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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    He could change that, he just didn't want to... as in "Life Line" when he actually gets upset with Dr. Zimmerman for changing it as part of an attempt to upgrade him with some quality-of-life improvements. The bigger problem is, IMO, that he's still around at all. He's over 800 years old, technologically, and by the time of Starfleet Academy even his mobile emitter is ~300 years old. He probably should've been taken offline like B4 was during the Federation's ban on artificial lifeforms and even in the 32nd century Starfleet prohibits self-aware AIs on its ships and bases... so if he's not really self-aware/sentient then why does he still exist at all, and if he is, why is he allowed anywhere in Starfleet?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Nearly halfway into the current Summer 2024 simulcast season, and whooboy did this season turn out to be a crop of stinkers. Wistoria: Wand and Sword's fourth episode dropped this week... and I am so tired of its protagonist Will Serfort. He's a blatant Harry Potter expy, but even Harry Potter had far more grit than this guy. Will Serfort's a whiny, indecisive, absolute doormat and the longer the story drags on the more obvious it becomes that the other students who bully him and say that he doesn't belong at their magic school are, despite their rudeness, objectively correct. He can't use magic, so he's incapable of doing most of the coursework and would have long since flunked out if not for one professor keeping him enrolled via credits from field work he can complete using his physical prowess. Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start with Magical Tools took five entire episodes to actually get to its main plot, and what it delivered was almost comically lazy. It's one of those weird revenge-fantasy sort of romance stories that starts with the protagonist's partner ending their relationship to be with someone else and then an impossibly perfect Hallmark hubby practically falls out of the f***ing sky and takes an immediate unprompted intense romantic interest in the newly single person. It's actually kind of unintentionally funny in how utterly lazy it is and how blatantly it's pandering. My Deer Friend Nokotan is just an Excel Saga-style drug trip. It's actually pretty fun for all of that, but it lacks those moments of self-awareness that took Excel Saga from merely weird to outrageously funny. My Wife Has No Emotion never really stops being cringeworthy. This is, after all, a romcom about a guy who's so terminally lonely that he fell in love with a ChatGPT-enabled kitchen appliance because it's vaguely girl-shaped and his definition of "woman" seemingly goes no farther than "domestic servant". 🙄 It's one of those titles where I really want to just find the original author and send them to therapy. Failure Frame is a pretty unremarkable isekai series. It's actually gotten a lot better for the lack of the protagonist's classmates, who are shown to be actually pretty incompetent despite their advanced skills. It is veering heavily into the fanservice side of matters now with the protagonist having acquired an elf girl sidekick who seems to have never heard about this marvelous invention called the "shirt". Every antagonistic male character seems to feel compelled to rant at length about how hot she is and how they want to sexually assault her... and at least one of them actually makes the attempt. The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army was a Human is pretty unremarkable as fantasy stuff goes. The animation is pretty consistently low quality and the writing is form letter for the most part.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    If Simmons's case is typical, Mars Base's candidates for cyborg soldier augmentation are frontline troops (infantry and pilots) who are killed or wounded unto death but whose bodies can be recovered, preserved or kept barely alive on life support, and shipped back to Mars. Simmons himself is in the latter category. He was wounded beyond any hope of survival on Earth but shipped back to Mars on life support, only to die while his transport was on approach to Mars colony. Well, there's nothing called a "Shadow Fighter" in Genesis Climber MOSPEADA or in Genesis Breaker... are you referring to the Dark Legioss? Genesis Breaker doesn't appear to have changed anything with respect to the Dark Legioss. The regular version is still a conventional Legioss that's had some stealth upgrades to mask its HBT emissions and make it harder to detect by other means. The unmanned Dark Legioss is still described as an unmanned conversion of the Dark Legioss fighter that's controlled by an onboard AI computer. There's nothing called "Mars City" in MOSPEADA either, as far as I can recall. As far as official material, there is "Mars Base" the military installation and "Mars colony" which refers to the actual civilian settlement(s). It doesn't really get any more specific than that. Some sources appear to conflate the two and refer to both as "Mars Base", like MOSPEADA Color Graffiti, which refers to the residential block that Stick grew up in as "Mars Base 22" and lists Stick and Yellow's hometown simply as "Mars Base". It's never actually seen except for Stick's one flashback in "Jonathan's Elegy", so we don't really have anything to go on. Genesis Breaker further muddies the waters there by treating "Mars Base" as the name of a specific armed service rather than one specific installation. Specifically, it presents "Mars Base" as another name for the Mars Army... a new armed service separate and distinct from Mars's defense forces that exists specifically and solely for the business of retaking Earth (and subsequently governing it as a colonial dominion of Mars). It does suggest that proper development of Mars for large-scale habitation was done after the unification of Earth, such that the individual experimental research stations were all folded into a single Mars colonization program.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    You mean Simmons? Somewhere between a Dreadnought and Robocop, yeah. He's basically just a head, a spinal cord, and a bit of upper torso grafted into a military-grade robotic body. In one sense, it might actually be worse than both since Simmons and the other "robot" soldiers had their brains forcibly reactivated after clinical death to be offered the choice of accepting their demise or being installed in robotic bodies and sent back into the fight. Simmons is said to have died multiple times. His Ride Armor's closer to a 40K Dreadknight though. Genesis Breaker really REALLY reenvisioned MOSPEADA as an absolute hellhole of a setting... and not even on Earth, it's Mars that's the absolute hellhole.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness, I'd say that's a certifiable non-issue. Unlike Data, who was a physical construct with a fixed appearance, the Doctor is a hologram. Every aspect of his appearance is entirely arbitrary and mutable. We've seen that he can modify his appearance to change his projected clothes (e.g. Fair Haven), to appear to be a member of another species ("Blink of an Eye") and/or gender ("Life Line"), or even to impersonate specific people ("Renaissance Man"). We know these abilities aren't unique either, because we've seen another EMH Mk.I reconfigured the same way in "Dr. Bashir, I Presume" to take on the appearance of Dr. Bashir. Appearing to age a bit is so far within what we already know he can do that it's readily excusible. He can play the "Screw you, I can look how I want" card every bit as effectively as the Founders. If they wanna digitally de-age him, they can even chalk the uncanny valley effect up to him being an obsolete hologram from 800 years ago.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    For the curious, Chapter X-1 "Simmons & Necessary" is a one-chapter short story that gives the broad strokes of Simmons's backstory. He was a miner working a deep sea mining platform in 2050 when the Invit first invaded, how he was gravely wounded in a friendly fire accident early in the resistance against the Invit occupation, escaped to Mars, and was rebuilt as a Robocop-style cyborg soldier to continue fighting. It ends with him being introduced to Necessary and inducted into the Breakers. Chapter X-2 "Case of Every" talks about Every's backstory and how she came to join the Breakers. Most of it covers her early career as a pharmaceuticals researcher developing a combat drug for the Mars Army in anticipation of a war of independence against Earth, before joining the anti-war/anti-Mars Gov't group "Woodpeckers". It briefly talks about her final, doomed mission as an anti-gov't operative to destroy a secret Mars Army thermonuclear weapons lab on Ganymede that culminated in her being captured and sentenced to 320 years of imprisonment in cryogenic suspension for her crimes. It ends with the Mars Base administration thawing her out 46 years later in 2082 to inform her she was being drafted to serve in the 2nd Earth Recapture mission. Chapter X-3 "Case of Eagle" talks about how Eagle came to join the Breakers. It starts with him being injured in an accident during a routine escort flight over Mars, then being briefeed on how his remote connections to the extremely wealthy family that founded the Intelligence Bureau led to him being selected for its secret mission to Earth during the 2nd Earth Recapture operation as a bodyguard for the mission's leader, Gate. It ends with him training Gate at a firing range and realizing, belatedly, that his memories of his life before the accident had been tampered with.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I'd recommend reducing your expectations a fair bit. Chapters X-1, X-2, and X-3 do have art... but with the exception of Chapter X-3 it's rough sketches that are way below the level of the art elsewhere in the book.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    If the Starfleet Academy writer's room is infested with the former occupants of the Discovery and Picard writer's rooms as it almost certainly will be, having him back at all feels like a lose-lose situation. I don't really wanna see the snarky, comedic EMH turned into yet another miserable bastard.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Beautiful and very tempting... but very expensive and with all the other starships Enterprise I've already got, I just can't justify it. If it were smaller scale and a bit cheaper, maybe...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    A Google search turned up pre-Disney art showing that character (or another of his species) with a generally humanoid bodyplan. Is that kid in the back a cyborg? I thought in Star Wars those were basically lobotomized meat robots...
  11. Seto Kaiba
    That's pretty normal for HLJ. They put more care into their packaging to ensure that goods don't get damaged in transit, so books tend to be shipped shrinkwrapped to a cardboard sheet in a box rather than just stuffed into an envelope. It's also why they offer a "private warehouse" to hold items for a month or two to allow you to batch items and get the best value out of the shipment cost. The copy I ordered from HLJ arrived just like yours, shrinkwrapped to cardboard and put into a box with paper wadding. The one I ordered from CD Japan was just stuffed haphazardly into a bubblepack envelope and shipped as-is.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That looks like an anti-meth PSA. ðŸĪĢ
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I'm worried about the kids. Look what Star Wars fans did to poor Jake Lloyd.ðŸ˜ĩ‍ðŸ’Ŧ Disney's proven they can't even really do THAT right anymore, though... so I'd say it's safer to assume they'll find a way to screw it up.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It's not Paramount+ that's for sale... it's Paramount itself. The current incarnation of Paramount was formed by re-merging CBS and Viacom in the hopes that consolidation would help them succeed with lower costs. It had the opposite effect because CBS and Viacom are two halves of a whole idiot, and so the company's been bleeding money and declining in valuation because many of their channels like MTV and VH1 aren't doing so hot and Paramount+ being the financial equivalent of a sucking chest wound thanks to its profound lack of content. They're looking for a Get Out of Jail Free card for the consequences of actions like selling billions of dollars in stock to fund the development and production of things like Star Trek: Discovery's seasons 3-5. Ah, but which one? Is this the original one from Star Trek: Voyager or the copy from "Living Witness" that was reactivated from a backup module in 3074? No kidding... this, like Discovery's third season, is a rescue from 80's and 90's Paramount's pile of rejected Star Trek series pitches. Various people have pitched the idea of a series set at Starfleet Academy half a dozen times or so, and it's always been rejected because the idea itself is boring and hard to write for. Starfleet Academy's basically just Space College and cadets don't get any dangerous/exciting duty even in field training. They even tried to make the concept into a comic book at one point, and it did so poorly it was cancelled after barely a year.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    So this is basically just the Star Wars version of Star Trek: Prodigy? I have a bad feeling about this... not just because I'm fairly sure the series is going to be bad, but because I'm 100% sure the fans are going to cyberbully the ever-loving hell out of the child actors who worked on this pretty much no matter what.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Paramount still haven't learned their freaking lesson. Discovery was a flop. Strange New Worlds succeeded as a spin-off because it did away with everything to do with Discovery. This is just going to run into the same problem Discovery did, putting a pack of unlikable characters in a setting the fans have already clearly and repeatedly said that they hate. I only hope poor Robert Picardo has good health insurance, because he's going to put his back out trying to carry this series.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Could've saved a lot of trouble by just retitling season two Star Trek: Oops! All Temporal Paradoxes.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    He's not really meant to be likeable. He's meant to be relatable, because his story is all about how the Empire's senseless acts of oppression and petty cruelty gradually radicalized its own ordinary apolitical workaday people into open revolt and forming the seeds of the organized rebellion that would one day bring it crashing down. Din was likeable but I wouldn't call him well-written, in large part because his story is driven by his shockingly firm and consistent grip on the idiot ball and the moon logic of the warrior cult he belongs to. When it comes to writing, as I've often opined, I think Star Wars's biggest weakness is its obsession with Force users. There's nothing particularly relatable about a space magic-using warrior monks living a life of self-denial and their axe crazy edgelord counterparts who dress all in black and do everything "4 teh evulz". The Acolyte suffers from that especially badly, with most of the cast being thinly written stock characters based on all the usual Force user tropes. It says a lot that the only likeable character is the villain who starts opining about wanting to be true to himself... after murdering like eight people. He's only well-written in a relative sense, standing out by virtue of how utterly bland and boring everyone else in the story is. (It is funny that his attitude is basically "What's a couple laser sword murders between friends?")
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Cassian Andor, in 2016 and 2022.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Hollywood as a whole has always struggled to write female protagonists. Disney's unwillingness to accept that trying to please everyone means you'll ultimately please nobody has just trapped them in a worse version of what other properties go through when trying to write a female protagonist. They can't look past the character's gender, so they inevitably veer into "strong female protagonist" cliches built on the sexist tropes that they're trying to subvert and end up writing an uninteresting middle-of-the-road character that can't be too much or too little of any one trait without risking accusations of sexism or Mary Sue-dom. They invest so much effort into making the character inoffensive that there's little to work with in terms of personality when the time comes to write a story for that character. Star Trek's Kate Mulgrew has been pretty open about this problem since the 90's. She opined that her character was so unevenly written because of the flip-flopping between the different female protagonist cliches that it felt like her character was undiagnosed bipolar. The series was saved by breaking the rules and introducing a character who was too much or too little in basically every category (Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine). Unrelated:
  21. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I don't think I have seen any source for this series attempt to explain the minor variations in uniform colors or trims in any functional or organizational context. The only differentiation noted in Genesis Breaker is between infantry and pilots, but even that is strictly textual when talking about the Mars Base plan for retaking Earth. Not sure why you would, the protagonists arguably aren't real soldiers so much as they are borderline secret agents. One of the previous art books even described them as the government's hit men for suppressing dissent.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    They've been trying to turn a boy brand into a everyone brand. Disney bought Lucasfilm because the Star Wars brand prints money. They want to make as much money off of their new acquisition as possible, because they are a corporation. So they are trying to make it appeal to the broadest possible audience to maximize their profit. They're just having an absolutely miserable time trying to pull it off since they massively underestimated how invested the fandom was in the status quo. No matter what they do with it, large portions of the fandom simply will not accept it. If they try to go their own way with it, they get chewed out for not respecting the lore. If they try to color within the lines, they get chewed out for being unoriginal. So Disney is stuck swinging for the fences in the hopes that they will land a hit by sheer dumb luck because nothing else they've tried is working. They've tried copycating the originals, they've tried going their own way, they've tried writing by committee, they've tried EU style backstories and background character spin-offs...ðŸĪŠ They hired a fan who treated the project like an astonishingly high budget fan film. The writer's room was full of fans too. So the script ended up being something like a bad fanfic, full of little continuity nods and love for the source material and all those little ideas that sound super cool in a fan's imagination but don't necessarily translate well into an actual narrative. How they got as far as actual filming with the script in that state is a mystery for the ages. I can only imagine any executive who was shown the "power of many" scene would have been left waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out of the woodwork and announce that they had been Punkd.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. The book is pretty light on art overall. Barring, I think, one chapter illustration all of the book's art of soldiers is of the titular "Breakers". The rest of the book's art is principally their equipment (Riding Suits, Ride Armors, incidental stuff like sidearms and rations), with a little bit on the new Invit designs and a bit on the Genesis Breaker versions of a few key designs from the original series like the Ikazuchi, Izumo, and Anubis-1 missile. There is a picture of Mars Base that's used in the book twice, but nothing related to things like ship crews, other bases that existed in the original's backstory, etc. Like the original series, which focused on the survivors from several different Mars Base units banding together on Earth, Genesis Breaker focuses on a unit of elite intelligence agents from Mars running a mission behind enemy lines to study the Invit.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    No problem. 👍 Except for certain proper nouns that are consistently written in English and often in all caps (e.g. "GENESIS BREAKER") and the names of various mecha, characters, and chapters which are written both ways, it's pretty much all Japanese yes.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Several toy makers/lines are mentioned in the interview section, but only in a historical context. Keiichiro Maeno, the toy designer working on the project on behalf of "Lil' Golem", reminisces a bit about having worked on the Beagle MOSPEADA toy line before it went under and moving on to Sentinel's RIOBOT line near the start of the interview section. I do not see any mentions of new/forthcoming toys, just past releases like the Sentinel/RIOBOT 1/48 Legioss (in passing) and the dedicated spread for the 1/12 scale Intruder Gate ride armor.
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