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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno... from what I've heard, most of the Star Wars EU was pure and unrepentant garbage. I don't think things have necessarily improved with Disney at the helm. Gonna hazard a guess and say it's probably something to do with emotional control and "practice makes perfect", since not being in control of your emotions is a path to the dark side. Nonsense, you heard the man... he is one with the Force, and the Force is with him. He might've been blind, but the man was rolling nothing but 20's on his spot checks.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    @Sailor Arashi hit on most of the answer, but there's a point that was missed. The Adventurers Guild in Goblin Slayer doesn't work like the ones in Overlord, Konosuba, etc., where guild officials were the ones who determined what an acceptable rate was, would decline to publish requests from those who couldn't pay, and policed the adventurers to make sure people didn't take quests that they had no chance of completing. In Goblin Slayer, the guild is mostly just a freelancer registry that tries to corral the riffraff, categorize them, tag them so the bodies can be identified if a quest goes wrong, and point them in the direction of work. They don't have the authority to stop a woefully underprepared party from taking a quest that's way over their skill level, nor do they have any real way to objectively measure someone's competency. The light novel doesn't beat around the bush about it, and straight-up compares the guild to a temp agency rather than the labor union-like guilds of other stories.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Oh I hope not... if the Walkure fanboys want wrist exercise they can just buy the f***ing h-doujinshi. I'd like to see something of actual substance.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It was a postcard that you could send away for if you bought the PS1 Macross: Do You Remember Love? video game. @sketchley has a translation of it posted here. Its canonicity, inasmuch as Kawamori cares about such notions, is dubious. No new info about Megaroad-01 has been released, apart from some updates/corrections to its tech specs in Macross Chronicle. Its fate remains a mystery.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    She's not the sort of "hidden depths" person you'd expect to launch an interstellar communications startup and shepherd it until it became a interstellar conglomerate megacorporation. What you see is pretty much what you get with Minmay.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    "Capture" is a VERY strong word for what happened there... He tracked Han Solo to Cloud City literally by following the Millennium Falcon at a distance, which isn't really a great feat of skill or cunning. He didn't actually do anything on Cloud City except grumble a bit, and received Han Solo almost literally gift-wrapped for transport to Jabba the Hutt. Vader did literally the heavy lifting for him. Oh, undoubtably... that's the reason they felt compelled to give her a cape and a shiny chromed armor paintjob. The goal was to be the new faceless, intimidating badass because that worked SO well for Boba Fett even though he accomplished the square root of bugger all in the actual movies before being accidentally killed by a blind man waving a stick. Unfortunately they succeeded a little too much, and also gave Phasma Boba Fett's all-bark-and-no-bite onscreen performance as a humiliating failure who betrays all of the First Order to save her own skin and gets tossed in the garbage, comes back to get beaten up by a mook and a beepy soccer ball before falling down a bottomless pit. Rumor has it Phasma took dance lessons, but only ever learned the steps to the Masochism Tango. It seems unlikely... from what I've seen and read, Star Wars fans seem to have rather cynically spotted her for the Boba Fett ripoff she is and in conjunction with her appalling onscreen performance given her an unofficial designation as the new trilogy's chew toy.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Officially? No. The only time that I'm aware of the show's staff commenting on the matter was a piece in Newtype around the time the Macross Delta series ended, in which they indicated they never decided on an identity for Lady M and were content to leave it ambiguous for the time being. One of the fansub groups - I think it was [Deadfish] - caused a stir and an enduring fallacy by asserting in a translator's note that it was Lynn Minmay even though in-series dialog basically makes it impossible for any pre-existing character to be Lady M.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Seems a safe bet they figured it out eventually... they had fold singers and weaponized them in their war with the Protodeviln, and even built a massive mind control system around the fold receptor mechanism that works similarly to the V-type bacterium. They had to have sussed it out at some point.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's indicated that the ancient Protoculture revered the Vajra, and there are some fairly strong indications that the Protoculture may have based a fair amount of their military technology on Vajra anatomy.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, there's nothing really inconsistent there in The Force Awakens. Rey has been working salvage on spacecraft of every stripe from fighters all the way up to the largest capital ships for essentially her entire adult life and a fair chunk of her childhood. It's not unreasonable for her to have at least a basic grasp of how to fly the ships she's spent her entire life scrapping, and a good grasp of the underlying technology in order to identify what parts were the valuable ones. She gets around on an antigrav jetbike, IIRC, and that's not exactly a simple machine either. With respect to using the force, didn't Yoda pretty definitively establish that one of the most important factors to using the force was belief? Rey grew up hearing legends of Luke Skywalker and has been told by no less a person than Han frigging Solo that it was ALL TRUE. Luke was a grown up cynical man who hadn't grown up hearing stories of the amazing power of the force, so he had a lot to unlearn before he could unleash his full potential. Rey doesn't have that problem. She doesn't do anything complex, and it takes her several tries to get simple stuff right, but the fact that she went into it believing the force could do anything she's not working with the same limitations on her access to power that Luke was. As for the dueling... yeah, she beat Kylo Ren. A badly injured Kylo Ren who'd tanked a shot from Chewie's crossbow that previously had been knocking stormtroopers several feet backwards with every hit AND gotten several lightsaber wounds from Finn. An untrained amateur with implicit trust in the force beat a winded, wounded professional who was in the middle of bleeding out and catching hypothermia while also losing some power due to being conflicted about his alliegance to the dark side AND trying not to hurt her. It's not like she spanked him at the top of his game, Yeah, Phasma was a damp squib when you consider they put a ton of press focus on her for what turned out to be a glorified cameo appearnace... but I'm not convinced that trolling the fandom wasn't the whole point there.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    They have some... alluded to back in Macross Frontier, which mentioned that galactic law forbade an emigrant fleet to invade an inhabited planet. It's not quite the Prime Directive, but it's a start. Thus far they seem to be doing pretty good, with the Vajra being their only non-friendly first contact due to the extreme differences in communication methods. Things only went south on Windermere IV because the Kingdom of the Wind was impatient about the slow pace of its economic growth due to its relative isolation. Yeah, though they did have the Apollo Base colony and the space colony clusters, so presumably at least some of that sort made it through OK.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Imagine my amusement when a little digging revealed I was spot on about Phasma... she was added because coverage of the first table read of The Force Awakens got a lot of feedback on social media about there being too many men/not enough women. In hindsight, it adds a new and cynically amusing dimension to Phasma's character. The audience demanded the writers add a new female character purely for representation's sake, so the movie's writers crowbarred her into a few scenes that totally subvert her alleged reputation as the badass action girl the fans clamored for, showed that she is so bad at her job that Starkiller Base is lost entirely because of her, and then literally threw her in the trash. Boba Fett was a background character who the fans blew out of all proportion because he looked cool... Phasma is the living embodiment of the writers saying "Don't tell me how to do my job". Fans clamored for her to not be killed off, so they brought her back in The Last Jedi to get beaten even worse. She manages a few intimidating lines and is promptly beaten by a droid and tossed down another hole by Finn after being beaten with a riot baton. What are the odds this is some kind of self-aware act of parody?
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Keith and Roid's little tête-à-tête on the Sigur Berrentzs's upper hull suggests the ancient Protoculture engineered the Windermereans with short lifespans intentionally. The "why" is never discussed, but it seems to be something neither of them is entirely happy with since Keith openly resents them for his people's short lifespans and Roid's assimilation plot is at least partly motivated by a desire to give his people longer lives. It may be related to their greater level of physical ability and the demonstrated link between the fold receptors in their runes that give their species a level of natural empathic talent and the greater base level of physical ability vs. other sub-Protoculture species. (It seems likely that the Protoculture tried to create a species with greater natural empathy that would be less inclined to violence and built the short lifespan into them to delay their development of advanced technology as long as possible in a bid to have them solve their internal disputes before leaving for the stars.) Roid's belief that the Windermereans were the chosen heirs of the ancient Protoculture seems to be mainly by two factors: That the Brisingr globular cluster, and Windermere IV in particular, are believed to have been the ancient Protoculture's last stronghold before succumbing to extinction. That the Protoculture left behind the Sigur Berrentzs as the key to the Delta Wave System along with some clues on how to locate, activate, and use it on Windermere IV (even though the core of the system was actually on Ragna).
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I don't recall when the logo was unveiled offhand, but I remember when they first started teasing a new Macross series in the summer of '07 it was as "Macross 25". They announced the title at the 25th Anniversary Live in August of that year. It was either late October or November, IIRC, that we got our first real good look at the VF-25 and principal characters.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    If you're waiting for it to get less rapey, don't hold your breath... I'm two volumes into the light novel and that unsettling aspect of it most definitely is NOT going away.1 Moreover, goblin slaying is more or less all it's actually about, so at least it's exactly what it says on the tin. (Goblin Slayer is, for all practical intents and purposes, Medieval Batman by way of Doom Guy... and instead criminals, it's goblins that get his hackles up for reasons that'd make perfect sense even if he didn't have psychological problems beyond the dreams of psychoanalysts.) 1. TBH, I can completely understand why this series is accused of glorifying violence against women. Its author, Kumo Kagyu, seems to take sadistic delight in having Goblin Slayer's party find bands of adventurers made up primarily or entirely of women that meet terrible ends with monotonous, clockwork regularity. Apart from the man leading the party of three girls in the first chapter, the men seem to be mostly exempt from this.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's increasingly looking like a new series has been back-burnered or abandoned in favor of more of the Macross Delta "story". There have been a few... like the proposed live-action movie Macross: Final Outpost: Earth which was originally intended for a Christmas 1996 release, or a 3DCG series called Macross 3D that got as far as a promo video before ending up on indefinite hiatus in 2000.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The only time that phenomenon is named is in the movie Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure, which refers to it as "crystalization". Crystalization is a normal symptom of aging in Windermereans. You could call it their species version of getting liver spots. It's not (directly) harmful to their health, but it is an overt sign of old age which starts to occur in their mid-twenties as they near the end of their natural lifespan of approximately 30 standard years. Windermereans who use/abuse their runes to enhance their abilities - like Freyja's rune boosting her fold songs or the Aerial Knights bullet time "Wind Riding" shenanigans - are essentially employing a "Cast from Life Force" buff at the cost of dramatically and permanently reducing their remaining life. The most extreme case would probably be what happened to Qasim Eber-hardt in Ep22 of Macross Delta's TV series. He was 23 years old, and overuse of his rune to "ride the wind" in a dogfight with Xaos forces burned up his remaining lifespan to the point that he died in his cockpit. Prince Heinz's overuse of his runes singing the Song of the Wind is another severe example. He abused his power so much to realize his father's goals that he's as infirm at age 9 as his father was at 33. Freyja, luckily, is only just starting to see the consequences of overusing her rune to boost her fold songs. She's 15 at the end of Macross Delta, what would normally be exactly halfway through the typical Windermerean's lifespan, and she's probably shortened her lifespan by at least a few years. You're thinking of the ending of the Passionate Walkure movie, IIRC... which showed both Heinz and Freyja's crystalization partially reversing itself.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I've never understood his memetic badass status in Star Wars. I assume it comes from the Expanded Universe, since in the actual movies he growls out a few lines and the one time we actually see him fight he's almost instantly defeated by Luke and then again by Han, who accidentally knocks him into the mouth of a giant anus monster in the Tattooine desert. That isn't exactly inspiring... he's literally less effective in a fight than Jar-Jar Binks. They seem to go down when shot pretty much anywhere. One of the vague recollections I have of the Star Wars books I was exposed to as a kid was of a short story where that fact was acknowledged and explained. I think it might have been a cost thing? Like, armor that could repel kill shots was too expensive to mass produce on that scale so they went with stunproof? There was something in the story about wanting to equip the stormtroopers with a personal energy shield that was under development and their dickish treatment of the developer drove them to the Rebellion's side?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, she and Hux are the First Order's designated buttmonkeys... if she comes back, they'll have to humiliate her even worse to one-up her getting tossed into the trash in The Force Awakens and getting beaten up by Finn and tossed into a bottomless pit in The Last Jedi. If they bring her back again, she'll absolutely end up an anticlimax boss again. Frankly, my money is on her accidentally killing herself in some spectacularly stupid way. If Phasma was one of the Knights of Ren, she probably wouldn't be a comically incompetent stormtrooper boss. I kinda figured the guards that Rey and Ren minced were the Knights of Ren. Oh, no doubt Phasma was meant to be the new trilogy's memetic badass like Boba Fett. Unfortunately, she's a little too much like Boba Fett in that her status as a badass and The Dreaded is entirely Informed Ability and isn't actually supported by onscreen performance. I hate to say it, but it's the one point where I actually find myself in complete agreement with the allegations by the new trilogy's critics that it was trying to push a socio-political agenda. Such a fuss was made in the promotional material about Phasma being a woman, and how armor on a woman didn't need to look feminine, and then the writers missed a memo or revolted against the idea and made her completely useless.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the first two episodes of Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken over dinner, and I'm kind of indifferent to it... it doesn't really feel like it's distinct from the other, very similar Isekai series that've come out recently like Overlord and Konosuba. Honestly, it kind of feels like a crossover between the two. Like a grown-up Kazuma is living a more benign version of Overlord's plot as a slime instead of an undead. Gonna give Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight a whack tomorrow over lunch. My girlfriend put me on to that one a while ago, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Deku being a crybaby gets old pretty fast but otherwise it's really good. (Considering what the internet has done with him, All Might really ought to change his name to All Meme...) EDIT: I forget if "Peace Sign" is the second or third OP... but it's a terrible earworm. Be prepared to be humming that song for days.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    From January of last year! Still, bleh... Tochiro's probably in a better position to know than anyone else here.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Seems like a lot of the light novel adaptations coming out lately are capped at 12-13 episodes in a season. There's even odds it'll pick up enough of a following to be granted a second season on the spike in light novel sales or its viewership share. Yen Press picked up the license for the light novel and manga, so that may help drive demand for a second season as well. They seem to be adapting 3 light novel volumes at a time, so it was kind of inevitable that the third season would be a bit of a slow one. Volume 7 was basically the comedown in the wake of Momon saving the day in Re-Estize in Volume 6, Volume 8 was a breather episode made up of side stories, and Volume 9 was mostly given over to laying the foundations for the next major story arcs where Ainz takes overt action in the world as the Sorcerer King instead of under the alias of Momon. Nice, I've got that one bookmarked on Crunchyroll. Haven't started it yet. I'll admit what got me to look at it was a bloody meme about a tsundere dragon I saw on Imgur.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Let's go all the way down the McCarthyist paranoia rabbit hole and start theorizing about how the PhD who wrote the paper is really a Russian agent!
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Considering the press coverage for Discovery's second season has focused pretty heavily on how CBS is trying to appeal to the many Trekkies who were put off by the show's first season, it wouldn't come as much of a surprise. (I'm mildly amused that CBS appears to be choking down a slice of humble pie WRT their, and Jason Isaacs, boasting about not needing Trekkies in the audience.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney) has a new season that just started airing recently, which adapts the third game in the original trilogy. The first episode is eminently skippable, given that it's adapting the frigging tutorial from the game, but the rest should be pretty good. I've heard good things about Goblin Slayer, and intend to catch the first episode over lunch today. The light novels'll have to tide me over for a bit until we get a fourth season of Overlord.
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