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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    If your logic circuits came to any other conclusion, I'd be recommending you contact a service technician immediately. Another Macross Delta movie didn't make sense... it made cents, as in "dollars and". Given that Macross Delta is more or less just an overwrought commercial for Walkure's CDs, you can expect all five to be present and contractually immune from anything that might constitute more than superficial character development. Can't do anything that might make the girls less marketable as waifu material after all. Oh, undoubtedly... the only question there is whether it'll be all tease and denial or just a messy finish that leaves everyone unsatisfied. Xaos will be around. It's an interstellar conglomerate whose star has been on the rise for the last decade or so. The entertainment division managing Walkure and the other Tactical Sound Units and the PMC division providing security personnel in the Brisingr globular cluster are just two of their many business ventures. Their main business ventures are in fold navigation (cargo/passenger transport?) and fold communications. They've been in business for 50+ years, so they're not gonna vanish overnight. The VF-31's going to be around for a while, even if we don't necessarily see it, since it's tipped to be next main fighter for the Brisingr Alliance NUNS when it's formally adopted two or three years down the line (c.2069-2070) and we can expect it'll get twenty or more years in that role before its replacement starts to be phased in. I'm inclined to wonder if it will wind up being widely adopted, since it's a latecomer to the 5th Generation and by all accounts the VF-24 and VF-25 made considerable inroads in that field already. The writing quality of Delta's second half suggests pocket lint and a particularly exhausted gerbil.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Based on what King Grammier VI said on the subject in The White Knight of the Black Wing, the New Unification Government wasn't just strictly regulating how much fold quartz that planets like Windermere IV were allowed to export at a time. They also apparently exercised direct oversight of the actual mining/extraction operations themselves to ensure that no shortsighted idiot with dollar-sign wingding eyes was going to do something apocalyptically stupid like attacking a Vajra hive or recklessly invading a Protoculture ruin keeping some ridiculous superweapon from the schism war sealed. If nothing else, it proves the New UN Gov't is learning from its mistakes and becoming rather genre-savvy. (For their part, the Vajra aren't ones to take attacks laying down and at least one faction of ancient Protoculture realized that a Keep Out sign can be self-enforcing if it's made in the form of a swarm of heavily armed and highly aggressive self-replicating biotechnological killing machines that take violent exception to intruders.) I doubt it would've worked out... Windermere IV wanted to have full control over their fold quartz mining and exports. They didn't have the technological base to manufacture their own overtechnology, so it'd be down to them and not the New UN Government to try to attract private enterprise to Windermere IV to build fold systems there. Even then, it likely wouldn't have appeased King Grammier since the workforce would likely have been brought in from offworld to do the manufacturing and most of the money would likely end up flowing into the offworld coffers of whatever corporation set up shop there. The net economic stimulus would probably be pretty small. Really, I expect the next Delta movie will likely go somewhere else. Windermere IV was pretty comprehensively declawed at the end of Macross Delta. Prince Heinz II was permanently out of action thanks to having abused his runes to the point that he's as infirm at age 9 as his father was at 35, they lost the Star Shrine, and the Aerial Knights took heavy losses including the Knight-Commander, the White Knight of Darwent, and several of their top aces. The whole galaxy is wise to their plan to use their food exports to spread Var syndrome, so their economy's headed down the tubes and they've lost their exclusive business partner in the Epsilon Foundation so military procurement is a great big goose egg. If it wasn't an agri-world, any future visit to Windermere IV would probably feature them boiling their boots for nourishment.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I'm familiar enough with the EU from my day job, I'm just saying that I can't really think of anything said thus far in Macross that'd support the idea of different levels of NUNG membership. The Windermere IV situation kind of presented it as an all-or-nothing affair. They didn't really get to pick and choose which NUNG policies they had to follow... they tried to negotiate opting out of a couple parts of the terms and conditions and were rebuffed, which was depicted as part of what convinced King Grammier that there was no diplomatic solution to Windermere IV's economic crisis in the gaiden manga White Knight of the Black Wing. (In all fairness to the New Unification Government, Grammier was trying to negotiate his way out of having to abide by what was essentially a strategic arms anti-proliferation treaty aimed at controllng the spread of dimensional warheads. They can hardly be blamed for saying no, even if Grammier didn't want to hear it.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    This actually came up in Macross Frontier... I believe it was episode 12. Fold faults are at their most dangerous when you don't know they're there. Blindly plowing into one is incredibly dangerous, since powering through an unexpected fault or two can leave a ship without enough stored energy to return to realspace like what had allegedly happened to the SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global. A ship that's blessed with good luck might just get knocked back to realspace in an ugly mess the way Megaroad-04 was. If you know they're there and you know how severe they are you can factor them into the computations for fold navigation, avoiding ones too severe to attempt to cross and banking enough energy to safely traverse the weaker ones that can't be avoided practically or economically. The catch is that doing so greatly increases the disparity between the subjective and objective passage of time in the ship. The trip to Gallia IV was a great example of this. By avoiding some faults and crossing others, the most efficient route to Gallia IV felt like a short commuter flight to the Galaxy Starliner's crew and passengers but was actually over 7 days of real time (a whopping +172.25 hour adjustment to ship time) as a result of the fold faults magnifying the disparity between the pace of time in realspace vs. fold space. The New UN Spacy's fleet probably planned to just power through the well-charted fold faults surrounding Windermere IV on their way to attack it. Their ships are at least theoretically capable of interplanetary flight in a reasonable timeframe, but you sacrifice the advantage of surprise doing so. Folding there might take longer due to the faults, but they'll only know you're coming shortly before you arrive, and surprise is an important advantage when you're planning to drop a planet-killing dimensional bomb on an enemy planet.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    You could make a compelling case that Windermere IV actually deserves the appellation "backwater", since it's so far off the beaten path that the SDF-5 Megaroad-04 only found it by crashing into the fold faults around it, it's isolated by those same fold faults, its economy is stagnant, underdeveloped, and principally agricultural, the locals are living with the cultural values of a bygone era, and there's more than a little folksy racism on display. As I remarked a bit snarkily on some of the episode reviews, you can practically hear banjos on the fold jump there.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm not sure about the idea of different levels of membership... but Kawamori did indicate in the Otona Anime #9 interview about Macross Frontier that the European Union was the modern governing body most closely resembling the function of the New Unification Government (c.2059). Zola's status was never really discussed... though as I recall it was generally assumed that the planet was something akin to a protectorate back before Macross Frontier. Now they seem to be full members who are simply too peace-loving to want to maintain a proper military so they have a well-equipped but studiously non-lethal space police force instead. Given what's said in Macross Delta and the gaiden manga, Windermere IV and the other worlds of the Brisingr globular cluster are (or were, in Windermere case) full New Unification Government members with all the ups and downs that entails. The Kingdom of the Wind's war of independence was essentially fought because Windermere IV's leaders felt that its membership in the New Unification Government was all give and no take. Specifically, because their planet was so remote and isolated by fold faults they were having troubles with growing their economy, and they felt the government was not only not doing enough to help but actively hurting their situation via the heavy restrictions it imposed on mining and trading in fold quartz (Windermere IV's only significant non-agricultural resource). They were also less than thrilled by the losses they took as a result of having sent reinforcements to support neighboring systems attacked by rogue Zentradi as per their obligations as a New UN Government member. (It was almost a war fought over "What have you done for me lately?"... since Windermere IV was benefitting significantly from all the technology they were importing.) One of the things established back in Macross 7 and finessed heavily by Frontier was that the individual emigrant fleet and planet governments have a lot of latitude in deciding how to organize and equip their local defense forces. They operate under the auspices of the New UN Forces, but they're not necessarily all organized the same. Macross Galaxy's was a corporate army that operated as the fleet's local New UN Forces. Windermere IV's Aerial Knights were the same, operating as their planet's New UN Spacy defense force during the world's thirty-three year stint as a New UN Government member, reinforcing other NUNG member worlds under attack and so on. Their different taste in equipment seems to have had its roots in their feudal martial tradition more than anything organizational. That's probably got a lot more to do with the sheer remoteness of the Brisingr globular cluster than anything else. The Brisingr globular cluster is 10+ years from Earth by space fold, in a fairly isolated region of the galaxy. It's noted to have had some moderately negative consequences for their economic growth. The Brisingr Alliance is basically space-NATO meets space-NAFTA, a mutual defense and economic partnership of astrographically-close states. Their isolation and the ensuing economic problems were cited as a reason they opted to develop their own 5th Generation VF, to stimulate their own economy, keep the cash inside the cluster, and to hopefully produce something they could sell in export. (In a close parallel to the Mitsubishi ATD-X/X-2, including in that they basically ended up buying a ton of hardware from the outside anyway.) The difficulty with getting the Federal New UN Forces involved in the conflict with Windermere IV was explicitly political, the conflict was seen as a tiff between emigrant planets so the federal forces were taking a hands-off approach because getting involved would be politically difficult. (The heavy-handed suppression of emigrant planets in the 2040s and 2050s hadn't exactly been forgotten yet... you might remember them as the events that came to a head in the Macross VF-X2 game.) With respect to the above about the local government of the NUNG member states having broad authority over the maintenance of their armed forces, Macross-29's case is one of the fleet government voluntarily disbanding its armed forces. Macross-29 was a gathering place of sorts for people with strong pacifist leanings, and many of its inhabitants moved there from elsewhere in the galaxy to get away from various conflicts. That profound aversion to conflict led the fleet to disband its armed forces and install pacifist doormat Serge Glass (brother to deceased Macross Frontier fleet president Howard Glass) as City-29's mayor. Macross-29's severe trade deficit and the ensuing economic crash were a product of the City-29 government's commitment to its policy of total pacifism and unarmed neutrality. It made the Macross-29 fleet government into extreme doormats in their trade negotiations with neighboring fleets and nearby planets. They were so conflict-averse that they would eventually agree to even the most unilaterally unfavorable terms if it meant avoiding a fight, so their neighbors took merciless advantage of them until their economy was teetering at the brink of total collapse and high unemployment had riled the population enough that a significant portion of it was ready to remove Glass by the ballot or the bullet and start busting heads if that's what it took to balance trade with their neighbors. That, of course, was embodied by the Neo Zentran political movement that favored reinstating the fleet's armed forces and assuming a stronger posture in the fleet's negotiations with its neighbors. (The two prominent sides of the Neo Zentran movement being, essentially, those who favored "ballot" like the protagonist and those who favored "bullet".)
  7. Seto Kaiba

    Macross 30

    Seto Kaiba replied to Tochiro's topic in Games

    Random question... anyone still have a copy of that .zip archive containing Macross 30 art assets that was doing the rounds a couple years back?
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I've got a plan in the works to go quite a bit farther than that. Over the last couple of years various folks have gently suggested I really need to properly organize and systematize my collection of Macross knowledge and/or start publishing all the translations and analyses I've done over the years. I've been supporting the Macross Mecha Manual by handling its web hosting and providing translations for some of its articles, but the scope of my own work has increased quite a bit and no longer really fits within the site's narrow focus. I didn't really have the time to do anything about it until last year, when my day job had a reorg that solved my team's critical manpower shortage. Not having to log 20+ hours of OT every week freed up a lot of time for other pursuits, so a few friends and I started giving serious thought to creating a Macross reference site with proper academic rigor. Right now, the site itself is still a work in progress. Designs for the various pages are more or less finalized, but the actual coding is slow going since my web design skills are rusty as hell after five years of not being used. I've got all the tools together except for a replacement for my ancient scanner that won't work on Windows 10 (recommendations would be enthusiastically welcomed), and at some point in the coming months I'm gonna have to find an artist to commission a few simple pieces that my art-fu is too weak to do myself.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda burned out on superhero movies in general, but this looks like it might actually be pretty interesting if they stay away from the special effects extravaganza shenanigans.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    CBS All Access just dropped the latest episode of Star Trek: Discovery... "Through the Valley of Shadows". All in all, great B and C plots that feel like real Star Trek... and the crappy Burnham-centric A-plot continues to circle the drain and get dumber all the time. Next episode looks to be headed into action-heavy territory, as the teaser consists entirely of the USS Discovery and USS Enterprise preparing for a battle against Section 31's fleet. This, at least, goes a small way towards explaining why Section 31 was forgotten by Picard's time... it was destroyed by Control, much like it was repeatedly destroyed and refounded by Control in the relaunch novel series.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    For what it's worth, I've found that the difference between being funny-bad and embarrassing-bad usually lies in how seriously the cast is taking the truly awful screenplay they've been handed. When the cast know they've been handed a real turd of a screenplay and make a heroic professional effort with it anyway, the result is usually a painful-to-watch mess that leaves you feeling a little bad for the cast. Treating an awful screenplay with the same gravitas as an Oscar-worthy one just highlights how bad the screenplay was to begin with. On the other hand, when the cast know they've been handed a steamer and either try and utterly fail to make a professional effort or simply can't be arsed, a truly bad screenplay can be transmuted into unintentional comedy gold. A cast that decides to either have fun or be completely unprofessional with a bad screenplay can be enormously entertaining. Starship Troopers 2 always felt to me like it belonged to the latter class, where the cut-rate cast knew from the outset that the screenplay would be illustrated with stinklines and went about Shatnering it up any time they stepped in front of the camera. Watching them overact the hell out of every scene made a painfully generic sci-fi horror plot actually kind of fun, especially when the bottom fell out near the end and it devolved into a snarky zombie action flick instead. Historically, Robotech has always desperately wanted to be taken seriously as both a science fiction series and an anime series. They don't have the talent pool to turn out screenplays that aren't dreadful and are so committed to taking them completely seriously that the end result crosses the line twice into unwatchable stupidity. If they stopped taking themselves and the series so seriously they could maybe achieve something in the field of ironic retro camp humor, but they seem to be holding out hope for a big budget sci-fi action movie like Paramount's Transformers film franchise, Star Trek, or Star Wars.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    How is this crap still in print? HOW? Seriously, we're hitting levels of soap opera BS and M. Night Shyamalan hack twists that shouldn't be possible.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... there's a not-so-fine line between "so bad it's funny" and "so bad you're embarrassed on behalf of people involved in it". On the one side you've got your Dooms and your Plan 9 From Outer Spaces, but original Robotech productions usually land on the other side where films like the Star Wars Holiday Special, Ishtar, and Dragonball Evolution live. They would be VERY lucky to get something even as funny-bad as Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation or Reefer Madness.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, it does... but in the most stringently literal sense there is nothing new to see there. Excluding its gunpod, which did not get a cutaway or anything, it's all weaponry we've seen before in other books. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-11 Thunderbolt is absolutely a book worth having and has a lot of frankly gorgeous art, but like the books for the VF-0, VF-1 Vol.2, Battroid Valkyrie, and Squadrons, it's one of the books where the real gems are in the text rather than the art.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    You're right. I've revealed I'm also a filthy filthy casual when it comes to comic books. I confused publishers for my two examples of botched representation characters, the other one being the first token black character in the Legion of Super Heroes who happened to have been written as a racist by a racist (Tyroc). They'd be a lot better off if they'd just go off the rails with it and let the story go where it will.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    With what IP? How do you do a Netflix-style reboot of a property that doesn't actually own - and thus can't use - most of its story or any of its design works? That's the eternal sticking point for Robotech. Copyright law with respect to derivative works being what it is, Harmony Gold can't claim ownership of 99.9% of what's in Robotech and thus 2/3 of it is off the table for future adaptations without the written blessing of Tatsunoko's lawyers and a hefty check for royalties owed and the remaining 1/3 is just plain off the table permanently. They can't pull a Voltron: Legendary Defender and make new designs based on the existing ones because that'd be copyright infringement if they did it without permission. Seems like they'll make a movie about anything these days... except Robotech. They'll never recapture the magic of that one year where the April Fool's joke was a report stating they'd fired the Yunes and had security walk them out of the building, complete with a photograph of (IIRC) Tommy hauling his crap out of the building in a cardboard box.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I'm not sure I would go quite that far. Yeah, the Star Wars sequel trilogy is stuck with the catch-22 that comes with trying to promote your characters based on minority representation. They've got instant appeal in some demographics, but at the same time they're limited in how they can develop those characters by the potential backlash they'll face if what they do with a representational character's story offends the demographic they set out to represent.1 Far from being "retarded", I'd call it a surprisingly easy pitfall for writers to fall into given that everything they do has to be strained through the peculiar social tone-deafness that seems to affect most large corporations. Doubly so in this current age of increasing social awareness, where many corporate executives, politicians, and other social movers and shakers are taking their athlete's foot cream orally in industrial quantities. Moreover, I would say that this isn't an insurmountable or unavoidable problem for Star Wars. Rogue One: a Star Wars Story demonstrated beyond doubt that Disney absolutely can do diverse casting correctly (by not making it an end unto itself and boasting about it), and I don't think Rey or Finn are unsalvageable in that regard either. In fact, for reasons that I will get into below, I find them to be the two Star Wars characters with the most narrative potential... in part because of what Rian Johnson did in The Last Jedi. Oh please no, we don't need someone Lucas-ing things up... the odds of a dramatic increase in quality are vastly outweighed by them adding more gimmicky bullsh*t that wasn't necessary. I guess you haven't been paying much attention, because opinion of the series was steadily trending upward starting from the Short Treks to the midpoint of Season Two, where the bottom fell out after the show fell off the wagon and resumed its bad habits. I know I'll keep watching for the foreseeable future because the last two Short Treks and season two's first half proved that CBS absolutely CAN do Star Trek right... which makes it all the more baffling when the writing quality takes a dive and we're back to a mary sue main character and a plot where the writers keep forgetting there are facts the characters shouldn't know yet. Not voicing an opinion because other fans don't agree with you strikes me as as intellectual cowardice. A robust exchange of views is a fundamental of discussion in general. If you have a thoughtful analysis to share, share it. We don't bite. To be brutally frank, I cannot say that I blame anyone for being pessimistic about Star Wars IX's prospects. Not just because pessimism is an inherently liberating philosophy where things almost always turn out better than you expected and you're braced for the worst when they don't, but because they have every reason to expect that Star Wars IX is going to be a stinker after the last several films. There's a point where it stops being pessimism and starts being pattern recognition... which you could argue is around the point where that discontent starts putting the kind of measurable dent in the box office take that would spell the demise of a lesser franchise. I don't really have a stake in it since I'm a filthy casual who thought The Force Awakens was entertaining if a bit unimaginative in a standard popcorn flick sort of way and wasn't all that bothered by The Last Jedi except for Rose and her plot tumor, but for the sake of fairness I would question what exactly the fans who were so disappointed by those films (and maybe Solo) have in the way of cause for optimism regarding Star Wars IX? Apart from the fact that a marginally less sh*tty director is in charge (I can't bring myself to call Abrams "good" after the last three Star Trek movies, sorry), all they've really got is two dueling creators whose visions of Star Wars aren't even on the same page. I did say I rather liked the poster... but hey, since I promised it to TehPW, try this one on for size: For all the vitriol that's been directed at Rey and Finn over their acknowledged status as representational characters and the writing problems that brought with it, I think they're two of the most interesting characters Star Wars has ever had. Both the original Star Wars trilogy and the Star Wars prequel trilogy revolved around a Chosen Hero of Ultimate Destiny. Luke Skywalker never really had much in the way of agency in how he lived his life. The Jedi Order sent him to Tatooine to be raised by his aunt and uncle, who conspired to keep him on the farm and far removed from anything resembling a choice about how to live his life. He got railroaded into following Obi-wan Kenobi offworld, joining the Rebel Alliance, and becoming a Jedi Knight. He didn't choose anything in his life because destiny and other people chose for him. (Admittedly if the ghost of Alec Guinness showed up and told me I had stuff to be getting on with, you'd bet I'd hustle too, so I can't hold that against him.) Anakin Skywalker had an even more exaggerated version of the same problem, since the Force and destiny shat him into being and he was more or less immediately labeled The Chosen One with the Great Destiny of defeating the Dark Side. That dogged him for his entire run until Obi-wan hacked off a bunch of his extremities, then yelled at him for screwing up his preordained destiny, and ran off. Rey and Finn are the first Star Wars protagonists to have agency. They're not being railroaded into things by the Force enforcing a great destiny because of their bloodline or any of that nonsense. They are, for all intents and purposes, random people whose fates were shaped by their morals and the choices they made based on them. Rey was a junk collector on a planet with an even better claim to being farthest from the bright center of the universe than Tatooine does (sorry Luke) who had at least half a dozen opportunities to bail on the adventure she's on and return to living as a junk collector on her sh*thole home planet. She strongly considered it several times, but in the end the choices she made set her on her collision course with Finn, Han Solo, the Resistance, Kylo Ren and Snoke, and ultimately Master Skywalker. Likewise, Finn could've turned a blind eye to the First Order's crimes, but he didn't. He could've chosen to run and hide once he got to Jakku, maybe take passage elsewhere. He could've chosen to take that flight to the Outer Rim. He also had many opportunities to opt out and run away, but every time he made a conscious (often visibly reluctant) choice to do what was right instead of what was easy. They're heroes because they were nobodies from nowhere who dared to be badass. They're not part of a chosen bloodline of the destined. It could've been anybody, which sends a powerful message in-universe and to the audience. For that reason, I'm interested in seeing where the final movie of this Star Wars trilogy is headed. They're products of their own choices and their fates are not preordained by the Force, so anything could happen. Will Rey keep stubbornly trying to find a hidden iota of good in the spoiled brat who is now the last of the Skywalker line, or will she make Sith sashimi out of him and prevent a recurrence of the problem a generation or two down the line? Will Finn become a leader in the new Rebellion or just stay a capable right hand man? Will Poe Dameron not suck at something besides piloting ever? Rian Johnson made a lot of terrible creative choices, but he left some story hooks open that Abrams would be a fool to pass on. This is supposedly the swansong of the entire main Star Wars film series, so they've got a lot of loose threads to tie up, and since they're operating with a good deal more freedom than usual it'll be interesting to see what they do with it. 1. Such as what happened when Marvel Comics revealed the backstory of their landmark representational African-American character The Falcon, and in a moment of supreme tone-deaf idiocy revealed that he wasn't a straight-laced kid... he was a career criminal who'd been brainwashed into believing he'd been an upstanding citizen all his life by a Nazi supervillain (Red Skull). More recently, Star Trek: Discovery found itself under fire for heavily advertising the presence of a gay couple on the cast and killing one of them off part of the way through the first season.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I get that this is essentially an indie effort, but quality-wise this doesn't look all that much better from what was available back in the 80's. They might do OK as long as the manufacturing is done on the assumption of ultra-low-volume sales.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    SOP. They were desperately trying to hype Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles like it was new for like eight years after it came out... though I guess their current record for twisting the truth until it resembles a slinky would be when they attempted to advertise the then-28 year old MOSPEADA OVA that'd had fansubs in circulation for over a decade as "new" and "never before seen" in 2013.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the usual fake news and announcements of some fourth-rate garbage from their bottom-of-the-barrel licensees and licensed bootleggers. HG announces every schmuck they approach about the film as if they had agreed to direct, and every writer who turns in a story treatment for a quick buck as if they're writing the final screenplay. It's all BS. Here's hoping the new RPG licensee gets their sh*t together before HG loses the license in a bit under two years time, because if the draft they published for their game is any fair indication of final quality they're making Palladium Books look positively on the ball.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Looking back over the season and a half of Star Trek: Discovery thus far, I feel like most of the show's problems can be traced back to one of three sources: Game of Thrones, J.J. Abrams's Star Wars: the Force Awakens, and J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot movies. It's pretty obvious that the success of Game of Thrones is what influenced Star Trek: Discovery's producers and writers to opt for an arc-based format with a dark, violent, action-friendly setting. You either imitate or you innovate, and imitation comes with a lot less risk. This isn't really a problem in and of itself. If you want to succeed on TV you have to follow trends unless you're setting trends yourself, and you can't go far wrong if you're copying the practices of the leader in your field. The relentlessly dark, violent, action-heavy approach to storytelling only became an issue for Star Trek: Discovery because fifty years of Star Trek had been lighthearted, generally non-violent, high-concept intellectual space adventure. It was massively out of character for the franchise, but not to the point of being unworkable. Where I think most of the problems came in was with Star Wars: the Force Awakens. We're in a period where there's a lot of focus on representation for women and minorities in film. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself either. Star Trek has always been pretty good about representation thanks to Gene Roddenberry's vision of a future where humanity has put things like superstitions and bigotry in its past. He created a fictional world where everyone can contribute equally to society because the whole idea that the human race had one group that was "better" or "chosen" had been abandoned as wrong-headed nonsense. More importantly, the thing that made Star Trek's diverse cast work so well was that they just slipped it in like it was the most natural thing in the world. They weren't shouting about how diverse the cast was from the rooftops. With Star Wars: the Force Awakens you suddenly had a huge amount of press coverage about the representation itself, with magazines, news sites, and social media gushing about the movie having a woman and a black man as the main characters. Even though this would've been fodder for a "That's cute" since that's something Star Trek did back in the 90's, they somehow let themselves get dragged into a game of oneupsmanship. They were suddenly promoting on the basis of how diverse they were being with a black woman in the lead role, an openly gay couple (after bailing on the idea on three previous occasions1), an arabic character, etc. The problem you run into when you do that is it ties your hands when you're writing, because you've made the character's minority category a fundamental part of their identity from the perspective of the audience. You're suddenly constrained by this no-win scenario where anything you do with that one character is going to be relentlessly judged as a reflection of your views of whatever minority they're representing. A character who's been advertised on the basis of representation like Michael Burnham ends up with an omniscient morality license as you can't have them face realistic consequences for extreme actions because people will insist the character is being picked on for their minority category. Look at what happened with Dr. Culber... he got killed because he stupidly was alone in a sickbay suite treating a man believed to be mentally ill who was a Klingon sleeper agent, and a fair chunk of the audience was baying for the producers blood and accusing them of killing him off for being gay. The writers are forced to do all kinds of ridiculous mental calisthenics in the plot to dance around the fact that, as a main character and a representation character, Burnham cannot be depicted in the wrong or having a moment of weakness except on rare occasions because more frequent occurrences would be courting accusations of racism and/or sexism from the audience. A protagonist who isn't allowed to be wrong can't grow and develop as the story progresses, so Burnham comes off as a Mary Sue. (This is made especially weird by a very un-Star Trek-like number of category stereotypes in the cast... Burnham is a stock sassy black woman from a broken family AND an ex-convict, Stamets is one effeminate lisp short of being stock catty gay man, Lorca turned out to be one red hat short of a stereotypical racist white nationalist complete with the expected unreasonably huge gun collection, Ash Tyler is a foreign terrorist motivated by his fundamentalist religious beliefs who happens to be disguised as an Arabic man, and Mirror!Georgeau was a cookie cutter standard evil authoritarian Chinese character complete and femme fatale with the expected catsuit, sexual promiscuity, and catty behavior. It's like they picked as many offensive stereotypes as possible hoping they would cancel each other out.) Lastly, Star Trek: Discovery picked up the over-the-top set design and obsession with VFX sequences that plagued the J.J. Abrams reboot Star Trek films. A setting that was always fairly low key and almost realistic with its future tech is suddenly infested with a ton of impossibly compact folding gadgets that unfold with eleventy-billion moving parts, huge holographic displays, lights which seem calibrated solely to produce lensflares, miles of exposed piping and storage tanks with no apparent purpose, an excess of polished metal surfaces, and conspicuous noisemakers. The aesthetics borrowed from the reboot movies just don't fit with the historical period the show is set in, and vary between being silly and just plain distracting. Paradoxically, the one thing that they included that absolutely deserved a big, complex visual effect - the Spore Drive - ended up as a surprisingly low key plexiglass cubicle with an ugly posture chair in it. Put all that crap together, and what you've got is an ungainly mess that even experienced writers would've struggled with. 1. First with Garak in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, then Lt. Hawk in Star Trek: First Contact, and finally Malcolm Reed in Star Trek: Enterprise. Lt. Hawk's orphaned plot thread got picked up in the relaunch novels, at least, where his former lover ends up assigned to Riker's USS Titan.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It couldn't conceivably be worse than the writing we've got now. Star Trek: Discovery has well and truly fallen off the wagon and resumed the bad habits that made season one such a complete and utter embarrassment to the Star Trek name. All that's really changed is we've traded Burnham's misplaced survivor's guilt from that first battle of the Klingon war that got her surrogate parent killed for Burnham's repressed abandonment issues stemming from her actual parents getting killed. Thank goodness Sarek and Amanda are spared by canon, otherwise they'd probably whack them too for some cheap drama. This most recent episode reminded me of nothing so much as listening to little kid tell a story. It's this long, rambling, disjointed narrative broken up by digressions that don't have a clear point. Earlier today I was watching a video on YouTube about an update in the legal proceedings between CBS and the guy who made that point-and-click adventure game that CBS allegedly ripped off to create Discovery. From the sound of it, CBS put forward a petition to dismiss in which they more or less admitted they committed plagiarism but maintain that it wasn't enough to be criminal.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Without exaggeration, the whole Control plot is basically Skynet's story arc from Terminator... it even sent a robotic probe (admittedly squid-shaped) back in time to try and kill Pike and Tyler and then attempted to advance its own creation using that Freeza-looking cyborg crewmember.
  24. Seto Kaiba
  25. Seto Kaiba
    You neglected to mention that the far end of said wormhole is in the writer's colon and they've been binging on Indian food like it's going out of style. This plot hasn't just deteriorated into sh*t, it's flaming sh*t at this point. The other problem with the direction the season has taken is that they seem to be going out of their way to avoid contradicting the pseudo-canon Relaunch novels... which, if they don't, means failure is the ONLY option. Control will still exist in 2376. ... was the Temporal Prime Directive a thing at this point in time? This, I could honestly see an explanation for. Whether it's the audience or in-universe, when people think of a Starfleet ship the first (and often only) type that leaps to mind are the big multimission explorers operating out on the frontiers of explored space. That's your Constitution-class and Miranda-class ships c.2257. People always forget that Starfleet does so much more than just explore outside the Federation's borders and battle external threats. They're also the Federation's border patrol, customs service, surveyors, colonial pioneers, infrastructure engineers, cargo handlers, medical emergency services, tugboats, tenders, and more. For every one of those big multimission explorers there are dozens if not hundreds of ships in Starfleet's logistical arms doing unglamorous stuff like patrolling the Federation's borders with hostile powers, patrolling inside of Federation space, surveying planets for future colonization, setting up the infrastructure for new colonies, towing damaged or disabled starships, delivering deuterium and antideuterium to refill the fuel tanks of other ships, and so on, shuttling diplomats around, and so on. Star Trek's original series and animated series were pretty good about occasionally depicting these unglamorous logistical support roles. We saw an awful lot of the Antares-type freighter design that first appeared in "Charlie X" in various logistical support roles, most of which were presented as unmanned "robot ships" hauling cargo either autonomously along pre-programmed courses or semi-autonomously under the guidance of a manned ship. Other, decanonized designs like the Ptolemy-class transport/tug seem to have got canon status back as a pair of ships closely resembling the Ptolemy-class are seen towing the Enterprise away in Star Trek: Discovery. Small scoutships and runabout-analogs like the Archer-class are also treated as independent starships. Some, like the Antares-type, apparently have a separate registry number system as we saw some of them having NCC-G####. They might also be counting ships that've been mothballed and could be returned to service in a reasonable span of time like the Daedalus-class ships that the Starfleet Corps of Engineers were using. The Enterprise was usually operating out on the frontier, so it often being "the only ship in the sector" makes at least some sense... or it may help to mentally append "combat-ready" to that in some cases. You wouldn't send freighters full of grain to intercept V'Ger. Lucky them, the Talosians seem to be quite content to be exactly that... impartial, isolated, and completely uninterested in the goings-on in the rest of the galaxy. They just want to be left alone, to the point of throwing up an illusion that their star system was eaten by a black hole. Seems a bit counter-intuitive, since the actual content of General Order 7 itself was sealed except for officers of command rank and their direct subordinates. Sort of. The Talosians nearly destroyed themselves in a nuclear war, and retreating into illusions of their own creation as a coping mechanism until they got bored with illusions of their own creation and realized they didn't remember how their ancient technology worked anymore. That was part of it, they were also looking for new content for their illusions since they had more or less exhausted their own imaginations.
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