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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The novels, at least, had a coordinated continuity across the four Star Trek relaunch novel lines and the new TOS novels that were made alongside them. I'm not sure if the Star Trek: Discovery novels are coherent with them, but the TV series itself borrowed the second season's primary antagonist (Control) from them and the ending of season two seems written to avoid ruling out that the Control AI was actually permanently destroyed. (Control in the novel-verse was not a malevolent AI as such, but more a very well-intentioned extremist ala Sloan that would take any action, no matter how unsavory, to preserve the Federation and its ideals in a galaxy that didn't share them. The actual malevolent AI was Control's creator, the AI Uraei, a pre-Federation surveillance AI which created Control and Section 31 to take extralegal action on its behalf... and was deleted by Dr. Bashir a few years after Nemesis.) Star Trek: Picard poses more problems, being that the Borg apparently are the centerpiece of its plot... while in the novelverse the Borg ceased to exist when the "sufficiently advanced" race that accidentally created them killed the Borg Queen for good and cut off the Collective for good a few years after Nemesis. The whole reason that they went back to developing in the Prime universe was that Star Trek fans largely didn't really care for the Jar-Jar Abrams reboot films and their darker, more action-centric take on the setting, and the films themselves were not really all that successful commercially. Star Trek: Beyond in particular did very poorly once marketing costs were added in, which led to an exodus of financial backers that killed the fourth movie stone dead. Because the audience that DID like the films were mostly the casual viewers and the Star Trek fandom's feelings for them hovered between ambivalence and dislike, there was very little in the way of licensing revenue to recoup costs and losses. Going back to prime universe Star Trek made sense... as in "dollars and". Bad Reboot still wants to do things Abramsverse-style because that's their take on Star Trek, but because many fans don't care for it at all they keep increasing the percentage of prime continuity references and appearances by characters from previous Star Trek shows in the hopes of making their creative output less unpalatable to the die-hard fans who actually buy the franchise's licensed merchandise. They're hurting pretty bad because there aren't as many licensees buying licenses and paying royalties because market research shows them that the fans who are paying for merchandise don't like Abrams-era Trek.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Started Nobunaga Teacher's Young Bride today. It's pretty unremarkable so far. The only thing that really stood out to me was that, like Isekai Cheat Magician and a bunch of recent shows with odd premises, the protagonist accepts a completely implausible situation almost immediately and practically without question. He asks her a few basic questions about her name, her family, and what year it is, and jumps right to "this girl is the real Ikoma Kitsuno, the warlord Oda Nobunaga's lover and mother of his children, and has traveled 467 years forward in time". Seems like fodder for some decent-ish comedy tho, and it's pretty well-animated for a short series.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Battlestar Galactica's 2004 TV series was a strong performer, but it kind of burned out on its own when its spinoff Caprica was poorly received and got cancelled by SyFy in 2010. Game of Thrones was what I mentioned because it's the property that's generally credited (or blamed, depending on your perspective) with the spate of dark, action-heavy, highly serialized shows we're currently living with by producers and film pundits alike. Can't say that I have, and please tell me that isn't the real cover... that looks like he made it himself in Microsoft Paint during a boring staff meeting. Actors have a bit more clout working in feature films rather than broadcast television... though, to be fair, all my examples were supporting actors and actresses raising grievances with the producers. After seven seasons and two previous feature films as Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart could kind of hold the project hostage to get any changes he wanted made. It's not clear if he could do that with Star Trek: Picard.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, a full replacement of the Star Trek creative staff is unlikely to occur until (or unless) CBS decides the current Star Trek projects under active development are performing too poorly to justify continuing to keep around. Star Trek: Discovery is already performing poorly enough that Netflix only reluctantly agreed to bankroll season two after securing a promise it'd be more like real Star Trek and, unless I've missed something, neither Netflix nor CBS have made any announcements about having resolved their deadlock over the show's future. CBS's attitude seems to be that Star Trek: Discovery's status as the flagship series of their struggling CBS All Access service and all the sunk costs involved in its development planned to be amortized over seven seasons mean that the series is simply Too Big To Fail. They're plowing forward with season three development regardless of the ongoing legal proceedings for copyright infringement and Netflix's reluctance to actually give them any money to make it. Star Trek: Picard seems to be headed the same direction, relying on the same deceptive marketing tactics used in Star Trek: Discovery's second season in the hopes of bringing Star Trek fans back to the franchise long enough for CBS All Access to turn a decent profit. Amazon was already reluctant to give CBS anything close to the amount CBS wanted for the show's production, so it'll be interesting to see how the curtailment of the budget will impact the quality of CBS's spectacle-before-substance approach to Star Trek. I'm not so sure we don't start to see the end of it in the near future... a large part of the blame for the tsunami of dark, gritty, action-ized, spectacle-over-substance versions of shows cropping up in recent years belongs to Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones was a license to print money at the height of its popularity and success like that naturally leads to copycat behavior from rivals and partners alike. The ignoble failure of Game of Thrones's eighth and final season as well as the at-best lukewarm performance of a number of other big ticket properties that tried to imitate its style like Harry Potter's Fantastic Beasts spinoff or the Star Trek reboot films should serve to disincentivize going all-in on the dark and gritty BS in the future. (That said, I was actually rather surprised to learn that Fantastic Beasts: the Crimes of Grindelwald had been poorly received... I'd thought it was rather good since its tone was amply justified by being set in Europe between the World Wars.) That said, I doubt CBS/Viacom will budge on either Star Trek: Discovery or Star Trek: Picard. I think they're smart enough to know that no amount of retooling will make Discovery a watchable show and are determined to plow forward with it anyway in the hope that familiarity with it might breed something other than contempt for once. I don't think that they ever really gave up on making Star Trek: Discovery into Game of Space Thrones, they've just had to change tack after using the Klingons for it didn't pan out with nobody giving any f*cks about L'Rell and Voq because they were a career backstabber and unloveable bigot turned into a subtly racist meme. I'm less than optimistic that any objections on Patrick Stewart's part would make any impact on the producers... Star Trek's producers have a long history of not taking complaints by their actors seriously, going back to WAY before Kurtzman. Nichelle Nichols's grievances almost led to her quitting Star Trek's original series until Leonard Nimoy took Roddenberry to task and Martin Luther King Jr. begged her to stay on the show, Gates McFadden quit Star Trek: the Next Generation and was replaced by Diana Muldaur for a season because she was frustrated at her character's lack of development after having been promised she'd be Picard's romantic foil and Denise Crosby quit because she felt her character wasn't doing anything of significance, Robert Beltran spent seven seasons phoning in his performances in protest of Chakotay being rewritten into Janeway's yes-man on Star Trek: Voyager and Jeri Ryan's complaints about being unable to breathe properly in her original catsuit that were ignored until it started to negatively impact her health on set, and Jolene Blalock spent four seasons protesting the handling of her character and Vulcans in general being inconsistent with previous Star Trek shows to no effect.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Harmony Gold's pretty screwed... trademark laws in most of the world are written to give priority to the owner of a property rather than the first user. Since the United Kingdom is still a European Union member despite its hilariously self-defeating efforts to the contrary, the European Union trademark law firmly working in Big West's favor is skewed even more heavily in Big West's favor by the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office's finding in Big West's favor being admissible as precedent. They're likely in a big of a scramble, trying to come up with something - anything - that might be used to convince the European Union to let them keep the trademark. My guess is, as they asked for a sixty day extension, they're trying to huddle up with Tatsunoko Production and see if Tatsunoko has anything that they could use as ammunition. (Tatsunoko is unlikely to be of any help, since they'd have to claim to own the Macross franchise to support Harmony Gold's claim, and THAT would get them sued by Big West.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Even then, he's still an idiot for not responding to the Rebel assault with maximum force. Tarkin and Vader had a comically overwhelming strategic and tactical advantage and didn't use it. If the Empire had anything like a competent leader at Yavin, that would've been the end of Star Wars right then and there. If they'd just blown Yavin itself up with the Death Star's stupidly huge planet-killing gun they would've destroyed the entire moon the Rebel base was on as collateral damage without ever exposing their battle station to harm. Or they could've just sent an actual counterattack out to leverage their massive numerical advantage, wiped the entire rebel force out without breaking a sweat, and either captured the base or just blown it up at their leisure. To reverse a remark from Spaceballs... "Good will always triumph because Evil is dumb".
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Wouldn't have helped... the redesign was visibly and obviously derivative of Macross designs, and its "creator" explicitly acknowledged it was based on Macross IP.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The artists must take it in turns to get blackout drunk while working on this comic. I know I would.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.2 - itself presented as a 2030-vintage in-universe mass market publication - makes mention of a 2012 in-universe film called Macross: the Truth of South Ataria Island that dramatizes the events of the start of the First Space War and a forthcoming direct sequel set to release in 2031 (which we know is the in-universe take on Macross: Do You Remember Love?). It wouldn't be surprising if a production company with the connections to shoot multiple films with the military's support to promote the ideas the danger of alien attack hadn't passed tried to branch out from historical dramas to speculative fiction... especially with the Mardook being implied to be the Protoculture. A 2040s vintage Macross II: Lovers Again in-universe film might even have been a somewhat subversive piece intended to quietly call the military out for its abuses of authority and its general complacency that were already in the process of snowballing into the Second Unification War c.2050-2051.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The redesign went over exactly as well as you'd think given the Robotech fandom's aversion to change and attachment to the original show.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    They don't really accomplish much... Vader's and his two wingmen do all the actual work, but the point is taken. It was more than three... but still far, FAR, FAR less than the seven thousand they could've and would've mustered to squash the Rebel attack outright if they weren't holding the idiot ball. If they'd taken their jobs seriously, Vader and Tarkin would still be alive, the Death Star would've blown Yavin IV to bits, and Lucas would've needed a rather different title for A New Hope. (The Emperor actually did it right, and would've won outright in Return of the Jedi if he hadn't let his complexity addiction force him to grab the idiot ball and fail to properly secure the perimeter of the shield generator base on Endor.) Tarkin was told point-blank that there'd been a security leak at the facility that developed the Death Star, and instead of fixing the problem used it to undermine a rival. He knew going into the Yavin operation that the Rebels had the Death Star plans he'd been previously told probably contained a potentially fatal intentional vulnerability and makes ZERO effort to protect the station. Then he's warned mid-battle that the Rebels are definitely onto something, and blows it off. That's not a one-in-a-billion freak accident, he was told several times there was a serious threat and he ignored it or dismissed it out of hand. If you got a recall notice saying that your car has a flaw that could cause it to spontaneously explode, a sensible person would get that recall taken care of straightaway. They wouldn't toss the recall notice unopened and then act surprised when the car blew up and killed them.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, this is the exact same f*ckup that Darth Vader made in A New Hope... Vader and Tarkin had command of an incredibly powerful battle station that supposedly had something on the order of SEVEN THOUSAND starfighters at its disposal, as well as a few docked Star Destroyers. The total number of starfighters launched to counter and contain the multiple fighter squadrons in the Rebel attack force? THREE. The total number of ships and starfighters launched to contain the Rebel base while the Death Star got into position? ZERO. The entire Star Wars series is only possible because the Imperials are juggling the idiot ball at any and every opportunity. Mostly, it takes the form of believing themselves to be totally invincible despite all evidence to the contrary (e.g. Scarif in Rogue One, the Death Star in A New Hope, the Death Star II: Sith Boogaloo in Return of the Jedi), though they moonlight as bumblers who screw up because the threat of having to explain themselves to Darth Vader has them so terrified they don't think rationally or behave professionally (e.g. every Imperial officer in Empire Strikes Back) or are so busy backstabbing and undermining each other in the name of political point-scoring that they do more favors to the Rebellion than themselves (e.g. Krennic and Tarkin in Rogue One). The First Order, as an Imperial remnant, are just keeping the grand tradition of Imperial incompetence alive and well into the future. Was it the first example? IIRC there was something about the hyperdrive leaking in The Phantom Menace that restricted the range of their hyperspace jump until they could no longer jump all the way to Coruscant, forcing them to divert to Tatooine. (I mean, they never say what the hyperdrive is leaking, but still...) I'd expect the reason they didn't split their forces was that they had one cruiser and three escorts. The vast majority of their forces were on the cruiser, the only ship big enough to hold them all, so splitting up would just give the First Order three weak escorts to ignore and one now-alone vulnerable cruiser carrying most of the Resistance.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it's nice to know they didn't just fold or fall off the face of the Earth the way Harmony Gold's previous partners-in-cancellation did...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Actual character development and story progression in an "original" Robotech work? Jeez, look who wants the moon.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    What it seems to be headed for is dying in interesting times... While the CBS/Viacom re-merger is cause for some slight optimism, I doubt it will have any meaningful impact on Star Trek: Picard or Star Trek: Discovery. The studio's already sunk a lot of money into Kurtzman's unsuccessful Abrams-ized bleak, depressing, action-oriented vision of Star Trek, and they're practically guaranteed to plow ahead with it regardless in a forlorn hope that it might one day be liked by fans and begin to pay off. The dearth of Star Trek: Discovery merchandise and the reported walkout of licensees who were solicited for bids on Star Trek: Picard merchandising licenses would suggest this is probably A Very Bad Idea, but some people will cling to a mistake just because they spent a long time making it. As polarizing as Bill Shatner has been in recent years, I have to admit I'm with him on one thing... the attempts to make Star Trek into a gritty, sci-fi action series through things like the J.J. Abrams films, Star Trek: Discovery, and now Star Trek: Picard and the persistent-but-apparently-unfounded rumors of a Quentin Tarantino Star Trek movie would have Roddenberry spinning in his grave. It's the polar opposite of the vision of an optimistic, principled, and inclusive future for humanity among the stars that he conceived in the original Star Trek and in Star Trek: the Next Generation. To briefly expound on the above, I think the thing that bothers me most about the Abrams/Kurtzman clusterf*ck in Star Trek: Discovery that's being carried forward into Star Trek: Picard is how Star Trek is suddenly treating racism (speciesism?) as something that's excusable, acceptable, or even justified. In every previous Star Trek show, judging a person by their race/species and generalizations about same was treated as a moral failing and something which wasn't acceptable, socially or otherwise. Burnham's bigotry is not only treated as completely acceptable in Discovery, it's excused and even treated as justified by making the Klingons almost completely malevolent for much of the story. I'm rather afraid of how Picard will run with the titular character's known issues with the Borg and Romulans, given the trauma he's encountered at the hands of both.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Remember to always spay or neuter your screenwriters. (In all seriousness, I thought screening it in theaters with liquor licenses was the fix.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Rampant tracing is a Robotech tradition! They're just showing how well they understand the source material.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Both, actually... it's fairly blatant in both cases, though Jar-Jar's borderline minstrel show shenanigans really took the cake. I doubt it ever even occurred to George that they might be seen as offensive. Previous generations had much lower standards for that kind of thing. The things I've heard my own grandmother say... and she's only ten years George's senior. In all honesty, I disagree with your assessment... our society is gradually and collectively coming to the realization that there's no actual reason to continue to tolerate the racist and sexist bullsh*t that previous generations took for granted and enforced. It's not about getting offended, it's about having some standards as a society that professes to believe that all men were created equal. ... the colossal amounts of Star Wars fan grumbling about almost every aspect of the film revealed beforehand, from Rey and Finn being "diversity" casting choices, to fans carping that it wasn't the Thrawn saga, down the line to people b*tching about how Phasma's armor didn't look like women's armor (read: "sexy"). You and your friends might not have, but a LOT of Star Wars fans did. A lot more came to the party after the fact, as evidenced in pretty much every thread about the new trilogy on these forums. A lot - and I mean A LOT - of the EU was exactly that... bad fanfiction. Mind you, just blatantly knocking off existing plots is a staple of bad fanfiction writing too. You're not exactly the arbiter of who is and who isn't a fan... which tends to render this objection invalid. But the majority of them ARE... a handful of exceptions doesn't make the general rule false and you know it.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Just a random detail that I found amusing/cute in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah... When Sheryl moves on to Macross Olympia c.2064 and retains a personal guard from the Strategic Military Services branch in Macross Olympia, she specifically requests a pair of VF-25F Messiahs (Queen's Knights) as her ship's escort with the MODEX numbers 727 and 1123... Alto's birthday, and her own.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    In the Macross Frontier movie version, Sheryl Nome's potentially lethal V-type infection was concentrated in her vocal cords rather than her brain. Her vocal cords were being surgically removed and replaced so that the V-type infection wouldn't kill her.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I'm inclined to disagree in part... because Star Wars always had problems making its concepts into something someone would actually want. George Lucas's original scripts for Star Wars were a pile of hot garbage so unworkable that Harrison Ford told him "George, you can write this sh*t, but you sure can't say it". The thing that made Star Wars's original trilogy into a classic was that George Lucas was surrounded (forcibly) by a group of talented individuals who were there to hold his leash and restrain his creative excesses to ensure that what made it into the script and onto the screen was something someone besides George Lucas would find palatable. After Lucas and his minders turned out three hit films and the property lapsed into a period where no new development occurred for over a decade, people kind of forgot that our boy George succeeded because his creative output was being aggressively filtered. He was given a free rein, and the godawful mess that aggressive filtering had kept the audience insulated from started to leak out all over Star Wars. We got Phantom Menace and the racist caricatures infesting it, the memetically awful child Anakin, famously wooden acting on the parts of multiple actors, and a pair of sequels with the worst love story this side of Twilight. From where I stand, the problem is Star Wars fans. Not just the fandom in general, but the promoted fanboys working on Star Wars as well. Nobody outside of Star Wars's die-hard fanbase gave a damn that Disney got rid of the Expanded Universe, but for that (admittedly large) demographic it was a thrown gauntlet and a lot of them went into TFA determined to hate it regardless of its quality or lack thereof. The people working on the films, who grew up with Star Wars, are developing the kind of stories THEY want to tell... which is, yes, in "bad fanfiction" territory. There are some good ideas among the heavily derivative dross, but they're unpolished and the Disney corporation is sanitizing it all to ensure that there's nothing in there which might deeply offend general audiences because Disney is all about family-friendliness. Just like the Star Wars Expanded Universe, they tripped themselves up by making a direct sequel to Return of the Jedi that included an obligatory Happy Ending Override because, damn it all, Star Wars fans don't give a tinker's damn about a story which doesn't involve Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia. The group that's being pandered to - the pandering that's making Star Wars such a mess - is the Star Wars fanbase. They tried to make The Force Awakens appeal to Star Wars fans who were determined to hate any future sequel for not following the old EU by putting in all kinds of familiar plot beats and references, and fans hated it for being derivative. They panicked, and tried to appeal to the Star Wars fandom by doing something radically different and subverting expectations... but the fans hated THAT just as much. The irony is that they tried twice to pander to Star Wars fans with really obvious fanfiction-y stories (Rogue One and Solo), and managed a perfect 50/50 split between "love" and "loathe" based on how much it shook up the sacred cow that is pre-existing Star Wars lore. It's always been like that. Popular fiction in general has ALWAYS been like that. This is not new. (Seriously, go back and look at the stuff you watched as a kid. They weren't making even a token effort to hide it... to the extent that it was extremely common for characters to stop and address the audience directly about whatever Aesop the show was about that week.) Yet general audiences seem to be pretty OK with the new trilogy... the ones getting outraged, and the ones whose outrage Disney is pandering to, are the Star Wars fans. It'd be nice if Disney didn't make identity politics such a big part of its marketing for the first one, but that's not really the underlying problem. ... I'd question how good Marvel's read of its fans is, given their track record on the small screen. The politics is still there in Rogue One... Star Wars fans just overlooked it, as they did in the original trilogy, because the quality of the writing was better and because it tied into the parts of Star Wars the fans are so devoted to the memory of without actually impacting anything.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, my view would be aligned with the fan theory that Macross II: Lovers Again is a popular in-universe work of dramatic fiction from the early 2040s. That would explain (in-universe) why the OVA's soundtrack seems to be EVERYWHERE in Macross 7, from the repertoires of the other popular musicians in the 37th emigrant fleet to hit music on the Galaxy Network charts, why the Minmay Attack girl has a cameo in the series as an already-successful idol singer, and why the Macross 7 NUNS's attempt to put together its own Sound Force (the Jamming Birds) uses the same songs the military was promoting for its events in the OVA (e.g. Riding in your Valkyrie). The UN Spacy of Macross II relies heavily on Zentradi warships the way the postwar Spacy did in the main Macross timeline, there are still Destroids, and the VF-2SS Valkyrie II is roughly on par with a VF-11 performance-wise (the military's current main fighter) even though it's more technologically advanced. My guess would be it was probably shot using real Zentradi ships, modified Regults, and VF-11's that were CGI'd to appear as VF-2SS's the way Basara's VF-19 was to be CGI'd into Hikaru's VF-1S for The Lynn Minmay Story. 2092, but yeah... it's a ways into the future yet. (2091-2092 if you take Macross Chronicle's view, which adds up to a self-indulgent Gundam reference when you note this puts the conflict in year 0079 of the New Era calendar that was established in Flash Back 2012.) Well, at the very least, Macross prime continuity Komilia and Macross 2036 Komilia are pretty much identical (thanks to Mikimoto-sensei). He did sneak some other nods to Macross 2036 and its sequel Eternal Love Song into his other Macross works. The pilot suit in Macross 7 Trash is the same model from Eternal Love Song albeit tweaked slightly WRT the hard-armor segments, and Global's uniform in Macross the First includes the Valkyrie pilot's wings from Macross II among his decorations.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't that the joke that was doing the rounds when Star Wars VIII's title was revealed? That the whole story arc would be The Force Awakens The Last Jedi From His Nap?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Not really, no... this just means that the Star Trek rights will be united under a single roof again. It won't do anything to fix the problems with existing developments like STD, Picard, or Lower Decks. It just means that, when Star Trek: Picard tanks like Star Trek: Discovery did, they can chuck them both (and Lower Decks in the bargain) and produce something that actually resembles real Star Trek again instead of Abrams and Kurtzman's watered-down sewage runoff. As opposed to Bad Robot, which is just a regular curse.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    None to speak of. Not clear if it has more firepower, but it has a lower rate of fire because it's recharging a capacitor bank off the reactors. I'm not sure it's more realistic, and official materials are pretty clear about the Strike Pack using particle beam cannons. It's just a thing they did for unclear reasons for the Master File books. It's a particle beam cannon on the VF-1's Strike Pack officially, the Master File book's description makes it out to be a gas dynamic laser cannon using a very toxic gain medium (unnecessarily, since the gain medium in question is one used for lasers operating in atmosphere and the cannon is solely for space use.)
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