Seto Kaiba

Oh, I agree... that was unpleasant enough in the web novel that even Malty's substantial hate-dom felt a twinge of pity for her. It's not exactly a race to the bottom in terms of depicting dark and disturbing content, but apart from That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime and KonoSuba the top Isekai series don't seem to be shy about animating the dark and disturbing content. Overlord left in the frankly horrific treatment of the prostitutes in the brothel the Eight Fingers run in Re-Estize both times it came up in the Men of the Kingdom story arc, the massacre of the Workers in the Invaders of the Great Tomb arc, and Ainz's killing of over 180,000 of the Re-Estize Kingdom's soldiers with one spell in the Caster of Destruction arc. Goblin Slayer kept most of how rapey the goblins are, though they thankfully left out describing in detail the horrific fates of the party who tried to oust the goblins from the old Elf fortress (even if it did still animate the end result). If it gets another season, we'll have to see if they remain faithful to the novels when it comes to the arc with the goblin paladin. The Rising of the Shield Hero left in the horrific treatment of demihuman slaves including what happened to Raphtalia and her friends after their village was destroyed. I wouldn't bank on them not animating that if the anime gets that far. On a lighter note, I marathonned the hell out Isekai Quartet this afternoon. It's... weird. As weird as you'd expect a short comedy crossover slice of life school comedy about the characters from KonoSuba, Re:Zero, Overlord, and The Saga of Tanya the Evil to be. It's got a bit of a fridge horror aspect for an Overlord fan, what with Ainz and co. being brought over to the alternate world pretty much immediately after Ainz killed 180,000 enemy soldiers on the Katze plains, and having him joke about using his instant-kill spell Grasp Heart. Some of the humor definitely comes from the characters whose horrible personalities compliment each other getting along a little too well... like Tanya and Demiurge, Rem and Albedo, or Albedo and Aqua. Also took another whack at Mobile Suit Gundam UC: Re:0096 while I was at it. Its animation is so beautiful... but its story is such a dumpster fire. It's got that usual Universal Century side story problem where it's impossible to like anybody because everyone's an a-hole. Banagher's the wettest blanket in an underwater laundromat, and everyone else has more angst than a 24 hour emo rock playlist. It's not as bad as Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt, but it's still pretty obvious it's a gunpla commercial masquerading as a show. There's a strong argument to be made that Syam Vist and the Vist Foundation are bigger villains than the entire Zabi family, Principality of Zeon, and all of the Neo-Zeons. They had the original Federation Charter all along and could've resolved the entire spacenoid rights crisis at ANY TIME... but they waited until there'd been THREE wars over the subject before doing anything, and all they actually did was pass the buck. Struggling through a rewatch of Nobunaga the Fool as well. The premise is interesting, but boy does it drag in the middle after the fight between the Takeda under Caesar's command and the Oda forces ends with Nobunaga totally wrong-footing Caesar with an invitation to a tea ceremony when a surrender was demanded. Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin: Advent of the Red Comet has been consistently good. When it's not ham to ham combat featuring Ramba Ral and the Black Tri-Stars in mobile suit prototypes, it's Char being a magnificent bastard. I haven't had a show featuring a villain protagonist this good since Code Geass's first season. Who'd have thought Gundam without Gundams would be a winning formula? (The best part of catching up has been that I discovered my office's switch from MS Office to Google's G Suite means that services like Crunchyroll, YouTube Premium, and Google Play Movies aren't blocked by their firewall anymore... so I can watch over lunch on my office's big damn 1080p monitors without using up my MiFi's data plan.)

Mostly, it's the small expected sales volumes and narrow profit margins. As I understand it, physical media is a bit of a specialty market in Japan. The average home in Japan is fairly small by western standards, and with space at a bit of a premium it can be inconvenient or just plain impractical to build a large home video library. This has kept the video rental industry alive and well in Japan and in so doing kept the expected sales of any given home video release on the low side. Prices are set higher, in part, to compensate for the lower expected total sales. That fans were still willing to buy physical media those high prices meant there really wasn't an incentive to try lowering them. It certainly doesn't help that anime is made on such razor-thin margins that home video sales and merchandise are downright essential to a show's commercial success or failure. The studios stay afloat on the profits from the few hits they put out year to year, with most of what they produce barely breaking even or resulting in a short-term loss that may or may not be recouped by a slow trickle of profit from years of merchandise, streaming licensing, international licensing, and back catalog home video sales. With such a narrow margin between turning a profit or writing off a loss, the higher price means fewer units need to be sold to break even. They do announce them fairly quickly these days, but even if they don't the massive disparity in price could easily entice a savvy Japanese fan to purchase a Blu-ray from America for a fraction of what the Japanese domestic market release would cost. Consider, if you will... the average Japanese Blu-ray disc costs about $64 (US) and typically has three TV series episodes on it. That's $21.25 an episode. Macross Delta was a bit more expensive at $71.91 a volume for nine volumes/26 episodes plus various cuts of episode one, and cost over $647 when all was said and done. Getting a 26 episode anime series on Blu-ray in the US? $52.50 including the average sales tax. That's $2.02 an episode... a savings of 91.88%. In terms of spending power, importing the American Blu-ray would save a Japanese fan enough money for: 140 gallons of gasoline, two inexpensive Windows 10 laptops, a reasonably high-end smartphone, 185 cans of Coke, 21 dinners out, or approximately a month's rent in a typical 2K or 2DK apartment. Savings-wise, that's nothing to sneeze at... especially with Blu-ray prices creeping up towards $72/volume and some of the more popular shows having more than 26 episodes. Even the limited low-priced edition Macross 7 Blu-rays cost over $500 for the complete series, at about $9.93 an episode.

Yeah, if Macross were to take off bigtime in the west I'd expect to see music mildly deemphasized towards a more balanced story like Macross Frontier. Gundam's plastic model kits cross barriers of language and culture a lot more easily than Macross's J-Pop albums, but music is so essential to the Macross experience and core themes that they can't deemphasize it very much without hurting the setting and story. Frankly, I'd be shocked if Kawamori didn't have a raft of studio executives, production committee members, and assorted hangers-on auditing his concepts and proposals to make sure what he's coming up with is actually marketable. It's very rare for a creator to actually be given a completely free hand to do whatever they please, and on the rare occasions that they do get complete control it almost never ends well.

My collection seems to be pretty mixed in that regard... though it seems to vary by distributor. I'm not sure if it's still an issue, but for a while there the Japanese studios were vocally concerned about the possibility of losing profits from home video sales to fans importing the less expensive western home video releases of their shows. Gundam's focus was always selling model kits... Macross's is on selling music. Macross Delta is, if anything, proof that Macross has ALREADY succumbed to the "saturation bombing" effect of focusing on the profit center at the expense of the story. Kawamori has, IIRC, expressed some frustration already that he's tied to a formula for Macross titles that includes a love triangle, music, and space war. It's just not as bad as Gundam, which has evolved its Universal Century to the point that new shows are basically written mad lib-style.

Harmony Gold already lost the appeal. Big West's Class 41 trademark on Macross is registered. Registration of a trademark is only granted after the trademark application has been reviewed, approved, published, and is not successfully appealed during the appeal period. Unless they're region-coded... the Americas, Japan, and Southeast Asia are Region A, while Western Europe (including the UK) are Region B.

From what I've heard, "growing market" doesn't quite cover it... I've heard South America has proven to be an unusually receptive market for anime and manga in general. It'd probably be an especially fertile ground for Macross eventually, given that it's basically the last bastion of the Robotech franchise currently. I wonder what implications Big West's new trademark are going to have for Titan Publishing Group and their current (awful) Robotech comic. They're based in the UK, and that comic is making fairly liberal use of the Macross name.

That'd be one way to do it, yeah... though that's an avenue that's only become available recently and doesn't seem to be the kind of thing a lot of the larger publishers and distributors are considering. (Kickstarter is, after all, mostly seen as a place for new companies and indie outfits to launch products.)

Home video, toys, and kits are probably going to be most of what we'll see in the first few years once Harmony Gold's stranglehold is finally broken. Art books and other print media like that are a much harder sell in the West because they require a non-trivial investment of money to translate into English and are guaranteed to not be as widely consumed as the series itself. I've seen a few translated art books make their way to US booksellers in the last decade or so, but they're mostly more literal applications of "art book" in the form of manga illustration collections from the various high-profile shonen manga like Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece. Some are just the Japanese books reprinted for sale in the west like the Bleach art book All Colour but the Black, while others are condensations of multiple illustration collections. I've only seen two that really buck the trend. One is the The Complete Art of Fullmetal Alchemist book that Viz Media published, which is mostly (but not entirely) a condensation of several illustration collection books garnished with the contents of one of the concept art books. The other is a Neon Genesis Evangelion art book that is an illustration collection... of original illustrations made for Evangelion Chronicle. The kind of book we think of when we think "art book" is a much tougher sell, in part because there's not as much call for it among casual fans and also because there's a lot more text that needs translating. Out of curiosity, I actually went and had several different professional translation services put together quotes on what it would cost to do a professional translation of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 a while back. The lowballed estimates based on page count rather than word count fell around $25K and three to four months. You'd have to move at least a thousand copies after you'd broke even on printing costs just to break even on the cost of translation. (My group is working on full translations of the Master File books and other publications for the site we're building, but those books are long enough that we're looking at more like six months to a year apiece.)

That year, I'll throw a freaking party the night before (or maybe of) Super Dimension Con so we can drink to the downfall of HG.

... and then some. Kinema Citrus is adapting the first five volumes of the light novel for their The Rising of the Shield Hero anime series. The light novel series adapting Aneko Yusagi's original web novel currently stands at 21 volumes with a 22nd coming out at the end of this month. The web novel was over 900 chapters long, so odds are the light novel has quite a bit of run left to it after volume 22. Don't expect her to be taking her leave of the story anytime soon... she's in this one for the long haul (in one form or another). They did leave out the bit in the light novel and manga where they made her eat the food she'd poisoned after she vehemently denied that it was poisoned. She never does learn her lesson, and eventually it gets her punished in such a horrific manner that even the people who wanted her executed couldn't bear to watch.

If I had the cash to spare, I'd totally jump on that cel myself.

Well, with a title like Absolute Live!!!!!! creating snarky titles for reviews is on Easy Mode... (especially since almost anything sounds like an insult if you stick the word "absolute" in front of it and say it with contempt). Depending on which source you want to trust, we've technically already seen the prototype version... either as the YF-30 Chronos from Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, or the unit Arad was flying in the flashback episode. (If they wanna give us a renewal YF-30, I'll pronounce it a wonderfully fine idea... and another VF-31A wouldn't be unwelcome either.) Seems unlikely, Earth is about as far from the Brisingr cluster as you can get.

So, I caught the latest episode of The Rising of the Shield Hero over lunch today... and I gotta admit my assessment of the show's future prospects might've been unduly pessimistic. After reading the light novels, I was sure the anime was going to bog down in spreadsheet hell the same way the novels did once it reached the point in the story where Naofumi finds out he can use all three of the weapon level-up systems the other cardinal heroes thought were the one and only. Some wise soul among the show's directors cut almost all of it. The class-up ceremony is over and done with in about 45 seconds, the summit lasts maybe four minutes, and if you don't count Naofumi tormenting the weapon shopkeeper by copying every shield in the joint the level-up mechanics are given less than a minute. They focused on character development with Raphtalia, Filo, the Queen, and Itsuki's party. If the show's staff exercise similar discretion with the material they adapt, they might manage to make the Spirit Tortoise arc watchable... which I'd count as a miracle given what a slog it was as a light novel.

Yup.

I can hardly wait for 2021, when I might be able to walk into my local Barnes and Noble and pick up a Bandai Macross kit as easily as I could walk in there and buy gunpla right now.

Kind of surprised to hear he's talked about Macross... all I've ever seen from him is a great deal of grumbling about the handling of the Star Trek, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and MCU franchises. Some of it justified, some of it not, and some of it just plain factually inaccurate. I'm not sure I would recommend him for a summary or analysis of a complex legal situation given the way he's handled talking about the situation between CBS and Anas Abdin, which has contained some... interesting... conclusions.

I'm kind of surprised we haven't seen a VF-31A Arad Molders type from the flashback episode... easiest variant ever, just one tampo printed section is different.

Probably laying the groundwork for 2021. Mind you, as much of a coup as it is, the actual impact of obtaining the trademark over Harmony Gold's objections is fairly minimal given that most of the distributors producing English translations of anime and manga are based in the United States and distribute in Europe and Australia through partners and affiliates.

Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory adapted volumes 7, 8, and 9 of the light novel... which are some of its darkest moments thanks to It actually gets a bit darker in volumes 10, 11, and 12 before the story ends on a high note and a terrible Knight Rider joke.

This is a big win for Big West and Macross... and further proof that the end is in sight for Harmony Gold and Robotech.

There's the dress code thing, yeah... but fictional militaries are famously loose on that sort of thing anyway. The writers cheated a little on the age thing by setting the age of majority under the New UN Gov't at 17, so almost every Macross character who joined the military was an adult when they did. The PMC thing is just a thing lazy writers do to justify the main characters doing everything. It's novel once, but then it just gets dumb. Like in Frontier it was justified by SMS's parent company being a megacorp so flush with cash that it paid for the fleet the show is set in and has tons of pull with the government. In Delta, they dont have that... they're supposed to be the heroes but for pretty much the entire series they suck at their jobs. We're supposed to root for Xaos over the NUNS because the NUNS is "The Man", but it gets a little silly when Xaos is doing stuff like slowing down a NUNS-led evacuation and almost getting Chuck's own family killed in the process. It's damn near impossible to take Walkure seriously as "heroes" for the same reason. They spent 24 episodes f*cking up at every turn, getting captured repeatedly, with every move they make playing into Windermere's hands, and generally failing at the one job they actually have... and the threat they save the galaxy from at the very end would literally not have been possible if not for their intervention. Mikumo was created for Walkure. Walkure's dicking around with the ruins tuned them to make them more suitable for Roid's purpose. Walkure kept going undercover behind enemy lines and got Mikumo captured. Walkure's leader supported a plan by Lady M to delay evacuation of the blast zone of a thermonuclear demolition charge. Walkure's refusal to work with the NUNS led to the entire Brisingr cluster being occupied by a hostile power using mind control. Literally the only useful thing they achieve in the series prior to the finale is discovering that Windermere was using a combination of apples and bottled water as a vector to increase susceptibility to Var syndrome. When "f*ck the police" almost leads to the extinction of sentient life in the galaxy, is defying authority for the sake of it really still "heroic"?

Some of it is, as @Marzan indicated, just that people really don't want to type out Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari or The Rising of the Shield Hero every time they talk about the series. There's also a two-sided sort of situation where some of the audience empathize or sympathize with the raw deal Naofumi got thanks to the false rape accusations leveled at him by Myne/Malty, and the slightly sardonic use of the nickname by audience members who (wrongly) perceived the story as having an unsubtle anti-feminist/anti-#metoo agenda with its protagonist having his life destroyed because a false rape accusation was believed without question.

Does a sigh of exasperated frustration count as a thought? Macross Delta had a painfully threadbare plot that all too often felt less like a story than a series of badly contrived excuses for Walkure to perform. The story felt weirdly segregated, as if the story about the idol group Walkure and the story about the Brisingr Alliance's war with the Kingdom of the Wind were being developed by different teams who weren't allowed to speak to each other. Until the last three episodes or so, there wasn't really any feeling that Walkure were actually doing anything to advance the plot... they were just bystanders. Being compressed into a two hour movie did that threadbare plot a few favors, but it was still so scattered that at times it felt more like a collection of quasi-related vignettes than a coherent narrative. It changed gears with the kind of audible clunk that would send most folks scurrying to the mechanic. Now we've got an announcement for Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!!. A title like that makes me think we're headed into another excuse plot to justify a two hour long animated "live" concert by Walkure. Macross Delta's TV series and first movie already had a threat that was essentially a potential galaxy-wise mass extinction event among sentient life forms. It's not exactly easy to do sequel escalation when you started with a threat that could wipe out most sentient life. I'm sick to death of this PMC hero kick that fiction's been on for a while now, so I'm still kind of hoping that the plot will be Xaos going on the run as the New UN Government comes after them and Lady M on charges of corruption, bribery, illegal cloning, harboring terrorists, and so on. I doubt we'd actually get that kind of Reality Ensues plot, so I'm expecting we get something else tying into the ancient Protoculture like some nutter digging up another Birdhuman or Fold Evil. Either that or maybe the Delta Wave System's activation did some unpleasant things to Windermereans by forcibly activating their runes and now Walkure's off to Windermere IV to prevent the extinction of the Windermereans with a massive live at Darwent Castle to de-age them with fold songs. (I kinda suspect that last one is actually it.) He's already done that one... it was called Macross VF-X2. Learning that the (New) UN Forces were the real baddies in the story was what separated the game's two endings. In the Bad Ending, the VF-X Ravens don't learn about Latence and dutifully carry out their orders to destroy the anti-government groups Black Rainbow and Vindirance. In the Good Ending, the VF-X Ravens learn that they've been manipulated by a fascist Earth supremacist faction in the New UN Government and New UN Forces called Latence that's been using the VF-X special forces to suppress armed opposition to its plan to give Earth absolute governmental authority over the emigrant planets and increase the military's already-considerable authority in the name of presenting a unified front against any internal and external threats. The Ravens side with Vindirance, the "anti-government" group that supports democracy and more autonomy for emigrant planets, and Latence's coup attempt is foiled by the destruction of Battle-13 in Earth orbit. Later stories call this conflict between pro-Earth and pro-autonomy forces the Second Unification War. (As is typical of Macross, the bad guys are largely presented more as well-meaning but misguided rather than actually evil. Except Manfred Brando, who's just an amoral arse.) They crop up in a few other stories like Macross the Ride and the Macross Delta novelization.

Yeah, the lineart for the destroids in Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love? has Army markings in the style of the US Army's World War II-vintage AR-850-5 system. They have markings that go Δ#Δ_# scattered around the unit's body and a Army-style bumper number on the ankles opposite the UN Spacy marking. Normally there would be another number in front of the first Δ to denote which Armored Division it belonged to, but that touch appears to be absent from the Macross's destroids. The ADR-04-Mk.X Defender is Δ5ΔG3/D-108231, indicating its unique bumper code is D-108231 and that it's from the 5th Armored, 3rd vehicle of G Company, in an unspecified number Armored Division. The SDR-04-Mk.XII Phalanx is Δ10ΔS7/D-229194, indicating its unique bumper code is D-229194 and that it's the 10th Armored's 7th vehicle of S Company, in an unspecified number Armored Division. The MBR-04-Mk.VI Tomahawk is Δ3ΔD7/D-210194, indicating its unique bumper code is D-210194 and that it's the 3rd Armored's 7th vehicle of D Company, in an unspecified number Armored Division. The MBR-07-Mk.XII Spartan is Δ7ΔO2/D-330517, indicating its unique bumper code is D-330517 and that it's the 7th Armored's 2nd vehicle of O Company, in an unspecified number Armored Division. The HWR-00-Mk.II Monster is the only one without a visible formation marking, bearing only the number 02. How they'd be organized below company level is uncertain... since those formation markings only go down to the individual vehicle number within the company. Assuming they're copying the US organization with a moderate level of fidelity, there ought to be (on average) 14 destroids to a Company, an average of 3 companies + 2 command units in a Battalion (44 destroids total), any anywhere from 6-24 Battalions in a Division, though 12 for light and 18 for heavy is typical. With 587 Destroids, the Macross had enough for at least three Divisions.

The UN Navy, and presumably New UN Navy, seem to use the US Navy's aircraft squadron designation system pretty much as it is today. The UN Spacy and New UN Spacy literally just stick an S in front of the Navy designation for a Spacy squadron of the same type. It's one of the overt Navy touches in the Spacy's organization. The UN Marine Corps, and presumably New UN Marine Corps, use the US Marine Corps's aircraft squadron designation system as-is, while the Spacy Marine Corps just sticks an S in front of it. So, essentially, Navy squadron designations are V[Mission], Marine Corps are VM[Mission], Spacy squadrons are SV[Mission], and Spacy Marine Corps squadrons are SVM[Mission]. The mission letters in use include (and squadrons can have more than one as follows): A: Attacker AQ: Electronic Attacker AW: Airborne Early Warning C: Composite F: Fighter FA: Strike Fighter FC: Fighter Composite P: Patrol PU: Patrol (Special Unit) R: Logistical Support (Personnel) RC: Logistical Support (Cargo) RM: Logistical Support (Multimission) T: Training UP: Unmanned Patrol Q: Fleet Reconnaissance X: Air Test and Evaluation SVC would be a Spacy composite squadron, while SVFC would be a Spacy fighter composite squadron. SVMF would a Spacy Marine Corps fighter squadron. That's the hull classification symbol for an Aircraft Carrier. Contrary to popular belief, the CV doesn't stand for "Carrier Vessel" but for "Cruiser (Voler)" with "voler" being the French for "to fly". Early aircraft carriers were converted cruisers, and the designation stuck because if it ain't broke don't fix it. That'd be a Navy airborne early warning squadron. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah had that one Macross Frontier fleet NUNS composite squadron that the VF-25VJ was built for... how official those are, I can't say. "Composite squadron" has had a couple different meanings over the last century, but for most intents and purposes a composite squadron is an administrative catch-all for any unit that's operating a mixture of different types of aircraft for whatever role. Originally, composite squadrons were squadrons assigned to the smaller escort carriers and helped balance the ship's capabilities by operating a mixture of fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers. Later on, it became "miscellaneous" in everything but literal name when the usage was changed to be an administrative designation for groups of detachments from various specialist units like photoreconnaissence aircraft, early warning planes, adversary training units, and so on. Fighter Composite squadrons (VFC/SVFC) are specialist units that assist in simulated air combat training exercises by standing in for hostiles. They're not designated as composite squadrons, but the protagonist unit from Macross Digital Mission VF-X and the Ravens from the sequel Macross VF-X2 are a lot like your classic (WW2-era) composite squadrons in that they operate a mix of fighters, fighter-bombers, and even a bomber from small aircraft carriers like the Valhalla III or Saratoga II. Exactly what interpretation of "composite squadron" Macross is using for the units designated SVC (if they officially exist at all) is unclear since the ones mentioned are First Space War-era units where there aren't a multitude of different models to fly. Fighter squadrons are responsible for conducting air-to-air combat. Attack squadrons are responsible for air-to-ground or air-to-surface combat, like close air support of ground troops, anti-submarine warfare, bombing runs on enemy ships, suppression of enemy air defenses, etc. Strike Fighter squadrons do both.