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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    CBS registered two new trademarks around the time they announced the Picard series: Star Trek: Reliant and Star Trek: Destiny. That first one, Star Trek: Reliant, makes me suspect we're headed for a "young Picard" prequel about his service as a newly minted Ensign aboard the USS Reliant. I don't even want to think about the other one, thanks to that title's previous use on the novel miniseries that ruined the Borg forever.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Looking back at the VF-31's specs and performance, I'd say it's not even that... it's more like the Apple strategy: "Yesterday's technology at Tomorrow's prices!". The stated goal of the VF-31 as an internal project initiated by the Brisingr Alliance was to be an economic stimulus. Instead of buying a foreign fighter and sending money away to their allies outside the cluster, they wanted to do it themselves and have something they could potentially sell on. They built their fighter using parts that'd been state of the art ten years previously, technology that'd already been proven on the battlefield, to keep development and production costs down so they can rake in more money on each aircraft sold. The hip-mounted guns on the VF-25 were supposed to be its light, fighter-mode default gun. They didn't see much use because they were designed for typical enemies like rogue Zentradi rather than monstrously up-armored enemies like the Vajra. Once the modular gunmounts exchanged the beam machine guns for solid ammo weapons firing MDE shells they were much more effective. The VF-31's railguns don't seem to be powerful enough to be a serious threat or a main weapon, and the ones on the Siegfried customs are noted to have been derated for safe use in close proximity to civilians. It's less capable than the beam gunpods on its predecessors, lacking both the MDE upgrade and beam grenade mode. But that didn't translate into actual performance gains because the slight improvement in engine output was more than canceled out by the greater airframe mass. You wouldn't be able to retrofit a VF-25 to take an ordnance container... the YF-30 and VF-31 had to have airframes and transformations specially designed around having it. That said, the VF-25 was already in widespread service before the VF-31 ever entered testing. Odds are it'll be much more widely used than the VF-31, likely already received many if not all of the upgrades that went into the base model VF-31 as block upgrades, and will likely continue to enjoy an advantage over the VF-31 simply because the governments which bought it once the Macross Frontier fleet started exporting it are wealthier than the Brisingr Alliance and its allies and can afford to keep updating them with the latest tech. The VF-31 is likely to see widespread use in the poorer regions of the galaxy, where the ordnance container system can be leveraged into better individual cost-performance at the expense of combat performance for its buyers who won't need to splurge on mission-specific variants to replace craft like the RVF-171. Both the VF-25 and VF-31 are likely to remain in service with the various regional New UN Forces in the galaxy through the end of the century.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Plus invested heavily enough in developing its characters that the audience actually cared about what became of them. Their personalities were particularly importance, since they drove most of the actual plot. Macross Delta had this enormous cast, but so few of the characters were developed at all that it was hard to care what happened to them. Like when Messer died in the TV series, the attempt to devote an episode to eulogizing him like he was a beloved Roy-esque mentor figure to Delta Flight fell hilariously flat because the ONLY interactions he was ever shown to have with anyone except Chuck's younger brother Zack were antisocial, angry, contemptuous, or all three at once. Trying to play it off as "see, he really cared!" by showing off a diary that he'd kept full of his nitpicking criticisms of his coworkers just hammered it home that he was hopelessly unsympathetic. His whole "carrying a torch for Kaname" thing came out of freaking nowhere in the series, since he'd always made excuses to avoid her and Arad... so much so that I genuinely thought he was gay. Same story with Makina. "Oh no, she's been shot" fell flat because... well... what the hell does she even do besides fill a large bra and periodically remind us she's a lesbian? So many of them have no bearing on events that it's hard to give a damn what happens to any of them. The processor that Marj installed in her was biotechnological, but yeah she stands apart for a bunch of reasons... perhaps my favorite being that she is a dark mirror of Myung, her id granted independent life by an accident of technology. She's barely a character in her own right since she's not even properly intelligent until near the end, but as part of Myung she's endlessly fascinating because of the sharp relief she throws all of Myung's issues and insecurities into. Eh... I've seen a lot of compilation movies that were worse. This one, at least, didn't feel like pulling teeth.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    We don't know which parts specifically, no... The aforementioned "protective weapons that guard the ruins" are the Dyaus, a technorganic species the ancient Protoculture created to keep people out of their abandoned facilities on Uroboros. The smaller Dyaus forms are vaguely insectoid, roughly the size of a large truck, flight capable, and armed with beam weaponry. There are two known larger forms, one which is a larger version of the small form that is several times the size of a battroid, and a "Mother Dyaus" which looks more like a giant flying fish that is the size of a frigate. Settlers on Uroboros refer to them as "Guardians" for obvious reasons. There are also regional variations in coloration between regions in Uroboros, which fill the role of your standard palate swap RPG baddies. The small Dyaus forms are autospawned enemies on the three worldmaps in Macross 30, which usually appear around their nesting sites (which can be destroyed for item drops), the large form is a miniboss, and the mother form is a straight-up boss. Really, it'd be hard to argue that the VF-31 represents a significant improvement over the VF-25 in any respect... The VF-31A Kairos shares so much hardware with the VF-25 that calling it a VF-25 in a different-shaped container is barely an exaggeration. I'd question whether the VF-31's weapons are actually better than the VF-25's, since it has half as many pylons, but includes internal micro-missile launchers and an internal weapons bay. Whether the forearm railguns and the beam gunpod actually represent an improvement in firepower vs. the VF-25's modular gunmounts and conventional gunpod is hard to say since the VF-25 could improve firepower by swapping ammo types. I think the VF-25 is arguably a more flexible aircraft in terms of armament, where the VF-31 is more flexible in terms of modification for special mission roles like reconnaissance due to its ordnance container. There's no evidence of better fold capability on the stock VF-31. Mind you, this comparison is drawn between the VF-25A-1 Messiah (2059) and VF-31A-1 Kairos (2067)... the VF-25 would probably have had several minor upgrades between then and "now".
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-27 needed a Super Pack - which was really more of a Ghost Booster - to even keep up with the YF-29. (Which is amusing in a way, since Macross Galaxy's final VF-27 design was completed using development data from the YF-29 program that Macross Galaxy illicitly obtained through back channels at LAI.) That's Rod Baltemar's YF-29 from Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy. The NUNS special forces squadron Havamal gave YF-29B Percivals to their ace pilots according to Macross Chronicle. The VF-31 was developed from the YF-30, though the directness of that relationship is unclear. There was almost certainly a YF-31 between the YF-30 and VF-31 in the development process, though some sources like Master File may put additional intermediate developmental models in there like a YF-30B NUNS-spec Chronos. A lot of people came to that same conclusion before specs for the VF-31 were made available. The YF-30, like the YF-29, was basically a super-prototype too awesomely expensive and resource-intensive for mass production in the form we see it. The relationship between the VF-31 and YF-30 is a bit like the relationship between the GM and Gundam... it's an economized derivative model that scales back the high performance and removes a bunch of expensive and complex systems to make the unit cheap enough for mass production. Performance-wise, the VF-31A Kairos is on par with the VF-25. To give you an idea of how severe the cutbacks were, the Siegfried customs used by Delta Flight use detuned YF-30 parts in their upgrades that put them a little bit below the "naked" VF-27 in terms of performance. (The VF-31's backstory is a case of "real life writes the plot", with its development essentially paralleling Japan's attempt to develop a domestic 5th Generation fighter jet.) Not that I recall? The VF-27 is very agile, but the YF-29 is working with 32% more output without its fold wave system boosting things... and has more armor and weaponry. "Mulched" would sum it up nicely. The VF-19EF/A "Isamu Special" is a custom tuned VF-19 monkey model. The key areas of its customization are actually deliberate downgrades of the fighter's aerodynamics and its avionics, to restore the unstable performance of the YF-19 that Isamu was so fond of. It has uprated engines and a few other improvements, but it's still mostly a VF-19EF Caliburn export model and has little chance of winning a dogfight against any 5th Generation VF since it lacks an inertia store converter. Reon Sakaki had the advantage of MDE weapons on his YF-30 and the Fold Dimensional Resonance system that outclassed the YF-29's fold wave system.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    People here are quite open to legitimate, thoughtful criticism of Super Dimension Fortress Macross and/or Macross Plus. It's kind of easy to view the stuff you posted as obvious bait... which, of course, won't get much in the way of positive responses. If the painfully dull, repetitive dogfights in Macross Delta weren't the #1 complaint about the series they were easily in the top three. They use exactly ONE maneuver for the entirety of the series, and almost never use the transformation system. Plus had enough variety that the dogfights never got samey. Keith vs. Messer, regardless of version, is a one-trick affair... it's like the scissors is the only maneuver they know. It's an ugly, graceless kludge of pieces of previous CG models. (No, really... it's made out of parts of the Tornado Pack, Cheyenne Destroid, and VF-25 Armored Pack.) IMO, it feels almost like a fan design. Like someone was picking and choosing pieces of previous, iconic designs from older Macross features and sticking them together. It's so over the top that, to me, it kind of feels like what I'd expect to get from a min-maxing munchkin in a Macross RPG if I let them design their own custom FAST pack. You've got the heavy quantum beam cannon turret from the Tornado Pack, the VF-25 Armored's CIWS launchers, the VF-171EX's reaction missile containers, that movie trailer-exclusive Konig Monster's forearm-mounted rotary cannons... all on one design. Specs-wise, I have a hard time even thinking of it as an Armored Pack. The defining trait of the Armored Pack is that it offers a substantial boost to the VF's defensive strength with additional layers of reactive armor, energy conversion armor, better grades of energy conversion armor material, and on later models supplements to the pinpoint barrier system. I don't see that in the VF-31 Armored Pack. It's ALL offense, all the time. I would have called it something else, like a Stampede Pack, Storming Pack, or Attack Pack. ... ... ... Ah, No. Just no. There have been a lot of silly things said to try to defend Delta, but this takes the cake. Macross: Do You Remember Love? is the quintessential Macross experience. Its mechanical and character designs set the tone for the entire franchise to follow. It gave us the #1 song in all of Macross. It's even a famous and highly influential film inside the universe of Macross. It has NEVER depended on nostalgia for its appeal. There is a reason that EVERY major Macross series since DYRL? came out has referenced it... it's just THAT good and that beloved by fans. Nobody needs to put DYRL? on a pedestal... it BUILT the pedestal, and the Macross franchise while it was at it. As far your analogy... I can only think of one Gundam show that would've been less appropriate, and that's G-Reco. I've never seen anybody rank ZZ highly... to every Gundam fan I know, it's "that one show" that everybody watches ONCE out of obligation but nobody really likes and is regarded as memetically stupid. To most fans I know, it was Gundam's worst show until Reconguista in G came along and became the new hate sink. Depends which standard you're using to measure good-ness. As a Macross feature? Not really. As an anime movie in its own right? Kinda, yeah. It's a fun but forgettable popcorn movie. One of its biggest problems is that the word Macross is in the title... so it's marked to MUCH higher standards than it would otherwise have been. If it didn't have to live up to that name, folks would be a lot kinder to it.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Plus's story had some real substance to it, even if it was a much darker story than Macross's usual fare on account of the cast being older and containing several individuals with serious psychological baggage. All the same, every main character in the OVA was well-developed, believably flawed, and interesting enough to hold the audience's attention. The only real weak point the OVA had was the weird, experimental music that didn't bring enough memorable tunes. Passionate Walkure's biggest problem was its source material. Macross Delta suffered from appallingly poor writing. There's just no excuse for so completely forgetting to develop the antagonists as characters that it's left to a standalone manga to give them any development at all, or that ninety percent of the protagonists don't even get that much. The movie does nothing to fix that... they just plow ahead at a pace that makes it harder to notice that the story's a lazy knockoff of Frontier's and that all but three or four cast members barely get the same development Fire Bomber's missing member cardboard standees got in 7. It's "fun", but completely forgettable and utterly devoid of substance outside of its music. For that reason, I can't bring myself to take seriously any ranking that would put Delta above any competently-written Macross title. If you don't have engaging characters who develop as events progress, you don't really have a story.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Overall, the YF-29 knocks the Sv-262 into a cocked hat like it's nothing. Seriously, we're talking 50% more performance and four times the armor. The only fighters that supposedly rival the YF-29 are the NUNS YF-29B, the YF-30, and the federal forces VF-24 that the YF-29 was an attempt to surpass. The Sv-262's inertia store converter does have higher output than the one on the hastily assembled YF-29 fielded by the Macross Frontier fleet, but by a near-trivial amount (eight tenths of one G) that is less than the improvement between the VF-25's and the VF-31's. Windermere may have been able to obtain better performance on their ISCs due to being flush with high quality fold quartz from their Protoculture ruins. The scarcity and expense of that essential material is probably doing a fair bit to hold back the capabilities of ISC technology. (Windermere's main beef with the New UN Government was that there were such strict restrictions on the mining and export of the stuff for extremely good reasons, which would otherwise have made them astonishingly wealthy and influential.) You may be thinking of when I compared the Draken III's fold reheat system to the more capable but still stripped-down fold wave system on the VF-31 Siegfried... It wouldn't be a stretch to call the Sv-262 badly-designed as a main variable fighter, given that its elaborate transformation caused it to have less room for internal fuel tanks and thus gave it sub-par endurance in space operations where the majority of variable fighter combat occurs. It may also have resulted in the fighter being entirely dependent on conformal packs for missiles. There's also the slight matter of its close combat blade being a glorified toothpick without an external power supply since it's entirely dependent on energy conversion armor for its structural strength and is otherwise too brittle to use. The YF-29 can also exert its full performance without damaging itself... which dialog in Macross Delta suggests is not the case for the Sv-262.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    If it were any other Macross movie that people were saying Macross Plus came up second best to, I could see it... but Passionate Walkure? Y'all know that an irish coffee is made with whiskey and not absinthe, right? Macross Plus might be the un-Macross in terms of its writing, but it's a million billion light years ahead of a cynical marketing tie-in cash grab like Passionate Walkure. For those who roll into town early for SDCon, I'm gonna try and find a venue to screen the movie for those who haven't seen it yet.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Not pictures of cels, just reasonable quality scans of concept art. I'd be surprised if cels from Southern Cross made it into circulation... the impression I got from the creator commentary was that the series just sort of unceremoniously ended and the staff and studio immediately moved on to other projects to recoup the loss.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The Sv-262 has a state-of-the-art Inertia Store Converter and its flight performance is above average for a 5th Generation main VF, but it's overspecialized as an atmospheric dogfighter to suit the traditionalist tastes of the Aerial Knights and Windermere IV's got very few (if any) pilots who have actual combat experience due to their short lifespans. Having the latest fighter with the best specs doesn't give you that much of an advantage if your pilots don't have the experience and training to leverage those specs.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, the Dian Cecht SV Works Sv-262 Draken III has an Inertia Store Converter of excellent quality and performance. Its Shinsei/LAI ISC-TO21G Inertia Store Converter is the highest-rated ISC system thus far, able to buffer 30.8 G's. They may be physically stronger and have faster reflexes than the longer-lived humanoids of the galaxy, but their insides are as squishy as the next guy's and their cardiopulmonary and respiratory systems aren't that much different from a human's. Yeah, they absolutely needed it. Even the Meltrandi, who were designed to be resistant to high g-forces, needed an inertia capacitor system in their Queadluun-Rau battle suits. Not sure where you'd have got the idea that it isn't as effective as the VF-25's or VF-31's... it's slightly better than the YF-29's.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Only what was preserved by Imai, one of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross's merchandising partners, and was later made available in the so-called "Imai Files" that were published by Roger Harkavy. That was mainly material from the Genesis Climber MOSPEADA series development though... the Southern Cross-related material therein was primarily from Tatsunoko's 2nd series concept: Science Fiction Sengoku Saga. The intermediate phase of development between the original, lolicon fanservice-heavy pitch for a slice of life series starring historical domain characters like Joan of Arc and Cleopatra, and the final, heavily Gundam- and Macross-influenced concept that made it to production as Southern Cross. It's mainly concept art of the Arming Doublet from when the story was "Sengoku period warfare IN SPAAAAACE!", so you'll see a fair bit of stuff like robotic horses and falcons, infantrymen with lances and the banners of famous clans like the Takeda and the Tokugawa. (Offhand I don't recall if they used the infamous and historically inaccurate Fuurin Kazan banner for Takeda, but their clan symbol and Tokugawa's are present on the art.) The only things that were really relevant to the final Southern Cross concept were the model kit blueprints and the concept for a transforming flying castle that became the Zor cityships.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Those "rogue elements" existed way before 2040. Max and Milia spent a good chunk of their post-First Space War careers in the special forces dealing with anti-government types, and most of Isamu's service record was in various civil wars. I don't think they have the tech to get there yet... unless it's to one of the dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way less than a galactic radius away.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Almost all of that isn't really examples of the UN Government and/or UN Forces behaving badly. They had to keep the civilians confined to the Macross because after the entire island they were on vanished in 2009 they covered up the fact that Earth had been attacked by an alien fleet to avoid a panic. If the civilians were let loose, the cover story would've gone to pieces in a matter of hours before the UN Forces could complete their preparations to defend Earth. They didn't act based on Misa's account of the size of the Zentradi fleet because she had literally no evidence to support it, and her abduction was a traumatic event which would naturally skew her perceptions. Basically, their problem was that they tried to keep a cool head in a situation where even the most obscene level of overreaction wouldn't have been nearly enough to change the end result. Considering what became of galactic politics after Megaroad-01 vanished, in all likelihood THEY'D be considered the ones in dire need of housecleaning. After all, the New UN Government of the Megaroad-01's era was what evolved into the oppressive Earth-first entity that spent most of the 2030s and 2040s stamping out little civil wars on its various colony worlds and doing increasingly dubious sh*t until its own military launched an unsuccessful coup in 2050-2051. (Given the sh*t the Macross veterans went through I'd expect they'd probably find the new checks and balances in the New UN Forces to be not only excellent, but WAY overdue.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if certain individuals are to be believed, there's a great big box of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross line art just collecting dust somewhere in Harmony Gold USA's office in Los Angeles. Southern Cross's premature conclusion due to its poor ratings performance meant that Tatsunoko didn't get a chance to put out much in the way of official publications. I, for one, am not convinced there's much in the way of unpublished line art for Southern Cross given that we know the show's troubled development meant that the series concept didn't achieve its final form until right before the start of production. There wouldn't have been time to come up with super-detailed animation model sheets when they were almost literally making it up as they went... which probably explains the many instances of off-model animation in background designs like the TAF Sylphid. Whatever art from Ammonite, Tatsunoko, or Imai that Harmony Gold is sitting on will probably be used in the next Robotech art book published by Udon... assuming that Udon will be doing another after the Macross book they just did. Even if it's only up to the same lackluster standard as that Macross book, it'll stand head and shoulders above every other Southern Cross publication for completeness.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It's hard to say for certain since those images are so small, but from the layout they appear to be Imai's blueprint sketches from when Imai was trying to develop a line of Southern Cross kits at (initially) 1/32 scale (later 1/40 and 1/48). The "Imai Files" contained drafts in that same format for the Spartas. As such, it's probably part of that allegedly vast collection of Southern Cross art that went unpublished because the series was canceled and HG gives zero f*cks. (Whether said huge art stockpile actually exists is unconfirmed.) Oh my, no. There is very little mechanical design art in This is Animation 10: Southern Cross... and nothing like as detailed or presentable as that. AFAIK, This is Animation 10 is the only true Southern Cross artbook. There were various magazine articles and color inserts around the time the show debuted, but none of them I've seen have anything like that. It's usually just the same handful of standard views of the mecha.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, the preorder price is $300 (if we can get 30 preorders).
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... you usually see an upward trend in reused material as a growing metaseries ages. Macross always felt like it was the exception that tests the rule thanks to Kawamori insisting on treating Macross more like a shared universe and making each new series a largely stand-alone story. Macross Delta's sudden adoption of a more Gundam-esque form letter reuse of plots and tropes and its plethora of expy characters feels really weird and out of place as a result even if it makes the series more like what you'd expect the product of a typical long-running anime franchise to be. It's one of Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure's better moments... but it loses a certain je ne sais quoi when you notice that all of it is lifted from Macross Frontier with the Sigur Berrentzs standing in for Battle Galaxy.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    That's Delta. There were one or two Macross Frontier movie releases that had English subs (the combo packs and one other, IIRC), but nothing for the series. I'd like to see official subs for the remainder tho.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, you missed out. Macross Frontier really hit its stride starting in the fifth episode. Mikumo's basically modeled on Sheryl from the first four episodes, when she was busy being Queen Bitch half the time. Mikumo's professional interest in Freyja closely mirrors the advice Sheryl gave to Ranka when they met near the Macross Quarter's dock and had to wait out a hull breach repair in an emergency shelter. It was actually really frustrating how blatant they were about it. Really, almost the entire Delta cast came with shades of it... Xaos being a low-rent SMS knockoff complete with an off-brand Macross Quarter and Roid's entire master plan being nicked from Grace's in the Macross Frontier TV series. It was kind of weird how committed they were to it, with Xaos having the same "we're testing the next-gen VF for the military" excuse SMS had for having better gear than the NUNS and the VF-31 even sharing a majority of its systems with the VF-25. Rules being rules, that kind of direction has to be done under the proverbial radar... don't wanna step on any administrative toes, y'know?
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, there are a fair number of superficial similarities between the Star Singer and Emulators... The biggest difference, offhand, would be that the Star Singers appear to be creations of the ancient Protoculture where the Mardook and their Emulators in Macross II are strongly implied by the OVA's creators to be a surviving offshoot of the Protoculture itself. The precise role of the Star Singers was not made clear, but the Emulators were priestesses in the Mardook religion. The Mardook Emulators controlled their Zentradi troops through songs that acted on those Zentradi like a battle drug due to mental conditioning, cybernetics, etc. It doesn't work on bystanders like the internally-inconsistent Var syndrome in Macross Delta does though. (Funnily enough, Mikumo's teal highlights look to be the same color as Ishtar's hair...) Nah, I was content back when Kawamori came out and utterly sank the argument that the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA wasn't a legitimate entry in the Macross franchise ten years ago. That alone killed upwards of 90% of the Macross II-bashing, which was coming mainly from Macross 7 fans who held the opinion that Macross II wasn't a "real" Macross series. To their credit, the vast majority of those critics revised their positions based on that new information and are now a lot kinder to the OVA. On the other hand, the suggestion that it took a half-assed mess like Delta to make people properly appreciate Macross II annoys me... To be fair, there's very little of the VF-31A at all in Macross Delta even though it, and not the VF-31 Custom Siegfried, is set to become the next main fighter of the Brisingr globular cluster's New UN Government members. ... you undermined your first sentence with your second. Right down to her outfit, Mikumo is an attempted Sheryl knockoff. Her bitchy attitude and her total obsession with her status as a "pro" is stolen almost whole cloth from Sheryl in the first few Macross Frontier episodes. Because she's only a supporting character, her ice queen side never defrosts like Sheryl's did starting in Frontier's fifth episode. (Seriously. Watch Sheryl's "pro" speech to Alto in Frontier's first episode and then Mikumo's one to Freyja in Delta... they weren't even TRYING to hide Mikumo's imitation-brand Sheryl status.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Like the software engineers say, "garbage in, garbage out". If you hire writers of indifferent quality to do your screenplay, you'll get a screenplay of indifferent quality out of it. The filmographies of the writers who worked on Macross Delta are uninspiring to say the least. Ukyo Kodachi's is arguably the highest profile, and that's only from working on that horrid Naruto spinoff Boruto. Frontier had a writer of a much higher caliber with more experience in series composition, so that paid huge dividends. So far, nothing on that front... the closest we've come is Macross the Musiculture, where one of the main cast finds an old Sharon Apple-era virtuoid that'd been junked. The Macross Frontier TV and Movie novelizations do suggest the Galaxy Executives were advanced enough to potentially Ghost in the Shell themselves and exist as disembodied minds. That said, in there only one of them had apparently done so... Manfred, a copy of the mind and intellect of the deceased Macross VF-X2 antagonist and fold quartz technology pioneer Manfred Brando. Still, it comes with the old Moravec-level philosophical problem of whether disembodied consciousness counts as human even if it's operating on a strictly artificial platform. Is a perfect digital copy of a human mind an AI or is it still a human being? Mobile Suit Gundam: Reconguista in G. Part of its backstory is that in the final centuries of the UC era before it was abolished and replaced by the Reguild Century, the cumulative damage to Earth was so severe that it caused famines bad enough for humanity to turn to institutionalized cannibalism. That is what "Kuntala" refers to in the series, the caste of people who were designated emergency rations (and continue to be discriminated against even a millennium after the practice was abolished). The show's resident Char clone, Luin Lee ("Captain Mask") is one... as are several other characters. It was still cultural communication in DYRL?, that prompted the Zentradi and Meltandi to muse on what'd been lost in their war to destroy each other. (There may have been an element of a genetic or racial memory there too, but still...)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Misa and Hikaru found the lyrics in the abandoned Protoculture colony ship on Earth. At around the same time, Minmay obtained the sheet music for the song that the Boddole Zer main fleet had kept as a "fragment of culture". When Boddole Zer's mobile fortress comes over the horizon to propose the truce, Minmay is singing the tune without the lyrics. If the scenes of prepping the performance are any indication, the tune may have been arranged for Earth instruments by Lynn Kaifun while Misa provided the lyrics.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, it's pretty obvious that many of the characters were intended to be expies of ones in Macross Frontier in the hopes that the similarity would be enough to sell them. Mikumo was clearly a quick and dirty knockoff of Sheryl, Arad's written as a copy of Ozma right down to his "reason I quit the military" backstory, Keith is trying pretty hard to be emotionless prettyboy Brera, and out here we've been calling Roid "Man-Grace" for so long I'm not convinced most of my friends remember what his name actually is. Without the excellent characterization that went into the Macross Frontier characters, the similarity alone really isn't enough to appeal. That's a big part of why Passionate Walkure's faster pace is an immeasurable help to Delta's story... you're not really given enough time to properly grasp how underdeveloped it all is before it speeds along to its conclusion. (Well, that and a lack of proper development is considered an acceptable sin in compilation movies.) Mikumo's situation has way, WAY more unfortunate implications than anything the Zentradi could muster. The Zentradi may have been treated as disposable tools by the Protoculture, but they still have far more actual living under their belts than Mikumo. They're emotionally mature beings, but stunted socially by their creators. Gundam... well... the franchise of everything is awful forever certainly doesn't shy away from all of the horrors of that kind of thing. "It can always get worse" might as well be the official UC motto... I've not forgotten that timeline ends in at least one historical era where there was state-sanctioned and widely-practiced cannibalism. That'd be an interesting conundrum... does a self-aware bio-android count as a sentient flesh-and-blood person or as a sentient artificial intelligence? IIRC, a purely technological android would be illegal in and of itself under the New UN Government since the technology needed to produce the self-aware AI is inherently unstable and prone to your standard self-preservationist AI insanity (e.g. Sharon Apple, whose incipient madness wasn't helped one bit by inheriting neuroses beyond the dreams of psychiatric analysts from the computer model of Myung Fang Lone's mind). Based on the very limited incidence of bio-androids and suspected bio-androids in Macross, I'd be inclined to guess that they would probably consider them a sentient being with all the rights which come with it. (Of course, since the only exemplars were the Protodeviln and that Mina Forte was briefly suspected of being one, it's not certain.)
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