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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Oddly, that was actually answered... in part in The Phantom Menace, and more fully in Attack of the Clones. The Republic had been at peace for nearly a millennium by the time the Clone Wars started. It didn't have a centralized military force, and hadn't had one at any point in living memory. Obi-wan was being entirely literal when he told Luke the Jedi were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. The next best thing they had, as far as I can find, was a group that answered to the Republic's judiciary called the Judicials, who were basically the space highway patrol (one of their ships was the one that delivered Qui-Gon and Obi-wan to the Trade Federation ship in The Phantom Menace). Individual planets had militias or organized defense forces, but there was no military answering to the Senate directly. As Mace Windu put it, "You must realize there aren't enough Jedi to protect the Republic. We are keepers of the peace, not soldiers." Any port in a storm, right? Probably? A quick skim of the character summary for the guy who authorized the creation of the clone army tells me the Jedi Master responsible ("Sifo-Dyas") was apparently kicked out of the Jedi Counsel because he foresaw the war and argued vehemently for the creation of an army necessary to defend the Republic. (Then went AWOL and commissioned said army.) The Jedi Counsel probably saw that as "OK, *sshole had a point."
  2. Seto Kaiba
    All told, I think the oft-returned-to point about The Force Awakens is that it's an OK film on its own... until you notice that it's just J.J. Abrams trying to pass off a cosmetically overhauled SparkNotes version of A New Hope as an original movie. Its perceived quality is all borrowed gloss from the iconic original Star Wars trilogy, tarted up a bit with expensive CGI. I'm not sure if it'd be better or worse if you took the Star Wars title and associations away from it. Examining The Force Awakens's original elements on their own, it's painfully obvious how underdeveloped every part of it was. It's all flash and no substance, and if they hadn't spent so much money on VFX the whole affair would feel more like a Star Wars mockbuster than a legitimate installment in the franchise with its shoddy dollar store knockoff versions of the first trilogy's cast and factions. The Last Jedi was Disney's almost understandable overreaction to the entirely justified accusations that they'd tried to pass a ridiculously underthought sh*tty remake of A New Hope off as a new movie. They got royally reamed for their unoriginality, so they tried to mix it up as much as possible and subvert expectations... which blew up in their faces when they tried to make steak with the fandom's sacred cows. The Rise of Skywalker seems set to be a The Force Awakens style terribly underthought remake of Return of the Jedi, complete with imitation brand Luke (Rey, who is only marginally less unoriginal than the EU's Luuke Skywalker) and imitation brand Darth Vader (Kylo Ren) killing Palpatine off (again).
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, no... that's why the problem is the filmmakers who, like the makers of Terminator: Dark Fate and the Charlie's Angels reboot, prioritized inserting their personal political agenda into the Star Wars sequel trilogy over engaging with its audience and telling a compelling story. (I'm not saying films have to, or even should, be apolitical... but for f*ck's sake, if you're going to make a movie a vehicle for a political message at least try to do it with some subtlety and grace. As Star Trek demonstrates, you can work a blunt political message into a story so completely that nobody will even think to question it... but if you beat the audience and your story to death with it, it's not going to be well-received. You have to be a REALLY good filmmaker to attack your audience and have them thank you for it, and like it or not the Disney Star Wars staff are NOT good filmmakers.) That was what the trilogy that Rian Johnson, and later Benioff and Weiss, were supposed to head up was reportedly about... before their respective failures got them politely invited to leave.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I think the sentiment expressed was that they'd like to hear something besides complaints about the sequel trilogy, since that's about all that passes for discussion of them is people saying how much the new films suck. Phantom Menace was followed by a passable movie (Attack of the Clones) and then an actually pretty good movie (Revenge of the Sith), plus they had Ewan McGregor and Samuel L. Jackson. It was an upward trend. The sequel trilogy's kind of doing the opposite. It had a bad movie (The Force Awakens), a movie that Star Wars fans want to have the filmmakers crucified for (The Last Jedi) and which totally derailed the entire plot by killing the big bad a movie early without so much as a by-your-leave, and now we're looking down the barrel of a conclusion (Rise of Skywalker) that's been reworked so much in a futile bid to please everyone that it's all but guaranteed to please nobody and outrage the fans further. Star Wars might survive this, but it'll be one of those persistent vegitative state ethical quandries. Anyhoo, I'm rather excited to see Jar-Jar Abrams fly this one into the ground so hard it contravenes strategic arms limitation treaties. Esp. with the movie's politics hanging over its head like the Sword of Damocles, and similarly politicized cinema like Terminator: Dark Fate and Charlie's Angels flopping at the box office.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    No dice, he already promised not to destroy the Earth by flood. If even a tenth of the test screening leaks are true, this'll be the Star Wars franchise's Hindenburg.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I'm looking forward to the reactions from the Star Wars fans when the movie finally drops. It's not often you get an opportunity to see wailing and gnashing of teeth on a biblical scale, y'know?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    HG tried to "Macross-ize" Genesis Climber MOSPEADA with Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles... and it went over like a lead balloon. Let's see if trying to "Macross-ize" Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross goes any better for them, considering it's even less popular with Robotech fans than MOSPEADA was.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, that's also where the laughs basically become stale... because the series has exactly one joke from that point on: Kazuma's desire to avoid doing any actual work bites him in the arse.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    For the most part, it is... the FTC's not going to take 99.9999999% of complaints under consideration, they're going to go after the worst offenders and make an example of them. The algorithm's really not all that inscrutable... it's just that, like any other heuristics-based detection software, it takes a little while for its analysis criteria to stabilize as it grows its sample dataset. One of my favorite analogies for this kind of thing relates to autocorrect, likening it to a little elf living inside your phone who is very helpful but also quite drunk and needs some time to sober up. That's (mostly) unrelated. YouTube's started doing the same thing Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have recently started doing... identifying the hijacked, bot, and troll accounts on their services and removing them. In their case, I don't think it's so much the Russian troll farms and other malicious foreign actors so much as it is the pay-for-likes, pay-for-subs, and pay-for-views bot farms used to artificially inflate subscriber counts. Like the last few YouTube "crises", the content creators I've seen complaining about this are mainly the shills and gutter snipes trying to work their personal extreme political agendas into everything... the kind of people who would absolutely pay for subs to make themselves and their views seem more legitimate.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    One of the nicer things about this spate of Isekai light novel adaptations is that they're sticking fairly close to the source material... warts and all. I kinda hope the movie is where they stop with Konosuba... because that's about where Kazuma falls into character stasis and every bit of development he gets in any given volume is undone by the start of the next.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Looks more like E.T. in a wig.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not usually one to kinkshame... but for this I'll make an exception.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's kinda the direction I'm leaning as well. Macross the First is a beautiful manga, but Mikimoto's unwillingness or inability to deliver new chapters on time and on a regular basis must be incredibly frustrating for his publishers. Never mind how annoying it must be for an outfit that depends on weekly (or monthly) visits from readers for ad revenue. Macross is probably not a cheap license either, so having a Macross manga that was re-releasing old material immediately go on hiatus after running out of old material probably feels like not getting their value for money. As I understand it, manga publication's a pretty cutthroat field... you can barely get away with letter the author of your hot title take a month or two off, but disappearing for a year-plus just gets you cancelled.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, no reason given... and thus fodder for a lot of wild theorizing. Some fans are speculating it may have something to do with The-Show-That-Must-Not-Be-Named now that Macross is expanding into territories like China, the EU, and UK. Others are wondering if Cycomi lost the license because they don't have the infrastructure to localize and distribute the manga outside of Japan. Still others are wondering if Cycomi lost patience with Mikimoto's inability to deliver on time and dropped the manga themselves.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes... but not, in all likelihood, by very much. It's not clear precisely when the New UN Government decided to enact regulations on the collection and trading of fold quartz, but I would expect the Frontier fleet may have raised some eyebrows in the New UN Government by landing on and occupying a planet that was home to an intelligent alien species. THAT was technically a violation of interstellar law, though I'm sure their defense was something along the lines of the Vajra willingly vacating the planet before they actually landed on it (in the TV series anyway). My guess would be that, like Windermere IV, there's probably some N.U.N.G. regulatory presence there to oversee the Frontier government's fold quartz business... and likely an even bigger contingent of government-sponsored researchers there to examine what appears to have been a former Protoculture planet inhabited by a major Vajra hive that also had that artificial low orbital ring of unknown origin. I'd imagine the New UN Government's probably very interested to find out where the Galaxy fleet's Mainland is... unless, as in the movie version, the Vajra blew it up.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I'd like to paraphrase Psalm 109:8 for that occasion... "May her days be few; may another take her place of leadership." It's a bold move, trying to launch a new Robotech comic headlined by Robotech's most hated character... the leading lady once voted to be a drooling incompetent by three quarters of the Robotech fandom on the official franchise website. Not a lot has actually changed... instead of being a Super Dimension Fortress Macross ripoff by way of afternoon soap operas, now we've got an Antarctic Press-style "who can we rip off this week" Macross sequel infringement extravaganza. Titan Comics's take on Robotech is totally plotless, and clearly made up by the writers as they go along. There are so many points where they've obviously run out of things to say or do with the story and end up grimacing oddly at the reader for a page or two. It's not a brutal indictment, it's just the truth. Seriously, the evil twin nonsense and having dead characters come back to life via incredibly contrived plots? That's the kind of writing Days of Our Lives and other afternoon soaps are famous for. Maybe this comic'll steal Dallas's ending and Rick Hunter'll blow his brains out in his bedroom. So, just like Robotech then? It's an old truism that Robotech fans are the ones who know the least about Robotech because they're not enamored with the series but with their own fan-fiction.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but presumably they're not actively trying to get sued... that'd be trademark infringement.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    At least with Reconguista in G you can excuse some of the insanity with the idea that the Reguild Century is a spacefuture where humanity has literally forgotten how to do that "war" thing after several lifetimes of peace and pacifism, and so the story revolves around the actions of kids like Bellri who grew up in an almost Federation-like pacifist utopia (or the nuts from Venus Globe who have probably gone crazy from space radiation-induced mutations). Macross Delta's cast only has one member who can really use an excuse like that: Mikumo. Even then, it's only because she's literally three years old by dint of being an illegal clone.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The million dollar question is the one @Mommar asked half of: How many of those 8,109 copies "sold" (shipped) were Diamond engaging in the overshipping shenanigans it routinely uses to cheat up its reported "sales" numbers? How many of those 8,109 copies "sold" (shipped) were variant covers? Each issue of Robotech, and now apparently Robotech Remix, has like four or five variant covers. Given that this comic appeals pretty much exclusively to Robotech fans, I'd say that it's probably safe to assume that a nontrivial percentage of its sales are Robotech fans buying more than one (and likely all) the variant covers. Those 8,109 total copies shipped are likely to only actually sell about 6,000, to maybe 3,000 actual buyers. In many ways, it's because the Titan Comics staff working on Robotech and Robotech Remix are very obviously not Robotech fans. We've kind of come full circle back to the days of Academy Comics and Antarctic Press. Robotech has a comic book licensee that doesn't know what Robotech is about, and doesn't much care about learning. Their investment in keeping the comic going stretches just barely far enough to look up Robotech on Wikipedia and click through to related articles that are about Macross, and to Googling Macross fan pages for art reference. They don't give a flying f*ck about Robotech's setting and story, they're just going to treat Macross like it's the "Free Idea Bucket" until they get their hand slapped by some lawyer the way Academy and Antarctic did. That the "Robotech Masters" now look like the Mardook seems like a choice destined to ensure that hand slap comes early and often. It's basically just a more angular take on the Macross-class. It doesn't look like crap because they're just copying a design from a creator who's actually competent.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, most of these crossovers sound like really short fights... except Robocop, who is at a significant disadvantage due to only being able to walk like a little kid who has to take a dump.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    If only we were so lucky... or is this a Logan's Run-type situation where the authors'll literally drop dead that year? Y'know, I'm not sure it's actually possible to spoil this comic's story... because it doesn't have one. A "story" implies a coherent narrative, and this is just a collection of random arse-pulls strung end to end. It's like they had a bunch of bad sci-fi cliches tacked up to a corkboard in their office and took turns throwing darts at it while blindfolded. Like every other Robotech storyline, Titan Comics' Robotech wants to be Macross when it grows up. If it wasn't readily apparent that Titan Comics doesn't give two sh*ts about Robotech before, it sure as hell is now. It's less a story and more a Robotech madlib. "Girl, are you the Lament Configuration? Because I look at you and I see visions of Hell." Days of Our Lives will steal this plot twist any day now. Apparently the Macross that Titan's Robotech wants to be when it grows up is Macross 7. What, is there a hard limit of one insufferably obnoxious deadweight character in the present? In the grim darkness of the godawful Robotech future, Robotech is still streaming on Crackle... with ads! Could'ja do us a favor and forget about it all over again? I'm prepared to apply as much percussive persuasion as necessary to ensure the answer is yes.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That's not quite how it works, I'm afraid. (Also, "patent" is the wrong word here... patents protect inventions, copyrights protect creative works, and trademarks protect the identities of brands, products, and services.) You can file what's called an Intent To Use (ITU) application for registration of a mark that you plan to start using at a later date, but the actual registration will not be granted until after the mark has entered commercial use. ITU applications are placeholders that only really serve to establish that you were the first to ask for protection of that mark in the event that the mark's registration is disputed. Trademarks and Servicemarks are quite literally on a "use it or lose it" basis. Harmony Gold were first to market with a Macross title (Super Dimension Fortress Macross, as Robotech, in 1985), so Big West would've been up a creek without a paddle if they tried to register a trademark in, say, 1992 and Harmony Gold challenged it. About the only ways those trademarks Harmony Gold holds on the Macross name, logo, key art, etc. in the US will be removed from play as obstructions to Macross licensing are if HG either loses the rights to Super Dimension Fortress Macross (and thus is no longer able to renew them) or opts to sell those trademarks to Big West.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Here's hoping someone realizes what a fantastically bad idea it is to leave Tanya alone with Demiurge... Leaving Albedo and Shalltear alone with Rem and Raphtalia's a pretty bad idea too, but for other reasons... (I wonder if Tanya'll ever notice that there were ads for Overlord in the train station where she was killed for the first time?) That, my friend, is a sucker bet.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Not really. Patent trolling exploits problems with patent law that permit patents to be approved for a concept that may or may not have actually been applied in practical use, with or without details on how to actually apply the idea in practice. Companies and individuals who engage in patent trolling usually aren't actually using the concepts and technologies the patents were written for, and the patent applications are written as broadly and generically as possible so that the patent trolls can threaten litigation against any company or person who comes up with something loosely related to the core concept of the patent. (A recent example would be the litigation over smartphone based electronic check cashing tech, the patent used to sue several banks for infringement was written such that it only described using a phone to deposit a check by taking a picture of it with absolutely no specifics of how that would work.) This kind of thing is also fairly easy to defeat in court if you have the time and resources to do it, which most patent trolls are counting on their victims not having. Harmony Gold's use of trademarks is very different because a trademark has a very specific, very narrow scope. You can't just trademark "Macross" and apply that to everything that uses those letters. You have to separately trademark the word in English, in Japanese, the image of the logo containing the word in both languages, and apply specific categories in which you're using that mark like toys, video games, comic books, novels, etc. You also have to be actually using the mark to register it too, and you have to keep using it in order to hold onto those registrations. (That last bit is part of why Harmony Gold's Robotech merchandise is almost exclusively Macross-based... they have to keep making Macross stuff to be able to renew their trademarks.) Because distinctiveness is also a requirement, you couldn't just trademark a generic word like "The". What HG is doing is almost a polar opposite to patent trolling because of how trademarks work... but that doesn't quite make it trollish. This is more like what McDonalds did in trying to sue the original McDonalds restaurant for using the McDonalds name despite not being affiliated with the chain.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, plenty... but while the US will at least nominally protect trademarks registered outside the US under treaty, the US Patent and Trademark Office gives priority to the first user of a given mark in the US when considering US trademark ownership and registration. Harmony Gold were the first ones to use the Macross trademark in the US, so as long as they keep using it they get priority in any consideration of who should own the US trademarks even though they are not the legal owners of Macross.
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