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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's the Agrama family, not HG itself... they are not interchangeable.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Ah... that's profoundly unlikely. You see, you're still working from a false assumption. Specifically, you're assuming that Harmony Gold is actually taking Robotech seriously as a business proposition. Like I said earlier, Robotech isn't Harmony Gold's main business. It's barely a side business, and if we're being fair it's treated more like a hobby the company occasionally indulges in to bring in some small amount of additional income... like knitting mittens and hats to sell on Etsy or something. While part of Robotech's failure can certainly be attributed to it just being an unworkable concept for various legal and creative reasons, there are quite a lot of failures in Robotech's history that are at least as much a product of Harmony Gold simply not taking Robotech seriously as a business venture. It was only ever something they did on the side to make a quick buck here and there. If they'd taken it as seriously as they did their rental properties, Robotech might've actually achieved some measure of success... but they cut every corner possible, cheaped out everywhere they could, and generally did an astonishingly lazy and half-assed job of it. So it failed, and continues to fail. Their rental properties, where they actually try to do a good job because that's the income which keeps the lights on, are at least reasonably well-regarded. The idea that "the way a person does one thing is the way they do everything" assumes that everyone does EVERYTHING seriously with their full effort... which just obviously isn't true. Not s'much... his age made him eligible for a pre-existing amnesty law intended to reduce overcrowding in Italy's prisons. It wasn't something specific to him. Now there's an interesting prospect... maybe they did it bad on purpose.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    ... given that several of your questions are literally answered by dialog right in the film itself - and not obscure dialog either, but important scenes - we're left to wonder if you really have seen the film. "Captured" is a strong word... that Max was still in the airlock with Milia after fighting to a draw was probably the furthest thing from the crew's minds when they folded away from Earth to avoid imminent obliteration at the hands of the Boddole Zer main fleet. ... no. Just no. And Minmay didn't "seduce" Boddole Zer either. Boddole Zer interrogated her and Kaifun and discovered, based on prior findings from captured cultural artifacts like the Minmay doll seen earlier in the movie, that she had the necessary knowledge base to interpret the cultural relic he had in his possession (the memory tablet with the sheet music for Do You Remember Love?) which he believed (again, based on the effects her songs had on his troops) that it could be used to defeat the Meltrandi. As seen on several occasions in Macross, that doesn't take very long. No. Boddole Zer's own dialog in the film contradicts your assertion. ... he thought he needed the lyrics because his expert - Minmay - told him the song was incomplete without them. He knew exactly where she was, because his troops were the ones who returned her to the Macross. There was literally nowhere else for her to go. He didn't want to unnerve the Meltrandi, he wanted to make them lose their will to fight just like the songs of Minmay had done to his own troops. *frustratedly gestures at Minmay* Rocket science this ain't... he literally talks about what he learned from Minmay in the film. He'd seen what Minmay's song did to the troops under his command who were exposed to a Minmay doll. Boddole Zer thought humans were a leftover enclave of Protoculture... that much is made very clear in the story. While the Zentradi have a "we have reserves" mentality for sure, even Boddole Zer's own crew protested the decision to open fire on tens of thousands of his own ships for a shot at destroying the Laplamiz mobile fortress... there's "acceptable losses" and there's "vaporizing a significant chunk of your own fleet needlessly". He probably could've gotten away with it a lot more readily in the TV series version where his fleet hadn't already taken such a heavy beating in the war, but even the Boddole Zer mobile fortress was in rough shape in the movie. You'd see a lot fewer if you paid attention.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    No, Robotech has NEVER made "serious" money... it was a commercial failure even in the 80's. What kept it alive was that it didn't have to be making serious money because it wasn't income Harmony Gold actually needed to keep the lights on. This is one of the misconceptions we keep comin' back to... people think Robotech is Harmony Gold's main business, and that the company lives or dies by its success or failure. Robotech is, at best, a side business that Harmony Gold dabbles in. It's more like a company hobby if we're being honest. It's not the company's main business. They're a rental property management company that owns apartment buildings and a theater in LA. It's not the company's secondary business either. The film distribution business the company used to be so involved in is now more or less a joke since it was mainly for the money laundering that Frank Agrama got convicted of in Italy years ago. They are not going to be in any danger of going out of business if Robotech stops turning its minimal profit. It accounts for only a small fraction of the company's annual income, and would not be much missed in their financial outlook if management decided to shelve it once and for all. If it were to go under, odds are management would barely notice... the most obvious change would be that there would be fewer people attending the staff meetings once Tommy, Steve, and Kevin were let go. It's not the company's financials that are the big issue, it's the Agrama family's... and believe me, the IRS and Italian court system are way ahead of you on that one. And no, their behavior does NOT stay on the legal side of questionable, which is why Frank got convicted of tax evasion and Jehan got busted for undisclosed foreign income on her taxes.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    On MacrossWorld? I'd hope so. I'm gonna have to second @treatment and ask if you've possibly considered watching the film? On Milia's ship... the one that attacked the Macross and which they both boarded during their dogfight. Boddole Zer straight up answers this question in the movie... Minmay told him the song was missing its lyrics, and he'd seen how effective Minmay's songs were at throwing a scare into his troops and how effective the song without the lyrics was. Because it was only ever an alliance of convenience... the surviving humans had the knowledge of culture to reassemble the music and lyrics into the completed song, which could be used as a weapon against the Meltrandi. When the Meltrandi arrived before the song was reassembled, he opted to destroy it so it couldn't be used against his own forces if it fell into the Meltrandi's hands. No, Minmay's song was what persuaded the Zentradi and Meltrandi on both sides - after the battle had already been underway for a while - to team up to take down Boddole Zer's mobile fortress after he wiped out tens of thousands of his own ships to get a shot on the Laplamiz mobile fortress. No, this is all fairly obvious in the film. It feels like you're basing this on reading a Wikipedia page or the summary on MAHQ.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Not quite. If there was truly no money to be had in keeping Robotech on life support, Harmony Gold's management would've pulled the plug on it. The problem is that there's so little money to be made from Robotech that - even at the decidedly unimpressive apex of the brand's popularity - the potential return on investment was too small for many companies to be interested at all and too small for many of the smaller companies to justify the expense of giving it their A-game. Quality costs money, so as the franchise slipped further, its licensees had to cut more and more corners to turn a profit. Eventually quality slipped to the point that products wouldn't sell at all and Harmony Gold would revoke the license and find the next smalltime sucker. Eventually we'll hopefully reach the point where there isn't enough money in Robotech for anyone to be interested, but for now the brand still turns enough of a profit for these little indie one-man operations and toy bootleggers to profit.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Ugh... Isekai Hell is dragging on and on. To be frank, Isekai Cheat Magician has actually become the high point of this onslaught of bland, samey, trash with ridiculous excuse plots... if only because the series is so blatantly and unapologetically half-assed that it feels like a work of accidental parody instead of the series story it's trying so hard (and failing) to put on airs of being. I'm not sure what part of it was the best for accidental hilarity. Perhaps the big bad being so crudely drawn that he looked like his beard was made of blue-silver soap foam, or the "royal treasures" that looked for all the world like item line art from a late 80's NES game manual, or maybe how the animation quality keeps spiraling through the f*cking floor so the utterly generic protagonist's face is left to wander idly around the front of his skull like an ill-fitting mask and other characters periodically forgetting to have little details like mouths or eyes. Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? has reached the point where the villains seem to make far more sense than the protagonist... actively rebelling against a game that seems set up to squash any kind of individuality or independence out of kids who were more or less abducted into the game by their (often abusive) overbearing parents. I know it claims to be a parody of the overused incest fanservice in harem anime and games, but it spends so much time playing it absolutely razor-straight that is isn't really a parody. I'm legitimately rooting for the group of kids who rebelled against their parents and stormed that dungeon themselves. They should do an epilogue where it shows that all these kids turned into Norman freaking Bates after being smothered by their mothers for so long. Lost Universe continues to be excellent, if a little odd. It definitely has a very similar vibe to Slayers, though after seven episodes I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been much sign of an actual story arc. I started Saiyuki Reload: Blast as well, which is so far pretty standard Gensomaden Saiyuki fare but for the fact that the Sanzo party has finally made it so far west that they've left the cosmopolitan parts of Shangri-La behind.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it was an in-joke either... after all, 4,795,122 (the actual number cited in the series) is such a weirdly precise figure that there may have been some hidden in-joke or reference there that we just aren't getting. Perhaps less so for an alien race whose mastery of cloning technology enabled them to duplicate individuals down to the level of creating identical copies complete with all the skills, training, and memories of the original in a matter of hours... and the factor in that these people had facilities for such en masse cloning that they could field a clone army somewhere on the order of almost 4 trillion fighting men (and women). Humanity leveraged this ancient knowledge and technology to provide personnel for the early emigrant fleets... duplicating individuals with vital skills and training to provide for the various essential roles emigrant fleets needed without access to adequate levels of trained personnel. It's been confirmed that the Protoculture admired and imitated the Vajra, to the extent that quite a bit of their tech may be reverse-engineered or copied from Vajra biotechnology. From the sound of it, the goal of creating the sub-Protoculture species was to essentially prepare habitable planets for future Protoculture colonization. There hasn't really been any indication of the New UN Government's emigrant fleets having to "tiptoe between Zentradi patrols". The nature of traveling by space fold means that a chance meeting between two fleets is like hitting a grain of sand with another grain of sand from across a football field... while blindfolded. You have to get stupidly unlucky for that to happen. (It has happened in both timelines, but it requires apocalyptic levels of bad luck.) That said, the New UN Government has - at least by the time of Macross Delta - acquired a healthy sense of caution regarding surviving Protoculture constructs and structures. The remnants of the Protoculture civilization that have survived the ravages of time into the modern era have a distressing habit of turning out to be ancient doomsday weapons or the containment facilities for ancient doomsday weapons the Protoculture felt were too dangerous to keep around with distressing frequency. That their immediate reaction to finding out what was buried on Windermere IV was to try to drop a dimensional warhead on it and wipe it off the face of the universe before it could end all life in the galaxy shows that, if nothing else, the NUNS staff officers are the Only Sane Men in Macross Delta. The ancient Protoculture themselves seem to have started to understand that the stupidly dangerous sh*t they were burying everywhere was, in fact, stupidly dangerous late in the collapse of their civilization. On Uroboros, they installed self-replicating biotechnological insectoid killing machines all over hell's half-acre to keep the lookey-loos out, and in their final settlements in the Brisingr Cluster they dumped the dangerous stuff into another dimension entirely. The closest we're likely to get is probably Macross 30, which includes a LOT of messing around in Protoculture ruins.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    So, yeah... business as usual.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Not sure how you're determining that it was way too many to destroy the planet's surface... most of the fleet was actively bombarding the planet for a couple minutes and they still didn't get everyone. It might've been overkill if they still had thermonuclear reaction weapons in their arsenal, but they were doing it the hard way with their standard beam cannon turrets and the heavy converging beam cannons of their medium-scale gunboats. Considering the scale of the Zentradi forces and the war they'd been fighting for the last 500,000 years, the only reason it looks like overkill is because humanity put up much less of a fight than the Zentradi were used to or expecting. To Boddole Zer and his senior commanders, it likely looked like an entirely reasonable level of response to contain and annihilate an enemy base. (Macross 7 put a bit of perspective on Boddole Zer's response to the situation, via Exsedol's instinctive fear of the Protodeviln and how the effects of culture shock on the Zentradi may have looked like the Supervision Army's mind control.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Yes. They basically referenced every Robotech property they could except for Robotech Academy.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    They're from the failed Robotech 3000 series concept.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    They already did a subs-only release of Delta, the first Delta movie, and the two Frontier movies.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Seems unlikely, given that most English language anime localization is done in the US.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    This is what, the second time they've done that? It's more merciful than what they did to her in the old Sentinels material, where she went from borderline stalking "Rick" at and after his wedding to being a homewrecker preying on his subordinates. It looks like the goal was exactly what we thought it was from the word go... to write the Masters Saga and New Generation out of existence so they could pursue a Macross-derivative ongoing story.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    As far as a smartarse answer to the original question goes... the size of Boddole Zer's fleet just goes to show Minmay's much better than Helen of Troy, right?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Macross II: Lovers Again's timeline seems to draw on Sukehiro Tomita's novelization of Macross: Do You Remember Love? more than any other iteration of the First Space War story... the novelization cuts a dash between DYRL? and the TV series for events. The Macross II timeline's Quamzin lived among humans for a while like he did in the TV series, but instead of that death or glory run against the Macross that was supposed to precede a return to deep space and ended up killing him he just legged it for deep space.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know, there isn't... not anymore, anyway. The Main Fleets were the highest level of organization, overseen directly by the Protoculture while they were still around. The Fulbtzs Berrentzs-class motherships even include artificial parklands and so on for the Protoculture's use, though the Protoculture are no longer around to make use of the facilities and haven't been for nearly 500,000 years. Even then, there were ~3 million ships of the Boddole Zer main fleet that were able to successfully withdraw from the combat zone after the Macross sank Boddole Zer's mothership. If they did tell anyone, they may have come to the conclusion that humans were the Protoculture and therefore to be avoided or that the ancient Protoculture had ordered them to leave miclones the hell alone for good reason and resolved to not push the issue further. The Macross II parallel world timeline does have cases where Zentradi who had fought in the war and fled into deep space to find other fleets and attempt to finish what they'd started. That wacky Quamzin manages to lead a whopping THREE main fleets into our solar system after the First Space War in that timeline... and it never ended well for the Zentradi. He led the Neld Main Fleet into our solar system first in an attempt to finish with Boddole Zer had started, and despite doing some pretty decent prep-work, promptly got his sh*t and Neld's sh*t wrecked by Vrlitwhai's counterattack spearheaded by none other than Komilia Jenius. This apparently convinced him there was something to Boddole Zer's plan of using Earth's culture against the Meltrandi as a weapon, because he tried again by leading the Burado Main Fleet to Earth in the hopes that the UN Spacy would sort out the Meltrandi Leplendis Main Fleet that was hounding Burado's forces. To his credit, this actually worked pretty well despite not cluing the Spacy in or in any way cooperating with them. After a few skirmishes and some fact-finding undercover work by her troops, Leplendis was so convinced she was dealing with the Protoculture that she ordered her fleet out of the system and was in the process of leaving when the Spacy and Zentradi delivered a one-two punch that crippled her fleet during their retreat. Quamzin's forces then turned on the Spacy, and in the ensuing final dustup the Spacy took out Quamzin's flagship AND Burado's mobile fortress. There are still so many leftover Zentradi forces in the vicinity of the Sol system that the Spacy has an average of one war with them every ten years clear into the 2090s. After five main fleets met their ends on in one solar system, the Zentradi and Meltrandi don't seem to be all that eager to start sh*t on a grand scale. (The Spacy in that timeline has technically racked up 3 Main Fleet kills and 2 assists in eighty years.) The main timeline seems to have fairly infrequent contact between the New UN Gov't and Zentradi, if only because stumbling on a fleet with another fleet is like trying to hit one grain of sand with another grain of sand from across a football field. That said, there are several references in books like Master File to emigrant fleets going so far as to self-destruct ships with dimensional warheads to prevent them from falling into Zentradi hands, or main fleets stumbling on the occasional emigrant planet and glassing it out of habit. Other, more official works tend to mention smaller conflicts where branch fleets are wiped out after stumbling into the New UN Government's territory.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I don't think HG would consider us flaming the old comics to be anything but a rare bit of common ground with us... they're not keen on them either, having publicly disowned them as garbage back in '06.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure it's a question of them being enamored of absurdly large fleets as the scale of Boddole Zer's main fleet drawing a line under how hopelessly screwed humanity was, and how amazing the miracle achieved by Minmay's song was. It's one thing to win a fight against overwhelming but not impossible odds... it's quite another to win a fight against odds that left no chance of victory otherwise. The ancient Protoculture's Stellar Republic spanned much of the galaxy at its peak, but their reasons for creating such a colossal military have been lost to time. It may have had something to do with their political tensions on the home front, or potentially the possibility of armed conflict with Vajra hives, or simply because they could. They started building their Zentradi forces about 400 years before their civil war broke out, and had something like 5,000 main fleets in operation by the time the war began in earnest. Between the devastation of the last few years of the conflict when the Protodeviln emerged and both sides joined together in the hopes of defeating the Supervision Army and the 500,000 years of warfare that followed, the Zentradi forces are down to around half strength... which is to say, between 2,000 and 3,000 main fleets still operating. Even then, virtually everything in service with the Zentradi forces was built 200,000 years or more after the war ended as replacements for battlefield losses sustained in their ongoing conflict with the remnants of the Supervision Army. So it's kind of a "yes and no" sort of answer... the Protoculture had such massive Zentradi forces before the war ever started for... reasons... but they've had half a million years of attrition and the slow, grinding replacement of mass manufacturing to at least sustain their numbers in the face of a foe who, many generations ago, used to be a significant chunk of the entire galactic population.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that was a new wrinkle to the tech added in Macross Frontier. Instead of the single-use fold boosters rated for a one-way trip of at-most 20 light years seen in the 2040s (Macross Plus, Macross 7), modern fold boosters c.2059 were capable of multiple short-ranged fold jumps. Yes. Fold systems are large, energy intensive devices. It's unlikely that we'll be seeing one compact enough to fit into a VF's airframe anytime soon. It takes an astonishing amount of energy to tie space-time in knots to teleport interstellar distances. Even large emigrant ships can require weeks or months to store enough energy for long-range fold jumps without compromising their normal operations despite having dozens of massive fold reactors. Mainly, fold quartz is used to produce fold waves or heavy quanta... it's the application of those individually or together that produce the dynamic effects that've underpinned several key advances like the Inertia Store Converter, Heavy Quantum beam gunpods, MDE munitions, zero-time fold systems, and fold wave systems. Generally, its benefits are simply more potent versions of effects produced by its lower-purity synthetic substitute: fold carbon.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Earl from Toejam and Earl in Aquaman cosplay? (Honestly, what gets me is this isn't even colored correctly... it's supposed to be red.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Even right after Robotech finished its broadcast run, prospective licensees weren't exactly beating HG's door down looking for the rights... the comics were always an amateurish-looking mess because it was only the little indie publishers that were ever actually interested in it, and most of them weren't giving it their A-game either.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, all 4th Gen and later VFs have miniaturized pinpoint barrier systems. The inclusion of pinpoint barrier systems on a VF was a major design goal/requirement in the Advanced Variable Fighter program that produced the first 4th Generation VFs (in Macross Plus, the YF-19 and YF-21 prototypes for the VF-19 and VF-22 respectively). Other design goals for the 4th Generation included a 3rd Gen active stealth system, thermonuclear reaction burst turbines, next-gen super AI avionics (ARIEL), and native support for fold boosters. The VF-25 adopted ASWAG advanced energy conversion armor for its anti-projectile shield to improve the robustness of the shield itself in the event it needed to stop a shot that powered through the barrier (or the barrier was committed elsewhere). On screen in Macross Frontier, the VF-25 mainly used its barrier offensively to reinforce its combat blade... though Alto did use it defensively in several high-visibility scenes in Macross Frontier: Itsuari no Utahime when equipped with the Tornado Pack. Very prominently, to the extent that I'm actually a bit befuddled that you asked. It's probably the most prolific user of pinpoint barriers onscreen since the VF-19s in Macross 7. Hayate's VF-31 loses a number of arms to shots from the heavy quantum beam gunpods of the Draken IIIs when his barrier can't absorb all the energy of the shot, and there's that very drawn-out scene in Hayate's first real combat sortie where we see him tank fire from a Var'd VF-171 on his barriers and watch the strength indicator for the barriers tick down on his cockpit display. Not ASWAG'd, the YF-29 achieves comparable defensive capability to the ASWAG-based Armored Pack for the VF-25 by applying a double thickness (vs. the VF-25) of conventional energy conversion armor and operating it at twice the power. It also makes rather extensive use of its pinpoint barrier in combat.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing says cheap late 80's comic like eye-searing gradient fills, right?
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