Seto Kaiba

My weekly watch group is starting Kaguya-sama: Love is War season two and Lupin III Part V... both excellent shows I'd highly recommend. Honestly, Kaguya-sama: Love is War is what I'd call the best romcom anime of the last ten years or so. It just seems like that one never has a dull moment, though with three seasons and a movie any further development heads into the parts where things get dramatic in an unfunny way. Lupin III Part V is another trip and a half... blue jacket, AKA modern Lupin, still just feels weird considering most of the iconic Lupin stories are set in the 60's (green jacket) or 70's (red jacket). Lupin's new signature gizmo, an AR monocle that he uses to hack things like video cameras, is an odd bit of future tech but no weirder than some of the nonsense he's had in the past.

It's Japan, a certain amount of social drinking for work is expected... and those long hours and late nights the animators do surely mean a fair amount of caffeine... ... but I think the best/most probable explanation I've heard anyone pose was over on MAHQ/MechaTalk. Specifically, that Studio Bones seems to be using Metallic Rouge as a sort of elaborate demo reel to showcase the capabilities of its animation staff and that the kind of threadbare story is an excuse plot crafted to get them from one animator friendly set piece to the next. That'd definitely explain why the series is visually very impressive but narratively a complete train wreck. Watched some more of The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil... and I've completely lost track of what's going on with this one. This latest episode was just one huge exposition dump, and it's clearly dumping things that are supposed to be important and shocking but the series has done so much nonsensical screwing around that it doesn't really feel like important and shocking revelations. It feels like an excessively dramatic distraction from the antics of this dumb*** couple. Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable! is still a cute but kind of generic romcom. The will-they-or-won't-they is leaning heavily towards "will" right now, though it still has a bit of an issue in that the three female leads don't feel particularly distinct since they all have essentially the exact same appearance but for their hair. (I guess the mangaka has a type.) I've basically given up on 'Tis Time for Torture, Princess. Dungeon Meals is still a damn solid series, though. Kinda weird that now, of all times, after the cast have been eating all kinds of horrifying monsters that explicitly or implicitly eat people the series decides to actually mention food safety when Laios gets sick from eating uncooked meat that contains parasites.

But why is it happening?

I had no idea they even made a kit of that. Am interesting find indeed.😄

Nope... Metallic Rouge was written by Yutaka Izubuchi and Toshizo Nemoto. Izubuchi's principally a mechanical and character designer with a lot of iconic titles on his CV including Gundam 0080 and Gundam ZZ, the Patlabor movies, and Yamato 2199. Nemoto's a writer whose filmography is less impressive but still contains some major titles like Legend of Galactic Heroes and Macross Delta. How it ended up such a complete and total cluster**** is anyone's guess. Villain-san's Day Off had an entire episode bereft of the titular character, focused on Valentine's Day and White Day. 7th Time Loop's story is regaining a bit of its sense of direction, though toward what end I have no idea. Things are happening and the protagonist clearly knows what they are, but she's really cluing the rest of us in because she's too busy doing a Sweet Polly Oliver for some reason. Banished from the Hero's Party is still stumbling towards a conclusion as Rud tries (and largely fails) to convince the new alleged Hero to be less of a Lawful Stupid Paladin. The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids forgot a chunk of its own premise for a bit WRT Homunculi, and has started building up towards a second season I'd suspect it's not getting... with some fuss and noise about a Demon King named Greed who's apparently driving research into Homunculi for military use in the neighboring kingdom. Blue Exorcist stumbled to the more-or-less end of the Shimane Illuminati arc with the defeat of Dr. Gedouin, though the resolution is every bit as weak as I remember from the manga given that it's essentially a triple deus ex machina... Mashle's still as over-the-top as you'd expect from its premise being Harry Potter by way of One Punch Man. Honestly, the disrespect Mash has for his opponents is real and they are taking it personally. It's actually pretty funny seeing him trolling opponents who think they have the upper hand. (Even if the idea that Mash's insane physical ability isn't magic now wears a little thin.)

Eh, maybe... I'd wager most of us have at least temporarily left some boxes sit in a hallway during moving, cleaning, or transferring stuff to/from a storage unit or new home or let a cosmetic/non-critical home repair wait a bit for lack of time, money, or some other practical reason. All the same, starting a discussion thread to publicly complain about the how someone you sold collectibles to in person keeps up their home and publicly shame them in absentia by characterizing their behavior as hoarder-like is some serious Karen-tier rude behavior. (Even if it is hoarder-like behavior, it's still rude to do it behind their back.) @TangledThorns should have kept this to themself, TBH. That it most assuredly is... but that clutter is part of what makes a home feel like home.

Having seen actual hoarder situations of the "legal intervention was required" level with my own eyes, I really deeply disagree with the characterization there. Being able to implement an orderly and visually appealing storage/display solution for your collection in your home is a matter of time, money, and of course space. Mostly money, if we're being honest with each other. With enough money, you can simply buy a big enough space and attractive storage solutions for your entire collection and hire someone who can do the installation work for you. Not every working stiff has the time to DIY an impressive storage solution or the money to hire someone to do it for them. That doesn't make them borderline horders. That just means they don't have the resources to do it right now. Using myself as an example, if you came to my home at this exact moment you'd find a pretty significant portion of my Macross collection and my model kit Pile-of-Shame neatly stacked in the corner of my living room. It doesn't mean I'm a borderline hoarder. I moved about a year ago, and I work 60-70 hours a week on average. Building display cases to house that collection in the space I've set aside for it is on my to-do list, but it's less important than other more expensive, time-consuming, and necessary home improvements on that same to-do list The TL;DR here is... don't judge other people like that. It's a dick move.

The Unwanted Undead Adventurer's latest episode is a breather one. It's rather amusing in an undignified sort of way to see Rentt bested by a The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic brought another pretty unremarkable episode. The story really has yet to do anything to stand out in either a good or a bad way. Even the big bad of the current part of the story is nothing more than a standard Dark Knight whose special ability is the equally standard... The Witch and the Beast is three quarters of the way into a four-parter "The Witch and the Demon Sword". It's definitely the weakest story the series has brought so far, not helped by the fact that the twist was telegraphed so heavily it failed to surprise even a little. This season's been a bit of a bust, all in all. Dungeon Meals is still pretty darn good tho. Going backwards a bit to watch The Ancient Magus's Bride while I recover from dental surgery... I've heard that one is rather good.

Not an uncommon reaction to Space Runaway Ideon, truth be told. It didn't exactly go over great with audiences when it was new either, though Tomino's made noises about wanting to remake the whole bloody thing. It got truncated by cancellation in its original broadcast run, so the ending was a rushed affair. It certainly feels that way. Something about a studio deciding to do an original sci-fi/action series for a major anniversary seems to bring out the absolute worst writers imaginable. Studio Bones has done lots of great work in its 25 years and counting, and it actually came as a bit of a shock to me that Metallic Rouge was an original IP by them because it's so incredibly underdeveloped and so badly written. When Tatsunoko Production decided to do a original IP mecha anime for their 55th anniversary I expected it wouldn't be very good but I wasn't expecting they'd just go and make the worst series they'd produced since Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. Imagine a sci-fi story so badly written that the only way its plot can function at all is to have Humanity at the level of interstellar travel and planet-scale terraforming forget that Conservation of Energy is a thing. Studio Bones's Metallic Rouge is nearly as problematic in that it's a conflicting jumble of cyberpunk cliches without any real cohesion and that its writers don't seem to understand that exposition is something a story does have to do every so often so the audience knows what's going on. Hoping for more from today's The Witch and the Beast, The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic, and The Unwanted Undead Adventurer. (HiDive went and released a new version of their app that is hilariously broken... it's way more full-featured than their previous bare-bones offering but they can't even get the subtitle streams working.)

Ah, yeah... Tomino-sensei has had more than a few moments in his career that've left me thinking that he was definitely NOT all right when he made them. Even his brighter and more upbeat work has a lot of darkness hiding just beneath the surface. Like Gundam: Reconguista in G, where several characters have to deal with lingering caste-based discrimination despite centuries of peace and prosperity because their ancestors were... Speaking of awful futures... Metallic Rouge has once again stumbled through some awful exposition in its latest episode. It really is embarrassing how poorly paced and composed this series is. It's oddly impressive how uninteresting Studio Bones managed to make a series about Rockman X-style sentient androids fighting each other because one side wants to instigate a robot uprising. The whole thing is just such a massive arse-pull that it completely fails to land... and leaves this ridiculous Rockman X-ing the show's been doing up to this point feeling like far and away the least interesting part of the setting.

And there it is... Exactly what I wanted from the line. Justaerin terminators.

Yup... and most of them are terrible or incredibly weird and out-of-place. But who among us wouldn't want to watch Earth secure a lasting peace with the Zentradi after Lynn Kaifun defeats Boddole Zer in a twerk-off on the moon or similar similarly out there? 🤣 He could... but would anyone want to listen? I mean, Game of Thrones spun in so hard that it almost completely removed itself from the public consciousness.

Yeah, Yoshiyuki Tomino was in a dark, dark place when he made Space Runaway Ideon. If I'd known your intention was to binge the series, I'd have warned you against it. Ideon is best taken in small doses because of how unstintingly bleak it is... and the movie version is worse.

... this might be the first non-main-movie Star Wars thing to get me to open my wallet. Yeah, Andor was/is supposed to be a two-season limited series. The first season is the story of how Cassian ended up joining the Rebellion and the second season is supposedly going to cover his life as a rebel agent and end with the start of the mission he was on at the start of Rogue One: a Star Wars Story. They were supposedly almost done shooting Andor season two when the strike hit, and as a direct-to-streaming series it's not beholden to the broadcast schedule so work could just stop instead of being beholden to scab writers like a traditional TV series, so the impact of the strike on the production shouldn't be nearly as bad as past strikes impacts on broadcast shows.

An unwise assumption to make, given his fairly well-documented habit of stretching the truth and outright lying to exaggerate his credentials and the show's as well. He indulged in a fair amount of "I meant to do that, honest!" and a few verifiable whoppers in the early 2000s interview that remark is from. Even HG has been more candid and said that there's no real intent behind most of the weird choices in the show. Nah. They can treat it like every other anime made while the manga's unfinished and make up their own ending. After all, that's never ended poorly for any series, right? 🤣

Yeah... Space Runaway Ideon was Tomino's first new project after finishing the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, and it's ever bit the relentlessly grim war-is-hell misery porn you'd expect from "Kill 'em all" Tomino. If anything, it's easily some of the darkest - if not THE darkest - work Tomino has ever been responsible for. So much so that it's credited by Hideaki Anno as a primary inspiration for Neon Genesis Evangelion's own hopeless story. It will forcibly remind you why Tomino's nickname is "Kill 'em all". This season's offerings are pretty meh still. We're well past the halfway point and out of the 20 or so titles I'm currently following the only ones that I can say I'm actually enjoying are Mashle, Dungeon Meals, and to a lesser extent The Witch and the Beast. Mashle is losing some steam as it pivots to a greater scope conflict between Easton Magic Academy and the setting's Voldemort-equivalent "Innocent Zero". It's still lots of fun and very much a tongue-in-cheek Harry Potter parody, but it feels like it's running out of things to do with the premise a bit. The Witch and the Beast is definitely bogging down in Witch Hunter Robin-type shenanigans, with the current mini-arc being an Idiot Plot that only works because everyone involved is unwilling to do any critical thinking at all. (Lampshading the fact that everyone except the main cast is a moron doesn't make it less of an Idiot Plot though.) It's especially bad as the villain of the piece is so Obviously Evil that he might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says "SERIOUSLY EVIL DUDE HERE" and singing a little song about how much he enjoys framing people for murder and kicking puppies. It makes the surprise from everyone else in response to his sudden yet inevitable betrayal feel a bit... silly? Stupid? Totally unbelievable? It's like having someone named Back Stabbington start measuring your back for the explicitly stated purpose of finding the best place to stick a knife and then acting surprised when he shanks you. If you telegraph the plot twist that hard, it stops being a plot twist. Banished from the Hero's Party S2 is flat and lifeless. Villainess Level 99 is pretty much form letter overpowered isekai protagonist comedy nonsense that isn't really funny. Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable is kind of tedious generic romcom stuff, as is The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil. 'Tis Time for Torture, Princess is almost unbearably tedious with its one and only joke. Villain-san's Day Off is cute but toothless for similar reasons. The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids feels like even the studio has given up as the animation quality continues to plummet and its story is clearly flailing for something interesting to do. Blue Exorcist is just a big mess because of the part of the source material they're adapting. The Unwanted Undead Adventurer is just kind of messing about with the same premise half a dozen other titles already did better (e.g. Overlord, Skeleton Knight, etc.). Metallic Rouge is halfheartedly trying to be Blade Runner and Android Kikaider at the same time. The Wrong Way to use Healing Magic is also pretty lifeless and uninspired. Bang Brave Bang Bravern is still just painful to look at because it won't pick a lane and wants to be both serious and a parody, though it's leaning more and more towards parody. A Sign of Affection, which was previously one of my standouts for the season, lost a lot of its appeal because they didn't even make it half the season before the two main characters officially became a couple and sucked half the tension and interest out of the story. It's still cute and interesting but it feels less invested in its own premise now. I really hope we're headed towards the end of the tyranny of isekai stories. Much like superhero stories in western media, isekai stories have really worn out their welcome and what little novelty their premise had. We got a couple really good stories out of it, and a whole lot of mediocre trash, but it's time to let it go and move on to the next thing.

That it does... though as seen in Macross Frontier, it doesn't necessarily have to separate in order to lay down the law with its Macross Cannon. I've often wondered why they didn't put the government facilities in the docking umbilical. Seems like a waste of space to keep the civilian command center in the military one so far separated structurally.

Well, it is a Yoshiyuki Tomino series, so at least you know what you're getting yourself into.

Considering the amount of space that the SDFN had to work with, it's not that weird... the folks operating the pilot fleets scouting ahead of immigrant ships need r&r too. Keeping the populations as small as possible keeps the risk down, and those ships were used after humanity learned what the prevailing situation in space was and decided to focus on avoidance rather than confrontation. If you don't count the Battle-class attached to the latter... that was very much an offensive option. Yeah they have some weird perspectives on things.

TBH, there are still some problems with that explanation too... mainly involving remarks about Earth's domestically-produced fold technology not being very good until some time after the First Space War. Zentradi ships were probably faster and more reliable, and we know they were definitely more available in the immediate aftermath of the war. Considering the infrastructure of those middle-generation fleets, it's unlikely that there were any giant Zentradi outside of the crews of those few remodeled Zentradi ships. Well, it IS a doujinshi... the author's own personal interest. The Macross-class was a less than optimal environment for maintaining a civilian settlement as originally designed, and the Megaroad-class was pretty much all envirionment ship with virtually no offensive or defensive ability... that's why later generations opted to keep those two roles separate as much as possible with the 3rd Generation City-class and the later Mainland-class and Island Cluster-class. Generally speaking, the last thing you want is someone shooting at the ship carrying tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians... so whether it's armed or not is less important than its ability to stay out of trouble in the first place. To clarify, the Zentradi-styled Northampton-class is the only fleet-specific variant featured... that doesn't mean it was the only Earth-designed escort ship in the fleet. Just the only one that merited separate coverage. Given that the fleet uses large numbers of VFs, they almost certainly have Uraga-class and Guantanamo-class carriers too.

TBH, I don't recall anything about Zentradi ships being used for short distance emigrant fleets because of range limitations. That wouldn't really track, since the Zentradi have been roaming far and wide across the entire galaxy for millennia. My understanding was that Zentradi ships were used for those operations because that's what was on hand and operational at the time those missions started. Though they definitely weren't all Zentradi crews though, given that Eden has a pretty substantial human population and it was that program's first success. Honestly? Any of 'em. It's easy to forget because we don't often see them next to familiar objects of easily conceptualized size, but even the smallest Zentraid ships are freaking gigantic by the standards of Humans. The Zentradi fleet picket - the tiniest regular warship they have - is significantly larger than a Nimitz-class supercarrier (500m vs. 333m). The regular combatant classes are all even larger than the Macross-class, humanity's largest warship by a sizable margin at the time, and there's a LOT of empty space to play with there.

Didn't they kind of give us that in Absolute Live!!!!!!? Instead of the big reveal of some grand decades-long adventure, the movie revealed they've been up to absolutely bloody nothing after breaking down on the side of the space road decades ago.

They could, but for a variety of reasons (e.g. respect for Hikaru's VA having passed) they almost certainly won't.

Pretty much. It's a borderline coin flip which version will end up getting used when any given scene calls for showing the original SDF-1 Macross. The same as many other designs from the first series and movie.

So... that's one of those areas where the lines blur a bit because of Macross's broad strokes approach to in-universe history. The explanation that's been on the books since ~1994 is similar to the ones offered for the VF-1 Valkyrie, Exsedol, etc. in that both versions are "true" and reflect its appearance at different points in in-universe time. Namely, that the TV version is what the ship looked like prior to Quamzin's suicide attack in January 2012 and that the Movie version is what it looked like after being repaired with postwar technology from January to August 2012. Now, that's what the books say... But, of course, actual in-story depictions are not as consistent. We essentially have three different versions of the Macross in play at any given time. The TV version, the Movie version, and the Novel/Manga version that is a Movie version with the Daedalus and Prometheus instead of ARMDs. It's not uncommon for shows to use the DYRL? versions of events when glossing over the First Space War, though we also see weird mix-and-match moments like Macross Delta showing a DYRL?-styled Macross lifting off without any attached ships like the TV version did alongside a character having a TV version Macross model on his desk. If you wanted to get Watsonian about it, it could be argued that people like Berger Stone are using footage from in-universe historical dramas without worrying about total historical accuracy. The Doylist view would be that the creators just think the movie version looks better.