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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Oh my, no... if this were Harmony Gold's idea of retaliating against Big West, that'd be absolutely f*cking hilarious. This is nothing more or less than the latest round of the Robotech streaming rights changing hands like the regifted fruitcake that license is. Harmony Gold goes through this every few years, when whatever streaming platform the show is currently on informs Harmony Gold that they don't intend renew their license because its average viewership and ad performance isn't meeting expectations. Harmony Gold cuts its asking price for the streaming license and shops it around until they find another service to carry it for a few years. Lather, rinse, and repeat. If nothing else, this is a pretty good indication of how desperate Harmony Gold has become in the face of increasing pressure from Big West and Macross. That Harmony Gold ended up back at FUNimation's door is some pretty hilarious karma, given that HG acted like they were too good for FUNimation back when FUNimation had the license to Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles a decade ago. Robotech was a D-list property whose owners made demands like the franchise was a AAA property, and that arrogance was part of what caused FUNimation to drop the license after a few years. Now Harmony Gold is crawling back to FUNimation after breaking up with garbage-tier streaming services like Crackle because nobody else will have them like a bad ex-girlfriend sending desperate texts at 3am. I bet FUNimation took them to the cleaners on the cost of the license. This is Robotech down on its knees, pleading with tears in its eyes that it's still relevant honest!
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Antarctic Press were the worst offenders, but far from the only ones... it was something that started early on and got progressively worse as time went on. Titan Comics is arguably the new worst offender, since they started at around Antarctic's level of blatant-ness with the rampant tracing, blatantly stealing designs from Halo and other franchises, and having allegedly stolen fanart then attempted to pass it off uncredited as their own work (according to the artist, anyway). Titan Comics seems to be acting on HG's desire to have Robotech regarded as "American Macross" the same way Star Blazers is "American Yamato" by Macross-izing everything.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... it's hard to argue that Southern Cross has much in the way of commercial potential when the series debuted during the mecha genre's heyday and still managed to get such poor ratings that the network airing it earmarked it for cancellation barely 1/3 of the way into its broadcast run and its main merchandising partner decided it wasn't worth producing merchandise for. Really, the fact that they got the rights for a song should've been Harmony Gold's first clue they'd bought a lemon. It'll be interesting to see if they try. My expectation is that they'll do the math and come to the same conclusion that Robotech's previous licensees did... insufficient expected ROI to be worth the effort. Toynami could, at least, keep costs down by basing its designs on existing Macross and MOSPEADA toys... but a Southern Cross toy would have to be engineered from scratch, which is much more expensive. To be honest, all that time was spent using the MOSPEADA designs because using Macross designs was off the table for various legal reasons and nobody liked the Southern Cross designs very much. It wasn't really a voluntary creative choice. That said, the Legioss was more or less made to be an imitation-brand VF-1 Valkyrie in Japan so it served the same purpose in Robotech as an adequately similar substitute for the fan-favorite VF-1. This is, of course, also the reason the Waltrip Robotech II: the Sentinels comics and the new Titan Comics Robotech series kept the VF-1s around instead of introducing the MOSPEADA designs. Comic books are legally merchandise, so since Harmony Gold could authorize the use of those designs in merchandise there was no compelling reason to swap the VF-1s out for another design. The legal restrictions that forced HG to use MOSPEADA designs in their animated sequels don't exist for comics due to the differences in their legal status. I doubt Robotech Remix's continued use of the VF-1 and Macross characters has anything to do with whatever Tatsunoko is cooking up for Genesis Breaker MOSPEADA 2083. Well, Harmony Gold and Carl Macek did put a LOT of time and effort into indoctrinating Robotech fans with the idea that Macek had taken three unpopular, unsuccessful, deeply flawed shows from Japan and "improved" them to make one allegedly-amazing series (Robotech). The reality, of course, being that Macek took a highly popular, highly successful series, a cult classic, and a flop and he edited them together into a series that got weak-to-middling ratings. Some Robotech fans just aren't willing or mentally able to cut ties with Robotech because they're convinced against all evidence and reason that Macross is somehow worse for not being a dark, gritty, war drama like they think Robotech is but it actually isn't. That's Robotech... cutting corners and infringing upon copyrights since 1985. That's a big part of why HG punted the old comics out of the universe entirely. There was so much blatant copyright infringement that flew under the radar back in the day but would absolutely get them sued if they did a reprint now.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    He's not. @TehPW was expressing confusion/annoyance that someone actually hit Like on one of his posts so his terrible karma went up fractionally. I don't doubt for one second he'd still be getting downvoted to hell if the upvote/downvote buttons were still enabled, since he does come here in what I can only characterize as a well-meaning but profoundly over-optimistic effort to keep people informed about an ongoing Robotech project as if we were likely to greet such a painfully bad comic with anything but derision, scorn, and a very slight touch of the same kind of compassionate pity one might feel for an animal that was beyond medical help and in desperate need of euthenasia. If anything, Robotech Remix really does prove that it's time to take Robotech out behind the shed and put it out of its misery in the manner of Old Yeller. The franchise has essentially given up on the idea that any part of it besides Macross is marketable, and in so doing has become the very thing it was always accused being: a terrible Macross fanfic.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    OK, so you just watched Phantom Blood. Yeah, that's a short arc but it's hard to get through because it's SO dense and only actually serves to set up Dio's origin story. The show gets much, MUCH better after that very short arc, so if you can bring yourself to simply push through it you'll get to the good parts fairly quick.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    By first season do you mean Phantom Blood or the combined Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    So, I started watching Jojo's Bizarre Adventure V: Golden Wind today... and boy is it weird. Feels a bit like a return to form after the slower, more upbeat start of Diamond is Unbreakable. Very little messing around, it's right into the action and we've had THREE Stand battles and one one-sided beatdown in the space of the first episode... Giorno vs. Koichi twice, Leaky-Eye Luca, and then Bruno. I have to say there's one thing that always takes me right out of any Jojo show... when our heroes are running around looking for the enemy Stand user and never once does anyone in the franchise say "ignore the normal people, look for someone dressed like a flamboyant moron". Koichi is legitimately surprised that Giorno is a Stand user, despite Giorno looking as out of place as a peacock in a penguin exhibit. Giorno is wearing a fuschia gakuran with gold trim and a basketball-sized heart-shaped keyhole cutout over his pecs. On the scale of 1-10 for conspicuous clothing, he's sitting comfortably at 5x10^8. Giorno's confusion at meeting someone else with powers like his is at least understandable, since Koichi's gakuran is a lot less ridiculous-looking than, say, Josuke's or Jotaro's. Bruno's the first other Stand user he's met who dresses like a Stand user... which is to say, like he got dressed that morning by mugging a runway model during a power outage in the middle of a particularly auteur fashion show. I guess beating Koichi down is a pretty good way for Giorno to introduce his Stand's power, since Koichi was always subject to The Worf Effect in Diamond is Unbreakable despite how many powerups his Echoes got.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, but it occurred on that half-sarcastic response of his from yesterday.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    For her, this is trading up... better dead than rewritten into an obsessed stalker-turned-homewrecking ho Jason and John Waltrip made her into in their Robotech II: the Sentinels comic run.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Not gonna lie, this series takes about 20 episodes to actually get moving on its actual plot. Basara's pretty frustrating throughout, but there's a pretty excellent case to be made for Mylene being the actual protagonist.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That was your first mistake. ノ・クオンメント。 A point of order, if I may... the "poorly redesigned Alpha" is, in actual fact, a "poorly de-designed" Alpha. The reason they called it a Vector Fighter was because the design is a reuse of one of the early drafts of the design that eventually became MOSPEADA's AFC-01 Legioss from fairly early in the show's development when it had the tentative title of Descent Soldier Vector. Titan Comics isn't the first one to go digging through the so-called "Imai Files" unearthed years ago by Roger Harkavy. Palladium Books did the same in the "UEEF Marines" sourcebook for their second edition Robotech RPG because they were fresh out of actual official material to adapt after just three and a half books. (The -and-a-half comes in with the New Generation sourcebook having been padded like a menstruating firehose because the mechanical designs had already been adapted in the core book.) It was pretty inevitable that Titan Comics was going to use as little of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross as they could get away with, given that the Robotech fanbase's un-favorite by a MASSIVE margin and all but the most blinkered and ignorant Robotech fans will often cheerfully admit Southern Cross's design works were hot garbage and that its characters were nothing to write home about either. This attempt to keep the Robotech story going is leaning almost exclusively on Macross, so it's not surprising they'd give as much of what remains a Macross facelift in the hopes that the fans would perhaps actually care about it. (Let's just say there's a reason Robotech's merchandising is pretty much exclusively Macross-based.) So, normal Robotech writing? While the rewriters failed to dumb the original three shows down to the level their intended target audience of the K-5s were at, the narration certainly didn't miss that mark... it's as bad as Metroid: Other M's, where the narration is a mixture of nonsense and stating the obvious. So, normal Robotech writing?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, it looks like they've thrown it out almost completely (one of the first good decisions they've made) in favor of making up their own story. Harmony Gold doesn't - and never did - have the rights to Super Dimension Century Orguss, so that's unlikely to occur... However, the plot of the Titan Comics Robotech series did have a vaguely Orguss-like plot with the SDF-1 being the instigator of a mostly-stable time loop that kept producing dystopian alternate realities (the various incarnations of Robotech), which culminated in those alternate realities invading the one the final loop iteration occurred in for various reasons. They seem to be carrying this multiverse nonsense forward into their Remix series, though they seem to have enough sense to not want to actually adapt Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and replaced the Zor/Masters with something that looks like DYRL Zentradi. This kind of multiverse crossover nonsense is the last refuge of the terminally bankrupt comic book writer... which is, at least, a sensible admission they know Southern Cross's story would get them cancelled.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Fate is just waifu fodder... like so much else that's coming out these days. The stories haven't been worth a damn since the original, and they've got like three good character designs so they're forever reusing the original Saber, Rin, and Sakura with slightly different builds and outfits.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    A local attorney, and through them, the local intellectual property office. They did the registrations the same way you'd do one in any foreign region... Retain the services of a attorney in the desired region whose practice specializes in intellectual property law, and have them file the appropriate paperwork on your behalf with the country's local intellectual property office. In China, that's be the China National Intellectual Property Administration in Beijing's Haidian district. It went much the same way when trademark papers were filed for Big West in the UK via the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (either the head office in Newport or the London satellite office) and for the trademark filing with the European Union Intellectual Property Office in any one of the 28 member nations (headquartered in Alicante, Alicante Province, Spain). Once it's approved and published, wait for someone to object within a set period. If nobody does, you're golden. If someone does, defend your registration in court. Big West registered, knowing full well HG would object, then beat them on the registration appeal hearing because the law was on their side.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    In a way, it's a perfect match for Robotech... both the Chinese government and the Robotech franchise have long histories of intellectual property theft. Kitz Concepts is, IIRC, an actual Hong Kong toy bootlegger that was making knockoff Macross merchandise even before Harmony Gold approached them with a dirt-cheap licensing offer. Their other resident actual bootlegger, MAAS Toys, was from the Philippines and mercifully went out of business a while back. Part of me suspects that Big West is going to China not just to grow the Macross brand, but to give themselves leverage to stop the Macross bootleggers there.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It became a thing there a few years back... HG was very proud of themselves for bringing Robotech to China. Macross had a presence there already, in part thanks to China's thriving bootleg market.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Man, Titan Comics busted into the Robotech franchise like the Terminator... "Come with me if you want to die." ... and a bunch of characters said "Yes, thank you for saving us from this hell". To be brutally frank, there is no power on this Earth that could validate Robotech's existence at this point... it's so utterly devoid of creative or commercial merit that the only reason the series didn't cease to exist almost thirty years ago was that it wasn't relevant to the bottom line of the company that owned it. @Knight26 isn't wrong to say that almost nobody here actually cares. The reason this comic has a thread here isn't because anyone's interested in it, this thread is an expression of that same voyeuristic impulse that causes people to slow down to gawp at a particularly nasty crash on their morning commute. Sure it can. Recent events involving many different corporations (e.g. Activision Blizzard) and China would make a profound argument to the contrary. Eh, whatever gets you off... just don't expect reactions besides a bemused sort of pity, mild disgust, or incredulous disdain.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Now, I'm no EMT, but I'm fairly certain that backing over a seriously injured patient lying in the road and killing them by crushing their skull with your ambulance's tires is well up there on the list of things EMTs aren't supposed to do. It wasn't even particularly necessary... Kira was already bleeding out from a fractured everything after Jotaro and Star Platinum got done with him, to the point that there were literal fountains of blood coming from his ruptured cranium at one point. Come to that, how much trouble is the ambulance driver gonna be in when the coroner does the autopsy and determines Kira's injuries look like he'd been hit by the ambulance going 160kph before getting run over?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I've officially finished Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable and I gotta say... it was kind of disappointing in the end. The climax of the series is five episodes long and manages to do almost nothing. Kira really does just become a low rent knockoff of Dio. It feels like they changed his hairstyle five episodes before the end because it would have been too bloody obvious that he's a knockoff of Dio if he went into the final fight not only wielding a time-based Stand ability but Dio's signature 'do from the climax of the Stardust Crusaders arc too. The two-parter where Killer Queen's new ability Bites the Dust is introduced is that one scene of Dio using The World to dick with Polnareff on the staircase stretched out into two entire episodes. After all that fuss and noise about a plan to use Bites the Dust to keep his identity secret, he gets caught monologuing in the middle of town and immediately gets beat up by Josuke. TBH, the worst part is that three episodes worth of final battle end with the big bad dying in an accident. Josuke didn't defeat him, and Jotaro roughed him up more in ten seconds of using Star Platinum: The World than Josuke AND Okuyasu managed to do in two entire episodes. Our heroes stand around remarking how incredibly determined their foe is... and then he's killed by Morioh's worst EMT team when they accidentally back over him in their econoline van. Josuke basically got robbed twice in the space of one episode, first by Jotaro breaking Killer Queen using Star Platinum: the World and then by an unnamed background character who actually got the kill without meaning to. When you factor in Hayato's contribution, Josuke is at best in fourth place in terms of heroic contributions to the fight in the finale of his own series. WTF! (Also, how did it never occur to anyone that, since Rohan Kishibe's Stand Heaven's Door can violate the laws of probability and the laws of physics, that he could almost certainly raise the dead just by writing on someone's book that they came back to life? The entire fight could've been over in one shot if Rohan'd been the one fighting since he could've just used the incredibly broken Heaven's Door to rob Kira of his ability to use his Stand or even kill him outright without him being able to fight back? When you think about it, Josuke was also probably fourth in terms of people whose Stands were useful for fighting Kira... behind Jotaro's Star Platinum being able to stop time, Rohan's broken as f*ck Heaven's Door, and Okuyasu's The Hand being able to erase people from existence in one hit.) My vote for best moment in the series goes to either Josuke beating the everloving stuffing out of Rohan in a literal blind rage, or Koichi's Echoes Act 3's conspicuous English of "Okay Masta! Let's kill da ho! Biiiiiiitch!". If I hadn't been watching the show with its original Japanese dialog, I'd never for a minute have beleived that was the original line.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Slow down, guys... it's a pointer not a riding crop. The riding crop is Sheryl's thing. No really, her microphone turns into one. My earnest hope is that, a few months down the road, this China announcement is mirrored by ones for the European Union as Big West is toppling HG's trademarks there as well.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Let's just say the public didn't get told anything the military wasn't ready to admit to... particularly about the military's involvement in developing the Sharon Apple AI, their plans to weaponize it, etc. The whole thing was a MASSIVE black eye for the New UN Forces. Macross Plus doesn't really hide the military's involvement in the incident... I mean, Marj got the AI chip that sent Sharon over the edge from them after all. She was basically a test case for the X-9's humanlike AI after all. Two contradictory ones, in fact... because Kawamori's never going to make it that easy, right? The first, a view held by Variable Fighter Master File and supported to some extent by Kawamori's remarks and some dialog in the Macross 7 series as well as the flashbacks in Macross Frontier, is that the UN Forces became the New UN Forces at the same time (April 2010) the UN Government was reestablished as the New UN Government after the First Space War ended. It was reorganized again in 2051 after Latence's failed coup d'etat, but kept the same name. The second, a view held by Macross R but technically contradicted by Macross Frontier's flashbacks to the mid-2040s, holds that the military was reorganized and became the New UN Forces after the Latence coup attempt in early 2051 (see Macross VF-X2). A lot of fans forget that the first actually mention of the "New UN" is in the Two Years After arc of the original SDF Macross series. Long story short, the emigrant governments and central New UN Government had very different ideas about how much autonomy the emigrant governments should have. There were two factions, one that wanted to concentrate more and more authority in the central government on Earth and one that wanted greater autonomy for the individual local governments. The Earth supremacist faction in the military eventually decided it wasn't enough to use the VF-X Special Forces to squash emigrant reform movements and resistance groups and tried to overthrow the central government itself. It didn't work out for them. Technically it's a metaseries since the narrative is split across multiple formats, but hey... analyzing the hell out of things is part of being a fan.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know from available documentation, Big West itself were the ones who lawyered up and fought for ownership of the trademarks in China. Presumably they believe (correctly) that China is a potential growth market for Macross, since China has been a growth market for anime in general. Big West has been fighting to take possession of the Macross trademarks in a number of different markets and winning due to trademark law in most of the world being written to favor the owner of a property rather than the first in-market user the way US trademark law is written..
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Shortly after her parents made her drink bleach in an attempt to be rid of her.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    But with so many people shrilling at Disney over various things in the new Star Wars movies, it's probably all just blurring together into a wall of angry white noise. It's easier for them to dismiss all complaints out of hand because the loudest are the ones saying stupid, sexist bullsh*t than try to wade through it all to see if anyone's making a good point. (That doesn't make their approach right, it just makes it less time consuming...)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Even companies that haven't, but are known to be associated (however peripherally) with dodgy behavior in China are taking flak right now. I can't see Big West doing anything as stupid as coming out in support of the Chinese government... that'd be PR suicide in Japan. It just feels like a less than opportune moment to go all-in on China when companies are currently taking a PR beating over ties to China regardless of whether or not they've voiced an opinion on China.
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