Seto Kaiba

Improvised ones, apparently... the "Federation Attack Fighter" design was originally presented in Deep Space Nine as a lightly armed civilian-use courier craft that the Maquis used as a raiding craft after being retrofitted with aftermarket weapons.

Oh, five'll get you twenty it's legal's doing. Max and Milia are featured prominently in Macross's sequels and spinoffs, and Harmony Gold doesn't want to do anything that might draw the attention of Big West's layers ever since the whole Big West v. Tatsunoko dustup they inadvertently triggered. That's why Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles got rid of every remaining Macross Saga character apart from Rick Hunter by either killing them or putting them on a bus as preparation for the Shadow Chronicles movie. Ah, I'm sure that was embarrassing as per the usual Robotech convention experience.

Seems a safe bet... declaring that a project is "on hiatus" has been the Robotech franchise's favorite way to announce cancellations for over a decade now. Still, what's the source? Did Harmony Gold announce that, or Titan Publishing? I know Diamond Comic Distributors has Robotech Remix remaining issues listed as cancelled these days. Then let us hope she fails miserably in that endeavor. A Robotech timeline bereft of both Dana and the collection of short bus seat-warmers that was the Army of the Southern Cross in the Robotech TV series is surely the Robotech franchise's best of all possible worlds.

Ah, yeah... it never made a ton of sense for the ō-yoroi armor designed for Science Fiction Sengoku Saga to be carried over into the very non-Japanese Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. Nothing worse for your health on the battlefield than wearing a great big sign that says "shoot me, I'm an officer". I guess Tatsunoko was just too damn proud of the admittedly rather stylish-for-the-time armor designs they'd made.

Nah, too western... this is anime, so you'll be boiled alive in the giant rice cooker. It's dead from a production standpoint... but they don't need to produce new shows to hold onto those trademarks that they're using to keep Macross out of the US. So I'm still gonna judge the crap out people who still buy their sh*t because they're directly financing Harmony Gold's legal effort to stop Macross's expansion into the global market.

We can expect the unexpected. Kawamori hates retreading old ground.

To be fair, the amount of content the VF-31 book copies from the VF-25 book is pretty well justified by the amount of hardware the VF-31 shares in common with the VF-25 in-universe.

That is such a little thing and yet makes such a huge improvement... Relics? My good chap, the oldest starship class in this shot hasn't even been in Starfleet service for forty years at the time of Star Trek: Picard's events in 2399. The Nebula-class ships spotted at the back of the formation are from the early 2360s, making the class around 37 years old given the oldest vessel of class's commission date. The Runabouts in the foreground are either the Danube-class that entered service in 2368 (31yo) or Yellowstone-class from a decade later (~21yo). The Intrepid, Sovereign, and Akira-class ships seen in this shot are less than thirty years old since their respective classes entered service in the early 2370s. Even the Galaxy-class would only be pushing forty at that point in time... the Enterprise-D would've been 37. Compare that to the service lives of previous mainstay Starfleet ship classes like the Saratoga or Excelsior, that were still pulling their weight a century and a half after being introduced.

... 2020 is a weird year. Who thought bringing this back was a good idea?

Why not just buy a copy? It's not hard to get on any of a dozen websites. My group is working on translating the Master File books, but it's slow going and we're not likely to get to the VF-31 book for years. (Admittedly we're also not very enthused for that particular volume either, as it's heavily derivative of the earlier VF-25 book.)

You won't find anything about that in there... lol All it brings to the table on that note is an unverifiable rumor from a character who spends the entire series jerking people around.

It's pretty inaccurate, all told... though some of its mistranslations can be awfully entertaining.

Monster Girl Doctor's second episode is up on Crunchyroll... missed that it got posted because the new app surprisingly doesn't seem to want to display it in my bookmarks. Still not over the fact that the lamia's name is, for all practical intents and purposes, "S. Nakes"... and the anime's opening isn't doing much to dissuade me from thinking the author of the light novel ran more than a cursory eye over Okayado's Daily Life with Monster Girls when they were writing this. Admittedly, this one is shaping up to be a lot less ecchi, and that would be a significant point in its favor. (I'll admit that the at-least moderate case of showing their work WRT albinism in snakes scored them a few points too.)

Your previous post on this topic was merged into the Newbie and Short Questions thread. (You have an answer waiting for you in there.)

Since this season's proving to be kinda weak, I've started some more old shows including KyoAni's Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. It's not quite what I was expecting, but in a good way. I was expecting something a bit more comedy-heavy, but this is more a surprisingly pure slice of life story. That kind of light and innocent story is right up my alley right now, given how stressful the world has gotten. I'm three episodes in and enjoying it immensely, though I'm a bit perplexed that Crunchyroll put the French dub as the default start position instead of the original Japanese audio. My weekly work watch parties are going smoothly in isolation too. My team's halfway through Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable and they all seem to be loving it. They want to tackle Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood once they finish Golden Wind.

They're strongly implied to be the descendants of a surviving group of Protoculture, but it's never stated outright.

It's a bit more accurate to how it's written in katakana (ゼントラーディ, Ze-n-to-raa-di). Admittedly, there have been several different official romanizations floating around for almost as long as Macross has been a thing, including Zentradi, Zentraadi, Zentrady, and the downright impossible to spell correctly Zjentohlauedy. Most people just write "Zentradi" because it's easiest.

Kinda, yeah... humanity has only colonized a few dozen planets, they don't have a very good grasp of terraforming yet, and they've only been at it for about half a century so far. It took almost five hundred years of space colonization for the Protoculture's internal schisms to boil over into a civil war.

Neither, in point of fact. I'm simply pointing out that there are specific reasons why some kinds of infringement are grudgingly tolerated or ignored by the Japanese IP owners while others end up the subject of litigation... and that those are the same reasons that people on these forums don't have any real issue with garage kits or doujinshi but are unwilling to support or condone bootlegging operations. You're trying to misrepresent these distinctions as arbitrary or hypocritical, and they're very clearly not. I'm also looking at this specifically from the Japanese perspective, as Big West is a Japanese company. The Japanese market is somewhat more tolerant of selling fan works than other markets in the west are, as long as it stays within certain limits. The reason Calibre Wings is catching richly-deserved flak from Big West is that they're operating well outside of those established limits. Calibre Wings didn't create the problem between Big West and HG, HG did... but this isn't related to that and you know it. This is Calibre Wings throwing a very public hissy fit because Big West either didn't respond to their proposal fast enough or said no, and forging ahead with a product anyway out of a sense of entitlement.

Probably not for a very long time. The galaxy is a really, mind-bogglingly massive place and humanity has only just started to explore and colonize it. It's sparsely populated enough that there's more than enough space for anyone who doesn't want to get along to be left alone, and it's likely to stay that way for thousands of years to come. Humanity's grasp of fold technology is improving, but it's not so good that it's easy to get across the galaxy. Their farthest-flung settlements are said to be about ten years away from Earth by space fold. That's a long damn trip to pick a fight. It's also true that there are a fair number of outside threats to provide incentive to maintain a united front as well... nobody wants to repeat what happened on Earth in 2010. We've seen or at least heard about various small civil war-type affairs like the isolated conflicts of the Second Unification War, Windermere IV's secession from the New UN Government, and Kaname Buccaneer's home planet of Divide being basically Planet Northern Ireland.

Sort of... in the sense that it actually already happened. The period of increasing anti-government sentiment that occasionally erupted into armed conflicts in the 2040s and ended in 2051 with the Latence group's attempted coup d'etat on Earth in Macross VF-X2 has been dubbed the "Second Unification War" in-universe in subsequent works. That conflict loosely mirrors the Protoculture's, with one side being in favor of more centralized government and one side being in favor of decentralizing governmental authority. Latence, the Earth-supremacist group inside the New UN Gov't and military, were instrumental in manipulating the military into suppressing pro-autonomy movements on emigrant planets by branding them as terrorists. They were exposed by the efforts of "rebel" groups like Black Rainbow and Vindirance, with the assistance of the VF-X Ravens and when Latence's coup attempt was foiled in 2051 the Second Unification War ended in a de facto victory for the pro-decentralization side.

Fan works like garage kits and doujinshi are an industry-wide phenomenon in Japan... these types of fan works only exist in Japan because the IP owners deliberately turn a blind eye to the fact that they are unauthorized works as long as their creators keep it small, discreet, and for petty cash profit at most. Your self-serving misrepresentation of my post aside, what I've outlined is simply the reality of the situation and how what Calibre Wings has done differs from what IP owners in Japan consider "permissible" or at least "ignorable" copyright violations. Regardless of how many people there are behind the Calibre Wings brand, two things put this outside that grey area that fan works like garage kits occupy: Calibre Scale Models is a company. This is For Profit. Even if the owner/operator is a fan, it's still a professional outfit making and selling unauthorized Macross goods. There's no way Big West wouldn't condemn that. To do otherwise would make it harder to defend their brand in court later on. Either way, it's still a criminal act and we shouldn't be promoting counterfeit goods here.

Oh, it's a safe bet they do... anything that could expose them to potential liability or make them a party to litigation against Calibre Wings is going to rustle their jimmies SEVERELY. Potentially... but it would be a far more defensible case than what it is currently, unless HG got involved over unauthorized use of the UN Spacy roundel.

Eh, I think that's more on you guys for failing to take into account the differences in scale and context involved... as well as whether or not the IP owner is OK with it. There's a world of difference between ultra-low volume amateur fanworks like doujinshi and garage kits and mass-produced, factory-made bootlegs. Fanworks like doujinshi or garage garage kits usually get an implicit pass from the IP owners because they're amateur fanworks made in extremely low quantities, with near-nonexistent profit margins, no marketing, and extremely limited (often single day) availability. People who make doujinshi or garage kits aren't doing it to get rich, they're barely making enough to cover the costs of the low-volume labor of love they produced. IP owners usually (but not always) give that kind of activity a pass on the grounds that nobody's making any real money on it, it encourages aspiring artists and model makers to hone their craft with an eye towards going pro, and in some cases it's been demonstrated to actually drive sales of legitimate product. Even then, there have been concerted efforts to legitimate that kind of thing with one-day licenses for events like Comiket. Bootleggers, by contrast, aren't in for the love of the game... they're specifically doing what they do to turn a significant profit and they're doing it on a rather different scale. These are nominal or actual professionals who set out to either copy an existing product with a specific goal of undercutting the legitimate product or are using an IP without permission to make a quick buck. They're not doing individual castings in their basement or running off a hundred thinbooks at their local FedEx Office, they're contracting factories in China to make their unauthorized products on a larger scale and intend to distribute them as widely as possible to make as much profit as they can from it. This kind of activity is explicitly and near-universally frowned upon by IP owners. That distinction is why there are plenty of members here who don't really have any issue with garage kits, but do take exception to bootlegs. It's all about intent and scale. That's why you see IP owners like Big West or Bandai/Sunrise turning a blind eye to things like character garage kits and doujinshi while pursuing toy and model kit bootleggers in court. Calibre Wings are professionals... their announcement of a Macross Zero F-14 was absolutely intended to misrepresent it as an official, licensed Macross product with a goal of making as much money on it as they could. This isn't one guy doing sculpts and resin castings in his basement or his flat's spare bedroom. This is a corporation that decided it was going to use a creator's intellectual property for profit without permission, and engaged the services of a factory to do so on a large scale. In all fairness, we don't actually know if that cancellation was prompted by legal issues or simply poor sales.

Several news articles from various sites have popped up in my newsfeeds over the last day or two alleging the same thing... that Amazon is dropping titles based on how much explicit content. The example title most of them used was the light novel series Isekai Maō to Shōkan Shōjo no Dorei Majutsu, which is admittedly not a good example of a marginal title given its massive quantities of fanservice. The third episode of Maō Gakuin no Futekigōsha went up on Crunchyroll a few hours ago, so I'm watching that right now. So far, the only thing that really makes Maō Gakuin no Futekigōsha stand out is its heavy use of Isekai tropes without actually being an Isekai story. Anos - and I am NEVER going to be able to take that name seriously - is a reincarnated protagonist who retained memories from his previous life, possesses immense magical power, and no matter what he does he ends up gaining status and power regardless of how many rules he breaks or who in power he offends. He's the standard Isekai protagonist in everything but the fact that he wasn't sent to another world. Admittedly, the fact that he has perfect recall of his past life has already started to make everyone's reluctance to believe he's the demon king reincarnated feel like it's arbitrary skepticism, and we're only three episodes in. All in all, I've revised my estimation of it up a bit in light of what appears to be the start of an actual plot thread worth following but it doesn't really feel like it's doing anything to stand out, y'know? The character design is very Mahōka Kōkō no Rettōsei and the plot feels like Ichiban Ushiro no Dai Maō.