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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Surely you meant to say "torture museum".
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    If they were more honest in their advertising, they'd be saying "The Worst is Yet to Come!" instead of the opposite...
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Or it spins out of Robin Hood: Men in Tights and she's really one of the Merry Men in drag... "Hey Blinkin! Fix your boobs, you look like a bleeding Picasso."
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Is that what that is? I thought they drew a mouth like a へ and accidentally gave her a fish mouth. I'm mildly more put off by the way her breasts appear to be attached directly to her collarbone... though that cover has enough off-putting stuff already like Rick Hunter looking like a drugged-up Elijah Wood, Breetai looking like a background character from Forging Ahead! Cromartie High School, or Roy looking like a young Willem Dafoe doing a bad Tom Cruise cosplay...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Starting in Macross Frontier, Kawamori's new "hobby horse" Aesop seems to be that megacorporations are shady as f*ck and able to perpetrate all manner of crimes under cover of the sheer size of the company. Macross Galaxy was basically an autonomous subsidiary of General Galaxy so it's not clear how much culpability the parent company had for the actions of the Galaxy Executives. The Epsilon Foundation is a more clear-cut example, since we've had at least two examples of evil (or at least greedy and amoral) executives from that organization who were directly acting to stir up conflict for the sake of their various enterprises. Ramla Saied in Macross E was leading research in weaponizing Var syndrome in 2062 and even facilitated a test that effectively took the form of an attempted coup d'etat on the planet Pipure. Berger Stone in Macross Delta, of course, was essentially pulling an Anaheim Electronics and selling arms and equipment to both sides in Windermere's invasion of the Brisingr cluster.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    ... sounds to me like he's doing a fine job replicating the Robotech creative process then. Even Harmony Gold will, somewhat shamefacedly, admit that the 1985 Robotech TV series has loads of random, contextually inappropriate, and seemingly nonsensical lines that were just thrown in because someone on staff felt a scene needed more dialog. You'd swear the (re)writers and voice actors thought they were getting paid by the word. Between the dated, stilted dialog that reads like the writer was coming off a heavy dose of dental anesthetic and all the liberties taken with stealing designs and whole plots from other franchises, it feels like a right and proper tribute to the spirit of Robotech.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The cover honestly looks like parody artwork. ... ouch, talk about damned by faint praise. It's Robotech... for all we know, this is him writing his heart out and it's crap because the source material he's working from is crap. Garbage in, garbage out... right?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    While we don't have a definitive timeline for the Sv-262's development and adoption, the gaiden manga Macross Delta: the White Knight of the Black Wing suggests that Windermere IV's Kingdom of the Wind obtained their Sv-262s only a year or two before the Aerial Knights first sortie at Al Shahal. If the New UN Forces had known Windermere IV had them, they probably would've identified them before they openly declared themselves. The Sv-262 definitely has some design lineage to New UN Forces fighters... particularly the VF-9, given that the SV Works were once owned by General Galaxy.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    None that we know of. It seems very unlikely that the Sv-262 would be used by the New UN Forces, given that it's known by its manufacturer's internal designation for it rather than a NUNF Variable Fighter designation. It's possible that some independent forces like PMCs or other paramilitary groups might use it, since Xaos immediately recognized it once the jamming hiding them from their gun cameras was no longer in operation. That suggests the design did get disclosed properly as required by law and that Epsilon was probably actively marketing it as an alternative to the various military 5th Generation VF designs. The "Megaroad-01 fell into a black hole" thing is, as noted previously, based on a gross misunderstanding of what that "Minmay's Last Message" postcard says... As to whether or not it was based on the YF-24... that's kind of a yes-and-no sort of thing, since it isn't structurally derivative of the YF-24 Evolution but it does have the signature technical innovations developed for the YF-24 like ISC, Stage II reaction engines, and so on.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Character biographical notes! Did you think I was translating all these books and magazines and not writing anything down? (Mind you, what @Master Dex said is totally correct too... I'm an engineer, so detailed note-taking is pretty much second nature. One of the skills they beat into you in any of the hard sciences is to obsessively document EVERYTHING. As Adam Savage once put it, "The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.") Years of my notes, collated data, and translations are what's going into the new website I'm working on building. ... I'll be terribly put out if that planet wasn't colonized by the Macross Savoy. Just give the Public Exploder a wide berth. (I want to see if anyone actually gets this...)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Episode 21, literally the first scene of the episode's lengthy and pointless series of flashbacks around 4:20 in when she's being interviewed by Ernest Johnson. Same scene. From what I've read on the subject, Kaname's home planet Divide has been at war with itself for nearly twenty years as of 2067. I don't recall where I read it, but what I recall seeing about the supposed cause of the civil war is that the Second Unification War never ended there. Apparently Divide was... divided... about whether it should side it should support in the war, and when the war ended the portion of Divide's population who'd sided with the defeated Latence faction were unwilling to pack it in the way the rest of Latence's supporters did. Basically it's Space North Ireland.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That's the beauty of idol groups... there's usually something for everybody. IIRC, it's the only thing that's ever brought up about her besides the fact that her home planet is Divide. She's never presented as bitter about it, just depressed that she couldn't live up to her dreams of solo stardom. She was also pretty clear that she accepted a job with Walkure since it was as close as she was ever likely to get to her dream. I've got a theory that the reason she's so bummed about it is because she was from Divide. I reckon she thought she'd be the Lynn Minmay of planet Divide and end the civil war there with her songs. The whole bit where she talks about feeling like she's losing her role as Walkure's leader to Mikumo, its star, is delivered in a pretty sad tone... she's clearly got a bit of an inadequacy complex going on. She's not bitter, she's just depressed by it.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yup, he did.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    All we know, thus far, is it's coming 2019 and it's supposed to be an all-original movie. Can't begin to guess what it might be about, given that the series resolved the Windermere thing pretty definitively and the movie drew a line under it.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The release of Macross Delta with subs sold well enough to do subs for the movie too... so hopefully next time they get it into their heads to re-release the library of previous Macross titles we'll see official subs there as well.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Seems that way. From the look of it, they haven't had any real difficulty securing budgets since Frontier unexpectedly set the world on fire.
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