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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... entirely too many fans in too many genres mistake "The End of the World as We Know It" for "The End of the World". It's one of those reactions that's as old as fiction itself. Let's wait until the Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure Blu-ray drops to see if there's anything else they ought to be apologizing for.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well, according to the product listing for the Limited Edition Blu-Ray, the extra features are: An AR card for use with Uta Macross. Staff and cast audio commentary Promotional footage Karaoke videos Picture dramas A "Making of" feature A greeting from the staff and cast
  3. Seto Kaiba
    That's just Robotech's creative staff pandering to the fan majority. Claude Leon was a massive jerkass even in the original Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and the Robotech adaptation didn't soften him all that much. Robotech fan antipathy for him and for his command, the Southern Cross Army, has always been pretty open. If you're going to retcon one of your show's existing characters into a villain, why not go for the one who's already established as a bad boss and militant xenophobe who isn't above sending his subordinates on suicide missions for arguing with him? (It doesn't help that the Southern Cross Army has a memetic reputation for incompetence among fans of Robotech... their failure to defend Earth literally falling under "You had one job!" territory. It kind of snowballed after a while, especially once HG tapped fans to provide stats for their official "Infopedia" and some remarks about the SCA's mecha being badly designed made the cut... likely because the Southern Cross print materials aren't shy about admitting the SCA's mecha do kind of suck. Especially the Logan.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, well... neither title is particularly inspiring. Star Trek: Destiny is marred by sharing its name with a terrible trilogy in the relaunch novel 'verse about the Borg's origins. Reliant would be an odd twist... since Picard's earliest-mentioned assignment as an ensign was to USS Reliant. I'd call it a week after the cast is revealed... though hopefully the (over)reaction will be significantly more muted than it was for Discovery. 'course, hopefully whoever ends up cast in the Picard series will engage their brain before commenting on their role to avoid stirring things up. Eh... that didn't stop a lot of folks on both sides with Discovery. There was a lot of fuss and noise on the subject, with folks railing against "forced diversity" and other such nonsense, claiming that CBS was ticking off checkboxes on some kind of mandatory minorities checklist. It died down a bit after the series started airing and Michelle Yeoh's character got fridged in favor of Jason Isaacs, but it's a topic that still crops up from time to time among Discovery's most vocal critics. (Weirdly, the folks griping about diversity on Discovery seemed to have ZERO problem with previous casts. One of my former coworkers still sends me 'round the twist by complaining about Discovery's diverse casting and in the next breath saying he wishes they'd done more with Mayweather and Sato on Enterprise... there's just no rhyme or reason to it.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Only after they discover Earth and are exposed to human culture... prior to that, they're not only just clone soldiers but literally have no frame of reference for anything outside of military affairs. Remember, Harmony Gold summarily disowned all licensee-created materials created prior to 2001 when they rebooted the Robotech franchise. None of the stuff about Breetai being ancient and one of Zor's bodyguards is canon. He's just another interchangeable clone commander whose only real significance is that he was the one who found Earth first, just like in Macross. Well, yes and no... the Invid can adapt and evolve, but only with direct intervention by the Regess, a practice she didn't get into until after the Robotech Masters devastated the second Invid homeworld and which didn't produce any meaningful changes in her Invid until after she arrived on Earth. So, theoretically they could... but canonically they didn't. Mind you, old and current lore tends to suggest the Robotech Masters didn't so much fight against the Invid as roll up, flatten their planet from orbit after taking what they wanted, and then knock off for lunch. They wouldn't have been able to offer any real fight regardless, since they didn't employ ranged weaponry widely until after occupying Earth, they're armored with crepe paper and wishful thinking, and they have exactly one starship with actual weaponry. You can't have massive ground battles when one side didn't bring weapons, or massive fleet engagements when only one side has an actual fleet. That's why old Robotech material basically ignored the Invid's backstory in favor of focusing on the Tirolians... they're boring.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Have they actually confirmed a title yet? CBS has registered trademarks on two: Star Trek: Reliant and Star Trek: Destiny.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well, thank goodness it's not you they're marketing this comic to... Robotech is used to failure, but "canceled after one issue" over a story even Robotech fans don't want would be a new low water mark for the franchise. Please apply for the Creative Director position at Harmony Gold at your earliest convenience. With your Magoo-like creative vision, they could finish flying the franchise into the ground by year end! You wouldn't know it from reading the comic... but I guess there's little immediate difference between a good writer phoning it in and a bad writer actually trying. Programmers have a saying "Garbage in, Garbage out". If your input is bad, you won't get good output. Robotech's plot wasn't exactly a fantastic story to begin with, and attempting to take it into "gritty" and "hardcore" territory was more than enough to put it into "garbage" territory. It's a bit like saying you'd rather have Stevie Wonder as your chauffer instead of Ray Charles.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The brig's too good for the likes of Pine!Kirk. Maybe if they had an Agony Booth...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I think I preferred it when they were at least trying to do something original even if it was stupid and ugly. Now we're headed back to the same old lazy imitation-brand Macross shlock they've been peddling since Harmony Gold "rebooted" the Robotech franchise back in '01. Amusingly, Titan Comics went to a lot of trouble for that hideous fan design they were using before. They went to the trouble of looking around the web for "inspiration" while planning out the comics, stole that fan design and used it without the artist's knowledge or permission, and then ended up paying the artist for post facto permission to use the design. Robotech fans. There is no other audience for Robotech-branded anything.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming everyone who was in originally is still game... 19/30 for each.
  11. 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).
  12. 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".
  13. 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...
  14. 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!".
  15. 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.
  16. 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".
  17. 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.
  18. 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...)
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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?
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