Seto Kaiba
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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba
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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".)
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Alien: Covenant (formerly known as Prometheus 2)
Seto Kaiba replied to taksraven's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
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...) -
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).
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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.)
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It does sound like it's headed that direction, doesn't it?
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Alien: Covenant (formerly known as Prometheus 2)
Seto Kaiba replied to taksraven's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
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. -
Alien: Covenant (formerly known as Prometheus 2)
Seto Kaiba replied to taksraven's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
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. -
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.
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He will surely be missed. His tenure as James Bond was an incredible one.
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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".)
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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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Alien: Covenant (formerly known as Prometheus 2)
Seto Kaiba replied to taksraven's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
That was the plan... to come away with as little plot-contextual information as humanly possible and just get a read on what people thought of the film without succumbing to any spoileriffic reviews. -
Alien: Covenant (formerly known as Prometheus 2)
Seto Kaiba replied to taksraven's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
I've tried to avoid reading reviews, so I thought I was fairly safe taking in the TVTropes page with Spoilers off... I'm a bit worried by the fact that its Narm and Too Dumb To Live entries are whole pages in their own right, and that there's frequent mention of setting a particular action sequence to Yakity Sax. I'm still gonna see it, but I'm a little worried now. -
As noted previously, Paramount was actively developing content for a Kzinti story arc for Enterprise Season 5 before word came down that the ratings plummet had prompted the network not to renew it at the end of Season 4, so they seem to have at least believed they could use make free use of the Kzinti concepts Niven put forward in "The Slaver Weapon". (Probably with less of a "Petting Zoo People" look, the way they did with the CG Gorn for the Mirror Universe episode.) That was one of a bunch of plots that ended up in the dustbin, along with a post-facto "fix fic" episode to explain that T'Pol was so emotional even early in the series because her dad is a Romulan deep-cover operative. Still, Spock's original accolade of "First Vulcan in Starfleet" keeps taking hits... prequel writers can't seem to resist having a Vulcan around for deadpan snark. T'Pol got 'round it on a technicality, but what about this new girl who's basically ripping off Spock's entire half-Vulcan schtick? Star Trek's already got several different species of felinoid kicking around the Federation and its neighbors... which, since Paramount reversed themselves on TAS's canonicity to the prime timeline, includes the Kzinti. (This, sadly, means tons of other Scooby-Doo level BS is also canon, like "BEM" and that one episode where the Enterprise's computer goes nuts and starts handing out dribble glasses and screen-printing insults on Kirk's uniform.) Actually, in hindsight, I'd love it if Discovery did that. It'd lend sort of a Red Dwarf feel to the show. We always see the Federation's shiny new toys with the best crews boldly going wherever, we never see the poor sods who are stuck with the old clunkers Starfleet keeps in service for aeons because they can't be arsed to scrap them (like all those old Miranda-class, Excelsior-class, and Oberth-class ships). Yeah, they were pretty explicit about that in the dialog... the Kzinti psychic decidedly did not enjoy the experience. That new alien in the Discovery trailer who was raised to sense the approach of death... that may be replacing the Kzinti as the new apex of narm in the Star Trek franchise. They'd better hope the show lasts, otherwise the jokes about sensing cancellation will be unending.
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Eech... you... haven't seen the TAS episode "The Slaver Weapon", have you? The Kzinti from Star Trek: the Animated Series are from a Star Trek screenplay adaptation of Larry Niven's The Soft Weapon, and the episode's screenplay was written by Larry Niven himself. As they've already paid for them, they shouldn't have a problem using them (and indeed were considering making the Kzinti the Enterprise season 5 main antagonist before the show was canceled). They're not Niven's Kzin though. The politest way to describe them would be "too dumb to live". A more honest assessor might consider them, based on their behavior and their history as explained by Sulu, "the cruelest prank evolution ever played". They are the polar opposite of being "hardcore", and they make the Pakled look like geniuses. (It didn't help matters that the episode was directed by Hal Sutherland, who was red-green colorblind, so everything the Kzinti have is an interesting shade of pink.) Star Trek's version of the Kzinti were gag villains, who'd fought four wars against humanity in the 21st century and lost all four of them so badly that they were forbidden by treaty from having any weapons other than stun-only phasers, and only then for their law enforcement. They steal a stasis box containing a Slaver spy's multitool from Spock, Sulu, and Uhura, and proceed to be serially outsmarted by all three, their attempted psychic interrogation is foiled by Sulu remembering what eating a salad is like (it drives the Kzinti psychic practically hysterical), and they're outsmarted by the tiny computer in the Slaver weapon and are quickly tricked into blowing themselves and their stolen police ship up. It's not hard to see why the network would consider Star Trek's producers and writers wanting to bring the Kzinti back as a sign of serious shark-jumping malarkey in Enterprise. Let's just hope Discovery, if it lasts long enough, decides to stick with Klingons and Romulans instead of revisiting Niven's pink pussycats.
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Parallel universe/alternate timeline stories aren't the problem with time travel in Star Trek... it's the inevitable continuity problems that occur when time travel is used (or abused) gratuitously in the bounds of a single timeline/universe. Star Trek: First Contact is a prime example of how the fallout can negatively impact other stories. It was a fairly benign time travel example on the surface, since only a handful of people in past-Earth had any contact with the 24th century Starfleet crew and their influence could be covered over with a handful of lies at most. It still caused one of the worst idiot plots in the Star Trek: Enterprise series. "Regeneration" somehow had Zefram Cochrane try to warn people about cyborgs from the future attacking Earth and not get written off as a crazy person, and the plot entailed 24th century Borg who'd had Starfleet's 24th century finest and their state of the art flagship on the ropes defeated by a 22nd century Enterprise for which phasers were still a new technology and the supposedly nigh-irreversible-by-24th-century-medicine assimilation that doomed almost the entire crew of the Enterprise-E is bested by a single 22nd century doctor via nothing fancier than exotic radiation therapy. (This, after a Voyager episode where a Borg based on future technology was seen as CIVILIZATION-ENDING GALACTIC DOOM if it got loose...) (Of course, there was also the timey-wimey ball question of Enterprise's Temporal Cold War resolution... Daniels said the timeline was resetting itself, so does that mean all the crap in the first three seasons just un-happened? The events of the pilot that changed the circumstances of Earth's first contact with Klingons and Enterprise's launch were Temporal Cold War shenanigans. Did Trip's sister and millions of others get un-killed when the Xindi attack un-happened? Did the Paraga II colony come back to life? Daniels did say "History didn't record it".) At times like these, all I can think of is a line from Red Dwarf about the future... "Poppycock! It will be happened; it shall be going to be happening; it will be was an event that could will have been taken place in the future. Simple as that. Your bucket's been kicked, baby."
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Actually, that's why they're so reluctant to move forwards in the timeline... because, thanks to Voyager and Enterprise, they can't jump very far into the future without landing in the period of the franchise's future history where Starfleet really should be called Timefleet. That's what I've usually seen its failure attributed to... the writers being compelled to throw in continuity-violating shenanigans and then using time travel to excuse it, until time travel-related timeline-screw became a plot arc in its own right. (Creative bankruptcy brought about by formula, so much so that before the show was canned they were considering tapping the Kzinti from the Star Trek cartoon as a new main antagonist... which officially promoted the show's cancellation to a Mercy Kill. When your first choice for a new main antagonist is a joke antagonist who can be defeated by remembering your side salad, it's time to take a break and regroup.)
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Really, I'm not so sure it's the fandom that's the reason for Star Trek's lack of innovation. Ever since the original Star Trek series, the studio and the network have had an established formula for the franchise that they were very comfortable with and resisted deviating from as hard as they possibly could. Their light, bubbly, moralistic format was a perfect fit for the audiences of the late 1960s, but it didn't play so well when the franchise was revived in the late 80's for a new series that became Star Trek: the Next Generation. The ratings were garbage, and from then on it was a fight between the studio wanting to take Star Trek in new directions while there was pushback from Gene Roddenberry and the network. They had to fight to be able to depict the Federation personnel as anything less than saints who roved the galaxy sermonizing to the backwards aliens about superior human morals. They had to fight to be able to include darker, more serious stories and to have actual story arcs instead of just planet/anomaly of the week stories and two-parters. They had to fight to be allowed to tackle certain social issues. They had to fight to set stories somewhere other than a starship named Enterprise. The network's intransigence was ultimately what flew Star Trek into the ground in the first place. Ratings were solid once TNG grew the beard and DS9 got rolling in earnest, but when TNG ended and Voyager was on the drawing board the network flatly rejected pretty much the entire premise of the series because it didn't follow Trek formula... resulting in a massive change in the project's tone from a season story arc-driven series like DS9's latter half to a lighter, exploration-focused episodic format like TNG. That was when the ratings started to fall... when the audience started to reject Star Trek's stagnation. Enterprise had the same problem. Despite being deliberately set before Star Trek and even omitting "Star Trek" from the title, the formula was king and they were quickly forced to ditch the stylistic suck and become a cosmetically advanced prequel, which combined with the insistence on continuity-breaking shenanigans in the name of tie-ins and references to previous shows, flew the ratings right into the toilet. The network attributed the reduced ratings from DS9's crappy timeslot as the fandom's indictment of its formula-breaking format, and killed innovation stone dead.
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Ain't personal teleporters grand? (Once you get past that whole "having your atoms sucked through a soda straw that just happens to pass through actual Hell" part...) Still, half the fluff text and fieldable characters in Warhammer 40,000 get weirder things for free with their breakfast cereal than were in that clip... and for the ones in the Inquisition, it's just about mandatory. A shame Dan Abnett hasn't been able to finish the third trilogy in his Inquisition trilogy of trilogies, if he started as he meant to go on the Bequin trilogy had a couple canon immigrants on the way in from the Cthulhu mythos and the books that inspired it. (Much ado about The King in Yellow...) After so many years of plot stasis, I'm kind of flummoxed at the sudden reversal the Imperium's having in 8th Edition... Guilliman's finally decided to get off his duff and fix his family's mess, someone put a boot up the Mechanicum's arse and got them developing new tech again, Cadia's gone to the dogs, and Abaddon may have finally become as competent as he was in the 31st Millennium again... as long as my Dark Eldar don't end up back in "glass cannons that are more glass than cannon" territory again, I'll be satisfied.
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Ugh... I had a bad feeling about Star Trek: Discovery when I heard it was going to be an exclusive for CBS's proprietary streaming service in the US. That trailer did nothing to diminish my premonition of Discovery discovering what it's like for a Star Trek series to get canceled after just one season. Both my parents are Trekkies and I was raised on Star Trek, and not even my profound affection for the franchise is going to compel me to get a CBS All Access membership to watch THAT shabby mess. (At least this trailer did one thing for me. I can finally put names to my sense of ill-fitting designs. The Klingons look like they mugged the Remans from Nemesis and stole their wardrobe and overall design aesthetic, and the Discovery herself looks downright Klingon from the outside and inside looks more like the USS Relativity from the 29th Century than a pre-Constitution-class ship.)
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Chapter 1: "Deep Space Warbird"... they don't show up much outside that chapter, being military models rather than customized air racers (or 5th Generation prototypes).
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The (New) UN Army does still exist... but they're kind of a rear-echelon security sort of affair, since VFs are the default currency in an era where the most common enemy faced are 10m tall giants. (They're the poor sods with the Beatrice tanks in Frontier, which do precisely bugger-all against the Vajra.) Macross Chronicle has some images of the New UN Army soldiers seen in Macross Frontier, like the mooks who were part of Sheryl's escort and who tried (and possibly failed) to gun down Grace O'Connor near the end of the series. There's some line art in a few of the art books too, particularly the ones for the movies. Barring the cutouts for cat ears, the troops on Voldor in the Macross Δ series are wearing the exact same uniform as the ones in Macross Frontier. sketchley has a partial pic at the bottom of this page that shows the standard New UN Army mook with their H&K G36 rifle knockoffs. (There may also be pics in the back of the Tenjin Hidetaka third Macross artbook.)
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Ah, yeah... it was kind of a pain in the butt to find a copy. Based on my quick skims I've found that some of the Macross Chronicle revelations and stats are actually drawn from it, such as the meaning of "ARMD" and the spec for the QF-3000 and SF-3A. Master File copied a few problematic statements from it as well, like the assertion that the SDF-3 was Vrlitwhai's ship, which the coverage in Macross Chronicle contradicts by way of Frontier's first episode showing SDF-3 is Megaroad-02. I decided to take a whack at it because I've never done an entire book before, and the lure of a pre-sequels look at Macross's technical lore is just TOO good...
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What I meant is I wasn't (until your most recent post) sure what precisely you were looking for... if you were just looking for confirmation of some story point or bit of technical trivia, or if you were looking for a full translation of the books. Yeah, unfortunately for Macross the Ride the few translators working the seemingly unending stream of Macross publications (myself included) focused almost entirely on the mecha since the story was serialized in Dengeki Hobby and accompanied by all those custom model kits representing the mecha of the story. The details of the story itself kinda got lost because there's only one or two who focus on translating actual stories, and they mostly go for the really old out-of-print stuff. Like most side stories, Macross the Ride's plot has very little in the way of impact on the story of the main (Macross Frontier) series. It's got some tenuous connections to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series, some fairly strong connections to Macross 7 and Macross VF-X2, and a lone connection to the novelization of Macross Δ, but it doesn't really have a very noticeable impact on anything that came after (chronologically). Many of the Macross Frontier cast are present, but aren't really involved in the story. SMS's Skull Platoon (w/ Ozma, Michel, and Luca) is present, Alto puts in a brief appearance as a fresh transfer to from entertainment to pilot training at Mihoshi, Ranka's an unremarkable junior high student, Sheryl's mentioned every now and then as the #1 idol in the galaxy, Brera has a bit part as the test pilot of the YF-27-3 Shahar ♂, etc. The only one who's arguably involved in the goings-on of the plot is Col. Grace Godunowa (alias Grace O'Connor) of the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army intelligence service (because isn't she always?). I'll work up a detailed plot summary and PM it to you, but the short version is that the two volumes are almost two separate story arcs. The first six chapters concern themselves with the protagonist (Chelsea Scarlett) transitioning from a retiring idol singer to SMS pilot, and SMS pilot to air racer before taking on kind of a "enemy racer of the week" format where the story's only conflict is between elite air racers competing for a spot in the League's most elite race... the Seiten Cup. The second volume concerns itself with the Seiten Cup itself and the venue being attacked by the remnants of Latence, the Earth-supremacist organization who staged the coup attempt in 2051 in Macross VF-X2. Connections-wise, the strongest ones are to Macross 7. Both Chelsea and the main villain Naresuan used to live in the Varauta system, and were involved in the Protodeviln conflict. The Latence splinter group Naresuan leads even uses old and upgraded Varauta mecha, and the venue for the entire second half is a ship design introduced in Macross 7. One of the minor characters new to the story is a Zolan doctor. Naresuan himself sports some ties to SDF Macross, being one of Vrlitwhai's subordinate commanders during the First Space War, though what he pilots in the end is a nod to the Macross Plus video game (a manned version of the Neo Glaug drone, the Ghost X-9's rival program). His organization, FASCES, is a surviving splinter faction of Latence, the villains from Macross VF-X2. The only real ties that go FORWARD in the continuity are that Chelsea and her mentor Angers 672 made some substantial contributions to the completion of the YF-25 prototype that became the VF-25 used in Macross Frontier, and that Chelsea herself apparently went into government after she retired as a Vanquish League racer. The novelization of Macross Δ indicates she's a representative in the New UN Government parliament in 2067.
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Was there something in particular you wanted to know from those? I've read them, though I haven't published a translation of same because they're in print still. No kidding. Have you ever looked into doing the old Sky Angels book? I'm taking a whack at it now that my day job workload has slackened, and was wondering if you've done anything with it (or would be interested in proofreading).