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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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?
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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..
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Shortly after her parents made her drink bleach in an attempt to be rid of her.
  9. 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...)
  10. 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.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, he's said that... but the Macross franchise itself doesn't seem to take his stance entirely seriously. As I see it, it's equal parts Kawamori excusing his broad strokes approach to continuity, his get-out-of-jail-free card for questions about the implications certain Macross stories have, and a way to justify the inevitable zeerust as real world tech surpasses the alleged future tech in-series. Other creators working on Macross apparently either didn't get the memo or didn't care for its contents, because the artbooks, manga, novels, etc. tend to do a lot more with inter-series connections than Kawamori himself would. Some details dropped in later series opened some new and interesting avenues of theorizing about the docu-drama aspects though. For instance, a suspicion that the role of the SDF-1 Macross was played by the postwar SDFN-1 General Takeshi Hayase or one of the eleven other Macross-class mass produced ships, similar to how the Forrestal-class USS Ranger (CV-61) was used as a stand-in for the Enterprise-class USS Enterprise (CVN-65) in Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home. In other cases, we got explicit notes on what stand-ins were used like the Boddole Zer mobile fortress being played by a West Point-class macro training ship with a holographic skin applied to it and some perspective trickery employed to make it look far bigger than it actually was. Variable Fighter Master File actually makes mention of the in-universe Do You Remember Love? movie being a sequel to a previous work called Macross: The Booby Trap that was about the first part of the First Space War ending with the fold jump to Pluto. Macross II, I suspect, was an in-universe piece of speculative fiction popular in the mid-2040s, given that the music from it is apparently topping the charts in Macross 7. Macross Plus is more of an issue, since the events of the Sharon Apple incident were classified top secret. If it's anything like Macross Zero, they likely wouldn't have been declassified for at least 50 years (so ~2090).
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Great news, but it feels like bad timing considering companies are currently getting crucified in the court of public opinion over China...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    You're not wrong about it being political, but it really isn't exaggerated and it absolutely is a realistic depiction of the super-wealthy. Discussing it here would be rather difficult, however, because it's basically ripped straight from the last three years of headlines about a prominent, very polarizing, political figure and his family who are notorious for their stupidity and for saying exactly that kind of thing with monotonous regularity and without a trace of irony. Fortunately, the other super-rich who are stupid enough to say things like that in public like the Fords, Hiltons, Kardashians, etc. are generally dismissed as the drooling imbeciles they in fact are.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I've never paid much attention to actors outside of the roles they play... but this guy apparently flew so far under my radar the mole people are probably filing a formal complaint. Having not watched the Doomcock video yet, I didn't even realize he was an actor. I figured he was just another one of the usual Twitter guttersnipes or e-tabloid rag reviewers who've become the favored targets of the so-called "fandom menace" video bloggers. After reviewing his filmography, the last film he was in that I recall actually watching or being in any way interested in was back in 1997. The outrage-driven video bloggers of the "fandom menace" seem to be running out of steam and material. For a while there, Doomcock was so hard up for things to be cross about he was reporting on arguments he got into on Twitter. Nerdrotic's host is down to just three or four topics and vaguely sexist remarks keep creeping into his videos...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, the VB-6 Konig Monster's engines are in the back of its calves in Destroid mode. That part of the leg does technically end up as part of the bottom of the foot in Heavy GERWALK mode, so the VB-6 is technically kind of prancing around on the balls of its feet in Destroid mode like a Mortar Headd from Five Star Stories... (pictured: Hathuha Union Republics A-Toll Scritti reconnaissance MH.) The unmanned Neo Glaug version doesn't even have hands... the earlier, manned Variable Glaug version has three-fingered manipulator claws like the VA-3's. The main engines are up on its back there, but I believe the only nozzles in the legs are the ones on the backs of its ankles. Well, it is designated as one... albeit with the dual designation Variable Battle Pod. (Officially: VBP-1/VA-110)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    As I understand it, the Joker is occasionally aware that he's actually a comic book character. One could ask... is the Joker's medium-awareness a product of his insanity, or is the Joker insane because his medium-awareness comes with the knowledge that his past and the entire world he lives in really are multiple guess thanks to the increasingly frequent reboots, retcons, alternate universe stories, and crossover events that occur whenever sales start to slip on the comic. Was he driven irrevocably mad by the knowledge that his increasingly fragmented reality and the many contradictory versions of himself exist purely for the entertainment of beings with the power to warp his reality at will? (Seriously, this starts to sound downright Lovecraftian the more you think about it.) Eh... that wasn't exactly a great idea when Star Trek did it back in 1967. Really, I think the thing that makes this film is that it really isn't a comic book movie... it has the title of a comic book movie, but you could take that tenuous connection straight out of the film and virtually nothing would be changed by it.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, I don't even know who he is... just that Doomcock and co. seem to be reaching for ever-lower-hanging fruit lately, in what feels like an increasingly desperate attempt to keep the flames of outrage that propelled them to YouTube "stardom" going.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the Neo Glaug from 2000's Macross Plus: Game Edition and Variable Glaug from 2001's Macross M3 have no hands whatsoever and the same type of hub-based fingers-only hand that the VA-3 has respectively... The real standout answer to this question would be the SeiRan 99kou (Starstorm 99-Armor), which was set to be the protagonist mecha in Air Cavalry Chronicles before the format of the story changed from science fiction to fantasy... effectively making it an early version of the titular Guymelef from Escaflowne. The Starstorm's distinctive trait, besides wielding a katana, was that it had a variety of option packs that didn't so much add weaponry as convert the mecha into a completely different type of vehicle. There were normal FAST Packs that look and function just like Macross's, but there were also packs that converted the fighter into a high-speed boat, a heavily armored glider, and a much larger two-seater aircraft with more powerful engines and forward-swept wings. Kawamori briefly toyed with a similar idea to that last one in the early designs that became the VF-11 Thunderbolt, where the canards were instead the wings of the Alpha parts and there was a second cockpit where the rear-facing laser gun was that was the cockpit of the larger Beta parts. When the two linked up, they looked a bit like the VF-11D. He never incorporated that kind of gattai mecha design into Macross proper though he did get close with the Sound Boosters in Macross 7 and the Zentradi rebels had a gattai-capable unit that was a boss mecha in Macross M3... though its combiner was a giant version of a Nousjadeul-Ger battle suit. They do have sub-nozzles in the feet for precision lift control in GERWALK mode, though the thrust for lift is mainly from the thrust-vectoring bypass vent in the bay where the legs are normally stored.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Different strokes for different folks, I guess? Stardust Crusaders is a hell of a tough act to follow, so that may be coloring some people's impressions of Diamond is Unbreakable. It's still a great show, it just doesn't feel like quite the white-knuckled wild ride that Jotaro took us on. (Part of that might just be our boy Josuke actually has social skills, where Jotaro just wanted to get right to throwing hands.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, Kawamori's supervisory role has him working on or contributing to a lot of material that is officially considered to not be part of Macross's official setting. Variable Fighter Master File would be the highest profile recent example. Kawamori's a recurring contributor/supervisor on that series, but each book self-disclaims as not official Macross setting material. It's an interesting look, and there's no guarantee that things he's done as what-ifs or unrelated non-Macross projects won't eventually find their way into Macross in some form or other. Kawamori's c.1985 Advanced Valkyrie project is a great example of this in action. Advanced Valkyrie was a non-Macross project Kawamori was developing in partnership with Bandai, and after Bandai pulled out it started finding its way into Macross one piece at a time. Its story about a pair of competing variable fighter test teams in a design contest to select the next-generation main fighter developed into the story of Macross Plus. The VF-3000 design was brought into Macross pretty much as-is via Macross M3. Macross Chronicle brought other Advanced Valkyrie designs into the Macross official setting directly including the VF-X-10 and VF-X-11, the V-BR-2, VA-X-3, and VF-X-7 Ghost Valkyrie. Some of the designs in Kawamori's Advanced Valkyrie were further developed for another project called Air Cavalry Chronicles - the VF-X-10 becoming the III-C Baron Rouge - and then being imported into the Macross setting alongside original Air Cavalry Chronicles designs. The plot of Air Cavalry Chronicles split off and became The Vision of Escaflowne, while most of its mechanical designs were imported into Macross: the III-C Baron Rouge became the VF-9A Cutlass, the A-9B Invader became the VA-3 Invader, the LV-7 Valorous Rapier became the SV-154 Svard, the Me-175 MesserGern became the VF-14 Vampire, the Fz-109 Elgersoln and Pazersoln became the... Fz-109 Elgersoln and Panzersoln, the Fz-109G Sturmsoln became the VF-14 Spiritia Dreaming Type, and the Fz-109Q Varutasoln became the FBz-99 Saubergern. One thing you can say about Kawamori, he seldom throws a design away. The SW-XAII seems to have developed into the YF-29 Durandal, but it's not outside the realm of possibility he'll one day find a way to include the SW-XA1 in the official setting. (For a friend's Macross MUSH, I actually brought the SW-XA1 in as an enhanced version of the VF-1X+ that'd been brought up to 3rd Generation tech standards as an improvised main VF for players on the anti-government faction.) Yeah, a lot of what the SW-XA1 had has already been incorporated into current VFs... the passively stealthy designs and conformal bays in the legs were already present on the VF-11, VF-14, VF-17, VF-19, and VF-22 when the article came out, and are also present on the VF-31.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The 2016 Ghostbusters movie, which relied heavily on the same "accuse its critics of racism and/or sexism" strategy Star Trek: Discovery currently uses to deter legitimate criticism... but with even less success, finishing somewhere between $75 million and $125 million (US) in the red. Speaking of Discovery's failures, I've heard that the second season of Short Treks has apparently had difficulty gaining a foothold in markets outside the US. Apparently a number of its intended markets opted not to carry it due to insufficient demand. I'm rather surprised that CBS managed to convince Netflix to open its wallet for a third season of Discovery given its lackluster performance as a streaming series and accusations CBS's admission of massively overstating its viewership numbers on its own service to its stockholders (which is a crime, btw). Also newsworthy, I suppose, is that the first round of Anas Abdin's lawsuit against CBS ended a bit ago... the court found in CBS's favor, so they're appealing. The guy from Nerdrotic apparently set up a GoFundMe to help Anas with legal fees for the appeal.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek became a bit self-aware about that after a while. The Star Trek Relaunch novel-verse even established that there was a bit of a superstition about ships named Enterprise being unlucky in the Federation's early years after the original NX-01 Enterprise was wrecked in the Earth-Romulan War and an Andorian ship in the newly established Federation Starfleet whose name translated as Enterprise was later lost with all hands as collateral damage in a brief Klingon civil war. Admiral Archer shut down any attempts to name another ship Enterprise for eighty years until finally relenting and approving a new Constitution-class ship to receive the name (and promptly dying the day after the new ship's christening). Unless you wanna count Ashes of Eden, where she got blown up in battle before she could meet her intended fate of... being fully decommissioned and blown up as a drone ship in a live fire exercise. Missing, presumed destroyed, in 2329 near the Cardassian border.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... I don't currently have either on that list. Truth be told, I hadn't considered their placement at all since the VF-Experiment article that Kawamori did for Character Model magazine was more or less a "what would the VF-1 look like if you designed it today". There is a little bit of setting-related backstory to them but, because they were both non-official setting material and a "what if" exercise, I'd left them off the list. They'd be non-official works category for sure, 3rd Generation experimental airframes based on the limited non-official setting descriptions they're given. As described, the Stealth Wing X program's goals were mostly the same as Project Super Nova's... develop a new, highly stealthy, multirole variable fighter with performance exceeding the VF-17's to cover the air superiority and interceptor roles the VF-17's attack focus made it unsuitable for. The Stealth Wing X program used VF-1s as the basis for its experimental airframes, built up with newer, stronger materials and improved systems. The timeframe is somewhat problematic, since it would've kicked off around the time Project Super Nova was getting ready to take delivery of the first YF-19 and YF-21 prototypes and been redundant in terms of its design goals. The closest I've seen to an official acknowledgement of the Schneegans is in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah... there's a YF-29 in there that's done up with this same paint scheme, as an apparent nod to the YF-29 design's origins.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I'm about two-thirds of the way through Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, and I can't quite shake the feeling that the fourth chapter of Jojo can't decide what it wants to be. Josuke really feels like a low-rent but more personable knockoff of Jotaro, but the season feels pretty unfocused. The first half didn't really have an overarching plot or antagonist... it was one part "hijinks in Morioh" with Josuke and his friends and one part "new Stand using jerk of the week" like a low-stakes version of Stardust Crusaders. It feels more focused now that it has an arc villain in Stand-using serial killer Kira Yoshikage, but at the same time it feels more derivative of Stardust Crusaders than ever. Kira's even starting to look a bit like Dio, with his new face and hairdo (and his Stand Killer Queen already looked like The World by way of Beerus), and his ghost father is playing the same role Enya was for Dio... to the extent that I half suspect he was one of Dio's minions.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    That's one gorgeous Excelsior. It's so detailed I can't quite put my finger on how big it actually is.
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