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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek has always been a bit camp, so the groan-inducing moments never really felt unnatural in the "Prime Continuity" titles. J.J.'s Star Trek movies take themselves completely seriously though, a move that makes the intentionally campy bits feel incredibly forced and the unintentional ones feel narmy as hell. Discovery's got the same problem of trying to be Serious Business... which is enough to take several characters like Tilly who would otherwise have merely been late-TNG Wesley levels of obnoxious to the status of "The Most Annoying Sound". I get that they're trying to be inclusive by having one of the recurring minor characters be someone on the spectrum, but Tilly would've been annoying in a regular Trek show and in a grittily serious attempt at Trek she just becomes a Hate Sink. I've had @Talos twisting my arm to get me to read more Star Trek novels for years. It started with the relaunch books, then Starfleet Corps of Engineers. Lately, it's moved on to Vanguard, the short DTI series, and some of the older stuff. I just finished Shield of the Gods in the DTI series the other day. The writing in the novels these days is SO MUCH BETTER than what's coming from Discovery and the movies. Well, except for the Star Trek: Voyager relaunch... the writers there made the dual mistake of accurately replicating Janeway's bipolar, incredibly self-destructive behavior from the TV series and continuing Voyager's serial escalation to the point that every new book seems to require a universe-ending event that is incredibly traumatic for Janeway. (I mean, really... where do you GO from being responsible for saving the Q Continuum from an apocalypse?)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I've got a new site in the works that aims to address that particular want... we hope to launch early next year, though it'll probably take years to get through all the Master File books. If HG were to lose the Macross license and its associated trademarks, there wouldn't be any obstacle to SoftBank releasing these books in the US in English. That's an IF that's still 2 3/4 years down the road though. Kickstarter, I think, would not be the best platform anymore... while Robotech RPG Tactics wasn't a proper Macross product, it's still a Macross-connected product that's connected to a big scandal on Kickstarter and it'll be years before that mess is gone and forgotten.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    That's more a mid-2019 question, assuming release schedules work out the way they seem to be headed. If Delta's movie sells well in export sales, it may well end up with official English subs as well... "We" in this case being a very small minority among the western Macross fandom, which itself is such a small percentage of the total Macross fandom that Macross's creators are barely aware that it exists at all. To wit, your discontent is mathematically insignificant in general terms... never mind your own, rather esoteric, tastes. Many western Macross fans, myself included, will continue to support new releases even if they're not exactly what we were hoping for because we love Macross and want to see more of it. Particularly for recent releases, since we want to encourage Macross's creators to make more material available to us in English so that fans who don't speak/read Japanese won't be dependent on grey market materials like fansubs and fan translations. Macross was never a serious work of science fiction. Indeed, if you ask Kawamori he'll tell you that the whole science fiction setting is just an elaborate framing device for the love story. It's always been that way, and it likely always will be. Macross is really not about giant robots, space war, and alien invasions... it's about love and music's power to communicate. More a distillation of the core themes about music's power to communicate. In that regard, it wasn't all that different from the love triangle in the original series. Minmay was so categorically oblivious to Hikaru's interest in her that she doesn't notice until literally after the end of the world. Even then, it still takes her a year or two to really get her head around it and by then it's too late. It had to be a bit lighter and softer... it was aimed at a younger audience than was typical for Macross, and during a period where anime was lighter and softer in general. (Look at its Gundam contemporary... Mobile Fighter G Gundam.) Macross in general isn't exactly aimed at the 30- and 40-somethings out there... it's targeted to the secondary school students (and maybe college students).
  4. Seto Kaiba
    "Good" is a purely subjective value judgement. "Well-received" is synonymous with "popular", which can be measured objectively via average viewership and merchandising sales. "Well-received" can be seen as synonymous with "Good" in the sense that a show that is well-received is one which a large audience subjectively judges to be good. Macross's creators and owners are, after all, running a business here. They'll go for what they think will be well-received because the goal is to turn a profit on these shows and their merchandise. That's why I'm pretty sure the news series isn't likely to be what older western fans want. They're going to be appealing to the younger, Japanese fans which make up their target television audience. While I don't wish to say or in any way imply your opinion isn't a valid one, it is essentially illustrative of what I'm getting at. Macross 7 was, in the final analysis, a distillation of Macross's core themes into a purer form than we usually got them in. It has more of the essence of Macross than almost any other title... more of what the Japanese audience has repeatedly said they want. Let's abuse an alcohol metaphor for a moment. The power of music is to Macross what ethanol is to booze. Anyone who said it wasn't essential to the experience is generally seen as a crazy person, but individual opinion differs wildly about how much is appropriate in a single serving. Plus is kind of like a microbrewery beer. It's sophisticated and artsy and impressive sounding, but there's not a lot of substance to it and it lacks punch. Macross 7's the opposite extreme... like shots of Everclear. It sounds like a fantastic idea when you're young and it's all but guaranteed to be a wild ride, but when you get older it sounds like less and less of a good idea. The other shows are sophisticated blends with varying degrees of kick to 'em. a cabinet of hard liquors. Big West and Satelite are marketing to a younger crowd in Japan... the viewers who are looking to indulge for indulgence's sake. They're gonna try a bit of everything, but they're going to hit the hard stuff first and fast.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    All told, I only really had two issues with J.J.'s Star Trek. The first is Jim Kirk being an insufferable fratboy sh*thead who really does deserve the contempt his fellow cadets heap on him in the first part of the film, and whose every action screams "I am a Mary Sue". Going straight from Cadet to Captain is the dumbest sh*t I've ever heard from a Star Trek story, and I've read Star Trek novels written by Shatner! There were hundreds of people on the USS Enterprise more qualified for the center seat than this version of Kirk. The second is that Jar-Jar Abrams felt compelled to turn the Star Trek setting into a generic grimdark science fiction setting with Starfleet being heavily militaristic and mildly xenophobic. It's so utterly antithetical to Star Trek that I can't begin to describe what an idiotic thing it was. Presumably they thought that since Wrath of Khan was such a perennial favorite with Star Trek fans, remaking it would bring in the fanboys by the thousands. As it happens, that was a terrible idea. The whole plot was just imbecilic start-to-finish. I'm not sure what the worst part actually was... that someone was stupid enough to defrost Khan Noonien Singh and try to blackmail him into working for them, that Admiral Marcus secretly built a terribly fanfic-y secret evil starship named USS Vengeance and somehow managed to keep it secret despite HAVING A MODEL OF THE DAMNED THING ON HIS DESK, or that whole sequence at the climax where Kirk somehow climbs into a warp core and kicks it until it starts working while mysteriously NOT being incinerated by the plasma stream (and where's the dilithium?) and McCoy cures his case of dead with a blood transfusion... apparently missing that he'd discovered the cure for DEATH in the process. It'll be a long, cold day in Gre'thor before I give it a try. It seems to vary by the writer. It needed three people in Star Trek III: the Search for Spock and Star Trek: First Contact, but in TNG and DS9 we frequently saw that the sequence could be set up with just two people. On a few occasions we've seen it set or disarmed by one person, though the bulk of those were under Janeway... who many would argue IS Voyager's self-destruct system.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    One reason among many that Discovery's critics continue to insist it's actually a Kelvin timeline show, or a third timeline altogether. (Frankly, I'd like to lump it into the same category as several of the aborted Star Trek ideas that got a "take that!" in Watching the Clock... the ones like that grimdark Star Trek cartoon proposal that they take a shot at by saying it was a bad future created by the Temporal Cold War and erased from the multiverse by the Temporal Accord signatory powers.) I'm torn between thinking it's an attempt to introduce a character who's actually likeable, and being just a shameless attempt to get existing Star Trek fans to stop boycotting the show. Poor Pike, being asked to stand aside on the finest ship in the fleet to play hall monitor aboard the starship of misfit officers. I still can't bring myself to watch Star Trek: Beyond. Fratboy Kirk annoyed me so much in the 2009 movie and watching Bandersnatch Cumberbund sh*t all over Ricardo Montalban's grave with that godawful take on Wrath of Khan leaves me feeling ill as it is. Or maybe just set the ship to self-destruct, lock out all the lifeboats, and beam back to Enterprise. Not just as captain... the Constitution-class ships were the prestige assignment at any grade back in that era. Above and beyond being Starfleet's favorite problem solvers and their biggest stick when hostilities broke out, they were Starfleet's biggest, best-equipped, fastest, longest-ranged ships for sending out into uncharted space on missions of exploration. They were where the adventure was. Enterprise doubly so, since she was held to be the finest example of the class and the one to break the most ground scientifically and diplomatically.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Ever since Frontier, we've seen a lot of that from various parts of the western fandom... and, to make it funnier, it really hasn't become any less hypocritical with time. The fans who were grumbling about how Macross was "ruined forever" because Macross Frontier had used CG animation would, in the same breath, praise Macross Plus even though it also used CG quite heavily and made a lot more noise about the fact. Others would grumble loudly about how Alto was so indecisive, while ignoring that Hikaru and Mylene spent more episodes than Frontier even got on moping over being friendzoned by their one-sided crushes. Macross Delta just moved the target. Fans grumbled about how Walkure looked like "magical girls", even though the holographic technology they use debuted in Do You Remember Love?, the idea of military idols on the battlefield goes all the way back to Macross II and Macross 7, song being more than purely words starting in 7 and being expanded on in Frontier, etc. It's not a complete loss though. There are those out there who've shown they can and will reexamine their views, like the fans who used to bash Macross II for not being "canon" who did an abrupt about-face when Kawamori said it was just as valid as any other Macross story. A lot of western fans seem really committed to holding up Macross Plus as the example of what they want a new Macross to be like, apparently blissfully unaware that the OVA wasn't nearly as well-received as Macross 7 when it was new, a series they seem to loathe. Macross has, and likely always will, change with the times... and a good thing it does. If it didn't, it'd get incredibly dull and samey.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Now if the quality had gone completely to pot once Xaos Publishing took over, I could buy that... it does often seem that Xaos sets the bar low enough to be a trip hazard in Lucifer's own wine cellar. Unfortunately, the overall quality took a dive with the VF-4 and VF-22 books. Seems unlikely. Kawamori takes a broad strokes view of continuity at the best of times, and that all too often ends up in "what canon?" territory with his position that all Macross stories are simply just dramatizations of a "true" Macross history and taking some artistic license with the facts. That said, whoever's policing things behind the scenes seems to be a pretty discerning chap. Very little "expanded universe" type material ends up definitively incorporated into continuity, and only those installments that are critical to future plots. Thus far, only four video games have made that cut for inclusion in the official timelines (M3, VF-X, VF-X2, and 30). Macross the Ride is one of the confirmed-for-official titles, but it seems to adhere to Kawamori's loosey-goosey views in that the story is clearly a Macross Frontier TV prequel and still acknowledges the YF-29 program and other movie-specific touches.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That fact alone could well explain why the Federation apparently built so few Crossfield-class ships. Being so much larger than the Constitution-class would make them more expensive and more time-consuming to build, having a bit more than half the crew of its smaller counterpart probably means more automation is necessary, and apart from the spore drive the Crossfield-class doesn't appear to have better capabilities than the Constitution-class according to official spec. That beast is 750.5m, vs. the Constitution-class's 289m. I wonder... since the McQuarrie design for the Enterprise was recycled for the Discovery, if this could mean the reused Star Trek: Planet of the Titans that appeared in Star Trek III, TNG's "Unification Part 1", and TNG's "Best of Both Worlds Part 2" are examples of post-refit Crossfield-class ships with the spore drive saucer design stripped out and shorter, more traditional warp nacelles?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah had a great explanation for that, which is what's driving a lot of this art of older VFs with NUNS markings. Its explanation for the UN Spacy's changeover to the New UN Spacy is that it happened at the same time the government was reestablished as the New UN Government in April 2010, and that some of the older settlements kept using the old markings out of respect to tradition or sheer stubbornness while many emigrant fleets readily adopted the new markings and have been using them all along.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah. That was the main character's (Chelsea Scarlett's) backstory in Macross the Ride. She was a retired idol who tried to become a fighter pilot, discovered she couldn't bring herself to kill, and became an air racer instead. (Word is that in the Macross Delta novelization she's a MP in the New UN Gov't now.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I think I'd prefer what they did with Macross the Ride, where one of the pilots was a retired idol and sings for fun (karaoke at a bar, no less) but is not a professional singer anymore.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, all of the installments in the Variable Fighter Master File series are presented as in-universe reference works by corporate publishers that contain public and declassified info. A bit like a Jane's book, really. The listed in-universe publisher for all but the two most recent volumes (VF-31 and VF-1 Battroid) is Macross Broadcasting System Publishing Inc., apparently a print-publishing division of the Macross's homebrew TV network founded during its voyage back to Earth c.10/2009. The first six books in the series are all just labeled "Macross Broadcasting System Publishing Inc.", presumably being from the MBS Publishing main office on Earth. The VF-22 Sturmvogel II and VF-4 Lightning III books are both attributed to MBS Publishing's branch on Eden. The VF-31 Siegfried book and the most recent VF-1 Battroid Valkyrie book are both attributed to a print-publishing company operating as a part of the interstellar conglomerate Xaos (the same one whose PMC company and entertainment division featured as the protagonists in Macross Delta).
  14. Seto Kaiba
    From the text on the pages you posted, it IS just more of same... though since my copy is still penned in transit I can't tell if it's more of the same garbage-tier writing as the VF-4, VF-22, and VF-31 books or more god-tier writing like the previous VF-1 volumes.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Given what's been said in recent days in this thread and elsewhere, I'm increasingly convinced older fans in the west have simply outgrown Macross. Or, rather, that Macross has outgrown those fans. I think it safe to say that this new series will not satisfy them. The last thing we need from Macross is for it to indulge in Gundam-esque stagnation or regression, and that seems to be a popular demand from the older fans in the west. Macross's creators have been hitting the Norse mythological references hard and fast since Macross 30.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Just got the notice from HLJ that my preorder for the new Master File book was filled and is set to ship.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Frankly, the crew of the USS Discovery is just lucky that the Starfleet Command of this time period is run by out-of-touch desk jockeys. If the brass ever actually looked into Discovery's activities out on the frontier, the whole crew would be clapped in irons and summarily tossed into the prison colony Lorca illegally removed Burnham from... That might actually make it watchable... so there seems little danger of that. It wouldn't be nearly gritty enough.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek: Discovery's first season has some very impressive visuals but suffers terribly at the hands of its writers and producers trying to make Star Trek dark and edgy. It's fine for characters to have flaws among their character traits, because that gives them something to overcome as they grow and develop and it helps make it easier for the audience to relate to them. Giving the characters nothing BUT flaws... well, that just makes them unlikeable jerks. Commander Burnham and the crew of the USS Discovery manage to be so very difficult to like and do so many questionable things that they fall somewhere between "designated hero" and "villain protagonist". So much so, in fact, that even when the show makes a rather drawn-out detour through the Mirror Universe of Evil Twins the crew's evil alternate selves literally have to resort to onscreen recreational cannibalism to establish that they are, in fact, the (more) evil versions of the characters. Hey, that's still a 100% net increase in the number of functional moral compasses aboard the USS Discovery. Pike's a stand-up officer with an impeccable record. He is absolutely slumming it by letting himself be temporarily reassigned to the Discovery. If it weren't so technologically advanced I'd say it was Star Trek's version of the Soyokaze from Irresponsible Captain Tylor.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's what happens when you let someone like J.J. Abrams who never understood, and really doesn't like, Star Trek helm a new Star Trek series. The producers and writers who don't "get" Star Trek will only ever be able to produce a generic sci-fi action series with a thin Star Trek veneer. For whatever reason, neither J.J. Abrams nor Discovery's producers seem to understand that what made Star Trek a sci-fi classic was that it was a fundamentally optimistic "High Adventure in Space" story. They're so intent on using space warfare as the quick and easy source of drama in the story that they overlook that it's only one method among many, that it's incredibly overused in American SF, and that NOT being a space warfare story was one of the things that set Star Trek apart. There were occasional skirmishes, the odd major battle or two like Wolf 359, but they typically ended in both sides walking away or solving the dilemma with a clever trickery. To make Star Trek work with the kind of space war story they want to tell they have to twist its optimistic setting into a Bad Future where the Federation and its rival powers are more militant, which makes things comically grimdark. MacFarlane and the various Star Trek fan film makers better understand that Star Trek was about exploration, and that part of what made its stories stand out was that its approach to conflict resolution was conflict avoidance by way of diplomacy or clever trickery rather than brute force. The Orville gets the "spirit" of Star Trek much more than Star Trek: Discovery does.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Smart money says Harmony Gold probably made Strange Machine Games buy the RPG license at the same time they purchased a license to make that board game. Harmony Gold did publicly refute Palladium Books's claim that they (Palladium) were outbid by someone else for the Robotech license, indicating that their license had been revoked because of the failure to deliver on the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter. It's probably that HG licensed the RPG and board game rights to Strange Machine as a package deal, possibly a compulsory one like Harmony Gold's earlier (unsuccessful) attempt to strongarm Palladium Books into acquiring the Robotech 3000 license sight-unseen at an additional cost by making it a requirement for renewal of their existing Robotech license c.2000. Harmony Gold is definitely in "once bitten, twice shy" mode right now as Strange Machine Games explicitly confirmed on their official Facebook page that their license prohibits them from using Kickstarter and other forms of crowdfunding on Robotech projects. HG's actions since their binding arbitration with Tatsunoko Production over royalties definitely have an air of desperation to them, like they're trying to squeeze as much cash as they can out of the Macross license before they lose it with a merchandising blitz before they lose the license in early 2021.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK, the original official stance from Star Trek's creators was originally that the timeline diverged from our own history around the time TOS was being filmed (~1966). The original Star Trek series had a few plots that supported that position. "Assignment: Earth" was one of them, depicting a 1968-era Earth where the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies was either never ratified or never created and where orbital thermonuclear weapons platforms were a thing. It was later shaded back to the 50's by Enterprise's writers, who put the break in the timeline shortly after the discovery of DNA. Star Trek is usually pretty firm about the idea that it takes a really significant event to spin a parallel universe off an existing timeline and that some timelines reconverge and branch off multiple times as probabilities converge and diverge. There's bound to be overlap between Star Trek's later history and ours, but things that happened may not have happened at the same time or the same way. I was really hoping that Star Trek: Discovery's season season would stop trying to be an action series and settle down into a more credible science fiction offering. That hope seems to have been dashed, and it looks like we're in for another season of Star Trek written by people who really don't understand Star Trek and wish they were writing Star Wars. For my money, the worst part of that trailer isn't the juvenile humor. It's the stupid, spinning one-man bubble pod fighter things. Is Star Trek so hard up for ways to make Star Trek an action series that it's resorting to stealing designs from the old Lost in Space movie? I think I'll once again refrain from taking out a CBS All Access membership. I might pirate the show if there's any real recommendation of Season 2's content, but there's no way I'm supporting this mess financially.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, the only semi-official attempt I've seen made at addressing the subject of the Eugenics Wars occurring when they did is in the Relaunch novels Department of Temporal Investigations series. The Suliban cabal's sponsor, referred to by the DTI as just "the sponsor" until a new recruit starts sardonically referring to him by the ENT production nickname of "Future Guy", figures prominently in the novel Watching the Clock which ties up a number of the loose ends left by the hasty conclusion of the Temporal Cold War arc in Enterprise. On several occasions, the DTI agents in that novel voice a popular-but-unconfirmed theory the agency has that the Eugenics Wars was a front in the Temporal Cold War. The theory holds that the unnaturally rapid progression from the discovery of DNA in the 1950s to workable genetic enhancement of human subjects in under twenty years was the influence of an unknown party from the future giving anachronistic technology to Cold War era nations to try to derail humanity's development. A related theory that the DTI was able to prove thanks to events that occurred in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's episode "Little Green Men" was that the unusually advanced-for-the-time technology of the DY-100 series sleeper ships was based on technology which the US Government had analyzed when they briefly captured the Ferengi ship Quark's Treasure in Roswell. The ISS is definitely a part of Star Trek's history. Captain Sisko had a model of it in his ready room on DS9. It's possible, given the above, that the ISS in the Star Trek universe also contained (and was built with) anachronistically advanced technology.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    If the quality of the writing is up to snuff, at least we'll have a new fountain of snark.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't the Emaan also have really short lifespans?
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, OCR on Japanese is still a bit of an inexact science. I worked on an early effort to produce a working kanji OCR back in graduate school, and we had very little success once the number of radicals in a single kanji passed eight. It was brought to my attention a short while ago that @Gubaba has been doing synopses of each of the revised Macross the First chapters on his blog as they come out. It enough to at least get the gist of things. (I didn't realize he'd done more than the first one.) https://gubabablog.wordpress.com/category/super-dimension-fortress-macross-the-first/
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