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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I went back and checked, and they do suggest that the witches are Nightsisters in the 7th episode. They don't confirm it, but the only argument they make against it is Nightsisters don't raise younglings... which Sol replies to by pointing out that they don't treat the girls like children. They are seeing using the same kind of weapons that the Nightsisters use (the bows) and we do see them use at least two powers that the Nightsisters used in previous works, like turning themselves into mist (Mother Talzin's favorite trick) and mind control. Not using necromancy may simply be from a lack of dead bodies to use since they haven't been living on Brendok long, or they may not have been taught the skill since in The Clone Wars it was only the elder witch who actually knew how to do that. It was well received by those who watched it all the way through. It just didn't have a very high total hours viewed because of all the people who dropped it after the first episode or two due to its slow start. It makes for a sharp contrast to The Acolyte, which seems to have achieved a broadly negative reaction from most of those who watched it all the way through.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I just want to leave those two painfully mediocre films very far behind where they can be forgotten in peace. I respect what Ridley Scott was trying to do. I just wish he'd done a much better job of it.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It is, but only against soft targets. Buckshot doesn't actually have much penetration power because it's typically rather soft lead pellets. It doesn't work very well against body armor even at short ranges. Also, explosive-tipped rounds don't explode inside the target. They explode against the hard surface of a target to break up armor and allow a smaller penetrator inside the bullet to continue deeper in. Normally that kind of ammunition is for antimateriel use, and most living beings wouldn't present a hard-enough first surface to actually set of the explosive via the incendiary primer. From what we've seen in the trailers, I wouldn't count on too many folks surviving this new one either... they seem want to continue pivoting back towards horror. Hmmm... not thrilling to that trailer, esp. since there are bits that look lifted from Covenant like the row of facehuggers in gel that looks like the embryo storage from Covenant's titular ship.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The Acolyte showrunner Leslye Headland credits Dave Filioni with mentoring her during the development of her series and helping her develop the setting for the story. I'm not sure it's a coincidence that some of The Acolyte's weakest and most-maligned writing - the witches - draws heavily on Filoni's prior body of Star Wars work.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    You'd think a multiple millennia-old organization that has strict emotional control as a central tenet of its philosophy because it exists in a universe where even justifiable anger or fear is literally The Power of Evil would teach its members healthier strategies for processing their emotions than "repress everything". This whole fiasco - by which I mean both The Acolyte's plot and the Skywalker Saga as a whole - could've been avoided if the Jedi Order had some therapists on staff to assist its members with processing trauma and perhaps preemptively identifying members at risk of falling to the Dark Side. Qimir's decision to quit the Jedi Order and join the Sith is implied (by Qimir) to be a mistreatment-induced betrayal. Osha washed out of the Jedi Order... ... because she was never allowed to process the trauma of her sister's attempt to murder her and the deaths of literally everyone she knew after becoming a Jedi trainee. Torbin and Kelnacca both holed up in isolation for over a decade because that was the only coping mechanism they had to deal with the guilt and trauma of their accidental roles in the Brendok massacre. Sol displayed a frankly creepy interest in Osha from the start, and was allowed to take her as his apprentice despite having killed her mother. Legacy characters seems to be their hook for a season two... getting Yoda involved, and possibly other familiar faces.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Wait, you mean you aren't simply crippled by FOMO over the amazing premise of an entire eight episode season devoted to how a lime-green Karen and a recent lobotomy recipient hunt the only halfway likeable character in this show and his new girl Friday across the galaxy to cover up the coverup of a coverup of events that are completely inconsequential to the setting and that almost nobody in the story cares about either? I am shocked. Shocked! Well, not that shocked. 🤔 It's actually kind of impressive what a complete nonevent the whole story actually is within the greater scope of Star Wars.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Why not hide in a cave if you're the Master? Perhaps it's just my jaundiced eye view as a filthy casual, but the Sith seem to have an extreme flair for the dramatic. I guess it must come naturally if you're part of an ancient sect that has spent millennia devoted to taking revenge on a bunch of stuffy and repressed space monks. That sort of backstory practically demands being extra AF. (What are they taking revenge for anyway?) Joking aside, if that really is Qimir's master then he has good reason to spy on Qimir. The one and only path to Sith career advancement is the Klingon Promotion: kill your master to become the master. If his student's up to something behind his back he has every reason to suspect imminent and possibly fatal betrayal is in the offing. Keeping an eye on a person whose literal job it is to one day murder you and take your place is common sense if you're as death-adverse as Darth Plagueis supposedly was. For bonus points, Qimir's come home with a living specimen of life created by Force manipulation... so if he's really Darth Plagueis the only thing standing between him and doing an undignified victory dance and giving Qimir a congratulatory hug is probably his villainous image wouldn't survive it.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Delta did establish that the New UN Gov't and other researchers think the Brisingr cluster was probably the last enclave of Protoculture before the species slipped into extinction, with a seemingly higher density of Earthlike worlds and sub-Protoculture species than other parts of the galaxy. We did see another sub-Protoculture species that isn't named in Macross Frontier: the Labyrinth of Time too... though it's not clear where in the galaxy their world is. Zola does seem to have been lucky in that regard. It probably helped that Zola's environment is not exactly suitable for Humans despite being Earthlike. The influence of Galactic Whales on the local ecosystem made the planet's microorganisms much more dangerous to Humans than usual. Depending on how you want to read it, descriptions of the state of Zola itself suggest it was possibly more culturally and technologically advanced than the worlds of the Brisingr cluster when first contact was made. Their tech level is around the first half of Earth's 20th century despite a low level of urbanization. If they were already in their industrial age when Humanity made contact, it would probably have been a lot less of a cultural upheaval... esp. since their culture places great significance on the Galactic Whales and thus presumably had some inkling of the idea of life in space for many years before Humanity found them. It was, and still is. The Macross Delta TV series showed us, via flashback, that the trial production VF-31A Kairos was first used in combat by Xaos in 2065 (I think it was Ep21?). Master File's story depicts the first use of Xaos's custom VF-31 "Siegfried" a year later in 2066, with only two of the eventual five aircraft in service. The VF-31's only been in service with Xaos for a year and a half or so when Macross Delta's TV series starts in April 2067. Per Kawamori (in Great Mechanics G), his concept is that the production VF-31 Kairos will be entering military service c.2069-2070. Xaos is basically doing the same job that SMS did, testing the new fighter in combat as disposable mooks whose deaths are legally accidents not combat fatalities to iron out any remaining kinks before it goes into mass production for the New UN Forces. Honestly, this lot sounds more like the Cardassians to me... particularly given that their invasion of Arkarelia was all about resources to fuel their economic growth and that they have a militarized government with strong expansionist leanings. It's not mentioned, but it's possible... and some of them were doubtless mercenaries in the employ of the Roakites like the four YF-30B pilots were. I'm sure I'll find more detail when I have time to delve into it... but the basic description suggests they were just scouting the area looking for the Supervision Army and ran into the New UN Forces instead. Yeah, I'm hoping there's some explanation there.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Palpatine won't be born for another 50-something years, so it certainly seems possible. Especially considering the turnover rate we've seen for Sith apprentices and the various students of those apprentices in titles like The Clone Wars.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Not that heavy... the rifles we see the Marines use are, according to the film's dialog, 10mm (.40 caliber) rifles firing light armor piercing rounds with explosive tips. That's not a fantastically heavy load by any stretch of the imagination. The smart guns supposedly use the same 10x28mm caseless ammunition too. We also see Hicks kill at least one of the xenomorphs with an ordinary 12 gauge shotgun. The only weapon in the movie that's ever shown to be ineffective is the Vasquez's pistol, which isn't discussed in the story itself but the prop is a S&W Model 39 in 9x19mm. Aliens definitely did not focus on setting up sequels, though the idea of successful horror movies becoming sequel factories was already well established and in practice when it was being written never mind filmed. Friday the 13th was a poster child for it, having run out an original movie and four sequels before Aliens hit theaters. Not to mention it's a matter of legal record that Brandywine Productions was pushing for a franchise basically right after they saw the box office performance of Alien. The main thing holding up the development of that franchise-starting sequel was Fox being a complete and total dick about it. (They tried to pass the first film's success off as a fluke and were sued for trying to cheat Brandywine out of profits from the film through creating accounting practices.) Aliens did well on its own, but it strangled the franchise in the crib in doing so. It's horror, that's pretty normal as outcomes go. The critics generally held that the problem with 3 was just its weak writing... it was a troubled production that went through a bunch of revisions and concepts trying to find a place for the story to go as an action story after Aliens before concluding it was a bad job and pivoting back to horror. Well, we couldn't very well go back to LV-426 again... so I guess the Engineers are just as irresponsible as the ancient Protoculture, the Forerunners, or any other ancient alien species now.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    To each their own, naturally... I don't disagree the fight in the throne room in The Last Jedi is beautifully composed. The style of lightsaber fighting used in the sequels is kind of awkward. It lacks the speed and the fluidity that made the lightsaber fights in the prequel trilogy so very impressive. There's a lot of (understandably) inexperienced flailing from Rey in the first and second sequels but Kylo Ren's style is very jerky with a lot of heavy slashes that don't feel appropriate for a laser sword with a weightless blade. They don't mesh with the style we saw in previous titles... which admittedly is not a very practical style as it involves so much flynning, but it looks more impressive. Whoever choreographed the lightsaber fights for The Acolyte is probably the only person on this series besides the set and prop designers who really earned their keep IMO. Just gorgeous, fluid, wild fighting especially from Qimir and Sol. It's a treat to watch, which makes the quality of the rest of the show kind of a pity. Qimir's style is brutal without being heavy and slow. It's why Kylo Ren's style should have been.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Oh boy... here I go watchin' schlock again. The eighth and final episode of The Acolyte. Mog is back... which I'm sure will not please @Mog one bit. Well, that explains that... I guess we now know how this little Sithy secret didn't get out. Well, that was... I think underwhelming might not be strong enough. The writers clearly tied themselves in knots to make sure that this series ended with the rest of the galaxy in the dark about the existence of the Sith Lords... except it finishes with Green Karen knowing... ... and we also see her taking the subject to a member of the High Council, meaning that there is now a pretty substantial plot hole. Neither Osha nor Mae's story received a satisfying conclusion. The Brendok Jedi's arc is basically a massive waste of time that goes nowhere and does nothing interesting. None of what happens here adds anything new or interesting to Star Wars. Like I said a few posts ago, the showrunner and writers are so preoccupied with showing their love for the lore that they forgot to write an actual coherent story.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The Law of Diminishing Returns says that, no matter what you do or how well you do it, you will hit that wall at some point as long as you keep doing it. Looking back at the chaos that ensued when Alien 3 was being developed, I think it's safe to say that the newborn Alien franchise hit that wall more or less immediately once they pivoted from horror to action. They had an absolutely miserable time finding a workable concept for a third film in no small part because the previous film kneecapped the titular monster so badly and left them no room to build. Ripley may be the protagonist, but it's undeniably the xenomorph most people are coming to theaters to see. Prometheus went and proved that point beyond dispute. Pivoting from horror to action got them one good movie, and ruined the prospects of everything that came after. They tried to go back to horror despite the handicap of Aliens as their starting point and failed. They tried to do another action movie spinning off the premise of Aliens and failed. They tried to do away with the xenomorph entirely and shift to monsters of an entirely different sort with a soft reboot in Prometheus and general audiences said "Where's my xenomorph?" and it failed. Romulus seems set to be horror soft reboot attempt No.3... which just shows, IMO, that as enjoyable as Aliens was as a summer action movie it isn't evocative of what audiences actually want from Alien. They're here for Scary Monsters, and I don't mean David Bowie... though he'd have been a hell of a choice to play a synth. If only they'd let it die there, but once it's a franchise there will always be someone ready to head into the graveyard with a shovel ready to do an unboxing in search of more money.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Writing good horror is a difficult proposition, sure. It requires a substantial grasp of subtlety, nuance, and pacing to really get into the audience's heads to build and release tension in order to ensure a palpable sense of menace throughout. Horror movie after horror movie can work if you have very good writers... or if you're working a more forgiving and campy horror subgenre like slashers or splatter flicks where the sheer personality of your villain can carry an otherwise weak story (e.g. Nightmare on Elm Street). It's hard, but it's more rewarding in the long run than the quick burnout that you get by cheapening the monster with an action movie transition. Once "just shoot it" is a valid option, you're left fumbling for ways to make the monster threatening again.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The problem with switching genres like that is that you can't easily switch back once you've made the jump from horror to action. That's the reason that Alien and Terminator have struggled so much as franchises. They're known for that first iconic sci-fi horror installment that made them pop culture icons... but they both went for an action-centric first sequel that robbed the signature monster driving the story of most of its ability to invoke fear. So what followed was a string of poor quality and increasingly campy action movies trying to cash in on the original's reputation and doing worse each time until they hit legitimate commercial failure. If the franchise survives, they try pivoting back towards the original's horror... but with the significant disadvantage of all the reputational damage they've done to the monster with all the action-centric sequels. A supremely good writer and director can overcome that obstacle and make the monster scary again (e.g. Alien: Isolation), but it's far more likely it'll just end up another flop. Based on people's reactions here, it seems reasonably common that folks think switching to action got them exactly one good movie and a whole lotta schlock after.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Started No Longer Allowed in Another World after dinner... and this is kinda heavy. Like really heavy. Indecently heavy. I have to admit, it's definitely a fresh take on subverting the usual isekai formula. A hero who has zero interest in, and negligible talent for, heroing and who is genuinely upset that his isekai-inducing run-in with Truck-kun wasn't fatal because all he wants to do is die and Truck-kun interrupted his double suicide attempt. There doesn't seem to be any of the usual power fantasy and it seems determined to subvert the usual romance/harem fantasy too. Is it gauche to say I'm going to keep watching this bizarre death-seeking hero out of morbid curiosity?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if they can't get to you they can't very well attack you right? Assuming one had the means to create and maintain artificial fold faults large enough to isolate a planet and intense enough to be non-navigable with a conventional fold system, that'd be a pretty dandy way to prevent attacks. The ancient Protoculture seem to have had the means to create artificial fold faults like that, given the unnatural fold faults surrounding planets like Uroboros and Windermere IV that were strong enough to disable or seriously damage ships attempting to traverse them and large enough to effectively isolate those planets from the greater galaxy. It's probably still a bit outside Humanity's capabilities, though. Their expertise with warping spacetime into an impassible mess are mostly focused on small-scale applications in realspace (barriers). To have any hope of matching a main fleet man for man, they'd have to mobilize everyone on the planet anyway...
  18. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I'm not sure that'd even be physically possible. What the Vrlitwhai branch fleet detected that led them to the Sol system were the gravity waves produced by the ASS-1's fold jump eminating from its defold point. Those radiate outward in every direction at the speed of light. Without knowing where the Zentradi fleet would appear in advance, it'd likely be nearly impossible to mask that.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Vintage audio tech is such a scam these days... it's long since fallen victim to "Monster cable"-ization, where objective performance quantification has taken a back seat to simply looking impressive and being conspicuous consumption "luxury" items. The old school audiophiles would be horrified to hear "the youth" romanticizing the imperfections in mechanically inferior record players with wow and flutter numbers that'd have been unacceptably high in the heyday of LPs. (This I know, because I've heard those strictures in person from the Ford audiophile society in person on a regular basis since I was a kid. At one of their listening sessions just the other day, they showcased a new model tube amp with MSRP in excess of $70K because expensive=good brainrot has taken over the whole industry.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the Cygnus multidrone plates aren't meant for air-to-air use according to the material we have. This seems to be an improvised use case inspired by the VF-31 Siegfried carrying less weaponry than the normal VF-31 because of having to carry Walkure's support gear. (The multidrone plates are said to be slower than drones meant for air-to-air combat, so presumably they wouldn't be able to actually keep up with the fighters at combat speed.) As sketchley noted, in the original Macross series and DYRL? the Earth UN Gov't and Earth UN Forces were well behind the point they wanted to be at in terms of defense readiness when the First Space War started. The scope of their defense plan was immense, and the Unification Wars surely did not help matters with the Anti-Unification Alliance forcing the UN Forces to divert resources to deal with them and doing things like blowing up Grand Cannon construction sites. Even if everything had gone perfectly, they still would not have been anywhere near ready for the Zentradi with just eight years of preptime. I doubt anything would be sufficient for them to be ready to repel a main fleet with just eight yeras of preptime... not even having a perfect understanding of the Zentradi forces tactics.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Fascinating. I'm going to give that a read. Thank you! 😀
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Debatable... it seems to take a lot of bullets to actually hit one, but the Marines in Aliens definitely seem to be a sloppy and unprofessional unit to say the least. There are plenty of horror franchises that are able to keep the horror going beyond the first film with the same monster. Alien: Isolation is my go-to proof that it's still perfectly possible to make the monster pants-soilingly terrifying and paranoia-inducing even today... well after two dreadful sequels and two dreadful prequels and decades of audience exposure to the xenomorph itself. Alien and Alien: Isolation derive a lot of their horror factor from the same source as Jaws: the tension invoked by how little you see the monster. You know that it's out there. You know that it's hunting. But you don't know where it is and you can't see it coming until it's too late. That's what makes it scary: not knowing. Modern horror movies so often completely fail to do monster horror correctly becuase they're so determined to show us how detailed and gross their latest squidgy monster is in all its CG-rendered glory as often as possible. No matter how physically horrible the monster is, if you can see the bastard coming a long way off its ability to frighten diminishes considerably because it is known. You can, to an extent, compensate for that by making the monster an Implacable Man (e.g. Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees) but it's still less scary than when they pop out of the woodwork and get right to business. When your monster jumps out of a window or ventilation duct or whatever and has to stop and take ten seconds to display its mutilated glory to the audience before getting down to work, it can only really startle because it makes itself known before attacking. Aliens hadn't completely forgotten that lesson (e.g. the attack in the reactor complex near the start) but Alien 3 and Resurrection lost that knowledge and so the xenomorphs there couldn't build tension effectively. I'm sorry, this wasn't supposed to turn into a lecture... but I'm pretty passionate about that lost school of subtle horror.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The one subtitled "The unproduced screenplay"? Because I am now very curious. If so, the book in question's available in ebook form on Play Books...
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I was also looking at the VF-31AX Master File's story section, The Miracle of Foegal. It's set in March 2068, and might be the oddest one yet as it's the story of the New UN Forces and Xaos collaborating to defend an uninhabited star system that the New UN Government had designated an ecological preserve from a Zentradi main fleet whose scouting force was able to escape from a run-in with the New UN Forces. Perhaps the most interesting part is the Foegal system itself... an artificial solar system the ancient Protoculture constructed around a white dwarf star. Foegal is orbited by seven planets, five of which are Earthlike, and most of which are believed to have been moved there from other star systems by the Protoculture. Even weirder, only one of Foegal's five habitable planets is in the habitable zone. The other four are farther away from the star, but are kept habitable by a Protoculture construct in orbit of the white dwarf that uses gravitational lensing to focus the star's energy onto the planets like a giant magnifying lens to ensure they get enough solar radiation to remain in Earthlike condition.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    True, but when your monster can be taken down by the simple expedient of bullets... well... it's not so scary anymore. Looking at the alternatives, I think I'll take the game.
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