of points in the history of their respective franchises... they succeeded despite themselves in a lot of ways, due to the production staff keeping them on a short leash. What was it Harrison Ford told George Lucas during late development of A New Hope? "George, you can type this sh*t, but you can't say it!" On that, I am undecided. I've never seen Game of Thrones... it's on my to-do list, but life keeps getting in the way, but it's unclear how much of the show's success was down to the strength of its source material and how much due to the contributions of Benioff and Weiss in distilling it down into a workable screenplay. Word going around was that Benioff and Weiss had been tapped to develop and direct a Star Wars movie trilogy set in the Old Republic. Say what you will about the quality of Game of Thrones's final season, but production design for the show was pretty amazing and intricate... which strikes me as the kind of thing Disney would want to do with a Star Wars storyline in the distant past of the setting. Star Wars has always been science fantasy, and going backwards from Phantom Menace's very Lord of the Rings-y sort of visual aesthetic would make the ornate fantasy aesthetic of Game of Thrones quite attractive (never mind that Game of Thrones made approximately all the money before it tanked in season 8). I think Disney was after more than just street cred, I think they wanted Game of Space Thrones.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Whether anything of value was lost remains to be seen... Either that, or Disney's execs were so desperate to generate some positivity about the Star Wars franchise in the news after the events of the last two years that they stretched the truth (or perhaps even changed their minds) about David Benioff and D.B. Weiss committing to direct a Star Wars trilogy. Let's face it, it's been a ROUGH two years for Star Wars. First there was the beating the brand took over EA's microtransaction-heavy Star Wars: Battlefront II and EA's idiot ball attempt to defend their terrible design choice that became Reddit's all-time most downvoted post. Then barely a month later they rolled out Star Wars: the Last Jedi and promptly to a massive beating from the Star Wars fanbase. Not even six months after that, Solo: a Star Wars Story came out and was promptly beaten into the ground to the point that 7th most expensive movie ever made was a box office flop that became the franchise's first legitimate commercial failure. Disney theme parks' new Star Wars land, Galaxy's Edge, opened to basically no fanfare and record low turnouts and met with harsh criticism for excessively high prices and lack of attractions apart from the cantina. It wouldn't be surprising if Disney were looking HARD to create some positive press. (They recently got some, via the preorder ticket sales, but after Game of Thrones S8's flop finale Benioff and Weiss's departure might count as good news as well.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    One legion of the Empire's ground troops was defeated by a crack Rebel assault force and a numerically superior force of pissed-off locals who also had the advantage of surprise... the size of a legion in Star Wars isn't specified, but if it's anywhere close to the Roman usage of the term he entrusted the defense of the all-important Endor shield generator complex to a force no larger than a single modern infantry brigade (~4,500 men) dispersed over a wide area. The actual force defending the shield generator, including the light armor support, was barely company-sized (~80-150 men) and so arrogantly assured of their own superiority they actually fell for Han Solo playing ding-dong-ditch at one point. (That's right kiddies, the Empire's armed forces are so incompetent their defenses can be breached without firing a shot by the favored tactic of your local UPS delivery man.) The actual fight was up in space, and even then the Rebellion's fleet had the Imperial Navy on an even footing or better before the shield generator went down and the attack on the Death Star II started in earnest.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    We don't have an absolute figure, only relative measures... but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3x as tough as the VF-25's conventional energy conversion armor. The defensive capabilities of the VF-25 Messiah's APS-25 Armored Pack are compared to two things: the armor of a New UN Spacy heavy cruiser and the YF-29. We don't really have a frame of reference for the cruiser, but the YF-29 is known to achieve better defensive ability than the VF-25 Armored Messiah by having twice the usual thickness of energy conversion armor running at twice the usual power. That'd generally suggest the Armored Pack is at most three times as strong as the VF-25's regular armor. (The one time Armored Pack defensive performance was objectively quantified - on the VF-1 in some VERY old tech materials - the Armored Pack's defensive ability was 1.667x as tough as the VF-1's own armor, leading to the VF-1 almost tripling its defensive ability when the pack was equipped.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Heh... ah well, not being a football fan I don't really have a stake in it either way. (One of my brothers is currently doing his DVM at OSU, so ours is a house divided.) Eh... while it does inarguably show a lack of imagination on Jar-Jar Abrams's part, it's more a case of even-less-subtle blind imitation because that aesthetic choice was actually made by George Lucas during the development of Star Wars: A New Hope. Modeling the Empire's aesthetics and organization on Nazi Germany was a quick and effective visual shorthand that made it immediately clear to the audience that the Empire was EVIL. The Imperial officer uniforms were modeled on those of the SS, their foot soldiers are called stormtroopers (what the SA were called), their control is handled through regional governors appointed directly by the head of state the same way Nazis ran Germany and captured territories, etc. The Nazi connection was already about as subtle as a half-brick to the head in the original trilogy, but J.J. Abrams went full ham with it in The Force Awakens. General Hux's speech and the venue for it were very VERY obviously modeled on the Nazi party's Nuremberg rallies. (Gihren's famous Sieg Zeon speech from the original Gundam and Emperor Charles's state funeral for Prince Clovis in Code Geass both borrowed this visual aesthetic to indicate the governments holding them were evil authoritarian states in a similar fashion.) Well, they are going to lose... it'll just be more humiliating than what happened to the Empire since instead of being taken down by a dedicated, highly organized, and well-trained rebel army with the support of dozens of planets and hardened by years and years of armed resistance against the Empire, the First Order is going to go down to a double handful of spacky twits and johnny-come-latelys because Disney's bottom line and Destiny say so even though they've demonstrated breathtaking levels of incompetence. Disney doesn't have the balls to end this new trilogy with a victory for the bad guys, so the Resistance will triumph and the New New Republic will be established... and because this trilogy is ironically a story about NOT learning from history, Disney'll launch an Expanded Universe storyline or five subverting THAT happy ending with the rise of ANOTHER neo-Imperial force. It's not even out of place... it's just badly done. Instead of being worked into the story, it was like Rose stopped the freaking film and walked sideways off the set while cameras were still rolling in order to give a forty-minute diatribe about the evils of the military industrial complex.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    What @DewPoint said... I'm pretty sure the reason Gundam fans so often side with the Char clone has an awful lot to do Gundam's writers march in lockstep with the franchise's tired formulae that stifle any protagonist character development by making them either a naive, introverted whiner with genetic godmode cheats (e.g. Amuro, Kamille, Judau, Banagher, or anyone in SEED) or a clinical psychopath all but incapable of feeling or understanding basic human emotion (e.g. Setsuna, Mikazuki, Heero, Io). In either event, they're usually just the boring invincible hero... which makes the villains oddly sympathetic since they get all the character development and have to fight the boring invincible hero without cheats. Star Wars fans identifying with the Galactic Empire or the First Order is much less explicable. Both the Empire and the First Order are literal faceless evil most of the time. Their troops are disposable anonymous masked grunts who unquestioningly commit acts of heinous villainy and excessive violence seemingly for no reason other than the jackbooted thugs in the upper ranks want to make sure they fill their monthly heinous villainy quotas even if what they're doing makes no strategic or political sense. Their leaders are also masked men, very obviously unstable masked mystic warrior monks who are so comically unsuited to leadership that their forces become substantially less effective whenever they happen to be around thanks to the interrelated problems of their unreasonable demands, their obsession with immediate results at any cost, their temper tantrums, and their knee-jerk tendency to murder whoever happened to be in charge during the temper tantrums they throw after not getting their way. The jackbooted functionaries in the middle are more or less the boss from the movie Office Space, except he's asking if you've finished murdering those children instead of filling out your TPS reports. There's nothing remotely likeable or relateable about them... which makes it really weird and slightly unsettling that so many Star Wars fans seem to prefer them over the protagonists. They're every bit the pack of literal space nazis that the Principality of Zeon are, and even more unsympathetic since they don't even really have a theoretically noble-sounding cause to pay lip service to while committing their atrocities. (Well, at least before this latest crop of even more hopelessly unlikeable protagonists anyway... fans aren't so much cheering for the First Order as they are cheering against the Resistance. Like how footballs fans here say "my favorite teams are Michigan and whoever's playing Ohio State".)
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