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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Depends when his birthday was, he could've been 17 at that time (which means he was a special entry candidate like Gamlin Kizaki). The one thing I keep wondering with this theory of yours is why? Leaving aside the fact that it's impossible to be in two places at once and all the other bits that don't work, what would he stand to gain from such a complex and pointless deception? Considering his service record and participation in foiling FASCES, the NUNS would jump at the chance to have him back. Why go to all the trouble of moving halfway across the galaxy and committing several different criminal acts including falsifying identity papers and committing perjury countless times by giving false information on enlistment papers and all the other legal documents he'd need to set up a life for himself. All it'd take is one halfway competent background check to land him in prison on a laundry list of felony charges and get him a dishonorable discharge. (We're almost certainly not getting a Delta sequel, Kawamori doesn't like doing direct sequels... so don't hold your breath.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, I overlooked an even more obvious, ironclad reason that Arad Molders and Hakuna Aoba cannot be the same person... their ages. From his official profile, Arad Molders is 33 years old in 2067. That means his date of birth is 10 January 2034, so Arad would have had his 12th birthday around the middle of the war with the Varuata army in Macross 7 at the start of 2046. The youngest you can enter the (New) UN Forces by special admission is 15 years old, and normal enlistment requires the enlistee be a legal adult (age 17+). Pilot training is a three year program, though highly skilled candidates can clear it in two. We know Hakuna Aoba was already a fully-trained, experienced UN Spacy special forces VF pilot assigned to SVF-473 in 2046... something Arad Molders would've been a minimum of five years, and more realistically eight years, too young to be. They really don't look alike, either, except that they have a slightly similar facial shape. Their hair color is different, parts to a different side, etc.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    None were used in the series... I don't recall if the Aerial Knights trainees in the gaiden manga used them for their Sv-154 Svards. They always just refer to each other by name, and it seems only Keith and Hermann rate any kind of honorific (Keith-sama and Master Hermann respectively). Keith's title of "White Knight of Darwent" gets bandied about a fair bit, but it's not used like a callsign... it's a non-hereditary title passed down to each top ace of the Aerial Knights. (Since many of the Aerial Knights are nobles, but noble blood apparently isn't a requirement to join, I wonder if the title could pass to a non-noble like one of the Jussila twins?)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Arad Molders himself establishes that he was part of the New UN Forces garrison on Windermere before the planet launched its war of secession... so he'd have to be in two places at once if he were an alias of Hakuna Aoba's, since Aoba was still active in the Vanquish League after the events of Macross R. It'd also be rather strange that nobody would recognize that they're the same guy. For one, the New UN Forces ought to notice that a decorated veteran special forces pilot1 who'd taken an honorable discharge and returned to life as a private citizen before being involved in a high-profile terrorist incident was trying to re-enlist under an assumed name. For two, it'd be virtually guaranteed to fail since Hakuna Aoba was an interstellar celebrity thanks to his Vanquish League career and Arad Molders is an interstellar celebrity as the leader of Walkure's bodyguard detail. For three, there wouldn't be any reason for him to re-enlist under an alias since Hakuna Aoba didn't have a criminal record and was highly regarded by the New UN Forces and other high profile organizations like SMS. (It'd also be rather difficult for him to serve under Ernest Johnson in the NUNS, since Johnson wasn't a NUNS officer. Ernest Johnson was, at the time, a mercenary who was being retained by Windermere's government as a military adviser. He held that position right up until the start of the war when King Grammier dismissed him so he wouldn't have to fight his own people. He even wears an Aerial Knights uniform.) 1. He was a special forces pilot attached to the 37th Large-Scale Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet "Macross 7" during the Varuata War, and was involved in the planning of Operation Stargazer and the liberation of the Varauta system colony. Oddly, his squadron's name is in French for some reason... SVF-473 Étoile Filante, or "Shooting Star".
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Since Hakuna Aoba was still active in the 2059 Vanquish season, wouldn't that require him to be in two places at once?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I'd attempted to avoid ever starting to collect Macross merchandise beyond books and other media, and was pretty darn successful at it until just a few years ago. Then Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy came out, and I fell in love with the YF-30 Chronos. Until that point, I'd only purchased one VF, the old Bandai snap-fit VF-2SS Valkyrie II kit. I mulled it over a bit and decided it couldn't hurt to splurge a little on my favorite main timeline VF design to date, and Mr March sped the blow by adding a second one to his existing order for me. Turns out that was the top of a particularly slippery slope... especially as I had a perfect storm of factors favoring starting a hobby like that: the recession was over, I had a lucrative set of new contracts, there had been a bunch of recent releases for designs I actually like, and my girlfriend's bad influence (she collects character statues). Now I'm looking into a third Detolf to hold this year's newest acquisitions (a VF-31F, Sv-262Hs, and Sv-51y) and there's a fifth VF joining the tiny squadron based on my desk at work (Hayate's VF-31J). I'm still quite picky about what I collect though, so I've only got about twenty VFs in total. I have managed to successfully get out of the Warhammer 40,000 hobby... though that escape was only ever meant to be a temporary reprieve. When the recession was at its worst, I'd decided to give the hobby up since I'm kind of miserly by nature and was coming over a bit paranoid that our main client would end up in bankruptcy. Turns out I needn't have worried... since they were the only ones who DIDN'T take some kind of government aid. Though, as a result, I dodged an expensive redesign of the entire faction I favor and a bunch of needlessly complex edition updates that are now being simplified. I'll probably pick the hobby up again once the dust settles after the launch of 8th Edition and the new codices for my factions have been released. (I've currently got, by 5th and 6th edition standards, around 2,800 points of Necrons and 2,500 points of classic 3rd Edition Dark Eldar.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    A thousand times NO. You'd think Hollywood would've noticed by now that every attempt to make a live-action anime adaptation in the west ends in abject failure, and usually ends up as either "our secret shame" (e.g. G-Saviour) or a standing joke (e.g. Dragonball Evolution) among the fans of the original work. At best, it's just mediocre enough to be a mainly commercial disaster like Speed Racer or Ghost in the Shell. Even the superficially flattering comparisons that were almost certainly used to pitch the idea ("like Firefly but successful") are kind of damning in hindsight.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    There's a good set of views in the GERWALK and Battroid portion of the VF-31 Master File, though I'm afraid my scanner's busted again so I'm kinda SOL unless a cell phone picture will suffice...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    An eyes-on count shows approximately twenty-two gun turrets of various sizes. 4 on each dorsal boom 2 on each knee joint 10 on the torso
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that'll do it. The default Android web browser on Android 4.4 and beyond is Chrome for Mobile, and earlier versions use a Chrome derivative based on the Blink engine. I've found if you use one of those setting sync features like Firefox and Chrome both have, the logins on one device seem to be portable to several other devices simultaneously. Using Firefox for Mobile on your phone may solve the problem. I think it's something with the IPS session manager.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Are you using different browsers on those devices (e.g. Firefox on one and Chrome on the other)? I had the same problem when I was using Chrome on one machine and the company-mandated nonsense that is Microsoft Edge on the other. When I switched to Chrome on both it stopped happening.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, I'd say Fassbender did a more than competent job as both David and Walter... he really sold that uncanny valley Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? kind of robot, and as David managed to make his obsession with creation genuinely unnerving. It's not a lack of competent acting or a gripping story that ails Alien: Covenant and its predecessor, it's that the movie just can't decide what kind of story it wants to be and that Western directors really seem to have forgotten how to do suspenseful horror. Alien was a great horror film for precisely the same reason Jaws was: because you saw so little of "the monster". The way the shark and the xenomorph kill in a targeted but indiscriminate manner is scary, yes, but what made it a source of genuine horror was that creeping realization that the characters are trapped there with the unseen monster lurking nearby waiting for its chance to make a snack of someone. There are two guidelines that Alien sequels keep ignoring that have contributed massively to the "scariness decay" of the franchise: The more you see of the monster, the less scary the monster becomes. The more monsters there are, the less scary each individual monster becomes. Alien: Covenant would have been a much scarier, more unsettling film if the xenomorph and neomorph never appeared. They had a really good plot going with David's hubris and what he did to the Engineers in the name of disappointment and arrogance, and made the horrible mistake of making that psychological horror a B-plot in favor of a mediocre monster splatter flick revolving predominantly around jump scares. The same problem happened in Prometheus, where they wasted half the film on jump scares and trying to chew over some half-assed Aesop about religion at the expense of a plot about how humanity's creators had decided for their own unknowable reasons to destroy humanity with the most appalling weapons of mass destruction.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Now that's a shame and a waste. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Rubeus Hagrid... The thing the Neomorph reminded me of most was, honestly, those creepy hairless cats that look like an ambulatory scrotum. IIRC, didn't Evangelion's creators explicitly refute that... saying that the alleged religious symbolism was pure BS, and they'd just thrown Christian religious references in there because it's a minority religion in Japan and sounds exotic as a result.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    We've had them all in HD for a while now, actually... some of them, like DYRL?, have even had multiple remasters in HD. There've been multiple editions of several of them as well. Mind you, a single monolithic box set collection would be insanely expensive. Japanese media prices are steep in general, and they don't usually incentivize buying a box set over buying the volumes individually. If you look at many of the blu-ray editions of Macross titles released in the last couple years and run the numbers, it's about $63.50 per disc regardless of whether you buy a collected edition or the individual discs. An "all of Macross" collected edition would be several grand. Macross 7 alone was like $600 new.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... that "perfect collection" wasn't a Macross release, it belonged to that one show we don't talk about on here. (Admittedly "perfect" was probably the single least accurate adjective Streamline Pictures could've applied to that hot mess. Not only did they not finish, the translation quality of the subtitled episodes they released consistently hovered between "poor" and "Chinese VCR manual".)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    You keep using that word, and it's fairly evident you don't know what it means... Let's not get crazy... As with Prometheus, Alien: Covenant is practically "They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: the Movie" several times over. It sucks that we'll have to wait until the home video release to get our hands on the commentary to find out how many cooks were involved in spoiling this particular batch of horrifying xenobiological broth. We have to ask if the producers screwed the pooch all on their own or if they had help from the studio executives who wanted a nice, safe action/splatter flick ala Aliens instead of the colossal lore dump that Ridley Scott was clearly hoping to put out and gotten blocked on twice now. (Maybe they need to give James Cameron a call...)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    We actually kind of already had that with, ironically, Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy and Macross Delta. Uroboros was established in Macross 30 to be an ancient Protoculture stronghold, and it was abandoned and overrun by the Dyaus... though admittedly the Protoculture seems to have made the technorganic Dyaus specifically to (non-destructively?) infest the ruins of their settlements on Uroboros as a security measure to protect the systems maintaining the seal on the Fold Evil they'd buried and abandoned under the Madis glacier. The worlds of the Brisingr globular cluster in Macross Delta are theorized, in-series, to be one of the last enclaves of the ancient Protoculture during the collapse of their civilization, which are now overrun by the sub-Protoculture species they created and then abandoned (e.g. humanity, the Ragnans, Voldorans, and Windermereans).
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It's pretty good, IMO... at least as sci-fi horror goes. Due to the subject matter and some incidental dialog it's often touted as an unofficial prequel to the Warhammer 40,000 setting. (Thankfully, while hyperspace is still a weird place in most sci-fi it's not out-and-out terrifying like in Event Horizon.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    It does sound like it's headed that direction, doesn't it?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well... that was awful. I mean, what was Ridley Scott thinking? This isn't so much an all-new feature as it is Alien as interpreted by Mr. Bean and The Benny Hill Show.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    From what I've read, they've pitched the idea of merging the Alien and Blade Runner universes several times and backed down from it almost immediately after on each occasion. Seems like a no-go. Well, I'm headed out to see Covenant tonight. Tried to get myself in the right mindset for it by rewatching Alien, Aliens, and Prometheus over the last couple days. My expectations are quite low now, given the number of my friends here in the US and abroad who've described the film in such colorful terms as "a dumpster fire", "shark-jumping bullshit", and the F-word repeated about five hundred times. The bar, for me, is set low enough that the Morlocks had to put up signs warning of a trip hazard.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    They wrecked more than a few that way, but I'd expect if they did go back for them they probably did it well after the war ended... so they could recycle them for materials to build their emigrant fleets. For the VF-31? Nope.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    He will surely be missed. His tenure as James Bond was an incredible one.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I was floored when Paramount announced it was no longer non-canon... it had its good moments ("How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth") and its lousy moments ("Bem", "The Slaver Weapon"), but for most fans it was firmly in discontinuity territory even if it did basically introduce the holodeck. I only got to see it because my dad got some bootleg tapes at a con. I don't recall the cousin thing in the Abrams movies, but I confess I barely paid attention to any of them once it became apparent they were just sci-fi/action movies with the Star Trek name slapped on. Spock was a fresh-out-of-the-academy ensign when he joined Pike's first five-year mission partway through... so if Discovery is 10 years before Kirk's tenure as the Enterprise's captain that means this half-Vulcan Lieutenant Commander in Discovery has to predate Spock by no small margin. After all, Discovery is set just one year after Spock's assignment to Enterprise. The Caitians existed way WAY before Star Trek Online... they go back at least to TAS, where Uhura's relief officer on the Enterprise's bridge communications station was a Caitian. The Caitians are long-time Federation members too, so they wouldn't be a good choice for a hostile power. (The Kzinti's backstory had them as having around a century of bad blood between themselves and Earth in "The Slaver Weapon".)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    What mechaninac said... honestly. We had the whole "Vulcan who decides to explore their emotions freely" schtick several times before, and it led to two of the most contentious/hated Vulcans in Star Trek... that prat Sybok from Star Trek V, and Subcommander T'Pol from Enterprise. (The latter being a case like that of Wesley Crusher or Chakotay, where even the actor hated how the character developed.) They also kind of overplayed the whole "The Vulcans are racist (speciesist?) a-holes" in Enterprise and the J.J. Abrams movies, which was entirely out of character for what was ostensibly an alien species whose "hat" was being mercilessly and entirely rational. (Mind you, Spock was having "all the other reindeer" moments as far back as TAS, but those were more because he was kind of an undisciplined kid who had trouble maintaining control of his emotions until his future self - via the Guardian of Forever - taught him a few life lessons while pretending to be a cousin from afar.) Even factoring in the Syrranite reformation in Enterprise, by 10 years before TOS the Vulcans should be the milder, friendlier breed of TOS and TNG. Having a Vulcan or Vulcan-equivalent merciless logician on the bridge is definitely a nod to the old formula (Spock, Data, Tuvok, T'Pol), but as Discovery looks like it's going to have more of an action focus than previous shows (in an easy bid for viewership) one has to wonder if the logical space pacifist isn't going to be a wet blanket. (At least as much as Mister "I sense the approach of death", anyway... that would've been so much funnier if he'd been a redshirt.)
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