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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The only part of it I really enjoyed was that the Sentinels arc was so badly written in every one of its iterations that the Invid Regent, the arc's Big Bad, ended up as a scenery-chewing, delightfully hammy, "for teh evulz" antagonist in the fine tradition of Ming the Merciless, Skeletor, Dr. Hell, or Emperor Daibazaal. The comic book version devoured the scenery with such gusto that he'd fit right in in The Venture Bros as a member of the Guild of Calamitous Intent. Alas, despite my best efforts, no I had not forgotten that hilariously corny robot cat or the robot noodle people that accompanied it. Kind of off-message for an alien race that found inorganic technology offensive and unnatural. I'm totally on board with Titan's earlier assessment that this series probably won't get far enough to have to worry about it... if it actually makes it to its final (12th) issue I will be quite surprised. Barring the incredibly lame attempts to make it darker and "gritty", I think this will be the same by-the-numbers revisit of the Macross Saga as every previous attempt, which means maybe Minmei is going to take up a different genre... think she's got it in her to do death metal?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Doubtful, IMO. As long as the Zentradi Army is still around and operating several thousand Main Fleet-scale forces in the galaxy, pretty much every fleet and planet needs to be prepared to fight enemy forces that will certainly outnumber them and almost certainly outgun them as a result by even the most optimistic assessment. The idiots who don't believe they need to be prepared for that - like Macross-29 - are few, far between, and certifiably too dumb to live. (Macross-29's status as a fleet in which the local government has adopted a philosophy of actual pacifism has earned them the acknowledged status of The Great Galactic Doormat in all matters political, economic, and strategic. They're suffering for it, though they haven't been attacked by outside forces yet their economy is on the brink of collapse in 2062.) Sort of. Var syndrome is a fold wave-induced mental disorder brought about by the fold bacterium that exist symbiotically with sentient life.1 The chemical compound formed by combining a protein from Windermere's Exdel apples with the dissolved minerals in the bottled water obtained from the Protoculture ruins accelerates the reproduction of the fold bacterium and makes people much more sensitive to biological fold waves of beneficial or inimical varieties. As the fold bacterium in question seems to be something that most, if not all, sentients have in at least small amounts, King Ketchup's ability to influence and control people using fold song is more dependent on amplification than anything else. Using seidznol to boost the receptivity of his local Brisingr Alliance audience via tainted foodstuffs just reduced the burden on him by making all his victims more susceptible to his song. 1. Berger Stone's periodic outpourings of exposition to Xaos's staff contain enough inaccurate information and outright contradictions to safely assume he's bullsh*tting them and our designated heroes are either humoring him to see if there's any unguarded observations buried in that extraneous waffle or, more likely, being military washouts and people who couldn't hack it at real PMCs they're too goddamn dumb to realize Berger's spinning a yarn. He would have them (and the audience) believe that fold song is something new that came about as a result of the Vajra conflict... which doesn't fit at all with the explicitly-stated fact that fold singers were present on Earth TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS before humanity made first contact with the Vajra in 2040, and that Dr. Gadget M. Chiba had (re)discovered biological fold waves in the early 2040's via fold songs ("song energy"), invented a means of mechanical amplification, and successfully weaponized it years before the V-type bacterium was even identified by the 117th Research Fleet's study of the Vajra.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    That's putting it mildly... IIRC, it was only the "Jack McKinney" novels that included that bizarre stable time loop plot wherein the SDF-3 and its crew were catapulted back in time to become the origin of the Robotech Masters and their Zentradi slave army. Minmei being treated like garbage and serving as the nonthreatening equivalent of a Goldfish Poop Gang is shared by all of them, though the extent of the abuse she suffers varies by version. In the novels she only really got ignored and neglected for the most part. The comics tried to make her a "Miss Fanservice" by giving her a HUGE set of knockers before making her, in rough order: a crazy and obsessive ex-girlfriend, the SDF-3's village bicycle, the destroyer of Jonathan Wolfe's marriage, a recurring threat to Rick's marriage, and the love interest to a complete and utter psychopath (T.R. Edwards). The official canon version kept most of the comics abuse, and added her being abducted and tortured by T.R. Edwards in an implied "Why won't you love me?!" sort of thing that ended with her being badly enough hurt for her condition to shock a platoon of career soldiers into silence and permit the series to put her on the metaphorical bus for good. Well, the Robotech version's kind of useless and annoying... basically being the Macross version but without any character development or redeeming qualities. They really put her through such a total wringer in the Sentinels arc in Robotech that it's hard NOT to feel bad for her on some level. There's being the woobie, and then there's that. Does it count as child abuse if you're abusing your own inner child?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Even the fleets in Macross 7 and Macross Frontier didn't get that kind of dismissive treatment. Other than being ugly and having a fold fault barrier like the Vajra Queen, it didn't really do a lot. There probably are a few like that. Macross Chronicle did indicate that there are several New UN Government member nations that abandoned manned air forces altogether in favor of the Ghosts and other unmanned craft instead of adopting the VF-171 Nightmare Plus. (I can't help but wonder how many of them are suffering a bit of buyer's remorse seeing what the 5th Generation VFs are like performance-wise after demolishing their pilot training programs.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    From my experiences with their "creative" staff I'm quite certain that Harmony Gold does not, in fact, have anything remotely resembling a "story [they] really wanted to tell" anymore. They've given up (again, and justifiably). It's not for want of effort, mind you. HG's RT staff have tried several times over the years to put together their own original stories and brought out the results of their brainstorming to show the world. The result is, always and without fail, a shabby mess that bears more resemblance to the worst submissions on fanfiction.net than professionally-written SF anime. The reasons are rather straightforward: they're writing with an astronomical number of legal restrictions on what they're allowed to do and use, the audience they're writing for adores "the Macross Saga" and views the other 49 episodes with something between disinterest and dispassionate loathing, and the actual staff working on it has historically been a collection of incompetents and bloviating hacks. They're stuck in a hilariously ironic vicious cycle. For all their efforts to deride Macross for having made music a central plot point, Macross is the only part of their story their audience cares about, so they're stuck endlessly rehashing it and being punished for any significant deviation while their own attempts at original stories die on the wire because they're not Macross-y enough while their audience also refuses to move on to Macross proper because they're invested in the propaganda about HG's version being better somehow. Like Oscar Wilde said, "There is no Hell other than the one we make for ourselves on Earth". HG made theirs, now they're stuck in it.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I did rather oversimplify things, in an effort to avoid getting into the politics of it. Here's hoping whatever story we get for the new series doesn't try to cheat by having all of the big warships mysteriously absent for its war. It was really jarring how Delta had a globular cluster that was settled by multiple emigrant fleets, and yet there wasn't a single New UN Spacy warship larger than a Uraga-class carrier and the largest gunship was the Stealth Cruiser Northampton subclass.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Similar age isn't all of it... Macross's protagonists have always sort of following the tone of the times in an effort to have them evoke the same sort of feelings that similarly-aged teens might be feeling at the time the show aired. Hayate's pacifist, borderline anti-military attitude is part of this. Japan's currently grappling with the psychological paradox of needing to build up their defense forces and being morally opposed to militarism after what happened last time. It's definitely to make the characters more relatable to the audience. I don't think any reason has ever been given for why the UN Government, and later New UN Government, set the age of majority at 17 instead of the more traditional 18 or 20+.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Two of the pictures are drawn by Shoji Kawamori. The middle picture in your first photo, with the Super Valkyrie on a greenish background. The Super Valkyrie spacewalk picture in your last photo.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Too late do I realize they skipped the one letter that would let me make a "She wants the D" joke. The most noteworthy improvement other than the slightly larger shells and more modern ammo incl. MDE shells is muzzle velocity. Those 58mm armor-piercing rounds are headed downrange at upwards of 4km/s, twice what the GU-11A was accomplishing. It's also had some significant improvements in durability, EMP-resistance, accuracy, and cooling.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, there are plenty of gearheads who don't mind at all that fancy sportscars are nowhere near as versatile as a family sedan. Her own designs like Walkure's field equipment are monstrously impractical and don't account for safety or other basic concerns. We are, after all, talking about an engineer who sent Walkure into battle repeatedly in nothing more than a sheer body stocking and underwear under holographic clothes... no body armor or anything like that. I'd expect the upkeep on the Siegfried units, which weren't designed for the kind of output they've been modified to produce and are acknowledged to have more intensive maintenance requirements than the stock model as a result are a big part of the reason Xaos runs out of money so easily. Yep, though it's one of those variants that's mentioned but never seen. Another mass production type like the VF-31A.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much, yeah... but if the rotary cannon gunpods and built-in machineguns like the ones the VF-25 and VF-171 were upgraded with weren't equipped with that special armor-piercing ammunition designed to defeat energy conversion armor they'd be worse than useless. The shift to dimensional beam weapons as gunpods seems to suggest that Stage II thermonuclear reaction turbine engines have improved the output and efficiency of their compact thermonuclear reactors to the point that they can now sustainably apply the brute force method to beat even the armor of 5th Generation VFs. (That the VF-31A/B can operate one with almost exactly the same engine as the VF-25 suggests that it may be something later production blocks of the VF-25 will pick up as well as a replacement for the GU-17.) Well, y'know... "Die for the Emperor or die trying!"
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Getting back to this, since my original analysis contained a math error due to my forgetting the % improvement in warhead filler energy density... A VF's gunpod is, ostensibly, its heaviest direct-fire weapon... though it has an advantage in that it has specialized armor-piercing explosive ammunition intended to defeat energy conversion armor's boosted resilience. Missile warheads are, for the most part, trying to overcome it by a more brute force route. In kinetic terms, the GU-11A's 55mm shells are moving downrange at 2km/s and carrying around 4.87MJ of kinetic energy apiece. That's about 16.35% more energy than the detonation of a 1kg TNT bomb, and the GU-11A can lob up to 20 of those downrange every second when the gunpod operates at its maximum rate of fire (1,200 rpm). I haven't yet found an explanation of the exact mechanism, but the shells are somehow able to circumvent/defeat the enhanced defensive ability provided by energy conversion armor and only have to worry about the physical strength of their target's armor material. They're also typically explosive rounds, so there's that little extra "bang!" after they've penetrated the armor. OTMat warhead filler is some seriously nasty stuff. The old technical materials suggest that it's 10 times as energetic as TNT, so around 8 times as powerful as modern fillers. The AMM-1A Arrow's explosive payload is roughly equivalent to a "1,000lb" Mark 83 GP bomb or nine AIM-120D AMRAAMs in terms of energy release, though it also has a much higher detonation velocity which makes it more effective at breaching armor. That's a smallish medium-range missile equivalent to about 172 of the GU-11's shells purely in terms of energy transfer. If you were to assume a hypothetical micro-missile with 1/4 the warhead filler of an AMM-1A, it would have an equivalent energy output to the kinetic energy of 43 55mm HEACA shells from a Howard GU-11A gunpod. We've seen some micro-missiles that are quite small compared to existing AMMs or larger HMMs, and others (like the VF-19's) that seem to be the same warhead as a medium-range missile only on a smaller rocket motor. She's allegedly a mecha otaku, so I'd assume she would probably exhibit most of the same traits you'd expect from a connoisseur of performance automobiles. She'd prefer the Siegfried Custom since it's higher performance (even at the expense of durability) and has more bells and whistles, including particularly expensive ones like the Fold Wave System. The VF-31A would probably be much less interesting to her, since not only is it a lower-performance stock model, it's also kinda occupying the role of the 5th Generation's economy model. If it weren't gorgeous, it'd be the 5th Generation's equivalent of a Prius. The forward-swept wing segment is supposedly intended to sacrifice some of the VF-31A's low-altitude delta wing stability for additional maneuverability. HERESY! *BLAM!*
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Hard to say, since we know very little of the VF-171's gunpod compared to others. The best-understood set of armaments belongs to the VF-1 Valkyrie, so they're usually the most reliable metric.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it is just a story treatment not a shooting script... those are usually pretty rough, since they're meant more to set the direction of the film's future development and provide an outline for a writer or group of writers to build on for creating the actual shooting script. It's definitely bad, but as treatments go it's a lot less bad than ones I've read for big-name science fiction properties that went on to be wildly successful after much polishing. Star Wars had a rough treatment penned by George Lucas that was so bad Harrison Ford told him "George, you can write this sh*t but you can't say it!". Star Trek's story treatments are always a hoot. Quite a few of the worst moments in TNG (many of them "Wesley" moments) were brought about by a writer's strike forcing the staff to use story treatments that had previously been rejected after minimal polishing and even several stories that had initially been earmarked for consolidation into a single episode. The legendarily bad first season was the result of giving Gene a free hand to both submit his own story treatments and rewrite those by other writers. EDIT: I have a copy of the Star Trek Voyager Season 1 writer's "bible" that makes this rough draft look like goddamn Shakespeare.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The term "micro-missile" covers a LOT of ground in Macross... the term applies to most any small, short-range, high initial velocity missile meant for visual range-use. They're theoretically meant to be used in numbers for saturation attacks, but beyond that there's a lot of variation. If one takes Macross Chronicle as a guide, the (New) UN Forces seem to benchmark the firepower of weapons against the energy conversion armor of the generation of VFs the weapons are meant for. One or two documented in Master File seem to almost be medium-range missiles with a less powerful rocket motor, but most seem to have scaled-down warheads to go with the reduction in rocket motor. Zentradi mecha being more lightly armored, one or two seem to be sufficient for destroying one of them, though from what we've seen two or three striking more or less at the same time seem to be enough to inflict potentially-disabling damage on a VF.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    To be entirely fair, Max and Milia were dodging bog-standard Zentradi Army ordnance designed to engage relatively slow-moving targets. Guld might've done it in a newer fighter, but what was being fired at him was the UN Spacy's state-of-the-art air-to-air high-maneuverability missile intended to bring down high-performance VFs. Guld's qualifications weren't anything to sneeze at either. He had a Special A qualification from the UN Forces as a civilian operator.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    All told, I think Macross finally became properly mainstream starting with Macross Frontier, which really increased public awareness of the metaseries to unexpected levels. The long intervals that usually occur between Macross series are more down to the eccentricities of its creators than the property not being well-regarded. Kawamori has always been resistant to the idea of doing direct sequels, so every new Macross is inevitably set in a different place and time with as little direct connection to previous shows as he thinks he can get away with. It's kind of like a one-man equivalent of a shared universe. I guess he isn't interested in getting caught up in a by-the-numbers sequel production rut like the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise has been for ages... he seems to prefer maximum creative freedom to the idea of a clockwork gunpla meal ticket, while leaving the more traditional sequels and side stories for the hands of the light novel authors, mangaka, and video game developers. I can't say that part hurts my feelings any. It feels like Kawamori's kind of pulling away from the metaseries again, and there were rumors a while back that he was quietly grooming Hidetaka to take over as Macross's top dog. Either way, I think he's probably feeling the pressure now that there've been two recent high-profile Macross successes. The sponsors probably feel that there's enough of a hungry audience to go to more frequent releases.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much, yes. One of the panels from the final issue of the Comico Macross Saga comic shows the ship in greater detail. It was essentially the unused SDF-2 design from the Super Dimension Fortress Macross animation model sheets, but scaled back down to the same size as the SDF-1. I suspect someone working on it had a copy of Perfect Memory. Their rationale for the three plateaus from Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross was that they were containment structures built to contain the wreckage of the SDF-1, SDF-2, and the Zentradi medium-scale gun destroyer that rammed the former. Even the post-reboot comics continued to regard them as such, and even showed them being constructed and buried. This new series will likely not get that far, since IIRC Titan Comics indicated they were only doing twelve issues that would span the Macross Saga's story. (I suspect an awful lot of stuff will get left on the cutting room floor, considering they barely got through one episode's worth of material in issue 1.) Draugs?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    's a bit before my time... I was all of about five years old when that show was canceled. That was, IIRC, the inspiration for The Simpsons "Who shot Mr. Burns?" thing tho, wasn't it? I certainly understand frothymug's attitude towards the "it was all just a dream" thing, but as the Macross Delta series didn't so much jump the shark as ramp off the shark's burning carcass while dressed like extras from Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon and emptying dustbins of useless exposition into the horrified upturned faces of the audience it could hardly make matters worse...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    They still did a pretty terrible job with 'em. The art for Comico's Macross Saga comics is so bad it's the subject of several memes due to frequent art inconsistencies like Gloval's pipe teleporting from one hand to the other between panels or coloring errors making him look like he has a harelip. (They also attempted to "fix" several issues created by their bad dub, like drawing a second SDF in the lake in Ep36, which created a persistent fan myth that there was animation showing a second ship there that was cut for some reason.) Clone was, IIRC, one of a large number of short-lived comic spinoffs that mostly got canceled. The comic book adaptation/continuation of Robotech II: the Sentinels started out based on what'd been drafted for the Sentinels TV series before its early production cancellation. It diverged into a loose adaptation of Luceno and Daley's godawful novels that skipped the vast majority of the Star Wars-ripoff1 stuff (to its credit) and largely stayed that way until the series met its premature end after Academy Comics lost the license in 1996. The successor, Antarctic Press, opted not to bring the comic's staff onboard and launched their own unrelated comic, Sentinels: Rubicon which was such an unholy mess it's almost a work of Dadaist art. Antarctic Press were, hands down, the worst offenders in terms of copyright infringement. They had several comics with entire plots stolen from other anime series like Ghost in the Shell, and in many of their comics they had characters and mecha stolen from other shows including a couple different Macross titles, several big-budget Hollywood movies2, and TV shows.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Somehow, I think that would end badly for Messer too... emo boy literally lives to protect Kaname. "No, Messer. It wasn't a dream. You're still in high school, and this is the greatest misdirection play of all time." The next hour and a half of the movie are a generic coming-of-age sports anime. EDIT: At least it'd explain why he goes through the entire series wearing kneepads... ... I think he just wants to see her in the shower. Or maybe he wants to see Hayate in the shower. I dunno.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Brigadier General Bruno J. Global's name has, on a few occasions, been transliterated incorrectly as "Bruno J. Gloval" even in Japanese publications. ("Global" is the official/correct form.) Obviously the highest-profile example of this mistake is The-Show-That-Must-Not-Be-Named, but you can also find an example of it in This is Animation Special: Macross Plus. The Variable Fighter Squadron Marking section the starts at page 83 at the back of the book has, on page 92, a VF-11C from the SVF-41 Black Aces that is marked up as being from CV-339 B.J. Gloval. Other publications have affirmed that this is a misspelling and that the Uraga-class CV-339 is the Bruno J. Global. (Exactly why he merits two ships named for him is unclear, but may have something to do with the mass-produced Macross-class ships carrying the names of the UN Forces' top brass like the SDFN-1 General (Takashi) Hayase or SDFN-8 General Vrlitwhai Kridanik while the New UN Government carries on the tradition of the government's chief executive having carriers named for him e.g. ARMD-01 Harlan J. Niven and ARMD-14 Robert A. Rhysling. Global did go into government after retiring from the UN Forces.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    ... and probably not even that. Delta's story was pretty fundamentally broken in that respect.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, I'm inclined to disagree that the characters could cultivate interest... most of them are so painfully underdeveloped that their bios on the official website actually offer more detail than the show itself does. Most of them are playing to very simple cliches. Mikumo, instead, is simply a combination of two existing characters: she's Sheryl Nome by way of Mina Forte. IMO, both she and Makina could be removed from the story outright without changing a damn thing. They're both only there to tick off some arbitrary checkboxes on the standard fetishes checklist. They don't even live up to the minimal promise of their official bios on the website. Makina's allegedly the crew chief on the Aether, and yet the only time she's ever shown to do anything is the first OP and is otherwise just a transport and life support system for a pair of gag boobs (while somehow also managing to be even less plot-relevant than Nanase, who filled that role in Macross Frontier). Reina's supposed to be some kind of elite hacker, but the only times she ever succeeds at it are when the enemy wants her to break in. Every other time she gets busted right away, which is how she ended up working for Xaos in the first place. Their elite super-hacker couldn't beat a single electronic door lock and one dozy rent-a-cop. It's actually even less complex than that. She tried to hack Xaos for some reason, got busted, and was given the standard cliche "work for us or go to jail" ultimatum.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I've never really been one for American comic books, but really? Most everything I've seen come out of both major publishing houses has every woman look like a lingerie model or porn star in spandex, where the men who aren't gonk all look like bodybuilders. Then again, I grew up in Liefeld's dark age, so you know what my first exposure to comics was like. Well... putting aside the fact that the military in question wasn't a navy in the original or the American adaptation this is based on... I do know a few who would if they thought they could get away with it. That was your first mistake, having high hopes for something that had the R-word on the cover. For all practical intents and purposes, the R-word is practically a warning label indicating the product is of depressingly poor quality, painfully stupid and/or lacking in originality. FFS, this is a brand with a "creator" whose name has literally become industry slang for screwing up so hard that the adaptation is a mockery of the original work. That was your second mistake, because Covers Always Lie. Robotech comics adhere to a very similar rule... usually it's "awful cover paintings, atrocious interior art". The few that bucked that trend followed the Dark Horse model you identified. As a rule, the content will ALWAYS suck. Never, NEVER underestimate the power of laziness. They weren't quite THAT blunt about it, but the meaning was absolutely there when they dismissed all the pre-2001 licensee-created works. They dismissed them on the grounds that the pre-2001 licensees were churning out poor quality work that was riddled with both internal inconsistencies and inconsistencies with the Robotech setting (tactfully omitting that they'd also frequently committed copyright infringement), and indicated that they would never have seen the light of day if the Harmony Gold staff at the time had been on the ball and exercising an appropriate level of creative oversight instead of ignoring the franchise entirely. They felt that made it Robotech in name only, and indicated it would not be counted as part of the official continuity in any way. In all honesty, having read virtually everything covered by that proclamation except Robotech: Clone, I felt that was a pretty good call. The vast majority of it WAS garbage even by the low standards of the day and the bush league comics publishers they were dealing with, and the copyright infringement by several publishers didn't help. I thought it showed a moment of rare integrity on their part when they admitted the root of the problem was Harmony Gold's brand management and pledged to change that aspect of their corporate culture in the hope that it would enable them to deliver a more consistent product instead of taking the Macek way out by laying all of the blame for ruining a perfect creative vision on their licensees and business partners.
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