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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, that's Robotech fan art by yui1107... she's been posting stuff like this from her DeviantArt page all over Facebook every few days for the last couple months. (Which is a distinct improvement from her other hobbies of providing 0% accurate translations and vandalizing Japanese Wikipedia articles about Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA with material from Robotech and Robotech fanfics.) It's always fun to see what errors and eccentricities will crop up when she posts this stuff... like the inexplicably inclusion of a Robotech soundtrack CD's cover art, the Tactics Armored Space Corps heraldry with incorrect colors and inaccurate scroll, the pilot being a non-canon Robotech character from the McKinney novels, the copilot being from Macross II: Lovers Again, or the aircraft belonging to "Faerie Squadron" (from Macross II again?) and having a Major for a pilot but having the markings for the defunct US Navy reserve VP-65 Tridents (who never flew helicopters).
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The interior shots aren't too bad, but when they cut to those shots out the window/viewscreen it's bits of black metal moving across a black background with a ton of foreground lens flare... it's a pain in the butt trying to figure out what the hell I'm looking at. IMO, Spock putting Kirk off the ship was one of the few good moments in the film. Kirk is so staggeringly petty that the first thing he does when he gets out of his escape pod is to start recording a log entry complaining about Spock. Made worse by the fact that those are REAL lense flares, not added in post with CG... so there's no getting rid of 'em. Not the first time Star Trek has represented physics in an unrealistic fashion... Star Trek: the Motion Picture did something similar with its V'Ger backstory involving Voyager VI being transported across space and time by a "black hole".
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe we'll catch that wonderful deleted scene later today. We've got Star Trek (2009) on in the background while we work on scans and prioritizing documents for translation today, and I tell ya it's easy to see where Discovery got a lot of its bad habits and worse ideas. This movie's writing is an absolute goddamn mess. The scene with the Kelvin and Narada at the beginning is so visually busy that it's nigh-impossible to tell what's actually going on. Young Kirk is an unlikeable arsehole to the extent that I find myself siding more with whomever happens to be beating him up or otherwise making him suffer at the time, be it the four cadets in the bar, the Narada's crew, McCoy, or Spock. Eric Bana absolutely sleepwalks through the entire film, delivering 90% of his dialog in a voice that sounds like he's either reading it off cue cards held up just offscreen or is coming off a heavy dose of novocaine. It's kind of surprising how much of this movie's plot was driven by people making absolutely the worst, most asinine decisions possible at any given point in time... as if Nero's temporal incursion lowered the galaxy's average IQ by forty points. Pine!Kirk and Burnham are definitely cut from the same cloth...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, being Robotech absolutely IS the reason it's bad... just not in the specific sense you mean. Robotech is, by any reasonable standard, a failed 80's cartoon property that is long past its use-by date and is largely only remembered for its epic amounts of legal baggage. Having a 100% failure rate in sequel and spinoff development over the last three decades left Robotech in a position where it has neither the money nor the brand awareness to draw competent people to the franchise. The creative staff managing the franchise is understaffed, underfunded, and hopelessly untalented. Consequently, the licensees the brand attracts are indie or incompetent, often both, and the few that aren't are totally phoning it in because Robotech just isn't a big enough deal for them to bother actually trying. Titan is arguably in the latter category, as they're clearly not giving this comic their A-game... or their B-game. It's actually come up a bit, but for the first dozen or so issues it was down around Q. Oh my, no. No no no. They are ABSOLUTELY aiming this comic at existing Robotech fans. Existing Robotech fans are the only group that can be counted on to pick up this sad nostalgia circlejerk of a comic book under any circumstances. The only other reason anyone would look up this dreadful tome is for topics like this, where we can go "Gather 'round, gather 'round! Everyone look at the freak!".
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Well, Robotech is dead by any conventional standard of measure... the argument could be made that this sad mess of a comic constitutes boobytrapping a corpse.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I can't honestly say that I could lay 100% of the blame for the Vengeance at Jar-Jar Abrams's door. Section 31 was responsible for its design and construction, and they were a hilariously unsubtle pack of drama queens with a complexity addiction even when they were first introduced in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Doing something like secretly constructing an enormous state-of-the-art warship for a clandestine preemptive strike on one of the Federation's enemies and making it incredibly conspicuous by forgetting to not design it like a Federation starship, designing a giant Starfleet delta into the hull, and then lazily painting it black and not applying markings is 100% in-character for them. (It's not much worse than what the Obsidian Order and Tal Shiar did in Deep Space Nine, really... they just skipped the coat of black paint in favor of a cloaking device and building more than one.) After all, Section 31 are the guys who think "inconspicuous" means going everywhere in a black pleather two-piece suit like some kind of business gimp. Nah, I'd have to say Snoke's big flying wing mothership was way better looking than the Vengeance... even after Vice Admiral Bad-at-her-Job turned it into a wreck and a line of ultra-velocity shrapnel. So that's why he keeps a model of the USS Vengeance on his desk in his office where anyone can see it! It must have come with a lovely card that read "To the filthy mammal Admiral Marcus with love, from the Gorn Hegemony".
  7. Seto Kaiba
    FWIW, I'm not so sure this applies to Southern Cross fans... the ones I know, at least, are an incredibly stubborn lot for whom the absence of any real Southern Cross collectibles1 something of a sore spot.2 I would bet cash money that many of them would wait as long as it took to get enough interest for a proper Southern Cross collectible of ANY stripe. The problem is whether there are actually enough of them to get a group of 30 together to fund something like one of your kits. Southern Cross being an almost totally forgotten bit of mid-80's anime esoterica in Japan and its Robotech adaptation being a fan Un-Favorite means fans of it are pretty thin on the ground. Getting them here to preorder would be another problem, since the most vocal Southern Cross fans rather actively resent Macross and Macross fans... in no small part because Robotech's merchandising and new material development favors Macross so heavily and ignores Southern Cross entirely except for one or two moments in the comics that play on the majority fanbase's dislike of it.3 1. The Southern Cross fans I've spent the most time interacting with generally reject the minimal Robotech-branded merchandise based on Southern Cross... partly because of its iffy quality, but mostly because the few prominent pieces are character goods that all suffer from Tommy Yune's rather polarizing art style and to say they dislike Mr. Yune would be putting it mildly. ("Yuneface" has become a dismissive/derogatory term for the faces in Tommy Yune's art, which tend to all look exactly the same.) 2. Enough so that some of them spent a fair amount of time on elaborate, poorly-researched, outright fact-defying theories about why the Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross series was canceled back in '84, and equally elaborate conspiracy theories about why Harmony Gold's licensees aren't producing Southern Cross goods that normally revolve around "Macross purists". 3. Most notably, the Robotech reboot's flagship limited comic series From the Stars. Robotech's version of Southern Cross's Claude Leon (Supreme Commander Eli Anatole Leonard) puts in a brief appearance in which he is revealed to be a highly-placed spy and traitor working to sabotage the development of VFs and Destroids on behalf of the Robotech equivalent of Macross's Anti-Unification Alliance. The comic depicts him as having orchestrated the hijacking of an ARMD-class ship, a nuclear strike that destroyed the military's #2 command center in Antarctica, and attempting to do the same to "Macross Island". The Palladium Books Robotech RPG (2nd Ed.) takes this one up a notch by also making him into an incompetent military dictator who rules over a puppet civilian government and equips his forces with substandard equipment because the deep space forces took all the best people and he's too butthurt about being left behind himself that he refuses to use the same gear.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, that term's old... back when Macross Delta started airing, it quickly became shorthand for the fans voicing the less-than-legitimate criticisms of Macross Delta over aspects of the series that'd been part of the Macross setting for years if not decades. It certainly trips off the tongue better than my dubbing them The Ambassadors of Unhappy. (That isn't to say there wasn't a lot of entirely legitimate criticism of the show going on, mind you...)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well, Admiral Marcus wanted to make sure that there was no way anybody could trace the ship back to the Federation after its planned preemptive strike on the Klingon Empire... so he made it look like Starfleet's most iconic ship class scaled up and carved a giant Starfleet delta into the saucer section.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    @captain america would be the one to decide if he's actually going to develop a Southern Cross kit, obviously... but he did seem willing before, contingent upon us being able to rustle up the required 30 preorders. We'd have to ask him to be sure if he's still game. It all hinges on getting 12+ more backers for either design.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Not necessarily a deal-breaker since Grand Cannon systems were meant to be weapons of the last resort... but then, they were originally intended to be used in conjunction with an orbital fleet that filled the same role as the defense satellites.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The two big questions there being "Which Spock?" and whether Peck's negligible acting talents will prove to be an asset while playing a character whose most iconic trait is a refusal to emote. On the former score, I sincerely hope the Spock we get is in line with Leonard Nimoy's dignified and reserved Spock rather than Zachary Quinto's paradoxically emotional snobby Spock.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    This is the latest in a series of borderline unintelligible machine-translated appeals for people to sign a change.org petition addressed to Shoji Kawamori appealing for a direct sequel to Super Dimension Fortress Macross that will continue the story of Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay. Topics about this crop up every now and then before major Macross live events, as Mari-ja seems to want to present a signed copy of the petition to Shoji Kawamori at that event. That the latest incarnation of this petition has been going on change.org for a year or more and still hasn't reached 200 signatures says all that needs to be said about it, really. EDIT: The link to the actual petition is, somewhat counterintuitively, the picture itself rather than a separate visible link.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Char had a custom Dijeh in The Return of Johnny Ridden, and Mobile Suit Moon Gundam had a Rick Dijeh... but that's about it for legitimate variants. The rest is all MSV.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Man, what'd we do to make you want to punish us with this stuff month after month? So everyone else gets a pilot suit made out of actual fabric, but Lisa's still rocking the body paint? Also, did they forget to draw the temples on Max's glasses... or has this depressing dystopian spacefuture invented birth control pince-nez?
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Is Shinichi Watanabe an acceptable substitute for Shinichiro? (It's a safe bet Kawamori-san will be in his usual "overall director" supervisory role, while the regular unit direction will be done by other directors.) Still, it's rather telling that that felt jarring and out of place and it was the only incident of its kind... well, unless you count Luca's earlier imagine spot involving dominatrix Sheryl and slave Alto. There wasn't really any fanservice going on there, though... that was played for pure comedy and a bit of fan disservice with her homicidal expression in that EX-Gear.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I'll take your word for it. As I said, I didn't really pay attention to the MPC line until the big to-do over not doing Southern Cross came out because it wasn't all that impressive, and I've never been much of a toy collector. None of the store pages I've seen, archived or current, mention separate production runs for them... just a flat limited edition cap. (I suppose it could be as simple as what I heard from IIRC Tom Bateman at one point about them usually expecting to sell about 1/2 of the limited edition's production cap... if they had orders for more than half they would have had to reorder even if the cap was always set to 15,000.) Yeah, I mentioned and linked to that a few posts back... the thread started out as an attempt to rustle up interest in an Auroran kit, and sort of expanded into a simultaneous interest check in a Spartas kit as well. Unfortunately, we were only able to secure 18 of the required 30 preorders for either design so it all ended as a non-starter.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not. Of the five Grand Cannons that were planned, only Alaska's Grand Cannon I is known to have been completed and brought online. Grand Cannon I was, as we all know, badly damaged in the orbital bombardment by the Boddole Zer main fleet and only managed to fire once. Grand Cannon II's construction site in Australia was destroyed in an Anti-Unification Alliance attack shortly after the Tsiolkovsky incident in 2005. It was never completed. The incomplete Grand Cannon III in Africa and Grand Cannon V in South America served as shelters during the Boddole Zer main fleet's attack, but they were incomplete at the time and probably were damaged further (possibly beyond repair) in the bombardment. Grand Cannon IV in the Lunar north pole region is the only real candidate for a postwar completion, though the resources to finish it probably wouldn't have been available when rebuilding Earth was a top priority. The nearby Apollo Base in the Mare Tranquillitatis survived the war basically intact and its adjoining colony is still inhabited, so it may have been finished at least for its command center.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Again, none of these corporations are the least bit interested in what their customers want or think unless it affects their bottom line. They're in business to make money. They are not going to sink time and effort into producing a product that they don't think will sell well enough to justify those efforts no matter how badly fans want it. Quality suffers when a company proceeds with a project that's not in sufficient demand, and opts to cut corners in order to maximize their profits from the lower expected sales volume instead of (or on top of) raising prices. You're mistaking their pragmatic interest in producing products that will sell well for some kind of personal interest in your satisfaction. This is all business. They've been saying it for well upwards of a decade, and people keep buying their sh*t despite the hilariously poor quality... so there would appear to be a problem with your hypothesis.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC it's just the Combo Pack versions of the movies.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    You may be overstating it a bit. The Galaxy Executives and the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army's cyber-soldiers were cyborgs with almost totally artificial bodies, but the available information points to the adoption level of implant tech being pretty low among the fleet's civilian population (mostly just network-enabling their brains). Curiously, this is hinted to be something of a cruel mercy, due to the Macross Galaxy fleet being a rather unpleasant place to live and that being trapped in an illusory paradise is preferable to its real nature. Sort of. A big part of the problem with the Ghost X-9 was that its AI core was built around technology from Sharon Apple's system, and that technology proved to be pretty unstable even before it was "completed" with a bio-neural processor. It was able to behave like a real human brain because that's what the system was set up to emulate. Later iterations of the design rolled the AI tech back to a more traditional hardware that wasn't capable of fuzzy logic or unpredictable behavior and curtailed the AI's autonomous air combat program. Even though Luca's Ghosts were running the same basic software, they weren't capable of the unpredictable AI behavior of the prototype. Galaxy's AIF-9V Ghosts were almost certainly running under the same conditions. The novelization of Frontier does, IIRC, make mention of true AIs (one of which is implied to be built on the digitized personalty of Manfred Brando), and those AIs do serve the Galaxy Executives. As far as we know, yeah... they lost Battle Galaxy and a bunch of escorts but the main fleet is still out there somewhere. Mind you, theres no hard guarantee that all or even most of the Galaxy executives were on Battle Galaxy or Mainland... being the fold network cyborgs they are, they did a lot of their conferring over zero time fold communications links. They could be pretty much anywhere in the galaxy. Galaxy's bigshots have gone full Ghost in the Shell, being brains in artificial bodies. Grace is no exception, and most of what we see of her is apparently bodies that she is operating remotely over a zero time fold communications link. (Cybernetics don't seem to be quite advanced enough to permit straight-up body surfing yet.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Huh. Well... that's a thing that is happening. I'll admit I'm surprised CBS went for a relative unknown for an important role like Spock. I expected them to go all-in on someone with more experience and a serious reputation. His filmography is a genuinely depressing read. Most of the films he's been in were box office flops or at least critically panned, with the high water mark apparently being either an Olsen Twins direct-to-video movie in '99 or a Mariah Carey vanity project. The only TV role he's had that wasn't a bit part was in the 10 Things I Hate About You series that bombed and was canceled by ABC after just one season. Either this is Mr. Peck's big break, or Star Trek: Discovery has gone full Springtime for Hitler and he's their L.S.D. EDIT: Or maybe someone is just being terribly savvy by hiring someone who can't act to play an emotionless character... Admiral Marcus was, at least, nicer about it than Kelbor-Hal... he didn't blow up the dock and kill all the construction workers to keep it secret. Still, the "top secret super-powerful ship constructed without anyone knowing" schtick is pretty bad writing IMO... unless you've got a galactic-scale civilization where something the size of a city could legitimately fall through the cracks, someone is going to notice either the small mountain of money that's gone walkabout or the enormous number of material requisitions being delivered to a space P.O. box and start asking questions. Proper prototypes like the Excelsior or the Crossfield-class strain suspension of disbelief way less.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Much like the USS Vengeance in Star Trek: Into Darkness, a completely over-the-top warship built in secret and meant to go toe-to-toe with entire fleets on a mission of approximate genocide.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Hopefully they'll tell us who's writing the new series at some point in the next few months so we can calibrate our expectations appropriately.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It may have something to do with the users who would've provided that information being banned a while back... I'm working on a project that'll get heavy into the contents of various Macross publications, but we're not planning to branch out beyond that one franchise. There's just too much stuff coming out for every show that airs that I doubt any one blog or site could stay on top of it all. You'd run out of places to store the books you reviewed in a year or two at most.
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