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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Venturing into Rom Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions season two... and it's just as good as season one. This one's rapidly becoming a favorite.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Indictments of the show's terrible writing don't come much more damning than that. Hideo "Nanomachines" Kojima likes the writing... that's like a pat on the back from Uwe Boll and Ed Wood at the gates of filmmaker hell. I know exactly what you mean. Being a subs-over-dubs guy, my first instinct was "Gundam is anime" and so I changed the audio to Japanese and the subs to English. Then I was politely baffled when the lip flap didn't match at all and the voice casting was full of dubious choices and dodgy performances. Turns out, this one was written in English so when Netflix says "English (Original)" for the audio choice they are NOT kidding. This series was written to be watched in English, so it doesn't flow right in Japanese. Then I switchd it back to English and found that, while the voice acting flows more naturally and the casting choices are far more appropriate, the writing is still dreadful. That's because, as is typical for Gundam UC side stories, they're not the same designs we're used to seeing. They're implied or outright stated to be yet another batch of one-off custom jobs for prototyping something or other. In this case, the Gundam is a bridge design between the original RX-78 and the RX-79[G] Gundam Ground Type from 08th MS Team. Weirdly, it seems to be drawing inspiration from the Ez8 custom for the head (which is why it has that weird chinstrap). Its official designation is given as RX-78[G]E Gundam EX.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    First, the section of my post you quoted was talking about the other characters of both genders in Requiem for Vengeance... not all female characters in Gundam. That's not the counterargument you think it is because everyone else in this series is in proper uniform, which just makes Hot Topic Trooper stand out more. Second, I'd like to point out that Helena from Code Fairy there is still wearing the actual uniform... something our Hot Topic Trooper can't claim. Her tattoos aren't visible when she has her uniform jacket done up properly and I don't believe her hair color is described as a dyejob like Chara Soon's is. Third and lastly, Helena's part of a special forces unit under Kycilia Zabi's direct authority kind of like Char and thus exempt from a lot of the usual regulations. Not something our Hot Topic Trooper can claim... and even then, she's only lightly skirting the uniform regs instead of outright ignoring them. Yeah... it's actually hard to take her seriously because she looks so incredibly unprofessional and out of place compared to all of the other Zeon soldiers. The writers can try to make her badass all they want, but she's never not going to look like Zeon was so hard up for cannon fodder that they pressganged some random carnie. Interestingly, the official website for the series actually mentions that Hot Topic Trooper's appearance is a violation of regulations and that she is routinely written up for failing to comply with dress code by her superiors. That, and her otherwise being highly capable, are her only character traits.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Everyone has their own experiences, certainly. My friends and family in the Army and Marines have had almost universally negative experiences with PMC troops on the ground. They almost without exception described the PMC troops they'd met as dangerously undisciplined military cosplayers. Civilians power-tripping on being allowed to carry firearms and play soldier, who are too panicky or too trigger-happy to be relied upon to de-escalate or conduct themselves properly in combat and too eager to feel powerful to be trusted not to intimidate or harass the locals. Just massively problematic people in general. This view extends well up into the military's top brass, with many generals commenting publicly that PMC troops are stupid, reckless, poorly-trained, and generally a liability because the military has to clean up the aftermath of their gung-ho idiocy. Brigadier General Horst made some delightfully trenchant remarks about that in '05, and he was far from the only one. The handful of current- and former-PMC personnel I've met and worked with when I was doing government work weren't much different from what I'd been told. Even the ones I met who'd already retired were very toxic people who constantly sought to intimidate others in order to feel in control and who were frequently openly racist. Mind you, there's also quite a lot of documented evidence of PMC troops - yes, even US ones - being involved in both petty criminal activity and actual war crimes over many years in various combat zones. Everything from little stuff like harassment, assault, and armed robbery up to the scale to rape, torture, and murder. PMCs on average are pretty well entrenched in villainous territory in the real world... which makes the heroic PMCs in Macross feel a bit silly in hindsight. Esp. with such high-profile villainy on the part of PMCs in recent years. Xaos, at least, is authentically inept when it comes to actual military endeavors. Their crew of military washouts fumbled the bag so hard that a fourth-rate power like Windermere whose troops had never even seen live combat before was able to push them out of the entire star cluster and bankrupt them with minimal effort in the space of just a few months despite being massively outnumbered by far more experienced personnel. It's a nice touch that the series actually acknowledges the illegal nature of their participation in the war, and the other criminal misconduct of the company like its illegal cloning operation.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    No, they were not. It's unknown if they were among the crew who perished when the ship was transported into deep space by the Macross's fold jump or if they were simply off screen for the duration. To the best of my knowledge, the only time either commanding officer has appeared is in the manga Macross the First. The captain of the Daedalus is briefly seen and named in the flashback chapters. His name is John Morton.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Gundam, and especally UC Gundam, gives that treatment to female civilians... not female soldiers. Those female civilians are typically The Load, The Chick, or The Love Interest and aren't directly involved in the fighting. They're "waifus". Women in the military in Gundam tend to be depicted as consummate professionals. There is some mild sexism mixed in based on when certain titles were made and the concept of professional women at the time, but almost all of them are shown to follow the uniform code as strictly as any other soldier (and often more than some of the men). Paramilitary factions in Gundam like the AEUG and Karaba, or mercenary outfits like the PMC Trust in 00 or Tekkadan in IBO are pretty loose on dress code... but they're not the real military. The EFF and Zeon/Neo Zeon/Cosmo Babylonia/Zanscare/etc. tend to all put their characters in uniform, neat and professional looking at all times. That one girl from the infantry in Requiem for Vengeance looks hilariously out of place compared to even the other characters doing her same job. They're all in proper uniform, no visible tattoos, no kind of piercings or hair dye. So she looks like she wandered onto the wrong set or something and was too embarrassed to admit she didn't belong..
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Second episode start, though... back to the weak s***. It's weirdly annoying that the cows are far better animated than the people. I wonder if the old joke about Egyptian tanks is true for Zaku tanks too... about the campaign to equip them with backup lights. Whoever is piloting that RX-78[G]E is just sadistic. It is even more apparent in this episode that the Gundam is toying with the Zeon mobile suits and stalking the protagonist. If nothing else, Requiem for Vengeance can say with pride that it has done more to make it clear why the Gundam invoked such fear from the Principality of Zeon's forces than almost any other title in the franchise and certainly any title in the UC. This is giving T-800 from the original Terminator movie energy. It's unstoppable. It's learning. And it's coming for you. RUN. I am at the end of episode two and I am almost ready to be disappointed this series is only six episodes long. It's interesting that there's so much emphasis on the Red Wolf Zaku II leader model, when it's only in one episode of the six so far. I'm gonna catch the remaining three episodes tomorrow... but at the halfway point what I can say for it is that this (mini)series stands on its action. The story is unremarkable at best, with some incredibly stilted dialog. The characters are almost totally undeveloped thus far and are really only here to react to the Gundam tearing sh*t up. The actual mobile suit fights are quite impressive. This series does a great job of one key point and that's making the Gundam scary. It isn't just unstoppable, it's predatory. It's sadistic in how it toys with the Zeon mobile suits before tearing the apart. This is the Gundam as a horror movie monster.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Okie-dokie... starting Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance... Still don't like that title. Requiem for Vengeance sounds edgy AF but it's nonsensical. A requiem is a mass for the dead, or a musical composition meant to be played at same. Did the concept of vengeance itself die? Once I got to the OP, it became apparent that this is leaning on MS IGLOO so hard that it's actually a bit sad... it's just reminding me of what will surely turn out to have been a much better show. Talk about borrowed street cred, though... yeesh. I will say this in Requiem for Vengeance's favor. That first beam rifle hit is ****ING GORGEOUS. Ooh. That's just... [a noise of distinct satisfaction]. It is as abrupt and horrifying in its power as you could ever hope to see a beam rifle from Gundam depicted. After so many shows where there's just a pink beam and the enemy mobile suit explodes into a pretty pink explosion, this is something that makes a beam weapon scary again. NGL, the writing in the first episode dialog-wise... pretty bad. That first mobile suit fight, though. Had me like:
  9. Seto Kaiba
    NGL, if you'd stopped at that third sentence I'd be sold. That's more or less exactly how I think a story told from the perspective of the Principality of Zeon's occupation forces should go. The jackbooted goons of one of the most evil regimes in human history getting a taste of the fear they've infliced on the entire Earth sphere. I'm gonna give it a whirl in a minute.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    That's been done a few times before... even MS IGLOO dabbled in it, showing Oliver May footage of the Federation's "white devil" recovered from the cameras of a Zaku. It's sensible enough. From Zeon's perspective, any engagement with a Gundam during the One Year War is basically Friday the 13th with giant robots as a single impacable killer with a chalk-white face embarks on an unstoppable killing spree. (Ironically, the best take on this one wasn't done by Sunrise. It was Aldnoah.Zero.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    We're almost never given more than the vaguest approximation of where planets exist in relation to each other... the Brisingr globular cluster and Eden are the only real exceptions, since we know approximately how far they are from Earth and each other. Yeah, I look forward to the day that Macross's writers decide to research what PMCs are actually like in the real world and rapidly course-correct towards depicting them as what they typically are: ammosexual civilians playing dress-up because they're convinced they're starring in their own personal action movie and ex-privates who lacked the discipline needed for a military career. In hindsight, I suppose Macross Delta did try to meet me halfway there. SMS was a hypercompetent PMC contracted to field-test the military's latest and greatest tech in live combat and staffed with the brightest and best soldiers that could be lured away from the NUNS with massive salaries. Xaos, by contrast, is a barely competent private outfit under the regional command of a guy who was kicked out of the military for sedition and is staffed mainly by folks who washed out of the underfunded local NUNS for various reasons. Their most promising recruit is a former forklift driver with a passion for dancing, and the all-important idol group they support and weaponize is made up of (in rough order of severity) a failed solo idol, a cyber-criminal working under duress, an illegal immigrant who also emigrated illegally, an illegal clone, and most heinous of all... Makina. 😝 (The above is a joke, folks.) If you think about it, we can acknowledge Macross Delta for what it really is... a truly spectacular ad for forklift certification. Hayate Immelmann got forklift certified, and it almost directly led to him saving the galaxy. Truly, the forklift certified are the real heroes among us. We did kind of get a scenario like that in Master File's Volunteer Knights of Arkarelia... with General Galaxy's own in-house private military company, the General Galaxy Corporate Forces, serving as antagonists and assisting one emigrant planet's invasion of a neighboring peaceful planet. I used that exact reasoning to explain why certain characters looked far younger than their chronological ages in more than one Macross RPG. (One of whom was a Jenius, yes.) Considering what we've seen malfunctioning fold systems do to ships, like warping space-time into an impassable wall or carving it up like a roast by teleporting chunks of it into higher dimensions, setting it to maximum range, throwing it at someone, and telling it to be anywhere but here is already pretty darn nasty.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Early model fold boosters like the FBF-1000A fold booster seen in Macross Plus and Macross 7 were single-use fold systems rated for a single fold jump of up to 20 light years. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur and VF-22 Sturmvogel II explain these limitations as a product of the somewhat basic/stripped-down nature of the miniaturized fold system and its use of large amounts of low quality fold carbon in order to keep the cost of the unit down. Master File also suggests that this cheap and disposable fold system's design was the genesis of the first improvised fold bombs that led to the eventual development of the Dimension Eater by 2059. Later models like the FAB-1000 fold booster that was used by SMS and the New UN Forces in Macross Frontier were more advanced and capable designs using higher quality fold carbon that could be used for longer distances and multiple fold jumps. They could be recovered and reattached automatically, as seen in Macross Frontier.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The hover tank is only supposed to be about 6 m tall. So yeah about 3 to 3 and 1/2 people tall. Still, look at the detail work there. Tekering is out here putting the official licensees to shame again.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    This is the page in question.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I just love that the Forever Ensign Harry Kim joke is finally canon. 🤣
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle and Variable Fighter Designer's Note both print the same shots of the CG model of the VF-27 + Super Fold Booster. The one on pg212 of Designer's Note is MUCH larger and clearer, though, and in that one it's almost salmon pink IMO.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, very true... I guess I forgot how old-fashioned much of Japan still is since the firms I work with over there use more modern solutions (probably for our sake). 🤔 My brief confusion aside, 365 Days to the Wedding is quite a cute little romance/romcom series. I've heard from a friend there's a live action version too.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    And it'd actually be three minutes for everyone! One of the bigger logistical problems with fold navigation is the disparity between the passage of time aboard a folding ship vs. the passage of time in realspace and the way fold faults exacerbate it. The trip to Gallia IV in Macross Frontier episodes 11 and 12 is a great example. According to Leon, the Frontier fleet was close enough to Gallia IV to make the trip there by space fold almost instantaneous. The multiple mild fold faults between the fleet and the planet meant that Alto and Sheryl only perceived a short time traveling to the planet but it really took over a week to get there because the fold faults increased the disparity between experienced time and actual time to over 172 hours. Thanks to the Super Fold Booster LAI'd developed, Michael Blanc was able to make the same trip that took Alto and Sheryl over a week in a matter of minutes because fold faults were no longer an obstacle. (It's entirely possible there are career space pilots in the galaxy who are physically and mentally months or years younger than their date of birth would suggest due to the disparity between time in fold vs. in realspace and the way fold faults exaggerate it.) It's still way less problematic than other FTL methods with time dialation-like effects. WH40K's warp drives come with the possibility of arriving centuries or millennia late, arriving before you ever left, or if something goes really wrong, having that coffee you were brewing drink you instead. 🤣
  19. Seto Kaiba
    My feeling exactly. As long as the characters are engaging and the story is compelling, I'm good with whatever. 😁 That's a question every mecha title ends up asking... because there are a few standouts like Macross or Evangelion, but mostly everyone's just copycatting Gundam since the early 90's. One of the provisions of the agreement between them and Big West is supposedly that Big West won't use the designs of the original series in new works going forward. With "Lady M" now linked to the Megaroad-01 and Misa and Minmay, it's highly likely to become an orphaned plot thread for legal reasons.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well, we did already have a Char clone in Macross II... Lord Feff ticks a lot of the checkboxes including having a custom red mecha with a horn and higher performance than usual, and being a space nobleman aligned with the baddies.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Acro Trip is... well... kind of a trip. It's the story of a young girl named Chizuko who is a positively rabid fangirl for her town's resident magical girl Berry Blossom. By coincidence, she encounters her idol's ineffectual villain Chrome in town one day and he attempts to persuade her to join his evil organization and provide some quality magical menace to keep Berry Blossom employed. It has a warped sense of humor to be sure. I'd say it's a bit like a non-ecchi version of Gushing Over Magical Girls, with a comedy emphasis instead. I'm having a lot of fun with it.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing so far, no. That's how it started... with Sunrise creating the Future Century because it literally couldn't make Bandai's demands for the next series after Victory work with the existing setting... but that stopped being the case a good while back. The Universal Century timeline was already a lot of baggage to work with in the mid-90's when the Future Century and After Colony timelines were created. Now, the sheer volume of material and Sunrise's (now Bandai Namco Filmworks's) canon policy have made the UC so dense, tangled, and impenetrable that new UC titles simply aren't accessible to non-fans. 2002's Gundam SEED was the first time Sunrise created an AU specifically to have a stand-alone story that would make Gundam accessible to first-time viewers. That's been their AU strategy ever since. Macross has a much more loosey-goosey setting and no firm canon policy, so it doesn't really have the problem that drives Bandai Namco Filmworks to create so many AUs. Each new Macross series is as separate from the others as possible and the whole thing runs on broad strokes continuity that only references specific events where it absolutely has to, so there's no continuity lockout and any information about past events you need can be summed up in under a minute. From what we've seen in the news, that restriction applies to new titles developed after the agreement. (Though the Absolute Live!!!!!! Max is based on the Macross 7 design, and the Megaroad-01 is outside HG's licenses. The main sticking point would be the original trio who we saw two of in silhouette in the movie.) It was, but the Battle Astraea and its Siren Delta System were the lynchpin of the whole operation under the organization's leader Cromwell. With those three key components gone, the organization almost certainly fell apart similar to how other anti-government movements in previous titles did. It's basically a repeat of what happened to Latence when the Ravens blew up Macross 13. The whole organization just kind of rolled up like a windowshade thereafter. The Epsilon Foundation's still around, but the organization as a whole doesn't seem to be malevolent. It's like General Galaxy or Gundam's Anaheim Electronics. It's a huge, amoral corporation that's mainly interested in profit above all else and has a few employees who sell arms to both sides out of greed, sympathy, or simply for self-advancement. It happens at the climax of the movie. That big skull-shaped pod that the Galaxy soldiers bring to the Battle Frontier's bridge is their life support system. After Brera breaks free from their mind control, he shoots his way into the Battle Frontier's CIC and blows them up with his gunpod at point-blank range. It's basically the last thing he does in the film before the epilogue. So yeah, they're dead... in a "the soot that used to be them is all over the Battle Frontier's deck plating" sort of way.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Mecha-ude might be a strong new contender for "Worst Shounen Anime". The first episode left me thinking the series was lazy, overly derivative, and profoundly lacking in anything resembling original thought or artistic merit. The second episode is, if anything, actually worse. This is what you'd get if you asked ChatGPT to write a painfully generic shounen anime. It's a collection of overused tropes and shallow stock characters woven into a woefully threadbare with no real sense of direction or purpose. This episode attempts to explain the central conflict of the story, but all that the writers could muster in terms of ideas was "Rise up against this litigation-safe stand-in for Amazon.com to defend these dangerous self-aware macguffins from being studied!" No, really. That's it. 365 Days to the Wedding is an interesting little romcom about a pair of travel agency employees who... actually, hold up. Does this kind of manual effort in-person travel agency even still exist in the real world? With desk jockeys actually calling hotels and airlines and such to reserve bookings for clients? I thought that kind of thing went the way of the dinosaur twenty years ago when online booking became the new normal. This seems like it'd be really wasteful, expensive, and time consuming compared to booking online. Anyway... 365 Days to the Wedding is the story of two seriously introverted 20-somethings who work for a Tokyo-based travel agency. When their company announces that it will reassign one unmarried staff member from their department to be the branch manager of a new branch office in Alaska in one year's time, they join forces to avoid the unwanted reassignment by faking an engagement. Their efforts to fake it 'til they make it are unwittingly helped by their manager totally shipping it.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Kawamori's just providing "oversight", so I wouldn't be surprised if he has Bandai Namco Filmworks marching to a similar schedule. It's effectively his franchise, after all. If anything, we should be hoping that Bandai Namco Filmworks is not supplying the writers for this exercise. The writers working on the Gundam franchise are so used to rote repetition of the same tired formula they they're all but completely incapable of writing original material. I'd much rather not see Macross devolve into a second Universal Century Gundam where the only thing that changes title-to-title is the proper nouns. If Bandai Namco Filmworks's Macross project is a new main series like we suspect it is, it'll be pretty much unconnected to previous works like its predecessors. That's how Macross avoids the continuity lockout problem Gundam has. Each new series is kept as separate from the others as possible and any required info about past events is either explained organically in-series or info-dumped at the start of the episode.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Ended up binging the first half-dozen episodes of Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions. It's really quite good. The titular detective reminds me a lot of the himbo Sherlock Holmes from Dai Gyakuten Saiban/The Great Ace Attorney, and the overall vibe is like if Holmes had resolved to stay out of the spotlight by steering John Watson to the answers and propping him up as the real Great Detective. It takes a fair bit from Sherlock Holmes, albeit framed in a modern context, and manages to keep the course of each case pretty well obscured without violating Knox's ten commandments of detective fiction.
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