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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    You'd think they would... when I went to see Fantastic Beasts: the Crimes of Grindelwald over the Thanksgiving holiday break the people in the theater with us seemed pretty put off by the trailer because of the character's huge eyes. (One of the people sitting behind me very audibly said "what the f***?" when there was a closeup of her face.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I really hope they don't change the character designs in Hathaway's Flash... I wanna see Bright's Magnum P.I. mustache, and Hathaway in Hibiki's flightsuit from Macross II.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The conclusion's another three movies off... the original production plan for Fantastic Beasts was a trilogy, but shortly before Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them came out they decided to extend it from three movies to five. WB's plan of record for Fantastic Beasts is, according to their press releases, to gradually phase Newt out as a protagonist and cover more of Grindelwald's reign of terror and end on Grindelwald's defeat at the hands of Albus Dumbledore in 1945. It'll be interesting to see where they go with it, considering J.K. Rowling has hinted many times that Grindelwald was connected somehow to the Nazis and that wizards covertly supported the Allies in the war in Europe.
  4. Seto Kaiba
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, monstrously so... the overwhelming majority of his motivation came from the backstory that The Half-Blood Prince left on the cutting room floor in favor of focusing on Ron and Hermione's personal problems. As a result, he comes off more as in it "4 teh evulz" rather than an almost tragic, hopelessly broken person whose quest for identity went awry in the worst possible way. Grindelwald got hit with it a bit in his brief cameo in The Deathly Hallows Part 2. Instead of being a repentant prisoner who lies to Voldemort's face in a bid to prevent him from going and desecrating Dumbledore's tomb, he's a gleefully evil prick who tells Voldemort exactly where to find what he's looking for.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    A pretense is all it ever was... Neon Genesis Evangelion was a typical 90's monster-of-the-week robot anime that gets mistaken for deep because its creator couldn't keep his contempt for his audience out of his work anymore. Shinji Ikari isn't written to be a pathetic loser for the sake of some obscure psychological point. He's an audience surrogate viewed through the lens of Hideaki Anno's disgust with otaku culture. "This Loser is You", as TVTropes would put it. It's less a deliberate deconstruction and more Anno taking every opportunity that he could to flip the otaku the bird as viscerally as possible without totally derailing an otherwise fairly typical giant robot series. It's just Anno's bad luck that his stinging rebuke of all things otaku not only went almost totally unheeded, but became a poster child for otaku-ness itself. Even his less subtle efforts to communicate his contempt like End of Evangelion didn't get the point across to most of his audience. (I'll admit I admire Anno for what he did with End of Evangelion... it was simultaneously the most breathtakingly petty and the most exquisitely beautiful revenge I've ever seen an artist enact upon his critics. He turned "rocks fall, everyone dies" into an 85 minute opus in the key of F-YOU dedicated to everyone with the temerity to tell him how to do his job.) TBH, I was thinking more of one of the more comedy-focused manga titles based on the parallel world in the last episode. Large Ham Gendo is kind of where I'm at, just for the reactions it gets from the more assertive Shinji. Sadamoto's manga is definitely worlds better than the TV anime though. There's actual character development!
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I can hardly wait for the series about Kamille's midlife crisis. ... you know it's coming. After all, we're getting three movies out of Bright's.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Here's hoping this is a prelude to Netflix financing an animated adaptation to one of those Evangelion alterniverse manga titles where Shinji actually grows a pair and stops being an unlikeable little squit.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    ... I dread this. American filmmakers who try to adapt anime into a live-action feature tend to really flamingo up.1 They just don't understand subtlety, nuance, or pacing... and Cowboy Bebop would be a challenging title to adapt even for a highly talented filmmaker, given that it shares most of the writing challenges Firefly did and they emphatically couldn't make THAT work. When you have a story that's driven by a status quo of always being one step ahead of failure and one step behind the big payoff, it has a VERY short shelf life because the entire premise quickly gets stale. Cowboy Bebop and Firefly are both remembered fondly because they were both short enough that the premise didn't have time to get completely stale before the end (and Cowboy Bebop changed gears in the last few episodes to focus on Spike's history with the Chinese mafia and his lover). 2017's Ghost in the Shell was hands-down the closest they've come to success thus far, in that the critics merely dismissed the film as a dull, lifeless, and singularly uninspired knockoff of a classic instead of crucifying it for being incoherent and nigh-unwatchable. It did make its budget back, but once advertising is factored in it still finished something to the tune of $100 million in the red. I've got a bad feeling Cowboy Bebop will be watered down and turned into a cheap clone of Minority Report. 1. Like a cock up, only much bigger...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Do you mean Voldemort's motivations in the books or the movies? I ask because I felt a lot of his Freudian excuse fell victim to the inevitable perils of story compression for the silver screen. They got the ball rolling on Grindelwald's motivations a lot earlier on, so he has three more movies to really get into why he's a total bastard (and the books never did get into why he's a muggle-hater beyond "he's Wizard Hitler, go with it".)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    None that I've seen? I can maybe throw something together later. Roid's family are priests or shrine keepers who manage the Protoculture ruins that are the focus of Windermere IV's Protoculture cargo cult state religion, so I'm inclined to suspect that it's not something he just made up. My personal theory is that the Kingdom of the Wind's equivalent of the divine right of kings is a divine lineage tradition similar to ancient Shinto tradition (from at least the early 8th century) that Japan's imperial family are direct descendants of the goddess Amaterasu. They venerate the Star Singer as a gift from the gods (the Protoculture), so that'd be an easy way for the royal family to assert a right to rule by claiming a special connection to the gods. Whether there's any fact to it is another matter entirely... though if the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree, keep Heinz away from the consumer electronics. "Henohenomoheji" (He-no-he-no-mo-he-ji) or, less commonly, "hehenonomoheji". It's a meaningless pseudoword that is used to refer to the face you can make from those hiragana characters. Kids draw them as faces on scarecrows or teru teru bozu, and it shows up in fiction a lot as a face drawn on a dummy or other body double to taunt the discoverer. I remember that as well... it's speculated that that was the source of the cell samples that Wright Immelmann "stole" from the ruins. It's speculated in Macross 30 that Mina Forte is a bio-android... and considering the influence she wielded over the Protoculture ruins on Uroboros, Mikumo seems likely to be a similar technorganic construct. The Protoculture based a LOT of stuff on their own DNA, so both Mina and Mikumo may technically be Protoculture or a close approximation of them. Since they're so full of "wind" and sh*t, why not just call them the Beano Brigade and have done with it?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, it gets WORSE. Way, WAY worse. Like, everything you've seen so far was a blank round exercise WORSE. Once the reveal that there are humans who can turn into Titans starts to blow over, the titans themselves basically lose all intimidation value and relevance, to such a degree that...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I checked, and it's not a mistranslation... Roid really does say Heinz is a descendant of the legendary Star Singer. That raises a series of awkward questions like: Did Roid even know what a Star Singer actually is at that point? The Sigur Berrentzs didn't spell it out for him until the end of episode 21. Roid is a crazy person hopped up on delusions of manifest destiny inspired by combining the Windermerean religion with galactic ancient history... is he really citing a verifiable historical fact that the Kingdom of the Wind's royal family are biological descendants of a Star Singer, or is this just Windermere IV's equivalent of the sort of god-king tradition that was all too common in ancient kingdoms on Earth? "You have especially powerful runes therefore you must be a descendant of the star singer" and all... even though most kings weren't wind singers. Does this mean one of Heinz's ancestors f***ed an android? Active star singers are subject to mind control... he basically shagged an appliance, the pervert. Isn't it a bit hypocritical to jump straight from "Windermereans are superior life forms because we were naturally born with weak fold receptors" to "our king's superpower is a direct result of having important non-Windermerean ancestors"?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Barring some potential coverage in issues of B Club, Hobby Japan, or Newtype, the first detailed coverage of the VF-11 Thunderbolt was This is Animation Special: Macross Plus feature article "Variable Fighter's Aero Report". Nope. AFAIK, the VF-11 wouldn't be officially depicted with underwing pylons until 17 years after its debut in Macross Plus's first episode. Macross 7 had dodged the question entirely by giving the VF-11Cs in Operation Stargazer an internal ordnance bay in the engine nacelle that wasn't on the production line art. The 8th chapter of Macross the Ride, in the 2011.10 issue of Dengeki Hobby magazine, finally officially depicted a VF-11 with underwing pylons. Anthony Clemens's VF-11C Thunderbolt Interceptor was modeled with four pylons - two per wing - carrying a pair of micro-missile pods and a pair of HMM-111CS high-maneuver missiles.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that was anticlimactic... Took the family to go see Fantastic Beasts: the Crimes of Grindelwald and I have to say it was pretty underwhelming. It gets off to a good start, but the excuse for getting the gang from the previous film back together within the first fifteen minutes is paper thin and requires some pretty massively out-of-character behavior on the part of its instigator. The story doesn't really seem to know what it wants to be... and is mostly just three groups of characters repeatedly passing like ships in the night and accomplishing nothing until the last 30 minutes or so when all the actual action happens. The Crimes of Grindelwald really feels like two hours and change of setup for the next film rather than a film in its own right. A more traditional franchise would probably have done most of this story as a comic book or novel and made the last 30 minutes the first 30 minutes of another story. The cast, for the most part, does a good job with a mediocre story. Johnny Depp is the cast's weakest link. You can tell he refused to let makeup change his hair or facial hair from his normal 'do except for a blonde dyejob, so he goes through the movie looking like an aging albino hipster or a humanoid cockatiel. The plot tries to build him up as some incredibly charismatic leader, but Depp sleepwalks through the film in the same emotionless thousand-yard stare he uses so often in any movie where he's not required to be quirky like Edward Scissorhands, From Hell, or Sweeney Todd. Jude Law kind of steals a good chunk of the movie... 1920's Dumbledore isn't just incredibly charismatic, he's... well... hot.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It doesn't get better... it just gets progressively more obvious that the series was a one-trick pony. I got caught up on the manga recently, and I'm convinced the author is trying to fly it into the ground because he's profoundly bored with its lack of potential. It's strongly reminiscent of when Tite Kubo lost interest in Bleach and resolved to drive the readers away.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    ... it'd help if you gave us an episode number and timecode. Still, I suspect you're confusing Star Singers and Wind Singers. A Wind Singer is what the natives of Windermere IV call the members of their species who possesses an unusually high fold receptor factor; individuals capable of projecting very powerful biological fold waves by singing. Indications in-series are that this is a rare (possibly recessive?) heritable trait that runs in the Kingdom of the Wind's royal family. It also appears to be of religious significance to Windermere IV's (initially unwitting) full-blown Protoculture cargo cult religion. A Star Singer is an apparent Protoculture construct of uncertain classification - possibly a bio-android - that was a powerful fold singer intended to operate the delta wave system the Protoculture created in an attempt to bring an end to conflict in the galaxy by uniting the consciousnesses of all sentient beings. The legendary star singer they reference at one point or other appears to have been the last Star Singer left on Windermere when the Protoculture either went extinct or legged it to elsewhere. Mikumo may or may not be a clone of her. No, Macross II's legendary whatsit wasn't a person... it was a ship. Specifically, the Ship of Alus that an ancient Mardook prophecy said would come from a blue planet and bring an end to the Mardook's warlike, xenophobic way of life by bringing them peace. The whole to-do around the OVA's second half was Ishtar's belief that the decommissioned SDF-1's history likely meant it was the Ship of Alus. (It would seem to have been something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, given that Ishtar's belief in it seems to have encouraged her to try bringing peace to her people by sharing the songs of love she found on Earth.) Not really... Macross Delta basically lazily reused the exact same rationale that Macross Frontier used to justify SMS having the VF-25s before the Macross Frontier fleet's NUNS. What Kawamori and Chiba wrote for the VF-31 Kairos's circumstances broadly parallels Japan's own next-generation fighter program. Like Japan, the Brisingr globular cluster took a look at export offerings for next-gen fighters and they were unavailable, too expensive, or politically untenable so they opted to launch domestic development of their own next-gen fighter to replace a fleet of aging build-under-license fighters and call it an economic stimulus. Because they were used to buying export models or licenses to build versions of the fighters developed elsewhere, their development of a next-gen fighter is lagging a solid decade behind everyone else's. Consequently, the VF-171-II is still their main fighter.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Surely you meant to say "torture museum".
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Sure we can. Both the DC/Wildstorm Robotech comics and Titan Robotech comics were half-assed projects with terrible writing, mediocre art, and indifferent overall quality. They both had spotty, inconsistent art and are both particularly bad when it comes to faces not looking the same page-to-page and bizarre facial expressions. I suspect we're just more comfortable with DC/Wildostorm's rendition because their Street Fighter comics-inspired anime-esque art style is closer in appearance to the familiar character designs by Mikimoto, so we give them more of a pass for the same sins (at least until Prelude). I'm given to understand photorealistic character art is a tough sell in comics in general, given that it tends to lend a certain uncanny valley feel to proceedings... which is probably why we're harsher on Titan. ... maybe my memory's playing me false, but wasn't Invid War one of the most-hated of Robotech's old comics because of its terrible art quality? The bits of it that stick out in my memory were mostly Invid War: Aftermath, where the art had decayed to the point that the series characters were frequently unrecognizable.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... and my brain mentally filled in "Attorney at Law". Gaikotsu Shotenin Honda-san has turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable slice of life series... might be the best thing on this season.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    ... can't muster much enthusiasm for a Reconguista in G compilation movie or a RE:0096-style reworking of Origin since it's old material, but an animated version of Hathaway's Flash is well and truly worth getting excited about.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The Macross Frontier TV series indirectly states that the Vajra hive that humanity had attacked was leaving the galaxy to go get their giant invertebrate freak on with another Vajra hive in another galaxy... but, of course, in that version they didn't temporarily take Alto. The Macross Frontier movie version never establishes where they went, but one of the artbooks implies they at least were nice enough to stop and drop Alto off somewhere safe before proceeding onwards.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    If they were more honest in their advertising, they'd be saying "The Worst is Yet to Come!" instead of the opposite...
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I have no special insight into the production staff's frame of mind on that front... but it certainly feels like it was intended to grab the attention of long-time Macross fans who were not following the show for various reasons. The problem is it doesn't fit with any of the previous statements about Lady M, so it feels like a cynical attempt to get attention from the older fans and it kind of takes the protagonists down another notch intelligence-wise as they're apparently now too stupid to even know who they work for given that they have fairly regular contact with Lady M and yet apparently have no idea who she is.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    The last official comment I saw from Macross Delta's creators indicated that they had never actually determined an identity for Lady M. The few tidbits we got from official publications and the show itself would tend to make Berger's claim of a Megaroad-01 connection profoundly unlikely... and also pretty well shot down the theories that she was a pre-existing character.
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