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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    After watching episode two of Zombie Land Saga, I really wish I could've been a fly on the wall of the studio meeting room when this show was being pitched just so I could see the looks on the faces of the studio execs when they explained the premise. Still, after two episodes I'm still having loads of fun with this series. It has a surprising amount of anarchic charm to it with such an odd premise and Sakura's determination to simply roll with the weird mess her unlife has become. A rap battle accompanied by beatboxing and a shamisen isn't the weirdest instrumentation I've seen1, but it's up there and it works surprisingly well. Kotaro's entire management style seems to be a Bavarian Fire Drill... just shout important-sounding things and act like you should be doing what you're doing and nobody's inclined to question it. For an idol group made up of the undead, Death Musume seems to have a lot more soul than Walkure's animated incarnation. EDIT: After episode three, I'm still having a grand time with it. Didn't that show come out like ten years ago? What took so long? I remember @Talos mentioning to me the manga had been canceled due to legal issues surrounding the likeness of one of the principal characters when the real person she was based on had a falling out with the author. 1. That would have to be a piece of modern classical music I once saw that called for a slide didgeridoo made from schedule 40 PVC pipe, a slide whistle, and a slapstick made from a 2x4.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    For the New UN Spacy defense force maintained by the Macross Frontier fleet government and those of its close allies who chose to purchase it... not for all New UN Spacy forces in the entire galaxy. For logistical reasons, the New UN Government gives the emigrant fleets and planets a fair amount of autonomy when it comes to deciding how best to arm local defense forces that operate under the auspices of the New UN Forces. The idea of having a single model of VF be the universally adopted standard arguably died with the VF-4, which was an excellent space fighter and indifferent atmospheric craft that ended up sharing the main fighter role with a slew of different low-cost atmospheric VFs depending on the needs of the various newly settled planets. It was definitively a dead idea after Project Nova, when a number of the New UN Gov't members opted to adopt the VF-14 over the winning VF-11 design like the Varauta 3198XE colony that would later be captured by the Protodeviln and become the antagonists in Macross 7. General Galaxy's VF-171 Nightmare Plus was widely adopted as a 4th Generation main fighter, but there are noted cases where fleet or planetary governments opted for all-Ghost air forces or designs from other manufacturers like the Sv-154 Svard used by Windermere IV. Between the arms export restrictions the New UN Gov't imposed in the early 2040s in an effort to keep advanced weapons out of the hands of anti-government forces and the ever-increasing size of emigrant populations, the 5th Generation was the first one to have some emigrant governments developing their own next-generation fighters using the redacted specs for Earth's next-gen VF prototype (the YF-24 Evolution) as a starting point. The VF-25 was one of two YF-24 derivative programs locally developed in the Macross Frontier fleet. The VF-27 was the same in Macross Galaxy. The VF-31 is the next main fighter the Brisingr Alliance had locally developed to replace their VF-171s. Earth and the federal New UN Forces have the VF-24, which is allegedly an incredibly overpowered fighter that is rivaled only by the YF-29. Not quite. The reason the Brisingr Alliance NUNS was still using the VF-171-II was because their economy is stagnant, and instead of buying an export model from Earth or another emigrant government they opted to try to stimulate their economy by locally developing an original 5th Generation fighter to replace the VF-171 that they could then market to their allies as an export model. The VF-31 Kairos is their next main fighter, slated to enter military service c.2069 or 2070.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    If it's carried off with the same grace and style as this first episode, I think I can get on board with that. The opening, "Fruitless Necromancy", is surprisingly catchy too...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Almost. The basic design of the helmet is the same and they look identical from the front except for character-specific color schemes, but there's some extra business on the back of the DYRL? version between the neckline and where that ridge going around the crown of the head is that provides an attachment point for a pair of oxygen hoses from the backpack. There's a really good side-by-side of them in identical poses in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 on page 76.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    So... I started watching Zombie Land Saga over lunch today. The first episode was so gloriously insane that I can hardly wait for work to be over so I can watch another. It isn't "this is your premise on drugs" so much as "this is your premise on ALL the drugs". They open on Sakura giving a fairly standard idol series opening speech about how she's a flake with a big dream, then out of nowhere and with barely a minute and twenty seconds on the clock she's PULVERIZED by a passing truck so hard it takes the entire opening credits sequence for her to hit the ground. Bam! She wakes up in a spooky old house full of shambling corpses and it looks like it has all the makings of a zombie horror series. We get a decent action sequence as she escapes a house full of shambling undead, only for the first police officer she meets to gun her down as she realizes that she too is undead! Bam! One more jump cut and we're back at the house where they reveal the entire first eight minutes was an elaborate double fakeout... it's an idol slice-of-life comedy series about a bizarre manager's moon logic plan to revive Saga Prefecture's fortunes by exploiting the dying regional idol craze with a group of the unquiet dead. The next fourteen minutes are a Bavarian Fire Drill thinly disguised as jpop idol group's first live performance... at a death metal open mic concert... which promptly deteriorates into zombie jpop idols headbanging and death metal-screaming with the best of them before attempting to eat the audience. I feel like I've watched a 24 minute version of one of those bait-and-switch "look at your man, now back to me" Old Spice commercials. It didn't so much subvert my expectations as completely pull the rug out from under them. I'm genuinely curious to see where this is headed. If the second episode delivers on the promise of the first, this might dethrone Skull-Faced Bookseller Honda-san for this season's #1 in my book.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Mainly because those are sequels rather than adaptations, reboots, or reimaginings. They managed audience expectations by promoting themselves as new, original stories in their respective story universes with their own distinct titles, casts, and story mechanics that didn't overlap with the original work. The creative process there was an additive one, where they built on the existing foundation of the original story instead of reworking it. When Macross and Gundam went back to reimagine their original works with modern standards, they made sure to closely follow the theme, tone, and setting of the original and just cosmetically update it. Paramount tried to totally retool Star Trek with the same-name movie reboot in 2009 and the fans crucified them for messing with the setting to turn it into a militaristic action story, just like audiences and reviewers tore into Ghost in the Shell (2017) for ditching the iconic philosophizing of the original and whitewashing the Major and tore the Dragonball Evolution movie apart for the... for the everything.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    As undeniably monstrous as their social policy is, it feels more like an arse pull than a natural development since it comes out of nowhere and completely changes the entire focus of the series until Attack on Titan becomes a bit of an artifact title. It gets worse when...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The problem with that approach is that, if you're not going to have any real connection to the original work, why bother using the familiar name? Announcing a live action Cowboy Bebop series is mainly going to get the attention of people familiar with the original work and naturally builds the expectation that they're going to see familiar sights and familiar characters. Ditching everything but the title is an invitation to the Angel Links problem where the audience is expected to enjoy it because the setting was the same but everything that made the setting fun has been removed.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, we would've expected to see a first teaser trailer months ago... Shamelessly stolen from the Wikipedia page for same. (For some reason, the way it's drawn puts me in the mind of Sharaku's iconic painting of Otani Oniji III...) Unless this new *gag* Macross Delta movie introduces new designs, they should be just about done with Macross Delta stuff soon. IIRC, all that's really left unreleased is Chuck's VF-31E, the stock Sv-262Ba, that fugly armor from Passionate Walkure, and maybe white redecos of the Sv-262s. I guess they could maybe do a redeco of their DX VF-1J and call it the VF-1EX. Since base engineering for the VF-31E and Armored Pack is already done, most if not all of the heavy lifting for Delta's line should be done. Wasn't that something that was mentioned early on WRT Delta, that it wasn't the concept Kawamori had pitched? They only way they could've been more blatant about it would be if he'd jokingly made the Siegfried the VF-48. Given how much Macross Delta was blatantly ripping off its vastly superior sibling Macross Frontier, I'd be far more inclined to suspect Macross's producers are interested in how they can distill Macross down to an easily reproducible formula so they can take a whack at Sunrise's mass production of sequels and trademark lack of innovation.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not convinced it'll be 2019 either... with another *gag* Macross Delta movie coming they won't want to do anything that might distract from the advertising blitz they'll be doing to promote the film. Anime's a damned difficult industry to turn a profit in at the best of times so they're going to want to make sure the fans are 100% focused on the movie and merch for same to ensure it earns back its budget in a timely manner. Perhaps if we're very lucky they'll announce a new series is in the works next autumn and give us the usual trailer and teaser edition episode 0.XX after Christmas 2019. I just hope it's done by different writers.
  11. 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.)
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. Seto Kaiba
  15. 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.
  16. 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!
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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...
  20. 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".)
  21. 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?
  22. 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...
  23. 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"?
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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