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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but it would have been a more enjoyable movie for all that... Star Trek 2009 suffers from many of the same flaws Star Trek: Discovery does, particularly when it comes to making its main character hopelessly unlikeable. Star Trek: Into Darkness did nothing to improve fratboy-Kirk in my view, and only exacerbated what an unlikeable, unjustifiably smug prick he was in the previous film having an entirely undeserved command. I doubt Star Trek: Beyond did anything to improve that. I'm actually inclined to view Star Trek: Discovery's Michael Burnham more favorably than J.J's version of Jim Kirk, if only because her issues are mostly the Janeway Problem. Star Trek: Discovery's writers can't seem to agree on how to write a "strong" woman, so she's constantly flip-flopping between a standard naive and trusting Starfleet officer, vulnerable flower with mommy issues, and the generic angry antihero (or perhaps villain protagonist). I'll take "inconsistent but occasionally good" over a protagonist who's consistently an arse any day. Hopefully season 2 and some guidance from one of Starfleet's best will turn Burnham into an officer worth respecting and not an officer worth jailing again.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, it's the usual moral guardian tripe that seems to transcend national and cultural boundaries... X media contains Y controversial topic, therefore it must be encouraging its audience to do Y. Like the oft-discussed and thoroughly debunked argument that violent video games encourage players to be violent offenders in the real world. The gist of their argument being that titles with loli characters are going to cause their audience to lust after children for real.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Given that forcing the writers to go all-in on promoting an idol group was enough to bring the story of the last Macross TV series to its knees, I don't even want to contemplate what a train wreck it'd be if they were forced to take a fanservice-heavy approach like Strike Witches, Asobi ni iku yo!, or, gods forbid, Transformers: Kiss Players. Macross has always been pretty good about doing its fanservice in moderation, and avoiding going anywhere creepy with it1. I'm pretty confident they'll stay on the side of good taste with this latest series too. That said, I wouldn't mind seeing a few more kickass woman pilots like Chelsea Scarlett, Aisha Blanchett, Sylvie Gena, etc. With the mechanical counterpressure pilot suits that's still a bit fanservice-y, but the net benefit to the plot is a lot more than, say, a bath scene or a lot of gainaxing. 1. Well, OK... Macross Delta's got a few moments and pieces of art that are enormously creepy in hindsight... but I'd expect nobody told the artists who made Mikumo into Ms. Fanservice that she was actually only 3 years old, a clone, and that her social awareness was underdeveloped, so that wasn't really their fault.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, I +1'd this post pre-edit simply for this wonderful turn of phrase. That got an honest-to-goodness out-loud laugh from me in the middle of a meeting. If anything, the Star Trek novel 'verse did a magnificent job cleaning up the prime universe aftermath of the poor creative decisions made in Star Trek 2009. The offending supernova's faster-than-light shockwave and other unusual properties were explained as a result of the Tal Shiar's latest idiot chairman1 conducting clandestine (illegal) testing of subspace weapons that'd been banned by treaty. That was what created the FTL subspace shockwave that was destroying star systems and gaining energy as it spread. A few other helpful odds and ends were explained like how the Narada came to have Borg technology, why Nero and co. blamed the supernova's destruction of Romulus on Spock and Vulcan, and what went on during the timeskip. To be fair, if a threat rears its head just long enough to destroy ONE ship and promptly disappears without so much as a peep from it in decades, people are going to forget or at least stop worrying about it so much. Like, for instance, Discovery's Commander Burnham. She was literally famous as Starfleet's first mutineer and for causing the cold war with the Klingon Empire to go hot in 2255, but barely ten years and one pardon later nobody remembers her mutiny at all and a bunch of officers who were in the service at the time of the war insist there's never been a mutineer before. 1. The quality of the Tal Shiar's leadership really took a dive after Koval from DS9 was assassinated. There seems to be an inverse relationship between arrogance and competence in the Tal Shiar, and they hit peak arrogance with the appointment of Sela to the post. She screwed up so badly trying to steal slipstream drive technology from the Federation that she nearly started wars with the Khitomer Accords signatories AND the Dominion, cost the Breen a major shipyard, cost the Tzenkethi a huge space station and all their research on artificial wormholes, landed her ally Tomalak in the Federation equivalent of a supermax prison serving a life sentence and was arrested on Romulus after pissing the Praetor off so badly that they were going to extradite her to the Federation despite the absence of an extradition treaty between the UFP and Romulan Empire and only avoided going by committing suicide in her cell. Her replacement wasn't much better.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Being rammed by the USS Kelvin did the Narada no favors, and while it was still crippled it was captured and impounded by the Klingon Empire. The Narada's crew was imprisoned in the gulag at Rura Penthe and the Narada itself was placed in an impound yard in orbit... a very bad decision that came back to bite the Klingons in the arse when the crew managed to break out and were able to reclaim their colossal spiky death ship and minced a Klingon fleet of 47 ships on their way out of Klingon space. The Federation did go looking for it, but because the ship had been taken deep into Klingon space they never found it.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    One fueled principally by a massive failure to grasp basic physics, yes... though every character in the plot is an imbecile and the entire plot occurs solely because nobody is willing to exercise any kind of critical thinking or behave rationally for more than three seconds at a stretch. (Stupidity a level that rivals Burnham's failed "Sense Motive" check on Malfoy in Star Trek: Discovery's first episode. The guy was practically wearing a sandwich board with the words "SERIOUSLY EVIL DUDE HERE" written on it. In hindsight, I suppose that means Burnham's headed straight to the top, since she's a horrible enough judge of character to be an Admiral.) There are some plot details that are entirely dependent on Star Trek: Countdown that are otherwise gaping plot holes in the film. The biggest would have to be why the Narada looks nothing like any kind of Romulan starship, why what is ostensibly a 24th century civilian mining vessel has firepower sufficient to tackle fleets of warships simultaneously when civilian ships of its time are generally not armed with much more than a "BANG!" flag and harsh language, and why the Romulan crew wants to blame the Federation and Vulcans in particular... though that last one still borders on insane troll logic. The comic is, quite frustratingly, necessary to actually fully understand WTH is going on in the story and why... which is the sign of bad storytelling (a Jar-Jar Abrams hallmark).
  7. Seto Kaiba
    And no more effectively than Xaos's lazy, ineffectual infiltration... he was spotted for a fraud from the word "go".
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't post one, IIRC.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The noise I just made was somewhere between a scream of unremitting horror and the sound of an old fax modem connecting... I really, sincerely hope we never end up at that point with Macross... there's enough anime out there already that seems tailor made for Japan's moral guardians to point to and claim that anime causes sex offenders as it is. (I'm no prude, but I was never able to get past the third episode or so of Strike Witches because the whole thing left me feeling like Chris Hansen was gonna bust through my living room wall like the goddamn Kool-Aid Man if I kept watching it.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's news to me. Fancy that, the Michael Bay Transformers movies actually had a story! One they were hoping to build on, even! (Seriously, who knew? I assumed that everybody in the cast was just sort of winging it because they couldn't hear anything over the sound of junkyard vomit robots fighting.) Sure, Rura Penthe gets a lot of bad press because of the lethally low temperatures, the Klingon prison colony, and the lethally dangerous dilithium mining operation run using convict labor... but the skiing is simply fabulous. All that time travel was stressful, so they went on holiday, right? That doesn't really account for a full quarter century of sitting on his hands. That, and a number of other plot holes, needed the supplemental materials to close. Like why that schmuck didn't lead an evacuation of Romulus or how he found out about the supernova in the first place before failing to warn everyone. Basically, without those explanations, Star Trek 2009 is an idiot plot. (Well, it's an idiot plot even with that, but it's less of one.) Kind of like how Discovery only starts to make sense in the second half of the first season when you realize that Captain Malfoy isn't just evil, he was too evil for the universe of evil twins.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it's still the default response of most paid tech support outfits (e.g. Geeksquad), warranty PC repair depots, and corporate IT departments to almost any significant aberrant behavior that can't be immediately root-caused to hardware. It's just more efficient that way if you've got a pre-prepared Windows image handy. The older the Windows version the more likely it is to be recommended as a cure-all, and it's Microsoft's favorite fix for any issues caused by one of Windows 10's periodic not-a-service-pack-honest major feature updates. Less necessary than it used to be due to the sheer number of repair utilities available these days.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That kind of tie-in merchandising seems to be used most often as an attempt to hold the attention of fans of a given metaseries who aren't particularly keen on a new installment. Star Trek (2009) did it partly to reassure the existing Star Trek fandom that J.J. Abrams's new film was not going to be a reboot that that it wasn't retconning previous Star Trek titles out of existence. The comic was, for all practical intents and purposes, an attempt to forestall the kind of boycott that Star Trek: Discovery is currently facing from something like half the fandom. You need a steady following to achieve long-term success with this kind of fiction, and fandom does tend to want things to be organized and sensible. Fans don't like it when The Order of Things gets messed with... so when you DO mess with The Order of Things, you need a ready distraction.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, we already did the time travel schtick in Macross 30, and you know how Kawamori hates to do the same thing twice. If yoiu're going for VF girls, why not cut out the middleman and just adopt Strike Witches as a Macross series... Chris Hansen needs work, y'know. Nah, that was some garbage about a stable time loop, the original trio's kids growing up to be evil bald space Romans in ugly dresses, and magic flowers being The Force.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Fairly often, in fact... though it varies from franchise to franchise based on how official the franchise's supplementary works are and how much oversight there is. One of the most overt recent examples was the 2009 Star Trek movie. That entire film was set up by a comic miniseries that explained the supernova event, its threat to the galaxy, Spock's involvement, how the Narada came to possess Borg technology, and why Nero is so incredibly butthurt about all of it. The film's plot only really makes complete sense if you've read it. Star Trek: Enterprise season five was also headed that way before cancellation, vis a vis tapping TAS for ideas. Star Wars does this fairly frequently too... though less often under Disney as they used to, if only as the inevitable result of ditching almost the entire Expanded Universe. I'm given to understand, from a coworker, that Halo also does a lot of referencing its side stories with recent titles. Most any superhero TV show practically runs on this and nothing else. Gundam practically runs on minutiae from its "for fans" side stories these days... they're literally on their third TV series about Gunpla, never mind animated features like Gundam Unicorn that run on MSV designs. The whole franchise is coasting on nostalgia, in-jokes, and homages to stuff that the casual viewer probably hasn't seen. Macross also gets into this pretty heavily, though it's usually not the focus of the story. There have been quite a few points where supplemental materials "for fans" are the only ones explaining WTF was actually going on, like how Macross Perfect Memory is the only place to get an explanation of what occurred during the timeskip in Super Dimension Fortress Macross, or Macross Delta's entire backstory being set up in side story manga titles. Perhaps... perhaps not. CBS's boasts about Star Trek: Discovery not needing the existing Star Trek fandom to succeed didn't last very long once the series went to "air". Pride cometh before the fall, and all that. By the show's mid-season break they were almost literally begging Star Trek fans to watch the show, and Netflix's management ended up rather unhappy with the ROI on the season. The second season looks to be shaping up to the film equivalent of standing outside a girl's bedroom window begging her to take you back, with Discovery going well out of its way to reference classic Star Trek as much as it can as if to say "we're a real Star Trek show, honest!". Standard industry practice is to dump expanded universe content that hasn't been pre-vetted by the franchise creative staff... not necessarily ALL expanded universe content. One thing that sets the Star Trek relaunch continuity apart from the standard EU material is that there's a rigid set of controls on content instead of unfettered silliness like what went on in the Star Wars EU that Disney tossed. Yeah, but that's comics... with one or two exceptions, those have never been regarded as canon by even the relaunch novelverse. Also, it's the Mirror Universe. As long as it's stupidly grimdark and gritty nobody really cares. There isn't even really a guarantee that the same mirror universe is being visited between different shows, thanks to the quantum nature of alternate realities in Star Trek. Much more likely than it would otherwise be, given the presence of a relaunch writer on the show's staff AND the recent renewal of Pocket Books's license.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    We know literally nothing... not even the title. That state of affairs will likely persist until at least late September, possibly late October, when they'll give us the title and maybe a teaser trailer if the pattern holds. You could've saved yourself some typing and stopped after six words!
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I was unsurprised when CBS announced that Star Trek: Discovery season two was going to redesign the Klingons again. I have a feeling the Discovery Klingons will be written off one of two ways: As with the TNG Trill, they'd be written off as an ethnic minority on their home world... presumably, in this case, one given to extremes of religious fervor. (I'd expect CBS to go this route, and only notice that it turns undercover Voq's casting into fridge racism after people start biting their heads off for it again.) Another species or subspecies of Klingon that evolved in parallel with the modern Klingons, ala Neanderthals or the Menk from Enterprise. Since the writers seem to be trying to take Discovery back towards TOS territory, my money's on a cosmetically advanced version of the TOS and TNG Klingons with familiar uniforms but more advanced prosthetics. They've brought in a relaunch writer to help sort it out, and it's to be set four years after the "present day" of the relaunch novels (2386) and one year after the prime universe events that precipitated Star Trek (2009). They've got room to maneuver. Maybe what's keeping Picard from a retirement job in the diplomatic corps or from an admiral's desk is the lingering stigma of his involvement with Section 31's coup against President Zife... especially since the truth would be fresh in everyone's minds in the wake of the op against Uraei and the publication of most of Section 31's database in 2386.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    They're on South Ataria island, at the airbase adjacent to the training center the UN Forces set up there to train the crew of the SDF-1 Macross in January 2007. The whole flashback involves Roy and Claudia meeting there after she's assigned to the new training center. The island is only called "Macross island" in that other show we don't talk about here.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Flight testing on the non-transformable VF-X and transformation-capable VF-X1 prototypes in 2007 was carried out at the UN Forces airbase on South Ataria island. I don't recall, offhand, if any source has said where the prototypes were built.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it's not like we're going to get anything particularly substantial for a while anyway... especially since most of what we'll have will be the official website. The official info on macross.jp was painfully sparse for Macross Delta. Hayate's bio was one of the longest, at a whopping three sentences on top of his age, birthday, and height. The longest page given to any mechanical design had all of two sentences on it. Just watch... VF-171s, but this time they're light green instead of light brown! EDIT: Or maybe Barbie Pink, like in Macross E.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Quark did it better. That's fair. I just can't get past how so many of the later ones seem to be Shatner trying to settle the "Kirk vs. Picard" thing in Kirk's favor every time. Q-Squared was interesting, I haven't read much of his other stuff tho.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Just as well, I was running out of unread Star Trek relaunch novels. All I had left was the Star Trek: Prey trilogy, the TNG relaunch novels Headlong Flight and Hearts and Minds, the DS9 relaunch novels Force and Motion, Enigma Tales, and Original Sin, and the Voyager relaunch novel Architects of Infinity. I'll probably be through that lot by the end of August. I shot through about half of the first book of the Prey trilogy last night while I was doing some computer maintenance. Yeah, why not? I'm probably never going to read them, since I find the Star Trek: Discovery crew so hopelessly unlikeable.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    With Kirsten Beyer onboard, they'll probably go one of two routes that've both been done in the Star Trek relaunch novels: Picard will have become Admiral Action and refuse to let his rank trap him behind a desk on Earth or at some starbase, and will instead insist on leading from the front by taking command of a Starfleet taskforce and screw up horribly over and over again. Picard will commit some heinous act that will be covered up, forever disqualifying him from promotion or a retirement post with the diplomatic corps. They could go the Indiana Jones route and turn Picard into a Starfleet academy instructor who moonlights as an adventurer xenoarchaeologist. ... really? Most of them, like The Return, were Mary Sue-tier fanfiction that's been banned from even the expanded universe's main timeline. Yeah, I have copies as well... but they are BAD movies. Not Star Trek V: the Final Frontier bad or Star Trek: Into Darkness bad, but to try and turn Star Trek's most cerebral captain into a one-liner-dispensing action hero was a big mistake. First Contact was a weak but passable Star Trek zombie movie, Insurrection was an idiot plot start-to-finish, and Nemesis definitively broke the odd-numbers bad, even-numbers good trend with Picard facing off against a clone of himself in a oiltone pleather onesie. Don't forget brainwashed Kirk beating up most of the TNG crew singlehandedly, including beating Worf in hand to hand combat and outwitting Data and Geordi combined. Oh, and brainwashed Kirk's hot Romulan girlfriend and the brand new edgelord-tier all-black super-powerful (temporary) Defiant-class USS Enterprise that destroys Romulan flagships from the inside and doesn't afraid of anything. "Being set on fire in a skid full of hospital waste is still better than several types of inoperable cancer."
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Ugh... so they've tapped the All-Stars of Suck for this? Kurtzman lost any right to be involved with Star Trek when he cowrote the crap-awful mess that was Star Trek: Into Darkness. Akiva Goldsman is the hack behind both the worst-ever Batman films and the terribad Lost in Space movie. If not for Shatner and Mack, Kirsten Beyer would be the worst novelist in Star Trek history as the author of the completely unreadable Star Trek: Voyager relaunch. I'm not saying this new Picard series is being set up to fail, but I'm absolutely getting shades of Springtime for Hitler... Did you watch Nemesis or Insurrection? The answer is "Very". With Beyer, Goldsman, and Kurtzman on board, bad is a foregone conclusion. The question to ask is how early one can get on the class action lawsuit to sue CBS for giving you cancer. If Beyer is involved, Picard will probably turn out to be a bipolar sociopath who flies from star system to star system destabilizing whole civilizations for failing to live up to his hypocritical standards inbetween sessions of crying about how traumatic his past is. Why? Because that's exactly what she did to Janeway.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's the clearest indication yet that CBS doesn't think Star Trek: Discovery will last after the mess its second season turned into in production... I can only hope that they won't permit anyone who works on Discovery to pull double duty on this new show. "Gritty Action Picard" was an obviously stupid idea the last couple times they tried it (e.g. Insurrection, Nemesis), and I expect time will have done little to make the idea less stupid.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I saw that same image a few days ago when the author of that tweet also posted it on Facebook. That said, I've been familiar with the VF-4 Siren design for over fifteen years now. It's something I first ran across when I expanded the focus of my Macross II research from just art books to contemporary magazine articles, video games, etc. The VF-4 Siren was the late-game upgrade for the main characters in the PC Engine TRPG Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Eternal Love Song. That game was one of two1 Macross video games released for the PC Engine as a tie-in to Super Dimension Fortress Macross II: Lovers Again. The VF-4 Siren in Eternal Love Song came equipped with Super Packs that included funnels (filling in for R-Type's additional gun units) and a very large beam rifle similar in proportion to the VF-27's but bearing a striking resemblance to the MSZ-006 Zeta Gundam's. They were used the for the last chapter or two, when Hound Squadron's Daedalus II-class carrier Prometheus II is used to launch a decapitation strike against the Zentradi Army Burado main fleet's mobile fortress similar to the one the Macross used against Boddole Zer. Until that picture was posted, though, I had no idea that line art of any of the VF-4 Siren's other modes had been published. Steps are currently being taken to secure copies of the relevant publications identified by Yui's friend who clued her in to the design's existence. I'm fairly certain Yui's tweet is incorrect for several reasons... above and beyond the usual reason that Yui's claims most often have less grounding in reality than Harry Potter: The VF-4 Siren has never been so much as mentioned in any collection of Shoji Kawamori's works. It was presented as a New design in Macross: Eternal Love Song when it came out in 1992. Neither Shoji Kawamori nor Tatsunoko Production were involved in Macross II project. The VF-4 Siren is based on the VF-4 from Macross: Flash Back 2012... a design Tatsunoko doesn't have rights to. Kawamori's published sketches show that his concept for the VF-4 battroid looked a LOT like the final one we got in Macross Digital Mission VF-X as early as 1990. This design is clearly drawn in an early 90's art style (that looks suspiciously like Kazumi Fujita's) and in a pose which is not typical of Kawamori's work but IS typical of the Macross II promotional art. Yui is probably confusing the VF-4 Siren from Macross: Eternal Love Song with Kawamori's design studies in a transformation for the VF-X-4 design that appeared in Super Dimension Fortress Macross (as a scale model only): That unused transformation was, according to the VF-4 entry in Shoji Kawamori Macross Design Works, further explored as the VF-X-7 Ghost Valkyrie in July 1985... another unused design from the mid-80's (see page 52 of the aforementioned book) that falls into his "Game and Advanced Valkyrie" category. Yui's confusion may have been instigated by Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III inventing a few extra intermediate VF models in the VF-4's development. It included the ambiguous art from page 68 of Macross: Perfect Memory's feature "The Lost Two Years" as "XVF-4" and asserts there was a tweaked version of that design that went into limited production under the name "VF-4 Siren"2 prior to the start of mass production on the familiar VF-4 Lightning III. 1. The other being Super Dimension Fortress Macross 2036, which was a side-scrolling shooter in the style of R-Type. 2. See Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III pages 23 and 27, and Macross: Perfect Memory page 68.
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