Seto Kaiba

SoftBank Creative has done a number of non-Macross Master File books for various titles over the years. Naturally, Mobile Suit Gundam got its own run of tech manuals under the title Master Archive Mobile Suit. They've currently only done Universal Century stuff though. That series currently has ten or eleven books including: Master Archive Mobile Suit RX-78 Gundam (OYW models) Master Archive Mobile Suit RX-78GP01 Zephyranthes (GP series units) Master Archive Mobile Suit RGM-79 GM Vol.1 Master Archive Mobile Suit RGM-79 GM Vol.2 Master Archive Mobile Suit MSZ-006 Zeta Gundam Master Archive Mobile Suit RX-0 Unicorn Gundam Master Archive Mobile Suit Victory Gundam (incl. Victory 2) Master Archive Mobile Suit MS-06 Zaku II Master Archive Mobile Suit MSV Pilot Log (basically Zaku II Vol.2) Master Archive Mobile Suit MSN-06S Sinanju Then they've also got one-off Master File books for the ASF-X Shinden II from Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, the Layzner from SPT Layzner, the ATM-09ST Scopedog from Armored Trooper VOTOMS, the Xabungle from Combat Mecha Xabungle, the Dragonar from Metal Armor Dragonar, the FAW-RV-S1 Vifam from Galactic Drifter Vifam, and now the M9 Gernsback from Full Metal Panic!. I've been collecting the Macross Master File series and Gundam Master Archive series... the only non-series ones I've spurged on are the Shinden II and Gernsback. The quality varies a bit from book to book, though it's generally good. Gundam had a couple of disappointing ones like the Victory Gundam, Zaku II, and MSV Pilot Log book.

I'm in two minds about it... On the one hand, the Master File series did put out three books in a row that were not at all up to the high standard set by the first five books. The VF-4 and VF-22 books were critical failures of research, so they ended up being mostly BS and ridiculous original variants. The VF-31 book is slightly more forgiveable since its lazy copy-paste of stuff from the VF-25 book is actually justified by the significant amount of shared hardware. On the other hand, the Battroid Valkyrie book is IMO a return to form on their part and nearly as good as the original five. They clearly can do it right when they want to... the question is, does the VF-11 merit their A-game? I really do love the VF-11, so I'm hoping against hope that it'll be a good one. They've got one more book I want coming out around the same time for the Geotron M9 Gernsback from Full Metal Panic!, so I'm hoping the VF-4 and VF-22 books were just an unfortunate lapse and that they're back on form full time.

Tangentally relevant for the discerning collector... GA Graphic apparently has a Master File tech manual coming out for the Geotron M9 Gernsback slated for a mid-January release: https://www.amazon.co.jp/フルメタル・パニック-マスターファイル-アーム・スレイブ-M9ガーンズバック-マスターファイルシリーズ/dp/4797398574/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=4797398574&pd_rd_r=56c21e5e-0b8c-11e9-bfa3-0d237f864cec&pd_rd_w=ud002&pd_rd_wg=5HO9U&pf_rd_p=a4de75e6-d8f7-4a34-bd69-503ea4866e6c&pf_rd_r=E8EGD5RT5TQ265VWM502&psc=1&refRID=E8EGD5RT5TQ265VWM502

Speaking of... did you notice what Amazon has as a pair-with item for this? A Master File for the M9 Gernsback AS from Full Metal Panic!. The only other GA/SoftBank tech manual series I've been paying attention to has been Master Archive Mobile Suit, but this might be worth getting.

One of the best contributions made by the Variable Fighter Master File series is, IMO, their explanation of the military adopting the "New" in its official markings. Pretty much all of the efforts to explain why the military changed from "UN Forces" to "New UN Forces" in Macross Frontier hinge on the plot of Macross VF-X2, where a survival-before-principles sort of survivalist faction called Latence that'd arisen in the New UN Government and the military was trying to consolidate governmental authority on Earth and in the military. Latence basically were Earth supremacists who wanted to give the military more authority than the already excessive power it had in the name of coordinating a defense against rogue Zentradi and other threats. The military was reorganized after their coup attempt in 2051 was done in by the very special forces unit they'd tried to con into suppressing their opponents. Most explanations, like the one from Macross the Ride, suggest the military officially became the New UN Forces during this reorganization. They inevitably all have the problem that NUNS markings are seen in scenes set several years earlier. Master File takes a slightly different approach. In their version, the government and military both adopted the "New" when they were reconstituted after the First Space War in 2010. It took a while for the new markings to start to be adopted since Earth's population had bigger worries like keeping everybody fed and watered, but the emigrant fleets started adopting those markings early on while the oldest and most established population centers like Earth and Eden dragged their heels about it partly out of pride and partly out of sympathy with the budding Latence movement. After the Latence incident in 2051, the holdouts in the military finally bowed to pressure during the reorg and the new markings finally achieved galaxy-wide adoption. Count on it.

... I really, really want to get excited about this because I love the VF-11 Thunderbolt, but I can't bring myself to forget or forgive the unholy mess they made of the VF-4 Lightning III and VF-22 Sturmvogel II books. It's going to be an anxious couple months until this comes out and I can find out whether they've done it justice or not. On the upside, my group is finally sitting down to get cracking on a full translation of the first VF-1 book.

Militarily speaking, giant robots of any stripe make fairly impractical weapons. That's why mecha anime generally has to come up with some reason, as part of its setting, that "awesome, but impractical" giant fighting robots are a tactical necessity. Otherwise it would be a lot simpler, cheaper, and more effective to apply that advanced technology to more conventional weapons like tanks or fighter planes. As in Macross, the most common excuse in mecha anime is that there is some threat (alien, monster, etc.) that is big and mobile enough to render conventional weapons ineffective and make giant robots advantageous. Then, of course, there's the ones that use the excuse that giant robots started out as construction equipment that was then hastily militarized (as in Gundam or Mobile Police Patlabor). Some just ignore the question entirely, like Southern Cross or Code Geass. There are a few rare ones where the impracticality of robots is openly acknowledged but they're used anyway because the future tech behind them is somehow not readily applicable to other platforms yet like Full Metal Panic!. Personally, my favorite excuse for giant fighting robots is the one from Five Star Stories... that being impractical is the entire point; that by restricting warfare to impractical giant robots that fight only against each other the collateral damage is kept to a minimum so the people in authority can have their territorial pissing matches without getting Joe Average involved. It's too expensive to ever catch on... it's way easier to just bomb the crap out of each other from afar using guided weapons and so on. That's why so many mecha shows exist in settings where a convenient macguffin renders missile guidance ineffective... huge robots are large, slow targets that only get larger and slower the better armored they are.

Since I'm up to speed on everything else I've been following this season, I restarted Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight while I was wrapping presents and I think I've finally figured this series out. It's reverse Fate/stay night. Lots of gender-flipped historical domain characters, but instead of being in the modern day fighting over the (not actually) Holy Grail they're in their correct historical period fighting over (one of) the philosopher's stone(s). Montmorency (it takes them five episodes to finally namedrop him as Gilles de Montmorency-Laval/Gilles de Rais) is basically Emiya in that he's surprisingly durable but otherwise useless except for dispensing vague platitudes like "people die if they are killed", and Jeanne d'Arc is basically loli-Saber with Ilya's personality. One of the things I missed while I was halfheartedly watching it the first time is that this show has a massive boob fixation... literally. Jeanne d'Arc and Philip of Burgundy are the only two characters who are proportioned remotely realistically, and Jeanne at least takes every opportunity to express how unfair she finds this. (Philip of Burgundy is too busy apparently being possessed by the ghost of John the Fearless, who looks like Esidisi from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, to complain about it.) The teaser for the next episode is always Jean Poton de Xaintrailles raving about breasts followed by a "practical" (rude or lewd) sentence in French as a "language lesson". This honestly feels like it's more gratuitous than Goblin Slayer... since it's clearly out to titillate rather than horrify.

He founded and owns the company that founded SMS (Bilra Transport), so yes... albeit indirectly. Bilra Transport established Strategic Military Services as a wholly-owned subsidiary to provide security for its interstellar shipping business, and the company later expanded its operating profile into defense contracting. Not quite. He's indicated to have been the captain of a ship in the Vrlitwhai branch fleet when it sided with the remains of the UN Forces during the First Space War. He adopted Earth culture after the war, and like a number of prominent Zentradi he adopted a human name as well. He's one of several former subordinates of Vrlitwhai's to go on to be movers and shakers in the world. He does stand out as the only one to appear who has thus far not become an antagonist. Macross VF-X2's Timothy Daldhanton and Macross the Ride's Naresuan were also former subordinates of Vrlitwhai's who were so enamored of Earth's culture that they adopted human names. (Naresuan is a historical name, one of the most revered monarchs in Thailand history.) His original designation is unknown, AFAIK. Like a number of his colleagues, he adopted a human name when he integrated into Earth society.

That would be a downgrade... not an upgrade. The VF-31 Siegfried isn't a production specification. They're all one-of-a-kind "ace custom" units built on the Surya Aerospace VF-31A Kairos, which are produced on an as-needed basis for pilots selected to join the Xaos 3rd Fighter Wing Δ Flight. Returning a Siegfried to military spec would mean stripping out the expensive non-standard hardware and software that Xaos Valkyrie Works added to restore it to its stock VF-31A configuration. (Not a shabby 5th Generation VF by any means, but on the low end if we're considering performance.) The derated FF-3001/FC2 engines the Siegfried already has are enough to overstress the airframe at 1,875kN... Hayate got told off for the damage he was causing by being too rough on his Siegfried on at least one occasion in the series. The VF-31 airframe was only designed for the stock FF-3001A engines at 1,645kN. Exceeding the design limit by almost 30% instead of 13% isn't likely to do nice things to the airframe. Those are railguns. Given that they have what are clearly cartridge ejection ports, the jury is out on whether they are purely electromagnetic or are like the SSL-9B Dragonuv as a two-stage system that uses both chemical propellants and a linear motor. The Fold Wave System doesn't provide energy in infinite quantity... but in infinite duration, for as long as it's running. (It's not on all the time either.) The VF-31 Siegfried's fold wave system is also implied to be less powerful than the YF-29's because it uses a lot less fold quartz. The YF-27-5 and VF-27 needed at least three Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines worth of output to power such a large dimensional beam weapon. I would guess that with its fold wave system active it could possibly power the BGP-01 heavy quantum beam gunpod to its normal operating levels. (Macross tends to take the more realistic view that "more power" doesn't equal better results... pushing something past its design limits tends to just result in damage and unpredictable behavior, if not a sudden and violent mechanical failure.) The Sv-262's engines are rated for 1,955kN, not 1,995. We haven't had detailed specs for the LD-262S Lilldrakens yet, but in all likelihood they're using previous-generation thermonuclear reaction burst turbines rated at ~500-600kN, similar to what was used on the QF-5100 Goblin II that formed part of the VF-27's Super Pack. Stage II engines would be too expensive for an ostensibly disposable drone, and with the existing engines already pushing the limits of the fighter's inertia store converter turning the pilot into a flightsuit full of chunky salsa by doubling engine thrust would be inherently counterproductive. Abuse of the Sv-262's fold reheat for a 25-30% temporary performance gain was enough to trash an Sv-262 badly enough to require significant downtime and/or replacement of the aircraft, a 200% increase would total the plane if it didn't just tear the wings off... and the Draken III's ISC is a fair bit better than the VF-31's. With the more manageable 500-600kN per wing of additional thrust it would be more maneuverable, but the gains would be limited by the limits of the fighter's ISC system to buffer excessive g-forces. Without the ISC buffering the excessive g-forces on the plane... well... you've seen Macross Plus, right? The ISC's buffer capacity is only about 2 minutes at a time, so that extra power and maneuverability would have to be used sparingly to prevent damage or accidental injury. It's not actually that much of a gain in firepower. The GU-17A is supposedly roughly on par with the LU-18A for stopping power, but it has limited ammunition. Having gunpods in the hands is likely going to stop a VF-31 from using the forearm-mounted railguns as well. It's only going to have enough power for the BGP-01 if it's fold wave system is running. The beam machineguns on the Lilldrakens are only about as powerful as the beam machineguns mounted on VFs as it is. (Generator output from a thermonuclear reaction engine is using the surplus after thrust production, so, much like VFs, there isn't enough surplus to put a really grunty beam weapon on there since most of the power is going to generating thrust. The Lilldraken's noted to be running pretty close to the limits of its power generation capacity as it is, such that while it has energy converting armor it is mostly dependent on power supplied from its docked mothership to actually utilize it.) Unlikely, for reasons given above. There are some issues with your spec idea, but you've done a fine job with the model.

As a kid, Basara tried to literally move an actual mountain with his song (and an acoustic guitar)... is that what you're referring to? (I mean, I guess you could say that his song moved an entire planet once. Thought, strictly speaking, his song only actually moved Gigile emotionally. It was Gigile blowing himself up that actually moved the planet... by compressing it into a singularity, not unlike a dimensional warhead.)

That kind of utterly insane coincidence does happen occasionally. One of the best examples of that is Dennis the Menace. Hank Ketcham and David Law, the former in the US and the latter in the UK, had had no contact with each other and no way to be aware of each other's work yet they both launched a new comic titled Dennis the Menace with very similar concepts and characters on exactly the same day (March 12) in 1951. The courts had a field day trying to figure out who should own the rights to the name, and it eventually ended with them agreeing that they'd both change names in the other's home turf. Maybe they're counting on the sheer inanity of Discovery's first season to put the judge and jury to sleep if it ever goes to trial? (Part of me wants to see this revealed to be an actual coincidence, just to see the courts tie themselves in knots trying to figure out what to do with it.) Since Discovery's first season is out on Google Play, we started rewatching it out here the other day after I threw it in the Family Library so my parents (lifelong Trekkies themselves) could have a go at it. I was rather amused that my parents immediately complained about how confrontational everyone on Discovery is. My mom even flat out called the series "not Star Trek" after just two episodes. My girlfriend fielded a rather interesting theory after we finished "The Vulcan Hello". She posited that Michael Burnham's sudden change of personality from a relaxed, thoroughly well disciplined officer who implicitly trusted her captain to a hysterically paranoid martinet wasn't psychological. She theorized that Burnham was/is suffering from transporter psychosis or some similar ailment caused (or exacerbated) by the Shenzhou's obsolete transporter and/or the repairs to her radiation-damaged DNA that she stopped partway. She starts to have a number of vivid daydream-like flashbacks and at least one vision that visibly disorient and distract her, she repeatedly becomes hysterical, and begins to behave in a paranoid manner. Paranoia, psychogenic hysteria, and somatic, tactile, and visual hallucinations are all symptoms of transporter psychosis. She also seems to have trouble sleeping later in the series, which is also a symptom. (The series conveniently takes place almost exactly equidistant on the timeline between the first diagnosis of transporter psychosis and the elimination of the condition's root cause.) IMO, she made a compelling case for Burnham's mutiny and subsequent behavior being the result of undiagnosed mental illness rather than bad writing.

More or less... Star Wars is a setting full of the kind of enforced moral absolutes that only really exist in mythology and morality tales. For the audience's sake, the characters all wear their moral affiliation on their sleeve. The heroes are a virtuous and noble lot who never leave a man behind and boldly sacrifice themselves for the higher cause, while the villains in that kind of story gleefully indulge in every atrocity they can seemingly for shiggles and tend to be big believers in the Klingon Promotion. Even Rogue One, which is often (wrongly, IMO) credited as lending moral ambiguity to Star Wars only really did so superficially for the Rebels. The Imperials are still a pack of utterly irredeemable and largely faceless puppy-kicking total bastards who commit mass murder simply because they can. That, of course, was the point I was getting at when I indicated we'll likely never see a Rogue One-esque "dark" Macross story. Macross has much more in common with Star Trek in its willingness to acknowledge that the antagonists are also people, with their own goals, dreams, morals, and loved ones, and that when war occurs it's usually between two sides which both regard themselves and their goals as good, just, and righteous have stopped talking or never made an effort to start. In Macross, the antagonists are always people working for what they see as the greatest good for their own kind. Yeah, it's pretty disappointing.

I thought they settled this one a while back?

Explaining why Macross isn't a gritty war story and likely never will be always gets a bit involved... a subject that inevitably comes up when a new Macross anything is in the offing. "Peace through diplomacy is unrealistic" was a new one, I must admit. With an apparent change of direction towards more Macross Delta, this thread has kind of run out of purpose.

It looks like Star Trek: Discovery season one has hit at least one non-CBS streaming service finally... Google Play Movies has the first season now.

You keep using that word... and I'm torn between suspecting you simply don't know what it means, and being appalled by the implication that you think your morals are absolutes. Ah, no... it does not. Why? Morality is fundamentally subjective. "Good" and "Evil", "Right" and "Wrong"... these things depend on the views of the speaker. The cultural, societal, and legal norms they were raised in, their education, and their own experiences and feelings. They're subject to change over time based on changes in society and culture, personal views and experiences, health, and more. Sometimes they change rapidly, and other times it takes generations. The point is that they are not constant over time or between individuals. Case in point, there are cultures on this planet where various entries on this list are NOT considered evil. The view that human trafficking and slavery are "evil" is a relatively recent cultural development that's still a long way from universal acceptance. Until the mid-19th century, they were not only considered socially acceptable but necessary for the maintenance of society in even the most enlightened ancient cultures and modern nations like the US and UK. The last country to ban slavery (Mauritania) didn't ban it until 1981, and even then they didn't actually criminalize owning slaves until 2007. There are estimated to be somewhere between 12 and 30 million slaves in the world today. It's still widely practiced despite being illegal in much of central and southern Africa, India, Pakistan, most of Southeast Asia, Russia, and western South America. Human cannibalism likewise used to be widely practiced, socially acceptable, and even religiously significant in many cultures. There are religious and tribal groups like the Aghori and Korowai that still consider cannibalism socially acceptable and practice it. Same story with paedophilia. Standards for what ages are acceptable vary quite a bit between cultures and religions and have likewise changed over time as well. Fairly recently we had a former judge from down south who ran for office and was dogged by a scandal involving different attitudes towards acceptable ages in the same culture and country. He had been involved with girls in their young teens, which most of the country found abhorrent but which that region found more acceptable. I don't want to get into the religious side of this for obvious reasons. For drug dealers, it depends a great deal on what drug they're peddling. Until recently, selling marijuana was frowned upon. Now there's a growing number of states and countries legalizing the sale of marijuana. It no longer carries the stigma it used to. There were, likewise, times when things opium, cocaine, and heroin were socially acceptable to sell and to buy. The famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes mirrors the attitudes of the time, in that he was a recreational user of cocaine and morphine and this is treated as being quite acceptable. It's not now, but it was back then. There are a number of countries where sexual assault is still considered, if not "acceptable" then "excusable" under various circumstances. Even in allegedly enlightened countries like the US we're still struggling with groups who feel there are categories or conditions under which rape is acceptable. Killing another person is one of the best examples. Whether or not this is "evil" is SO subjective that people can have multiple, conflicting opinions on the subject based on incredibly specific circumstances. You'll find people who, in the same breath, will suggest that abortion is evil because it ends a life and that those who practice it should be put to death for doing so. Opinions are incredibly divided over what constitutes acceptable circumstances to kill in self-defense or just cause for war. There really are no moral absolutes in this world. There aren't even moral absolutes within a single culture, nation, state, city, or large group of people. Morality is a flexible abstract that we bent, twist, fold, spindle, and mutilate to fit our circumstances, views, and beliefs. I'm honestly not sure even you know what point you're trying to make... There is no objective evil. People who do things others see as evil believe themselves to righteous, or justified, or that those things were necessary, or simply don't acknowledge that the things they're doing are wrong at all because they have different standards. There's that word again. To be objectively evil would mean that, regardless of an individual's views and beliefs, that something can be factually demonstrated to be wrong. Things can't be objectively evil because morality - the concept of good and evil itself - is fundamentally subjective. You yourself acknowledge with your very next sentence that the Nazis believed they were in the right doing what they did... which refutes your premise that they were "objectively" evil. If they were objectively evil, then their evil is a demonstrable and irrefutable fact. They would see themselves as evil precisely the same way their adversaries did. They didn't... which means it's subjective. There are, distressingly enough, groups of people out there today who argue that the Nazis did nothing wrong. Even if you want to argue that they're brainwashed, that still means the perception of morality is can be changed situationally. To be frank, the Nazis could've been swayed by reason easily enough. The whole reason their party came to power in the first place was the crushing weight of war reparations the German government was obliged to pay, the ensuing hyperinflation of their currency running their economy into the dirt, and led to fears of a communist uprising. The militarism was an economic stimulus. If both sides had sat down and talked before the shooting started, the entire war could've been avoided by taking remedial action to save the German economy. Because a technologically-advanced species is, by default, going to be a social animal. You can't pass down learned knowledge from one generation to another without a social framework through which to do it. One of the cornerstones of social species is empathy: the ability to understand and/or vicariously experience the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of another. That means evolution literally neurologically hardwired them to respond to attempts to communicate. Those are not social animals, so that's kind of a BS attempt at an example case. A social species is going to have language of some kind. It may not be something intelligible to us initially, but it will exist as a quantifiable property that can be studied, analyzed, and eventually replicated to communicate. Bees communicate through dance and pheromones. Whales sing. Elephants vocalize in infrasonic ranges, and cats in the ultrasonic. Hell, cats are intelligent enough that they have a separate language in the audible range for speaking to humans. We learn easily enough to intuit what our dogs want from their behavior and vocalizations. It's not an insurmountable problem. It really does make all the difference. Macross, like Star Trek, acknowledges that a conflict with a hostile power will occur because both sides believe themselves to be in the right. That they are doing what's necessary for their people and nation. This does not make them evil in and of itself, it merely means they have a different perspective and that peace can potentially be achieved by finding common ground. Gundam is a pessimistic version of this, where peaceful resolution CAN be achieved (and humans are literally evolving psychic empathy to help it along) but the universe is run by crazy people who refuse to have a meaningful conversation with anyone who doesn't share their views 100%. The moral ambiguity is crucial, as is the point that most combatants are not bad people... just people in bad situations. Star Wars exists in a universe of moral absolutes. Fundamental drives are categorized by knowledgeable force users as explicitly and unambiguously good or evil. Dark side users seem to be quite aware they they are in fact evil, and rejoice in it with all the subtlety of a Saturday morning cartoon villain. They want to take over the galaxy just because. There's no way for the light side and dark side to reach an accord because destiny is an unavoidable actual thing enforced by a universal fundamental force and they are destined to try to destroy each other, and their users drag the rest of the galaxy into it. There's zero inlking that the dark siders have any actual goal besides despotic autocratic rule for cruelty's own sake and they're literally fueled by hate and fear. The moral ambiguity is superficial because the conflict and the people in it are explicitly divided into Light and Dark, Good and Evil, Right and Wrong.

Not gonna lie... that does sound like a huge improvement.

Aren't these pros, though? Guys from Titan's regular staff. Maybe she's just a really convincing trap?

It's the most recent one mentioned, yes. Yeah... unfortunately the non-variable stuff just isn't as action figure-friendly as the VFs.

Yeah... really, any functioning adult with a decent science education would've spotted Zeon Zum Deikun's newtype theory for the unscientific BS it is, given that it depends on the totally unscientific notion of evolutionary predestination. ... are you really trying to argue that reality is unrealistic? Yes, armed conflict is avoidable. Nations spend huge sums of money and man-hours going to great and frankly tedious lengths to avoid armed conflict with each other. They maintain armies of diplomats and dozens of embassies to facilitate communication and smooth over incidents that could lead to conflict. They invest their time and energy in vast international diplomatic organizations to prevent and mitigate conflict and foster international cooperation and peace. They bend over backwards making (sometimes insincere) apologies for stuff they've done that might've antagonized someone. They go to frankly obscene lengths to avoid armed conflict. Why? Because war is a messy, confusing, expensive undertaking that's an enormous drain on a nation's economy and tends to wear out its welcome VERY quickly among voters. Rare are the occasions when armed conflict is genuinely unavoidable... and most of the time, what we see are eminently avoidable conflicts that occurred because people either stopped trying, or never tried, to communicate and find common ground. There is no absolute good or absolute evil in the real world. The kind of abject evil and (often literally) cackling villainy you see in Star Wars and other fairy tales just doesn't exist in the real world. There is no great and irredeemable cult of evil. No omnipresent force of darkness that rises up and must be opposed by force of arms. No armies of darkness that exist to kick puppies and gloat about how evil they are. Evil is, all too often, quite subjective. One man's villain is another man's hero. History's most vilified leaders, the men who oversaw Earth's most terrible atrocities, firmly believed that what they were doing was good, right, and justified for the sake of their nation and people... and so did their followers. That's the kind of dichotomy you see in Macross or Star Trek. There are no card-carrying villains gleefully chortling about how nasty they are. The antagonists are people who are doing what they believe is right for their nation or species.

... ... ... so, does a gig like that come with business cards or is it purely word-of-mouth advertising? (Honestly, I'd love to see the HR people at my day job slowly come unglued trying to figure out a way to safely broach that topic in the hobbies and interests part of an interview... like watching an old timey movie robot cope with a logic bomb and slowly freeze up.) It's been a good year for parody, so that actually sounds like it might be pretty enjoyable. Maybe the trailer I watched is just rubbish, since my takeaway from it was more that it was just a fanservice-centric sports anime like Wanna Be The Strongest in the World. I'm not averse to fanservice, per se, but I like it to serve a purpose in the story. Gratuitous fanservice is kind of a buzzkill to me.

That's probably a more realistic option nowadays... but back when we were first tossing the idea around we were full of more ambitious ideas, and less involved in our careers. Not that I've seen... though I'll admit I have not been paying particularly close attention to this one.

While Kawamori can be unpredictable at times, a grimdark Macross series is about as unlikely as it gets. Macross is, and always has been, a fundamentally upbeat and optimistic metaseries about the power of love, communication, and music. It's closer to Star Trek than Star Wars, in that diplomacy and mutual understanding are the preferred solution and armed conflict is an avoidable result of failures to communicate and find common ground. It's basically what the Universal Century of Gundam would be if the Earth Sphere were full of functioning adults instead of borderline sociopaths.

In the final analysis, there isn't a lot of difference between an amateur who's trying and a professional who's not. Titan is phoning this in so hard that it's come clear around from "not funny" to "actually pretty funny".