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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's almost always presented exactly as it's read: "Gubaba".
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Gosh, what gave it away? I can see it now. The first one to open the Star Wars: the Last Jedi BD box in his home will be visited by apparitions of the Disney board of directors, who will say "We have such sights to show you".
  3. Seto Kaiba
    As @Sandman said, that's been done already. The fourth season of Star Trek: Enterprise already gave us the explanation for the human-looking Klingons in Star Trek's original series in the two-parter "Afflication" and "Divergence". That was a result of an imperfect fix for a botched Klingon genetic engineering experiment to create augment Klingons using DNA obtained from the remains of the Eugenics Wars-era augments that Dr. Soong had "liberated". The augment DNA had been picked up by an alien flu virus and become a highly-contagious retrovirus that was lethally mangling Klingon DNA. Dr. Phlox's treatment could only do so much for the already-infected, and only stopped the virus in the early stages... resulting in their loss of cranial ridges, and biochemical changes that made them behaviorally more like humans. In the Star Trek: Enterprise relaunch novels, the victims of the virus are called QuchHa' (which is apparently Klingon for "unhappy ones") and were second-class citizens in the Empire until a cure was found over a century later. By the time Star Trek Discovery is set, the human-looking QuchHa' Klingons had already been a thing for over a century. (101 years, 5 months, and 14 days if we're counting the days between "Affliction" and "The Vulcan Hello".)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Someone did... the CG art they stole and later got retroactive permission to use was transparently modeled on a VF-0, to the extent that the original model has the VF-0B/D head.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Tonight, I presume you'll be one-upping that experience by solving the Lament Configuration?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, but with panels from this cropping up here and on several Facebook groups showing the ongoing deterioration of the art I'm starting to suspect this is a clandestine project on Titan's part to build a summer house in the Uncanny Valley.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    ... why do people keep buying these comics? If they really want to make themselves suffer, couldn't they just do something more sensible like get a minimum-wage service industry job, eat a bucket of laundry detergent pods, or swallow barbed wire, pull the other end out of their rectums, and floss themselves to death? I swear the art is getting worse with every panel.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. Disney paid a fortune for it, so they're going to milk it until its udders turn black and fall off. Extrapolating from my own experience with the "Legends" material, I suspect it'll take a VERY long time before Disney's near-pathological brand mismanagement diminishes the quality to the point a majority of Star Wars fans will no longer open their wallets. It was pretty, but it was all flash and no substance... and it loses many, MANY points for screwing up the opening of A New Hope retroactively. It reduced Vader's first scene from The Dreaded Enforcer hunting down suspected rebel sympathizers with incredible mystic powers and resources to a tired-as-hell traffic cop asking a young woman if she knows why he pulled her over and trying not to roll his eyes right out of his skull when she says "No".
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Harmony Gold is known to have obtained the merchandising rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love? from Tatsunoko in the early 2000s. Apart from reselling a few Macross-branded items from Japan pre-2008, IIRC the only thing they ever used those rights for was to do a single convention-exclusive "stealth" VF-1 w/ Strike Pack that a blatant knockoff of Yamato's 25th Anniversary VF-1S and include the Strike Pack in Toynami's short-lived 1:100 line. Mostly, they got the license to deny it to anyone else.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I don't know if you've looked in the Star Trek: Discovery thread and seen my strictures on the Star Trek relaunch continuity... but really, that one sentence about them hiring the Star Trek EU's writers said all that needed to be said. Yowza, that must have been a dumpster fire you could see from Andromeda.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The narm levels were off the charts there... most fan fiction is not THAT badly written. It makes The Last Jedi look like Oscarworthy material by comparison. IIRC, the "Diversity Alliance" was the moniker of a terrorist reactionary racist movement consisting entirely of aliens from species who were oppressed by the Empire and who were on a Bender-approved mission to Kill All Humans (via germ warfare). In true, terrible fan fiction-y expanded universe form, the original character running that terrorist organization was obligated to have some direct tie to the films so she was the sister or cousin of that dancing girl Jabba fed to the rancor. She would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids and their wookiee. Somebody get a mop! Unfortunately, my ridiculous memory for detail extends to way more than just Macross. I remember reading those books in like the 7th grade, just out of sheer boredom because there were several days a week I'd be obliged to bum around the library. I have very clear memories of finding the books painfully cliched, especially the spoiled rich kid and that girl who was a walking after-school special on the dangers of drug use. (Also have very clear memories of being amused by how anytime Lando appeared, Han or his kids would absolutely ruin whatever his latest business venture happened to be.) For me, I think it was either that Diversity Alliance sillybollucks runaround or that Dark Jedi who was trying an Oz gambit to set himself up as the Emperor-by-proxy that topped the charts in narm. (Of course, I was a cynical kid.) Apart from that crap about fuel pumps, the only hyperspace shenanigans were that big freaking gun on Starkiller Base and Han flying the Millennium Falcon through the Starkiller Base deflector shields by coming out of hyperspace a scant hundred meters or so above the surface. Personally, I thought the ship battle at the start of Revenge of the Sith was pretty awesome too... but then, being a big Warhammer 40,000 fan, that whole aesthetic of spaceships lining up to fire broadsides at each other and exploding into fiery conflagrations speaks to me on a deep, 8 year-old level. Wut?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Officially, yeah... what they've printed there is pretty much a straight pronunciation of the katakana. Gamlin's one of those unlucky characters who practically lives the Spell My Name with an "S" trope. Even the Macross 7 PLUS episode that features him joining the New UN Forces in the 37th Large Scale Long Distance Emigrant Fleet has a different variant spelling (the episode title being "TOP GAMRIN").
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Han made it sound like running into a physical object would be a "instant death" type thing, but I think The Force Awakens kind of nixed the idea that hyperdrives in a gravity well would have any major impact on space-time when the Falcon came out of hyperspace only a couple hundred feet above the surface of Starkiller Base. I can't shake the feeling that all that's really changed is the names... like a UC Gundam series, the space nazis are calling themselves something different this time around but it's the same old card-carrying evil. But "Only a Sith deals in absolutes" is an absolute... Hate is a path to the Dark Side, and prequels Obi-Wan does a suspicious amount of vocally hating things... One of the few EU titles I'm familiar with. KILL IT WITH FIRE. WITH. FIRE. (Wasn't she the one who built her lightsaber wrong and it blew up in her hand?) I know they jettisoned the old EU, but haven't they been releasing new tie-in comics and novels? I remember reading something about them creating a big, detailed backstory for Phasma that ended up being jettisoned into a novel rather than having any part in the films.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    As someone who doesn't consider themselves a Star Wars fan, I thought Return of the Jedi was a pretty solid flick. Not the most exciting of the original trilogy (that would have to be A New Hope) because it spent about half of its length aggressively tying up all the loose ends left behind by the conclusion of Empire Strikes Back, but still a respectable film and a worthy payoff for the end of a Hero's Journey story archetype. The fact that there was a very definite ENDING to the Star Wars story arc is a big part of why I've never been able to bring myself to like any of the Star Wars expanded universe and why I felt the new trilogy's offerings were both decidedly mediocre. You had a classic story capped with a solid, satisfying ending that the new work utterly invalidates. There is no great rebirth of democracy in that galaxy far far away, all that noise about a great destiny restoring balance to the force was a load, and the forces of darkness and oppression are at best momentarily inconvenienced by their efforts. ... if so, why did they sh*t a brick when Luke levitates C-3PO and start worshipping him as a god? This came up in a thread on MechaTalk a while back. What was said there was that the interdictor field (which I only remember from X-Wing vs TIE Fighter) doesn't actually prevent ships from using their hyperdrives... it's just creating conditions that trigger built-in safety features in hyperdrives to force ships back into realspace. If the safety features are disabled or removed, it's only creating a potentially injurious navigational hazard, which would be a non-issue for a ship hell-bent on suicide anyway.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Did they indicate that it's moving to another streaming service? Since today's a holiday and I don't have to work, I took advantage of the extra free time to watch more New Mobile Report Gundam Wing over breakfast. After the 13th episode I'm increasingly convinced that either OZ or the United Earth Sphere Alliance hit on a surefire way to detect seditious behavior: they outlawed internal monologues. Every sodding character in this feels compelled to announce their inmost thoughts to the world regardless of whether or not their thoughts are contextually appropriate. I left me thinking of the Leela musical episode of Futurama where the Robot Devil takes to the stage to complain about the writing, declaring "You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!" The Alliance commander of that base in Mogadishu announces OUT LOUD "I had no idea this fortress was so fragile" when it comes under attack by just a handful of mobile suits and is collapsing around his ears, and every time Zechs is using the Tallgeese he's muttering to himself constantly. Then there's this perplexing tendency of Gundam pilots to commit suicide. Heero tries to off himself at every opportunity, to such an extent that he's done about fifty times more damage to himself than any enemy has. I can only imagine what he could manage as a Gundam pilot if he turned that frightful urge for self-harm to hurting others instead... it's probably make those ZERO system-induced rampages later in the series look like a blank round exercise. Last episode, it was Trowa's turn to try to kill himself for no reason, apparently instigated by Heero. The only reason he manages to put his plan into motion is that security on OZ airbases is apparently on the honor system... absolutely nobody noticed the huge tractor trailer with the one-of-a-kind mobile suit wanted by every authority on the planet even when said mobile suit was standing in the big top with them. Not sure if OZ troops just all need corrective lenses, or if hundreds of trained elite soldiers all failed a spot check together. (How the circus staff didn't notice Trowa installing a giant mobile suit in the circus tent is another matter entirely...)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not really sure how that would work. I mean, there's loads of precedent for refits and variant subclasses within a class of starships that change its outward appearance like the Constitution-class refit or the Enterprise-B subclass of the Excelsior-class. I don't think we've ever had a case of a ship of one class being upgraded or retrofitted into a whole other class of starship. The creative staff for the Star Trek: Discovery series recently attempted to explain the difference in appearance of the Constitution-class wireframe for the Defiant vs. the classic Constitution-class as a retrofit carried out by the Terran Empire. I suppose it's theoretically possible that the Oberth-class was really an older class of starship from some point prior to the Constitution-class's development, but to accommodate the unusual registry number on the Grissom she'd have to be a contemporary of the Antares-class freighters from the early 2200s. That'd make the Oberth-class hands down the oldest class of ship in the Federation Starfleet by at least half a century. The non-canon Galaxy-class technical manual suggests a design lifespan of approximately one hundred years for a modern (c. 2360) Federation starship, but the Oberth-class would be approaching double that if they're still in service around the events of Nemesis, and they probably weren't built with an eye towards lasting even that long. (Mind you, some of the Relaunch timeline novels suggest the Starfleet Corps of Engineers have bandaided a few truly ancient ships such as Daedalus-class ships into continuous use, and those would be even older as the class is a relic of the Romulan War.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if the pattern continues and it's just a matter of preptime... the First Order should be done in by an army of Porgs led by Chewbacca in the next one.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, people were grumbling LOUDLY about "forced diversity" even before that... look at the fuss that was thrown over having a black main character in The Force Awakens. When you think about it, shouldn't the point effectively be moot regardless? I mean, if the character is there solely to tick off a "we have one of those" ethnic checkbox that means that their ethnicity is not relevant to the story. If the character could be played equally well by an actor or actress of an arbitrary ethnic background without any material change to the role or story, then what's to complain about? Unless you're a racist, there's no material difference between the role being played by the actor they picked or any other random actor or actress. (Not saying anyone here is... but I really can't see any other reason to get good and mad about those casting decisions when the character could be just as easily replaced by another CGI abomination like Jar-Jar Binks with no appreciable difference.) Didn't they? I mean, they wiped out a solid division of Imperial ground troops including multiple armored fighting vehicles using nothing fancier than napped-stone weapons, arrows, and logs tied to ropes. They had the advantage of numbers and the element of surprise, and they seemingly did enough damage to the Empire's forces on Endor to start repurposing captured Imperial kit as household items.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Δ Gaiden: Macross E declines to give the vessel's original name, but does confirm that it was a Macross-class SDFN that was part of the emigrant fleet that settled Pipure. Ivan Tsari, the series antagonist, dubs it the Macross Extra after taking possession of it and relaunching it.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Somehow, I doubt the Epsilon Foundation will end up becoming the final boss... Berger Stone was more an opportunist than any kind of card-carrying villain like Grace O'Connor or the Galaxy Executives. All the Frontier movies did was transfer the blame a bit higher up the chain of command in the same faction, whereas that would be more like substituting a different faction. (It'd also be a poor fit for Windermere's anti-human racism to be puppets of a human-owned corporation.) Well yeah, but that's because the planetary government was looking to offload an obsolete warship and they had an ulterior motive for buying it and gifting it to Ivan Tsari... they wanted to field test the use of fold song to control Var syndrome.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I feel like you're kinda missing the trees for the forest with respect to the point I was making. Yes, people go to the movies to be entertained. A big part of the entertainment of a movie is immersion, and what helps with the immersiveness of a movie and thus its entertainment value, is having characters you can relate to. Being unable to relate to the cast can damn an otherwise good movie, and being able to relate to the cast can save an otherwise mediocre one. That's why, back then, the roles of Leia and Lando were a pretty big deal. A princess who was an ass-kicking take-charge leader instead of a naive, defenseless piece of arm candy, and a black man who was successful and respected businessman and civic leader rather than a criminal or a butler. It's much the same reaction that Whoopi Goldberg related having when she found Star Trek while channel-surfing as a kid... "there's a black woman on TV and she isn't a maid!". Do I even want to know what that means? Still, it was a huge, HUGE step forward from your standard film industry princess or ladies role in an action movie as The Load, the Damsel in Distress, and/or the Plot Coupon. Yeah she's not a super-complex character, but then nobody in Star Wars is... it's built onto your standard Hero's Journey tropes, and the public's familiarity with all the associated tropes helps gloss over a lot of really severe issues with the writing. I mean, hell, Disney didn't have a princess who wasn't The Load until what? 1998? Back then, the audience would've gone into Star Wars expecting Leia to behave more like Willie from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Kinda my point... it's not like the civil rights movement magically cured inequality, and even today there's still a pretty big struggle for minorities in film to escape being typecast into racial stereotypes. Good luck finding a black man in a police movie who isn't either the partner, the guy who's two days from retirement and dies, a shrieking ninny like every character Chris Rock has played, or some kind of drug-dealing thug gangster pimp. Actresses with large breasts get typecast as the sexpot or the femme fatale, and there's a standing point of frustration that women over 40 get offered an anomalous number of roles as witches. My point, it's an ongoing problem. George Lucas just wanted to make his spacy fantasy movie... Gene Roddenberry was a man on a social progressive mission to give every last one of the network censors an ulcer. Mind you, Gene could only push the network censors so far before they started pushing back. His original vision of Spock was as someone who looked "Satanic"... as in bright red, with horns and a goatee. The network were also the ones who killed the idea of having a female first officer on the Enterprise, and Gene and William Ware Theiss played all kinds of merry hell with the standards and practices on wardrobe. There was considerable frustration expressed that shows like I Dream of Genie could get away with a costume where the actress's breasts were one good sneeze away from falling out but you couldn't show a belly button. The huge topic of pushback was the interracial kiss, so much so that the network insisted on shooting an alternate "hug" take that they had intended to force the show to use instead of the kiss... and were only stopped by Bill Shatner deliberately flubbing every take that was shot for the hug variant by making absurd faces at the camera. (The political adversaries part was a representational issue that Gene himself admitted was a massive oversight, resulting in the addition of Chekhov, and with Khan recognizing him in Star Trek II despite "Space Seed" having been shot before Koenig's additiont o the cast, a famous joke about Khan and Chekhov having met in the bathroom, earning Khan's eternal enmity for using all the TP.) It could be argued that defining "forced diversity" is the very heart of the discontent about casting in The Last Jedi and The Force Awakens. To some, any minority representation in the main cast is "forced diversity". To others, that minority representation isn't forced... it's just a reflection of modern society. To an academic, it might be the writers predetermining a character's race even when the character's race has no situational or contextual relevance to the plot or their role in it. To most, it's "shut up and watch the film you smegheads". (Really, IMO Ridley Scott and co. had the right idea on casting when they were writing the original Alien... wrote all the characters without any references to race or gender, and then just cast whomever they felt best for the role.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Somethin' like that, yeah... I would've compared it to VIN numbers, but it's the same basic principle. It'd explain why there are multiple classes of starship mixed together in the same numerical range, like how there are Daedalus-class and Intrepid-class starships, and Antares-class freighters all mixed together in the same number series. There are still some weird aberrations, like the Oberth-class ships that look to be on par, technologically, with the Constitution-class refit and Excelsior-class yet have registries that were only three digit numbers initially.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Back then, minorities were happy for any representation they could get that wasn't a blatant racial stereotype or an extra in a background shot. That lack of representation in leading roles is literally the reason blaxploitation movies became a thing in the 70's. There's not a lot of fish-people living among us, so they're not exactly a category that screams for some representation in film... but from everything I've read, Leia was a pretty big deal being an action-oriented woman in a highly visible leadership role and Lando was as well thanks to a largely stereotype-free role as a civic leader-slash-respected businessman who got an actual character arc of sorts. (Mind you, after the whole gold bikini thing, you'd be hard pressed to find a man who DIDN'T care that Leia was a woman...) Yeah, though diversity was arguably the lesser of Gene's controversial progressive agendas...
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, Starfleet did give ships in the "runabout" classification their own registry numbers as befitting their status as independent short-to-mid range warp-capable craft... but the "runabout" classification itself was a relatively new introduction to the Starfleet inventory in the second half of the 24th century. By that point the Starfleet registry number system had already long since reached the high five digit range. The Danube-class used extensively in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and on occasion in The Next Generation was Starfleet's first design in the runabout classification and that was commissioned in 2368. Like I said, there are a number of theories to explain why there are such large skips in registry numbers. The one I find most plausible, and which has a fair amount of support in Expanded Universe material, is that the first few digits are a kind of "contract number" and the last few digits refer to the individual vessel itself. A contract might be for X vessels from a given class design, with those having sequential numbers, while other ships of the same class built under a different contract will have numbers in a different range. That'd explain why there are cases of especially old classes still in service having ships with three, four, or five digit registry codes like the Oberth-class, Excelsior-class, etc. A contract may not actually use the full range reserved for it. Seems to be the attitude of a lot of American viewers... $9.99 wouldn't be objectionable price-wise if it wasn't essentially just for Discovery. The people watching it on Netflix outside the US are much happier with the arrangement because the streaming service carrying it there has enough other content to be worth the investment.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but the Macross Valiant (NMCV-16?) from the 46th Large Scale Long Distance Emigrant Fleet is not official setting material... it's from Variable Fighter Master File.
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