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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the Macross Delta series certainly brought out the toxic fans in the Macross fandom the way that The Last Jedi did for Star Wars. There was SO MUCH B*TCHING about Walkure and how they operated, even though very little of what they were doing was in any way new to Macross and most of it had been part of the setting for over twenty years at that point. Totally mirrored the Star Wars fans whinging themselves inside-out about Luke doing the same thing every other Jedi Master did in response to a new dark lord rising or Rey holding her own against said dark lord after one afternoon of verbal abuse from an old-of-practice hermet in the boonies. Thankfully, the impact Macross Delta's hatedom had on Macross was a lot less than the impact The Last Jedi's hatedom had on Star Wars.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It's a natural evolution of the online social concept... having a separate account for every group was rather clunky and cumbersome. The current model means you have just one account that is portable across an enormous number of social environments. It's less of a headache for the end user, if you discount the suspect use of personal data by Facebook itself. Honestly, I've tried to take a more positive outlook on Delta's ending. Big West and Satelight have gotten Pretty Soldier Sailor Walkure out of their system and made a quick buck on the idol group before its members spun off the pursue their own solo careers. Now they can focus on telling an actual story instead of on frantic promotion of an idol group, because they won't want to undermine their own achievement by attempting to launch another idol group hot on the heels of the previous one. The first half is a satisfying and enjoyable series almost as good as Macross Frontier. The second half is a such an unqualified disaster caused by a profound lack of exposition and a spectacularly lazy attempt to recycle Macross Frontier's second half that it feels like a punishment for enjoying the first half. That was Walkure's schtick... one constant about Macross is that Kawamori never lets them do the same schtick twice in a row. IIRC, he wanted to do something more alone the lines of animating Macross the Ride, a show with no idols that was about dueling airshow teams, but he got overruled. Now the pendulum's due to swing the other way and hopefully give us something that's at least more balanced than Delta was. Passionate Walkure isn't available on BD/DVD yet, but I'm inclined to suspect it's going to turn out to be Walkure's version of Interstella 5555.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    GERWALK mode isn't really made for fast forward flight... it's more for hovering and attack helicopter-like support maneuvering. That said, as powerful as some of those sub-engines are they don't really NEED to be big to achieve the intended result. The VF-1's liquid fuel rockets are small, but they're more powerful in terms of maximum output than the fighter's FF-2001 engine running at overboost (200%). The VF-25 had a bank of six small thrusters that, from the color of their exhaust, appear to be small thermonuclear reaction thrusters that are on the back of the airframe body in the part where it connects to the forearm shield. They're visible in that shot shortly after Alto rescues Ranka from the hull breach in Island-1 in Frontier's second episode. There's a part on the VF-31 that looks like it's probably something similar, though simply angling the VF's main engines is going to produce some pretty impressive thrust on its own (e.g. what we saw Hikaru do in the original series w/ that VF-1D, with one foot for hover thrust and one for forward motion).
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Page 061 of the Macross Delta Character Design Works book. It really doesn't look anything like a Zentradi Army uniform. If it weren't for those rank tabs on the shoulders and those funky shoulder pads, it'd be a pretty generic gray long coat of the type you could buy in practically any store. What he's wearing under it looks like it might be the regular uniform shirt from the New UN Forces duty uniform in Frontier and Delta, for those who aren't "fancy" like Major Marin or Brigadier Peliot (who wear either ties or ascots). More interestingly, a good view of the pilot suit looks nothing like contemporary New UN Forces-issue TSV or TSS-series pilot suits either. It looks for all the world like it's based on the Feios Valkyrie's pilot suit from Macross Digital Mission VF-X. He's not in a leadership position though... he's just a rank and file pilot. The New UN Forces officers we see are wearing a mostly unmodified version of the same New UN Forces duty uniform from Macross Frontier.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    No offense, but from your remarks elsewhere it's pretty clear you didn't care before... about any title after maybe DYRL?. Nah, Macross Delta doesn't seem to have done any harm to the Macross fandom. The movie Passionate Walkure reportedly did quite well in Japan recently. It's slow here because forums are kind of on the decline as an online social environment while Facebook groups are on the rise, and this site's kind of Delta-hostile thanks to so many older fans who were opposed to the series on principle because it was basically the second coming of Macross 7. I'd be surprised if it did. Past performance, Kawamori tends to set new series in new locales with the minimum necessary references to past shows. Future novels... hell yes, we'll almost certainly see Windermereans who've emigrated away from Windermere facing suspicion (if not racism) for their homeworld's hostility towards the New UN Government. 'course they did kinda worry that bone quite a bit in Delta itself with the suspicion towards Freyja.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty big reach, IMO... considering that aliens and hybrids usually have some obvious trait that marks them out as such. (Pointy ears, exotic skin colors, extra appendages, etc.) Wright's jacket is pretty close in design to Ushio Todo's special forces longcoat, and he was a certified human (and certifiably crazy). The hat looks like a black version of the regular New UN Forces standard issue one (which is usually white, which I guess marks him out as special forces). "Natural talent" is kind of a recurring schtick in cases like this. Look at how it worked for Mylene... she had basically zero experience and in fairly short order her natural talent for VF operations had her flying at the same level as elite special forces badass normal Gamlin Kizaki. Alto too. He changed majors at Mihoshi Academy from theater to space flight and he was flying at a level rivaling professional soldiers with two years of regular commercial-grade spaceflight training. Hayate's had the advantage that mecha control systems have been at least partially standardized for somewhere on the order of half a century by the time he made the move from a forklift operator to fighter pilot.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Somewhere between "vanishingly small" and "zero", I reckon. With Macross releases still effectively blocked from regular distribution channels in the US by You-Know-Who through at least mid-March in 2021, there's nothing for them to gain by unveiling the series in a market they can't legally distribute that series in and where the fandom isn't all that big. (To say nothing of doing so at a convention that takes place on the opposite side of the country from the biggest concentration of Macross fans.) Smart money says they'll do the big reveal in Japan, to the home market crowd. I'd love nothing better than to be wrong about that though. Like Delta, our path to legitimate access is going to be the Blu-ray release when it comes out three months or so after the series airs in Japan. Hopefully sales of the English-subbed DVD/BD Macross Delta and Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure are strong enough that the new series will follow suit and include official subs. Otherwise, we're stuck with fansubs.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    As noted previously, it would appear that this latest Macross production is likely operating on similar production timing to what was used for Macross Frontier and Macross Delta. If that is in fact the case, we shouldn't expect to hear anything of significance until mid-September at the earliest. The last two times it was a title reveal in September, followed by the first trailer in late October, and then the cut-down teaser edition of the first episode airing in the last week or so of December.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I could kinda see that... admittedly not because it's not enjoyable in its own way, but because it's so wildly off-tone from the usual Universal Century War-Is-Hell depression-fest that it stands out like a live peacock in a police lineup of thanksgiving turkeys. As much as the Gundam franchise indulges in continuity porn via the Universal Century, I suspect a lot of that inclination to dismiss it stems from it having been decanonized. The UC's obsession with continuity has reached the point that like half of what gets produced is side story material and they had at least one whole series devoted to continuity porn (Unicorn). The fandom does lapse into an attitude that the UC is for SERIOUS BUSINESS and "fun" and "lighthearted" stuff should go be in a different timeline... like what happened to G-Reco. Which makes it all the more tragic that they didn't cast Tim Curry. (His scenes in Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 were him chewing the scenery with such gusto that it rivals Raul Julia's hammy M. Bison from Street Fighter or his earlier performance in Rocky Horror. "SPAAAAAAAAAAACE!")
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Agh... I'm gonna miss it by three days! Three stinkin' days.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    If it's not an imposition, what all did you hear about G-Saviour from the online community before watching it? I've only rarely seen G-Saviour lumped into the same category of celluloid cancer as the Star Wars Holiday Special. Usually, fans tend to lump it in with other quickly-forgotten adaptations that were accidentally funny because they were campy as hell but tried to play themselves seriously like that 1994 Street Fighter movie or Starship Troopers. I found watching the movie to be a lot like seeing someone's compilation of all the overacted live-action cutscenes in Command and Conquer.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Hopefully another 100% original feature that Sunrise can easily disown if it turns out to be a steaming turd like G-Saviour. I'd hate to see them sh*t all over a classic like Char's Counterattack. Never underestimate the ingenuity of fools... mother nature is always building a bigger and better one.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    They even brought a redshirt (or greenshirt, fittingly for Macross) with them in true Star Trek TOS fashion. You could always tell when Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Ensign Ricky beamed down to a planet, Ensign Ricky's wife was about to collect on a Starfleet widow's pension. To be fair to Star Trek, Starfleet is only ever depicted or described as an actual military agency in its bleak, conflict-heavy alternate quantum realities like the Mirror Universe, the Kelvin timeline, or that short-lived one in "Yesterday's Enterprise". (Discounting fabrications like "Living Witness".) They've always depicted Starfleet as an exploratory, scientific, diplomatic, and humanitarian aid agency first and foremost. They moonlight as soldiers in wartime but they're more like a space coast guard than a space navy. They can't deviate from the TV series story too much... Robotech fans are known for being highly averse to change. She could get away with it, since she was only a 1st Lieutenant and chief flight controller for alpha shift rather than, say, the CO, XO, CAG, or some other high administrative talking head. To be fair, he does an awful lot of making things worse before he saves the day... like covering up for Guld's mental instability and his attempt to sabotage the Shinsei team by framing Isamu for an attempted murder.
  14. Seto Kaiba

    Hi-Metal R

    Seto Kaiba replied to joppewo's topic in Toys

    Got in my preorder for Nex Gilbert's VF-2SS early this morning. Not about to miss out on the Macross II love while Bandai's actually showing it for once.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, one of the 5th Generation emigrant fleets... those bioplant ships look like they're actually pretty nice places to live. Not Macross-25 (Macross Frontier) or Macross-29 though. Getting shot at by space beetles or living in a deteriorating city full of rioting Zentradi because the head of state's a ninny who couldn't negotiate his way out of a damp paper sack wouldn't go over all that well with me. Eden was colonized by a short-distance emigrant fleet in 2013 in the time between the 2012 launch of Megaroad-01 at the head of the 1st Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet and the 2014 launch of Megaroad-02 and the 2nd Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet... around 17 years before the first New Macross-class emigrant ship was launched in 2030.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming they're even aware of his incredibly blatant evilness. You may or may not remember (personally, I try to forget) that the "Macross Saga" holdover characters in Robotech II: the Sentinels failed to notice any of the blatant signs of his sinister intent and Saturday morning cartoon villain behavior and evil dialog for over 21 years until he finally launched a coup d'etat against them. Two decades of cackling about how he's going to get those Hunters and their little dog too, and they were still surprised when he tried to kill them. The hammiest villain in Robotech, and that's saying something considering how crap the franchise's writing typically is and its "creator" being a fan of L. Ron Hubbard.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Nah. In order to set a trend, people have to actually acknowledge the existence of the party doing the trend-setting. One of the constants in the Robotech franchise's history is that nobody really takes any notice of its existence unless its owners are actively f*cking over another, much more popular franchise at the time and is often swiftly forgotten thereafter.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Captains in Star Trek go charging headlong into danger to get captured all the time?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    One travesty is as good as another... though Robotech's fans were doing the militant butthurt fanboy thing before it was cool. So many memories... so many flame wars over TV vs novels vs comics, Macek vs Yune, official canon vs speculation...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    One would imagine they would court Big West first for that purpose... deeper pockets, y'know? In the unlikely event that Tatsunoko were to go bankrupt and have to liquidate assets, they wouldn't have to wait until 2021. I'd have to check how Japanese contract law is written to see if selling their Macross rights would invalidate HG's license outright, or if the new owner would be obligated to continue honoring that license until its term ended. I suspect the former.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The Best is yet to come!
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That's not much of a loss, TBH. Round-number figures for per-episode anime production costs on a typical late-night anime series c.2016 were cited at approximately ¥19.23 million1 (~$174,300 USD), with ¥250 million (~$2.27 million USD) being the typical going rate for a 13-episode series. In perspective, that ¥50 million net loss that Tatsunoko posted for FY2017 is about what they would spend on production for 2 1/2 episodes of a weekly TV anime. (Or, more depressingly, what they'd spend on the annual salaries of 16 animators at the industry average compensation of ¥3.1 million per annum.) Animation is a hard business to turn a profit in, since so much of it depends on merchandising and events. I'm sure they're used to the occasional lean year if they don't have a hot property on deck at the time. One has to wonder how much of that red ink is Harmony Gold's fault, from the arbitration over the issue of royalties and legal fees, and getting stuck with HG's court costs and attorney fees on top of their own because of it. 1. https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2015-08-13/anime-insiders-share-how-much-producing-a-season-costs/.91536
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The track is "Nostalgia". It's #30 on Disc-1 of the soundtrack CD set Macross the Complete.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    You misunderstand. I'm saying the preview is torture, and I want to know what I need to do to send the cenobites inflicting it on us back to their hell-dimension.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    The UFP wasn't in a declared war with anyone when the Constitution-class was upgraded to have an automated bridge defense system. Also, for a nominally non-confrontational galactic power, the United Federation of Planets seems to be at war more often than not. Just in the overlapping TNG-DS9-VOY era, you had: The Cardassian War (2347-2367) The Galen Border Conflict (mid-2350s, vs. the Talarians) One or more wars with the Tzenkethi (mid-2360s for the most recent) The Second Klingon War (2372-2373) The Second Borg Invasion (2373) The Dominion War (2373-2375) The Borg-8472 War (2374) The Reman Invasion (2379) Precious few were the years when the Federation Starfleet wasn't fighting a war with someone in the galaxy between 2332 and the present day... which gets worse when you factor in events from other sources (the Relaunch timeline): The Parasite Crisis (2376) The Iconian Gateway Crisis (2376) The Tezwa Conflict (2379) The Third Borg Invasion (2380) The Fourth (and Final) Borg Invasion (2381) Skirmishes with every Typhon Pact power (2381-?) Paramount abruptly reversed course on Star Trek: the Animated Series around 2004-2005. Up to that point, the series had been non-canon. From that point on, it's considered to represent years four and five of the Enterprise's five year mission. Surely it was only a coincidence that The Powers That Be decided to canonize TAS at exactly the same time they announced plans to release the series on DVD while Star Trek: Enterprise season five development (pre-cancellation) had an episode under development under the working title of "Kilkenny Cats" that featured the Kzinti and was explicitly billed as a prequel to TAS's "The Slaver Weapon". (The episode proposal got as far as concept art for the 22nd century Kzinti ship when cancellation killed Season Five.) Yes, surely there was no ulterior motive at play...
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