Seto Kaiba
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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba
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... considering how dumb the season finale of Discovery was, no realistic hope of that. Honestly, I'd put the two on about the same level. Voyager would've been a lot better if the network hadn't interfered so much, but it was pretty enjoyable on average. Janeway's emotional inconsistency was frustrating but they never tried to depict her as a perfect person, she was flawed in believable ways even if the constant abandoning of ways to get home fast for flimsy reasons got a little silly after a while. It would've been better if Robert Beltran hadn't spent seven seasons phoning it in and if they hadn't let the lawyers write Locarno out in favor of Paris since that would've given him more of a redemption arc. Enterprise was pretty fun for the same reason. Archer and his crew were flawed in believable ways, they made mistakes, they were occasionally embarrased, but they seemed to be having so much fun doing it that it was kind of infectious. If it weren't for the whole Temporal Cold War plot tumor I'd rate it higher than Voyager because the business of exploration felt less routine there, and the cast really made it feel like the crew were having the time of their lives. I'm kind of in two minds about the aborted season five since it had material that was equal parts amazing (the opening moves of the Romulan War) and embarrassing (the Kzinti).
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That there'd be in-universe docu-dramas about events like the First Space War and Minmay's role in it is only logical. What's dumb as hell is a director saying there is no continuity because he can't be arsed to answer questions about it. While reboots are a thing, you don't see many directors trying to pretend that sequels are unrelated to each other like that. That's just George Lucas levels of stupid.
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It's an excuse Kawamori came up with around the time Frontier came out... he claims all Macross shows are dramatizations of a "true" history, which is his way of getting out of answering questions about continuity. It's not something the people working on Macross seem to take seriously... or acknowledge at all. What @sketchley is referring to is something said in a Master File book about the 2031 in-universe verson of Do You Remember Love? being a sequel to another in-universe film from the 2010s. Of course, since it's Master File, it's not official anyway.
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Well, the final episode of Star Trek: Discovery's second season - and great bird of the galaxy willing, its final episode overall - had its premiere tonight. I'm forcibly reminded of a quotation from Q that he used to describe human history and I think best suits season two of Star Trek: Discovery: "It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing." This episode is a god-awful mess of overly-busy CGI fleet sequences where they forgot to animate ships actually firing back at their attackers, ridiculous drama punctuated by the dead-eyed fish face that Martin-Green fondly imagines looks dramatic, and more very desperate attempts to make certain female characters "cool" with incredibly forced dialog. It's such an unholy mess that it defies summarization... which may have something to do with the eleventy-billion lensflares, the constant shakycam and rapid pan shots that left me suspecting the camera man had an inner ear problem and a six martini lunch, and spending the entire budget on the CG effects sequences having left no room for budget to write proper dialog.
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Crusher's got Burnham beat in terms of author self-insert wish fulfillment... but Burnham wipes the floor with him in terms of sheer Mary Sue-ness. Wesley wasn't a main character, after all.
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For my money, Discovery has already seized the top (bottom?) spot as "worst Star Trek". Star Trek: Discovery is bad, but it's bad in a way that's very different from the weak spots of previous generations of Star Trek shows. It's most similar to TNG's first season, where you had the Enterprise crew journeying to worlds near and far and sitting in judgement of their cultures and values even though that was explicitly the opposite of their mission. Burnham ended up being a lot like Wesley, a wunderkind who can do no wrong and for whom other characters exist simply to facilitate her displaying how awesome she is. Even when she is clearly in the wrong, the writers bend over backwards so that she is still right. Unlike TNG, which quickly realized Wesley was annoying as f*ck, STD doubled down on Burnham to the point that it's hard to argue that she isn't a Mary Sue. She's also got a touch of Janeway syndrome, where the writers can't decide if she's a tough as nails action girl or a delicate and emotional wilting violet, so she whipsaws back and forth between the two extremes with nary a stop in the middle. Anson Mount did say he was open to the idea, but in the interview where he said so he made it pretty clear both in explicit terms and by implication that he found working for the CBS showrunners in charge of Star Trek to be a frustrating, exhausting, and unpleasant ordeal and not something he's really interested in doing again... which may be connected to the HR complaint that leaked into the news in which there was reportedly a physical altercation between Mount and a director working on the series. If he does come back, he's made it very clear it'll only be on his terms.
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Today's the premiere of the final episode of Star Trek: Discovery season two. Any hopes for this episode, or are we all just waiting for the axe to fall?
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Really, the whole of Star Trek IV is one huge problem... Kirk creates a bootstrap paradox by selling glasses he brought with him from the future to an antiques dealer in 1987. Kirk almost creates an international incident by sending Pavel Chekhov, a Russian, to infiltrate the Enterprise and he nearly gets killed and is captured and interrogated as a foreign spy. Chekhov leaves behind his Starfleet identification and a working late 23rd century Klingon-issue subspace communicator and Starfleet phaser pistol. They abduct Chekhov - a suspected foreign spy - from the hospital where he was sent for treatment. McCoy casually dispenses 23rd century medication from his kit while in said hospital and gets in several altercations with doctors along the way. Scotty gives away future technology (the chemical formula for transparent aluminum. Kirk abducts two humpback whales and a marine biologist, possibly indirectly causing the extinction of that very species in his own present day. Kirk essentially attacks a whaling ship in international waters. The DTI must've had a fit when he got back and crashed that Bird of Prey in San Francisco Bay. I can only assume the fact that he saved Earth, brought home the first-ever captured Klingon Bird of Prey, and potentially unmasked a whale species as sentient alien inhabitants of Earth got him off the hook. You'd probably enjoy the Enterprise relaunch novels... their jumping-off point and the first novel's framing device is Jake Sisko and Nog going over declassified documents from the Federation's formative years and brutally taking the piss out of Enterprise's last couple episodes. (Trip's death, for instance, is written off as a frankly terrible effort on Archer's part to allow Tucker to go off the radar in the name of undercover operations on Romulus.)
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That'd certainly explain why MAAS Toys is apparently shutting down so abruptly... they're in debt, and have no obvious way out as the income from new crowdfunding can't keep pace with the cost of new production and their outstanding debts from their earlier, failed projects. Yeah, that was a big scandal. It left Palladium Books with two great big public relations black eyes... one from the dustup over a member of Palladium Books's own staff attempting to finance a side business by extorting money from the backers of the Kickstarter, and one from Kevin's attempt to use the fallout from it to silence his critics. It also sank Rogue Heroes LLC, the side business the staffer had tried to fund via extortion, since they got branded as a shell company Palladium Books created to sidestep Kickstarter's terms of service. -
Turns out I was thinking of something they'd said two months earlier about their attempt to go solo and do crowdfunding without an intermediary like Kickstarter or Indiegogo... which resulted in several backers never paying and others backing out and getting refunds thru PayPal after the money had been spent, leaving them tens of thousands of dollars in the red.
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Any more extremities and I might not be allowed to leave the next time I visit an aquarium... or maybe I'll just have to move to New York and annoy Spider-Man. On this, I am inclined to disagree for the reasons given previously. Look at what happened with Evolution Toy's VF-2SS. Even though the quality of their toy was iffy at best, the fact that it still sold was evidence enough to convince companies that'd previously written the Macross II series off to reevaluate their estimate of its profitability. If there's enough demand that a bad toy sells, competent companies will naturally assume that a well-made toy will sell proportionately better. It's a gamble, but it's gambling with infinitely better odds than having nobody interested in making an attempt. That's not the situation we're in, though. MAAS Toys was the ONLY outfit willing to gamble on making Southern Cross mecha toys in defiance of the professional consensus that Southern Cross mecha toys are commercially unviable. With MAAS Toys out of the picture, there's no outfit left that questions Toynami's assessment that Southern Cross is a dry well for something as development-intensive as mecha toys. Wasn't that around the point where they started to make pointed hints that their attempt to go solo on crowdfunding backfired epically when a bunch of their backers backed out and got Paypal refunds? Tabletop game. Palladium Books tried to launch a tabletop miniatures strategy/war game ala Warhammer 40,000 under the title of "Robotech RPG Tactics" via Kickstarter. It was the second of two epic Kickstarter disasters for Robotech. Their campaign was successfully funded with ~$1.5 million (US), but Palladium Books screwed the pooch right out of the gate by not checking that the factory they partnered with could manufacture from the design docs they'd had made for the minis. It went downhill from there: Massive cost overruns from redoing the miniature designs nearly exhausted the budget early on A rigged backer vote to take the incomplete game to retail in defiance of promises that backers would get the game first caused a storm of controversy and accusations of breach of contract with the backers Misappropriation of most of the remaining budget to manufacture retail stock of the incomplete game that didn't sell worth a damn led to three years of lying to cover up the fact that they'd run out of money while Kevin Siembieda frantically tried to get a loan for the ~$700k he needed to finish the game and meet his basic obligations to the Kickstarter backers. Having to hire a new PR guy to lie for them since nobody believed Palladium's own staff anymore further depleted the budget, One of the game's contributors attempted to blackmail the Kickstarter's backers into backing an unrelated game based on a property he'd licensed from Palladium. He promised that he could fix the issues with Palladium's Kickstarter but would keep the fix to himself until (or unless) his own project was fully funded. The predictable backlash from te blackmail attempt led to the attempted blackmailer getting banned from Kickstarter and Palladium Books's account being threatened with a suspension, leading him to attempt suicide, which Kevin Siembieda immediately blamed the Kickstarter backers for in an attempt to morally blackmail them into silence. The whole sad mess ended with Harmony Gold revoking Palladium Books's Robotech license... but not before the backlash from it contributed to Harmony Gold's own Kickstarter plans for a crowdfunded new series pilot called Robotech Academy crashing and burning so hard Harmony Gold ragequit before Kickstarter could officially declare their project a failure with less than half of its funding goal reached. The whole game was doomed to fail anyway, since Robotech doesn't have the kind of brand awareness you need to sustain a tabletop game, but hey... they went out with a bang AND a whimper, because Harmony Gold took Old Publishing Yeller out back and put him down.
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I'm honestly not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, MAAS Toys were undeniably a criminal enterprise... so I shouldn't feel sorry for them. On the other hand, MAAS Toys seems to have been trying to go at least partially legit by licensing Southern Cross from HG... so I ought to feel a little bad for the fact that their attempt to go legit was a part of what sunk them. On the third hand, MAAS Toys was apparently dumb enough to pursue the license without first checking whether or not HG was OK with their crowdfunding-based business model... which puts them in "too dumb to live" territory. On the fourth hand, they were literally the ONLY ones willing to make the attempt at Southern Cross mecha merchandise... which is laudable in a self-destructive sort of way given that every other company refused to even try. On the fifth hand, I really need to see about getting this geiger counter fixed... Transforming mecha toys are a good deal more difficult to design and produce than standard action figures... I would assume that they'll stick to what they're good at. It was the obvious outcome... especially given that MAAS Toys was exclusively crowdfunded and Robotech has been death on the whole subject of crowdfunding ever since its embarrassing failures on Kickstarter. I disagree. MAAS Toys were literally THE ONLY "company" willing to consider developing Southern Cross mecha toys. It was them and no one else and it took thirty-four frickin years to get THAT far. The professional toy companies in Japan and the United States turned up their collective noses at Southern Cross as a waste of time because the projected return on investment wasn't big enough, and the indie and bootleg crowd that are now all that's willing to touch Robotech passed on it too. MAAS Toys WAS that 0.001% Hail Mary that could have resulted in better-quality Southern Cross toys from another company down the road if their stuff sold reasonably well like what happened with Evolution Toys, Bandai, and Macross II. Now we get nothing. Maybe, maybe not. What MAAS Toys was trying to do was a lot less ambitious than the obviously doomed Palladium Books Robotech tabletop game and MAAS Toys's staff aren't as moronically self-sabotaging as the Harmony Gold staff running the Robotech Academy campaign. IMO it's at least a coin flip whether they could've done it or not. We'll never know for sure now, but if HG had been willing to allow MAAS Toys to try I don't think failure would've been a foregone conclusion the way it was for HG itself and Palladium.
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The DTI in the novels didn't have any means of time travel themselves, they were all about monitoring and regulating research into temporal mechanics and any related technology, confiscating any time travel technology they find (whether ancient, new, or anachronistic), investigating, and if necessary prosecuting, individuals who try to alter history. They get assistance from uptime agencies like the TIC and FTA when the offenders are from the future. There is a very good reason most of the novels are non-canon to the Star Trek novel verse.
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https://toy-wizards.com/2019/04/17/toy-news-rumor-maas-toys-goes-under-customers-demand-refunds/ Looks like the MAAS Toys Spartas project is dead.
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Looks like this project is probably dead... and MAAS Toys with it. https://toy-wizards.com/2019/04/17/toy-news-rumor-maas-toys-goes-under-customers-demand-refunds/
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Wasn't that Delta? He'd originally wanted to remove music and do a thing about competing flight demonstration teams.
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Does it really count as having lifted the idea if the entire book series is spinning off from that one and only canonical appearance of the DTI in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine? Get properly angry, then do the paperwork.
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Yeah... as I mentioned a few days back, CBS seems to have hit the same brick wall with Star Trek: Discovery that Paramount did with their Star Trek reboot movies. They're visually impressive special effects tours de force, but by being all flash and no substance they exhaust their bag of tricks very quickly and have nothing to hold an audience's interest long-term. Star Trek can barely break even on the lukewarm support of the casual audience, and in some cases (e.g. Beyond) allegedly actually lost money in the long run. The designers working on Star Trek: Discovery initially leaked reports that they'd been told that everything had to be "25% different" from classic Star Trek aesthetics for legal reasons stemming from the divided rights to the Star Trek franchise. They later deleted those posts and stated it was purely a creative choice. Either way, the sticky fingerprints of Jar-Jar Abrams's hideous movie designs are all over Discovery, which was a pretty surefire way for CBS to shoot itself in the foot given that Star Trek fans roundly mocked the omnipresent lens flares and "we outsourced our interior design to Apple" aesthetic. Not to mention it's all types of merchandise that the most casual tiers of viewer would be more likely to actually buy. There's nothing for the die-hard Star Trek fan because Star Trek: Discovery is about as welcome in the die-hard Trekkie's home as dry rot. What does the future have against pockets anyway? There was something said in a review back in season one about how Star Trek: Discovery wasn't fun... the characters were plainly not having any fun, so it was hard for the audience to. Without that sort of "high adventure" science fiction setting I can't imagine Star Trek: Discovery would do much to appeal to kids. It feels more like a Star Trek series catering to this guy. Honestly, one of the best parts of the Department of Temporal Investigations novel series was how the name "James T. Kirk" seems to still be giving the DTI grey hair and migraine headaches a century after the man's (official) death. Lucsly practically has a stroke every time the man's name comes up... never mind when he actually meets him and descends into borderline angrish for several minutes before winding up in insane troll logic territory. Even the chaps in the Temporal Integrity Commission who seemed to like her (e.g. Lt. Ducane from "Relativity") chastised her for her ship showing up on the Temporal Integrity Commission's sensors way too often...
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As you can see from StarTrek.com, the overwhelming majority of Star Trek: Discovery's merchandising is dirt-cheap apparel and drinkware rather than collectibles. Seriously, of the 150 items currently offered by the StarTrek.com store for Star Trek: Discovery 121 are apparel and drinkware. That's 69 different t-shirts, 23 sweatshirts and hoodies, 6 hats, 4 jackets, 16 mugs, 2 wine glasses, and 1 thermal flask. Of the 29 remaining items, 11 are posters or prints, 7 are badges, 4 are standees, 2 are books, 2 are home video releases, and there's the soundtrack, a dogtag, and a sticker sheet. There's been no sign of the more traditional Star Trek merchandise like prop replicas (phasers, communicators, tricorders, etc.), the large "electronic" model starships, action figures, and model kits. For a Star Trek series that is allegedly wildly popular, the absence of this kind of merchandise is rather surprising. Even Star Trek: Enterprise got that much... and Star Trek: Enterprise was the target of the same kind of "ruined forever" hyperbolic criticism that Discovery currently is. (I guess that's one benefit to Star Trek: Discovery... people are suddenly looking back at Star Trek: Enterprise much more favorably.) We're a few days out from the Star Trek: Discovery season two finale - which might shape up to be the series finale if the issues with Netflix and the merchandising partners aren't sorted out - and I'm still left to wonder one thing: Star Trek: Discovery's entire season two plot revolves around Section 31 creating an unlawful time travel device and has been using it in a highly irresponsible manner. The Federation's Department of Temporal Investigations doesn't exist yet in 2257, but one of its uptime successor organizations that was tasked with taking more proactive measures against accidental or intentional alteration of the timeline like the 29th century Temporal Integrity Commission or 31st century Federation Temporal Agency should have intervened to put a stop to all of this ridiculous Red Angel nonsense and formally charge the Burnhams. If Janeway's handful of incidents was enough to drive a Starfleet captain attached to the TIC to murder, Michael and Gabrielle Burnham's nonsense with the Red Angel suit should have had legions of agents descending on them to arrest them and retroactively remove the Red Angel suit from the timeline. EDIT: Yikes... the dispute between CBS and the licensees has reportedly resulted in CBS having to call a halt to production of the Picard series, which was set to begin shooting yesterday.
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Well, remember this Spock is basically at the height of his Vulcan "all of the other reindeer" phase, when he was actively rejected (and overcompensating for) being half-human. That was part of his character well before Star Trek: Discovery. He's especially bad about it because he's around Burnham, which would be enough to make anyone wish to be a different species even if she weren't a major factor in his abandonment of his human side.
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What Current Anime Are You Watching Version v4.0
Seto Kaiba replied to wolfx's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Shame... you're missing out on some truly wonderful good-bad dialog like Emiya's frequent insistence that "people die when they are killed". Fate/stay night was a so-so series that tried to bundle a LOT of lore into not a lot of runtime. Unlimited Blade Works was better, IMO, if only for being slightly more action-focused and dramatic. Hard pass on everything the franchise has put out since, which seems to be mainly for the waifu crowd or that one knockoff of Shokugeki no Soma they had. Looking at this season's offerings, it feels a tad underwhelming to me. Apart from One Punch Man's second season and the Gundam: the Origin series, nothing's really catching my eye except Nobunaga Teacher's Young Bride. The Rising of the Shield Hero is the most interesting of the lot right now. I'm currently stuck playing catch-up on shows I didn't get the chance to finish yet like Lupin III Part V, The Morose Mononokean, and Domestic Girlfriend. -
... we must have read two very different Star Wars expanded universes, because my first blush reaction to that was "very funny sir, now tell the one about the airline food". The old Star Wars EU was so divisive that there was no way that would please the fans any more than what they actually got, and it certainly wouldn't have pleased general audiences... except maybe the Thrawn trilogy. They were two people from radically different walks of life. IMO the new trilogy version is a lot more believable an outcome for the two. Han was always a bit of a coward and after a life of crime followed by a brief paramilitary career he definitely wasn't the kind of guy who could adapt to being chained down as a politician's house-husband. For her part, it never made sense that Leia would end up in power when she's politically tainted by her association with Darth Vader. "... are literally the same damn thing but with slightly non-indicative names". "... does the exact same thing the previous generation of Jedi Masters did when they screwed up royally and ended up handing the dark side-users near-total power over the galaxy. F*cked off to a remote planet and lived as a hermet with every expectation that he'd never be called back into service." Yet they're oddly similar, aren't they? Jacen is pretty much a proto-Kylo Ren. He even showed up to Mara's funeral cosplaying as Darth Vader. This is kinda my point. What we're getting is so very similar to the old EU stuff they threw out, yet nobody's happy with it... so it's unlikely they'd have been happy with adaptations of the old EU stuff either.
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They may, at least, be dimly aware of what fans consider "real Star Trek" to be based on what the fans are crucifying Star Trek: Discovery for.
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It's not hard to imagine why... the backlash against The Last Jedi and Solo: a Star Wars Story was so severe that it not only put an enormous dent in Star Wars's box office draw, it led to a Star Wars film ending as a box office flop. Disney was having that exact same realization the Empire and First Order had when they discovered their invincible macguffin was a good deal less invinicible than previously advertised. Any business would be playing it safe after an unexpected one-two punch like that. Star Wars fans might not really know what they want in a sequel, but they're demonstrably happier with films and shows that take no risks and push no envelopes than they are with anything that changes the dynamic of the Star Wars setting. I see...
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Star Wars Disney+ limited TV Series
Seto Kaiba replied to sh9000's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
I find this argument by proxy vague and unconvincing. Why would logic need to help? Its own writers are doing a fantastic job with that already.