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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It's actually quite edible... just not to everyone's tastes. Kudzu starch noodles are a popular ingredient in several traditional Japanese desserts, for instance. Eh... I'm not sure I'd say that. It is, however, pretty inescapable that Witches in past Star Wars titles were very much in "Bad Powers, Bad People" territory to the extent that the most prominent Witches are every bit as cruel and evil as Darth Sideous. Being aware of that tends to make the entire idea of the Witches in The Acolyte are victims of the Jedi pretty laughable. It's especially silly in light of the one recurring Witch character outside of The Clone Wars being a fascist who aligned herself with the Empire, oppressed an entire city in The Mandalorian, and went on to help Thrawn create an army of Stormtrooper zombies.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not. As far as we know, the only Variable Fighters in Macross that acknowledge an in-universe connection to their real world design inspirations are the VF-0 and VF-1. They still aren't truly directly connected, though. The in-universe resemblance Stonewell Bellcom's VF-0 and VF-1 bear to Grumman's F-14 is more a matter of convergent evolution than anything. Stonewell Bellcom's design proposal E303 was developed around the Earth UN Forces requirements for a Variable Fighter rather than being based on the F-14, and the must have requirements the military imposed led to the design resembling a miniature F-14. It helped that the military had put the F-14 back into service with minimal OTM-based upgrades as a stopgap during the Unification Wars, but only the unofficial development history in Master File draws a direct connection between the two (with the VF-0 development using that coincidental resemblance and a surplus of old F-14s as a starting point for physical testing). It's very likely that any non-public development records of the YF-23 Black Widow II, along with all physical parts and prototypes, were lost in the orbital bombardment of Earth in 2010. General Galaxy started their development of the YF-21 based on their earlier work restoring the Quimeliquola automated factory satellite and developing the improved-for-NUNS-use Queadluun-Rhea, so the YF-21's Fighter mode bearing a resemblance to the Northrop/McDonnell Douglas YF-23 Black Widow II is almost certainly more convergent evolution due to similar operational requirements and aiming for a Battroid that resembled the Queadluun-Rau/Rhea they were using as a starting point. That was probably true originally, given that the earliest versions of the VF development history were penned in the early 1980s before the Advanced Tactical Fighter program had even refined its requirements to the point of submitting a Request for Proposals to the various manufacturers. Sky Angels more or less treats the VF-1 Valkyrie program as being the de facto 5th Generation fighter jet and even got shockingly close to the flyaway cost of the actual 5th Generation fighter jets that wouldn't be revealed to the public for quite a few years afterwards. However, Macross did update its pre-1999 timeline (and even its post-1999 timeline) to account for real world events and technological advancements. For instance, mentions of the Soviet Union in the timeline were replaced with Russia and West Germany with Germany. Northrop and McDonnell Douglas rolled out the first YF-23A prototype in 1990 and it was tested against the YF-22 in a competition that eventually ended with the YF-22 being declared the winner in April 1991. Because the development occurred in the early 90's it would be reasonably safe to say the YF-23 probably did exist in the Macross universe. With that in mind, it's also extremely likely that all or virtually all records of the YF-23 Black Widow II were lost to history in the Zentradi 118th Main Fleet's orbital bombardment of Earth in 2010. The destruction was so complete that even then-current military developments were irrecoverably lost. Official setting materials describe the VF-4's rival program, the VF-X-3, as having been lost this way with the only surviving evidence it ever existed being some photographs and a single part contracted out to a factory in space that wasn't destroyed in the war. Macross the Ride suggests the only reason the SV-51 and "SV-52" weren't lost to history is because a few SV-51s survived the orbital bombardment due to having been abandoned in underground bunkers during/after the Unification Wars. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix suggests the VF-0 was another aircraft effectively lost to history until teams excavating the ruins of Edwards AFB years after the war found two battle-damaged VF-0A's from the CVN-99 Asuka II's carrier air wing in storage there and eventually turned them over to Shinsei Industry where they were painstakingly reverse-engineered as a lead developer's passion project. (Essentially, the adjustment of the timeline for events after the original Macross series aired and their impact on the development history of VFs effectively just moved the VF-1 from being the setting's equivalent of a 5th Generation fighter to a 6th Generation one.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It's a common assumption to make. The US Navy tends to target around 12 planes, but they do everything in pairs. The UN forces in Macross do things in threes and fours instead.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Kudzu is a perfect metaphor for it, not just because of how it is tangled and invasive and spreads like mad in every direction while being generally unpleasant to deal with... there are also a fair number of people who happen to enjoy consuming kudzu. Having watched the tail end of the Clone Wars in parallel with the early episodes of this series, I can kind of see why the creators assumed it didn't need to be explained. The witches attempt to invoke Dark is not Evil, but anyone familiar with Star Wars knows it doesn't work that way in this setting. The dark side is, for practical intents and purposes, the Power of Evil and a coven of witches that worship the dark side would naturally be a Religion of Evil and not something defensible. The previous depictions of witches in the prequel era are very much in card carrying villan territory. The most prominent group of witches in the Clone Wars could fairly be described as a Sith Acolyte talent agency. The coven's "magic" included things like necromancy, mind control, and standard Hollywood evil voodoo. They are so heavily villain coded that the Jedi can effectively get away with being dicks to them while maintaining the moral high ground, and even then the one survivor decided to carry on being maximum evil and sides with the Empire twice. The only way they've been able to make the witches even slightly sympathetic was by having them exterminated by a greater scope villain like General Grievous in Tales of the Empire. Other force worshiping religions depicted have been either primitive superstitions or other evil cults like the witches. Sometimes both. It's actually surprising the Jedi tolerate as many of them as they do. Especially considering the traumatic history the Republic has with the Sith.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    What little information we've gotten WRT squadron organization in the Spacy has put the number of aircraft per squadron at somewhere between 15 and 24. The sample org chart from the TV series era showed 15, organized into five three-plane platoons. Hikaru's original callsign in the TV series made him Skull 23, and various tech publications like Sky Angels and the later Master File series seem to favor a larger size closer to 24. (Sky Angels suggests there were approximately 62 squadrons active in the days before the end of the First Space War, accounting for approximately 1500 aircraft... which breaks down to a bit over 24 aircraft per squadron.) What he's citing is the Operation Stargazer taskforce. (Note the "aboard Stargazer, 2046 February".) IIRC, the only time we've seen the Northampton-class deploying fighters in normal operations was Macross 7 PLUS "Spiritia Dreaming", and they're shown deploying no more than a platoon (of VF-14s) in a completely different manner (via a ventral hatch instead of through the missile launchers. (I'm not counting the Gefion, the Northampton-class light carrier variant from Macross 30 which had an arbitrarily large hangar as a game mechanic.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    They don't mention anything, but I'd assume they probably stripped out absolutely everything they could to make room for all of that.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The Acolyte, being produced and partly written by a megafan, has a real problem with doing that kind of fanservice bonus. Like the most recent episode, we had that completely unnecessary scene where Green Karen has to kill a bug for no real reason in the middle of a conversation just to show that she's got that lightsaber whip they haven't STFU about since the series cast was announced. It doesn't add anything to the story - it actually interrupts a scene - but they felt that they needed to tick that fanservice checkbox and get that weapon onscreen so it got a pass. Those kinds of nods can be made to work in a story, like when Yoda visits the Sith homeworld and talks to the ghost of Darth Bane in The Clone Wars, but when they're just there for the sake of being there it just detracts from the story.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    There are definitely some legit cases of that in Macross. Operation Stargazer in Macross 7 is probably the best example of that. Northampton-class stealth frigates can carry a single platoon of Valkyries normally... that's 3-4 aircraft. For Operation Stargazer, Max somehow managed to squeeze about three dozen Valkyries into the frigate Stargazer for his surprise attack. An entire Super Thunderbolt squadron, Max himself in a VF-22S, Diamond Force, Emerald Force, AND Sound Force. There's no way that physically works, let alone as spaceously as the series made out.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... an interesting thought, if nothing else. To be honest, most of what I've seen in terms of reactions to Disney-era Star Wars leaves me thinking that many of the franchise's current problems can be summed up in just six words: "The Expanded Universe was a mistake." If Star Wars had just done what most other franchises did and made its licensed comics, novels, etc. non-canonical all along we wouldn't have to hear the fans kvetch about how what the writers of these shows are doing contradicts some decades old comic book or novel or fact file. We also wouldn't have to put up with stuff like The Acolyte is pulling where the story is infested with unnecessary callbacks to comics and novels that 90% of the audience never read. They struggle to deliver a series that'll satisfy most viewers because a good chunk of the audience is determined to be unhappy with everything, and a decent percentage of the rest are just ****ing lost because there's more required reading for these shows than most college classes. Imagine learning that, to properly understand the story of a series that's currently only got eight episodes, you should watch TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHT EPISODES of decades-old painfully mediocre CG cartoons?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, sort of. Palpatine/Darth Sideous refers to Darth Plagueis using masculine pronouns (He/Him) when he relates "The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise" to Anakin. Hopefully you see what I'm getting at there WRT your hypothesis... and why that topic could very quickly turn ugly for reasons beyond simple lore ones that we shall not discuss further. By that standard, anyone with a functioning memory, any kind of attention to detail, or any inclination to use Google to look up unfamiliar key terms knows too much... Because that's all I've got here... a good memory, attention to detail, and Google for when I get confused about who Quardlo Dungleflap from Bongwater XVII is supposed to be. That's pretty harsh. Granted, perhaps not unduly harsh. It definitely seems like there's very little middle ground between the Star Wars fans saying The Acolyte sucks and the ones blatantly white knighting for it.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Huh... if we take that view, then someone like me whose prior exposure to Star Wars is basically just the movies ought to be the ideal Disney+ Star Wars viewer. That I still find most of these shows to be incredibly tedious and overdependent on fanservice is probably not a great sign. I'm probably not supposed to be rooting for the bad guy, but here I am doing it... because he's the only character in this bloody show with an actual personality.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    In methodology, it's not much different to what Palladium Books did when they gave some internal layouts for various Macross ships in the original Robotech RPG or when they got Dream Pod 9 to design whole books of internal layouts for ships in Macross II: Lovers Again. They basically just tried to fill the internal space with strictly rectangular rooms and then tried to see how many silhouettes of VFs they could fit into those spaces.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Either that or Master Sol will arrive to discover the entire coven is actually alive and well... the whole disaster that drove him to decades of grief and traumatized Mae and Osha was actually just a prank staged for an episode of Space Jackass. Oh no... I could see them actually doing that... and the absolute bedlam that would ensue not just for lore reasons but politicized ones as well. 😵‍💫
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I wouldn't put it past them.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    "This is an enormous slur on my professional conduct." As unlikeable as everyone except our potential Sith Lord is... I'm A-OK with Smilo Ren stepping in to clean house again. Watching him do it the first time was the only moment of dramatic tension or excitement the series has had so far. I couldn't remember the name, but that was absolutely what I thought when I saw the little trunked whatsis critters skittering around and the islands. Maybe those are the baby form of Luke's green milk sea cows. Nah, I'd disagree... the plot in The Acolyte isn't by any means nonsensical. What it is, is poorly constructed. It's a cliche storm full of flat characters and standard issue set pieces where the story progresses more in spite of the characters than because of them. The only thing keeping the story going at this point is the promise of eventually revealing what the Jedi actually did on Brendok. At many points, it really does feel like a work of fan fiction in the negative sense. The writers are so eager to show their affection for, and intimate knowledge of, Star Wars that it's getting in the way of developing interesting or likeable characters and telling the story. So Smilo Ren managed to get all the way to another planet, likely in another star system, in the time it took Master Sol to walk out of the woods? Anything and everything in Legends is subject to replacement in the new canon... though considering what I found when I looked into possible Sith identities for Smilo Ren he may be Plagueis's Master since the range of dates given for Plagueis in now non-canon media would make him either not born yet or just a teenager at most at this point. If he does turn out to be Darth Sideous's teacher, it would absolutely explain why Sideous was such a pro duelist... and why he had to kill his master through subterfuge instead of direct confrontation.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    All right... it's 9pm on Tuesday, time for Disney+ to serve up another helping of The Acolyte so we can either marvel at its insipid blandness or wonder why it took half the series to start doing lower-middle-tier competent storytelling. I gotta say, they are jumping through some hoops to avoid having Master Sol just spit it out and say what really happened on Brendok. He dodges it at least twice in this episode alone! Hopefully in one of the two remaining episodes he'll finally spit it out. Mostly, this is just the tedium of the Parent Trap switcheroo pulled last episode, except the reveal is done offscreen so it doesn't really come with a dramatic payoff. All that this episode is really doing for the series is giving Qimir more character development, which he's already got the lion's share of, and having Green Karen do a literal postmortem of last episode. How can a series be just eight episodes long and still feel this padded?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, thinking back on it... the arrogant overconfidence of the Jedi Order is on full display in Master Sol's handling of the mission to Khofar. They never seriously consider that Master Kelnacca, who has apparently been out of contact with the Jedi Order for a year, might already be dead. Despite theorizing that Mae was probably trained by a rogue Jedi faction and having previously caught an accomplice of hers, the Jedi don't seem to consider that Mae might not be operating alone on her mission to assassinate the Brendok four. Master Sol certainly doesn't seem to consider or prepare for the possibility that his mission might run into trouble. He takes the entire group, civilians included, with him into the uncharted forest in one large group. He doesn't leave anyone - civilians included - back on the ship where someone could relay a call for help to the rest of the Jedi Order or even bring the ship into the forest to rescue survivors if the mission went badly and they got ambushed. He just marches his troops right into the forest and right up to Kelnacca's hut without any kind of encirclement or means to prevent escape, and is promptly ambushed by the third party he neglected to consider the possibility of because his forces weren't paying attention to their surroundings. He basically did everything he could to fail and die. Even Star Trek's Starfleet, who are memetically infamous for their lax attitude towards security, show more caution than that.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Not just dirty fighting, aggressive fighting. You've got generation after generation who've mainly if not exclusively trained against people using the same defense-focused styles they do... leading to them getting caught by surprise on those rare occasions someone runs into a Sith Lord and learns the hard way that they're underprepared for an opponent who aggressively prioritizes offense. I think it's more a general failure that happens all the time when writing Jedi. There's a fantastic example in The Clone Wars where a pickpocket steals Ahsoka's lightsaber, and despite seeing the thief walk away with it in hand she chases after them on foot instead of using her force powers to grab the lightsaber and pull it back to her. So instead of an annoying incident resolved in thirty seconds, it balloons out into an entire episode devoted to her chasing multiple thieves across Coruscant on foot. Without an Anakin around to mess things up for him, probably pretty well considering he had Darth Sideous on the ropes in fairly short order.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    For example, this whole series was theoretically preventable if Sol had just remembered he can use the force to lift people. He could have prevented both sisters from falling into that pit and neither of the sisters would have had to spend over a decade believing that their sibling had died that day. Mae would not have signed on with a Sith Lord thinking that she needed to take revenge for her sister's death.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    One of the recurring problems that I keep harping on for every Star Wars title is how often the Jedi forget they have superpowers... It's meant to be a drama preserving handicap or something like that, but it's just honestly just kind of infuriating that they keep putting Jedi in situations they could easily resolve using their powers and have them conveniently forget to use them so that they don't resolve the situation too easily.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yup. Nah, Jedi would probably have LOTS of experience fighting against a foe with superior skill and/or experience by training with their instructors and masters and peers in the Jedi temple(s). The problem I see, which got the Khofar taskforce mulched by Smilo Ren and probably accounts for every other case of the Sith beating superior numbers of Jedi too, is that Jedi train against Jedi. Their experience is all fighting opponents who have the same reserved, defense-oriented, unaggressive fighting style they do so. So when someone like Smilo Ren comes at them with a heart full of murder and holding nothing back they're completely out of their depth. (You can tell in Revenge of the Sith that even though the Jedi knew they were coming to arrest a Sith Lord they did NOT expect that old man to screech like a banshee and do a 720 in midair right into a stab.) Yeah, the "Sol Patrol" were expecting Marquess of Queensbury rules and Qimir delivered a back alley brawl.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... maybe. Considering they sent four Jedi (a Master, two Knights, and a Padawan) just to surveil some witches on Brendok, that Green Karen sent just eight Jedi (two Masters, five Knights, and a Padawan) to Khofar to deal with an assassin who'd not only killed a Jedi Master in close combat without a lightsaber but also proven skillful enough to escape capture by another Jedi Master and a half dozen other Jedi on Olega feels like an inadequate response. Especially given that she and the other Masters were entertaining the theory Mae'd been trained by a Jedi splinter group with an unknown number of members. They would've had nine if Qimir hadn't already killed Kelnacca, but he apparently didn't even put up a proper fight. I think The Acolyte's fifth episode is itself a pretty good argument against the idea that they underpowered the Jedi and overpowered Smilo Ren. He himself points out that what makes the difference between them is adherance to rules. The Jedi learn to fight by training against other Jedi, so their experience with fighting other lightsaber users is limited entirely to other people who also follow the Jedi order's rules and philosophy. Their style is very uniform and restrained and they're clearly being cautious not just because Qimir was an unknown quantity but because there are a bunch of them all in the same fight and they don't want to risk hurting each other. Qimir, on the other hand, is not fighting with such restrictions. He's swinging for the fences because he's been placed in a target-rich environment with no friendlies to worry about hurting and because he has no reason to honor the Jedi's conservative code duello or restrain himself from just going straight for the kill. He doesn't have to abstain from using tactics and techniques that the Jedi may consider too lethal, too underhanded, or too cruel to train in. Jecki and Sol both manage to put Qimir on the defensive when they start attacking aggressively. Jecki manages to force him to give ground and lands the first real hit on him by breaking his helmet with her lightsaber hilt. He has to resort to that second hidden lightsaber to take her out and regain the initiative before Master Sol can reenter the fight. It is probably one of the most overused and misused criticisms in fiction, yeah. Related criticisms were bad enough that Mike Godwin coined Godwin's Second Law in 2022.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    From what I've seen on social media - and oh what a mistake social media feels like these days - the "Mary Sue" contingent are already at least partly up in arms over the series in response to Mae easily killing a Jedi Master in the first episode and outwitting the Jedi at every turn until episode 5. The one thing that seems to be staying their hands is that the online response to the series is already overwhelmingly negative in most of the fan spaces I've peeked into. That said, the Mary Sue accusations seem to be almost par for the course these days when a series tries to bring more female viewers into majority-male fandoms by giving the new installment a female protagonist. We've seen this happen so much lately that well-defined patterns have emerged. Quite a bit of it is simply gatekeeping and misogyny, but IMO it's rare for the accusations to be completely unfounded because the writers are stuck trying to avoid offending a bunch of different groups and end up leaning on the tropes common to girls young adult fiction to sell the characters. This tends to lead to writing hypercompetent protagonists who have to constantly establish their credentials surpass those of other characters to avoid accusations of Chickification, who have to have traumatic backstories involving the loss of their family coupled with a special upbringing that justifies their hypercompetence, and who are either not allowed to show any vulnerability at all or have to flip-flop between "badass action girl" and "fragile flower" with little to no middle ground. The only part of the girls young adult fiction formula they tend to miss is being a self-depricating pretty girl who describes herself as plain and uninteresting but nevertheless has a bunch of hot boys fighting over her. Star Trek and Star Wars both hit this hard in the last decade with Discovery's Michael Burnham, Picard's version of Seven of Nine, Lower Decks's Beckett Mariner, Disney-era Ahsoka Tano, the sequel trilogy's Rey, and now Mae. That need to have the character constantly assert dominance or behave in a situationally inappropriate manner to prove they're a "strong female character" seems to be what drives a LOT of the toxic "Mary Sue" accusations. In all fairness, those are actually the same goal... "Get revenge". Maul wanted revenge on Obi-Wan for his defeat and bisection in The Phantom Menace, and the reason he spent so much time building up a power base in the criminal underworld was partly to lay traps for Obi-Wan and partly prepwork for his plan to take revenge on his old master, Darth Sideous for abandoning him. Mae is also seemingly motivated entirely by her desire for revenge. Her first attempted murder is to take revenge for Osha "abandoning" their family to join the Jedi. She spends the events of the in-series present day seeking revenge against the four Jedi who were once stationed on Brendok because she blames them for the deaths of her family. Then, once she learns Osha is still alive and still loyal to the Jedi, she either switches back to her original motive of wanting revenge because Osha chose the Jedi over her or is going with a combination of her earlier two motives for revenge. It seems increasingly likely that, in the end, she'll be seeking revenge against Qimir and/or Qimir's master for having pulled the strings behind her birth and the destruction of the coven on Brendok. I guess she's technically closer to Maul's brother Savage Opress then... since her motive seems to be pure mistreatment-induced revenge. (Or at least revenge for what she herself perceives as "mistreatment".) Yup... but that was a painfully low bar to clear.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Up to now, she really has been written as a crazy person so it wouldn't exactly be out of character. Not to mention Star Wars is a setting that runs on very basic moral absolutes and loves to play with the idea that evil makes you crazy... and not only has she been trained to use the dark side, the power of the witches she trained in before that is also dark side. Looking at it, her arc feels a lot like Darth Maul's in The Clone Wars, what with her insane desire for revenge and occasional flip-flopping of priorities, her obsession with a sibling, etc.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Kind of, yeah? Mae hated the Jedi enough that she attempted to murder her own sister at the age of like 8 years old to prevent her from going with them. Then when she thought her sister had died during the incident on Brendok she hated the Jedi enough to sign on with Smilo Ren and plan the murders of all four Jedi who were involved and actually kill two of them directly or indirectly. She hesitated and even decided to turn herself in once she learned that her sister was still alive, but that resolve to turn herself in seems to have been very short-lived because she immediately resists being arrested for the murders she was planning to turn herself in for and then mood swings all the way back to murderously violent once she learns that her sister still sides with the Jedi and seemingly decides to go finish doing the murders she had previously decided to stop doing and turn herself in for. As unstable as she is, it seems really on brand for her to murder Sol and then attempt to do in her master as well. Up to now, basically her only response to anything that makes her angry is violence. But for one or two small childhood scuffles we could say that her only response to things that make her angry is attempted murder. No, but with that reaction maybe I should send them my CV...🤪
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