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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    So is Kaifun's romantic preference. Despite the references to the VF-11 as the first "true successor" to the VF-1 as an all-regime multirole variable fighter, I don't think it really made it all the way there. We never saw a dedicated trainer variant, or anti-ship hardware like a Strike Pack, etc. It was just a dogfighter. For my money, the VF-14 was actually the superior main fighter in its generation. General Galaxy seemed to get that all the combat that was likely to go on for an emigrant fleet was going to be in space, and they designed for that appropriately in their VF-14. A nice big space fighter with a lot of room for onboard fuel, optional hardware, and future upgrades that had good passive stealth design and internalized weapons. IMO, the VF-11's Achilles heel is that they made it too small... so it was dependent on the extra propellant and thrust from FAST packs to have a sustainably long operating time in space. The designation for what you're thinking of is EVA-3, but yeah that's a thing.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Being a one-and-done would be an amusing bit of karma considering how dismissive they've been of the existing fans... In the short term, maybe... it's all down to whether or not they can present more content that will actually keep people there, and whether Star Trek: Discovery will be enough of a draw to keep the ones who took out trial subscriptions there long term. They wouldn't be the first network to try a streaming service and massively overestimate the potential audience for same. There's been a lot of back-and-forth about whether Disney was going to pull its content from other streaming services, and last I heard they had backed down on that one... so we'll see if anything is going to actually come of that.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, that Star Trek: Discovery would be a highly pirated show was pretty much inevitable the minute CBS announced it would be carried only on CBS All Access. I just wasn't expecting pirates hitting it so hard right out of the gate, seemingly as a rebuke to CBS for their idiotic move. I had figured we'd see a spike in piracy around the time the third episode was set to "air". Between CBS's aggressively viewer-hostile handling of the pilot and that complete idiot Jason Isaacs challenging the established fanbase not to follow the series, one has to wonder if Discovery will end up a "one and done" Star Trek series for the first time in the franchise's history. As unimpressive as the pilot was, I'd say fifteen episodes and out would almost be preferable.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Seeing as the closest we had before was the Macross Delta Mecha and Technology thread, and that has outlived its usefulness... I can't see them objecting too loudly (if at all). For my money, "best" would have to be measured by a mixture of performance and operational versatility... which leaves the contenders as the VF-171 Nightmare Plus and VF-25 Messiah, both of which had enough modular option components to be quickly converted into most any role from fighter to bomber to reconnaissance plane... "Most stylish"... well, my love for the VF-2SS Valkyrie II is well-known, but I have a fondness for the VF-31A and VF-4A as well. Depends how you want to measure service life. Longest tenure in actual service belongs to the VF-1 Valkyrie, which is still used as a training plane a whopping fifty-nine years after its introduction and was still in use with the New UN Spacy's special forces into the mid-2050s. The VF-4 Lightning III also hung in there like a champ, still being used by the Special Forces at thirty-five years in service (2012-2047). We know, via Macross R, that the VF-11 was retired and being sold off by the Frontier NUNS in 2058, so its run appears to have lasted just about thirty years exactly. Longest tenure as Main Variable Fighter is no longer an easy thing to measure, since the individual emigrant fleets retire and replace their equipment at their own pace. Best data suggests the VF-11 Thunderbolt's stint as main variable fighter was almost exactly twenty years (introduced 2028, with its replacement introduced 2048), and the VF-171 is narrowly edging it out by still being used in an isolated part of the galaxy with a replacement not slated to go into production until 2069-2070 (so, twenty-one to twenty-two years).
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Given the success it'd had in Japan, I'd say you'd probably find a fair number of folks who'd argue that Macross Delta is one of the stronger installments... though it definitely favored the music over the actual plot. Still, I think that's more down to different tastes and different introductions to the Macross franchise. Frontier and Delta have brought a LOT of new blood into the fandom, so their expectations are built on those shows rather than the older stuff. I know, but it's this weird thing people do where there's this automatic assumption that a creator of a story is somehow responsible for everything in the final version... as if it'd sprung from his (or her) mind fully-developed and in its final form. It's something we see a lot with Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas, both of whom were great idea men but whose ideas needed a lot of filtering and no small amount of revision and rework before they became something watchable. (The Star Wars prequel trilogy and the first season of Star Trek: the Next Generation are the kind of thing that happens when you let that kind of person have more creative control with less oversight.) I'm not sure if DYRL? was necessarily darker than the original SDF Macross series... it dwells on the dark bits for a little longer than the TV series did in Ep1-27, but it also skips over a bunch of darker moments from the TV series like Kakizaki's drawn out death sequence and actually seeing Earth get pasted. It also plays the optimism card a bit more strongly too, what with the temporary truce that Earth gets with the Zentradi, etc. Macross is always going to be a relatively light and soft war story. Power of love and all that jazz. Even at its darkest, it'll never get anywhere near the kind of soul-shredding, I-need-a-stiff-drink depression of Tomino-style Gundam.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/star-trek-discovery-is-getting-pirated-a-lot/ It seems the tech-savvy public is expressing their feelings about CBS All Access rather clearly...
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Practically zero... Macross is, as Kawamori has said, a love story first and a mecha series second. It simply isn't compatible with classic Gundam's bleak, dark, hopeless outlook or the lame over-the-top gritty tryhard nonsense in Thunderbolt that crosses the line into accidental self-parody. Plus, y'know, Kawamori ain't too keen on the idea of direct sequels and remakes. ... eh, I dunno if that's entirely true. I mean, Guld and Isamu did exchange a few "Say My Name!" moments in Plus, and in 7 Gamlin had a couple mild temper tantrums and a modest character arc devoted to being pissed off that Basara is a better pilot than he is... though that was far milder than anything in Gundam, and at least part of it was played for laughs at Gamlin's expense. So far, Titan Comics is having exactly the problem I outlined above for Gundam Thunderbolt... Titan Comics' staff is trying SO HARD to rework the story into this grim, dark, gritty mecha/action series it became unintentionally hilarious. You can tell it's a dark, serious story because everybody grimaces 24/7, and you know it's an action series because everybody strikes poses like they're modeling for a movie poster in every panel. It's right up there with the Doom comic for unintentional silliness. (The only difference is Gundam Thunderbolt doesn't quite manage unintentional hilarity... it only got as far as feeling like a Tite Kubo-style "Take That!" aimed at Gundam fanfic writers.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Just a little... enough to really throw his lack of character development and personality into sharper relief. Her one-dimensionalness distracts from his. Like the world's hardest working, but most-disadvantaged, xenomorph... Y'sure that's what that is? To me, it always looked like she was fighting a wicked sneeze.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much, yeah... though from what I understand, even before Enterprise came along and reduced the laser pistols from the Star Trek "The Cage" pilot to Canon Discontinuity, the Star Trek staff just sort of ignores the problem. Later episodes of TOS reused the laser pistol prop (e.g. "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", "The Man Trap") and explicitly identified it as an older model phaser pistol in the final draft of the script. By the time Star Trek: Discovery is set (2255), the Constitution-class USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) would've been in service for about ten years. We know Spock served under Captain Pike for over 11 years on Enterprise, and we know his successor Kirk's five year mission was 2265-2270, so the captain of the Enterprise during the events of Star Trek: Discovery ought to be Christopher Pike at about a year into his tenure in the big chair. Or, even worse, why would the show attach itself to the Prime Continuity when they're going to play fast and loose with canon and continuity? We've only had the two episodes, and they've already got technology showing up in Discovery over a century before it's supposed to have been developed in prior Prime Continuity stories... never mind the whole "sister Spock never spoke about" thing. Playing fast and loose with canon in prequels already bit them in the ass once in Enterprise... did they not learn their lesson? Eh, I dunno... it's highly probable that this Klingon cult's personal artistic interpretation of Kahless the Unforgettable will resemble their distinctive appearance, in much the same way the mental image the augment virus-affected Klingons in TOS had of Kahless was as a fellow TOS Klingon instead of as a historically accurate TNG Klingon. (Kahless is a religious figure after all, and without getting unduly specific we know that in the real world it's quite common for artists to "reinterpret" the ethnicity of mythical and/or mytho-historical individuals to suit their patrons and/or personal tastes.) It may simply be that the Discovery Klingons are a minority ethnic group or something, like the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine relaunch did with the Trill in Worlds of Deep Space Nine... establishing that the TNG version of the Trill were a racial minority among the Trill who coexist with the DS9 Trill majority.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm genuinely unsure which was less impressive... the opening title on its own, or the actual first episode. Considering it was supposed to sell us on the idea of paying for CBS All Access, I'd call the first episode of STD a resounding failure. It wasn't as bad as I'd feared, but it wasn't anything like good either. It has established a firm foothold in the bleak, cloying void of ambivalence by having less substance to it than Prelude to Axanar. I feel I might have been kinder to it if it didn't have Star Trek in the title, because it really doesn't feel like a Star Trek series. Put some laser swords in it and I'd be prepared to accept it as a bad Star Wars prequel flick tho...
  11. Seto Kaiba
    A lot of western fans hold Plus up as the example of the kind of Macross they want... which is odd to say the least, since that series is pretty much the un-Macross. I think the fact that the two Macross sequels to actually make it out of Japan were both more dark and serious than is typical for Macross probably did a lot to skew people's expectations of future developments in the metaseries. It's rather ironic that western fans blast Macross 7 and Macross Delta while singing Kawamori's praises, when both of those are much closer to the ideal Kawamori was talking about when he identified the love story aspect as the most important, and the space warfare part as merely a backdrop for it. Another thing a lot of western fans do is dramatically overestimate Shoji Kawamori's direct involvement in the creation of Macross stories. He's mainly confined his contributions to series concept and storyboarding in the last several titles. Macross II was a story that followed religiously in DYRL?'s footsteps, the thing that made it seem so out of place was that it was made darker and grittier, and they even hired staff from the Gundam franchise to make it so. It is, essentially, exactly what all the people who want Macross to be more of a gritty war story are asking for, but they don't realize that fact. It is, in a largely literal sense, Macross viewed through the filter of Universal Century Gundam. From a mecha standpoint, Delta definitely disappointed... but it was pretty evident that they were expecting Walkure to carry the show from a very early stage, so at least they hit the nail on the head. From what's been said on the subject, he wanted to do a series about competing flight demonstration teams... essentially a Macross series without a big space war. "In life, each man gets what he deserves!" (Admittedly, plaintext lacks a lot of the punch compared to hearing that line delivered by BRIAN BLESSED! in Blackadder.) This ain't Gundam... Macross is an expensive advertisement for MUSIC, and Delta blatantly so.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    's not exactly a new position of his... he's been maintaining for ages that the original trio will not be coming back, since their story arc is over and they've sailed off into the metaphorical sunset. Somehow, I suspect if she didn't age herself out of the role in the meantime, they'd cast her as Linn Feichun... Minmay's aunt (and Kaifun's mom), who had been an idol singer before retiring and getting married to the head of her fanclub. That's because Shakespeare was shooting for a lowest common denominator... dirty jokes, saucy situations, and depictions of the Great and Good behaving badly know no boundaries of class for entertainment value.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno... there's no rational explanation for it, since the comics are legally merchandise and thus there was nothing stopping them from just using the original VF-1 design everywhere therein.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Um... very slight problem with your premise here. Macross Delta WASN'T panned. Quite the opposite, in fact. The series was very well-received in the Japanese domestic market, and Walkure in particular has done EXTREMELY well for itself as a result of the show's popularity. Its following isn't quite as strong as Frontier's was, but that was a success beyond any rational prediction. Outside of Kawamori's whimsy, if anything is going to set the tone for the next series, it'd be the audience's reception of Delta... a broadly positive one even with the show's flaws. (If you're going to build a show around the music, and the music ends up carrying the show... well, that's just "Mission Accomplished" I guess.) All told, the overwhelming majority of the discontent with Delta comes from the fans in the show's periphery demographic, who've never taken Macross's more lighthearted installations all that well, and seem to keep hoping for something similar to Macross Plus even though you could argue that one was the one that was actually panned in Japan. (The audience has shown more favor to the OVA years after the fact, but when it was new it didn't do so hot there.) So, it's basically up in the air what the next show will be like because for all Delta's success it was not quite the show Kawamori wanted to make... so his reaction is going to be less predictable, if they're still letting him call all the shots. So you're a cranky young guy instead?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It hasn't actually changed much... you've just gotten older, and perhaps nostalgia has glossed over the goofier moments in the original series in your memory.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Arbitrary, as far as we know... though there are hints there may be some specialism-related color coding. Macross II is, AFAIK, the only Macross title thus far to make the uniform coloration explicitly meaningful with the base color denoting branch of service and the color banding denoting specialization. (They also helpfully have sew-on patches that denote the same information.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, like I said, Kawamori has acknowledged that dropping the "New" was a goof on the staff's part... it's supposed to have been New UN Forces and New UN Government since the last few episodes of the original series. Nowhere that I've seen, no. Macross Chronicle has a thing about certain iconic squadron paintjobs. ... you could've just checked the page for his VF-1J color scheme on the Macross Mecha Manual. Wherever possible, we mark the episode of first appearance and timestamp within that episode. It's after he and Hikaru both get promoted, so Max is a platoon leader and Hikaru rose to squadron leader.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Back in the day? Absolutely not... if Big West and co. had noticed (i.e. had the comics actually sold worth a damn) then it would've come down to a copyright infringement lawsuit. Part of the reason they were able to get away with ripping off so many other titles (including several Macross ones, Independence Day, Ghost in the Shell, and others) was that they sold poorly enough that they were too obscure to draw the attention of the IP owners who could've/should've sued. Less a problem now, since Harmony Gold obtained the merchandising rights to DYRL? from Tatsunoko in the early 2000s to keep Japanese VF-1 toys from summarily torching the prospects of the Toynami "Masterpiece" collection.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    While I'd like to start with "that's the stupid part" there's so much stupid it gets lost in the shuffle... but they didn't need to redesign the Valkyries for this. It's a frigging comic book, and thus legally merchandise, so there was nothing stopping them from using the original VF-1 design. The proportions are all wrong, though, it looks like an old Matchbox toy instead of the battroid from the series. Ave Deus Mechanicus... for a minute there I thought you'd posted a picture of William Dafoe in drag!
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Presumably at some point in the mid-to-late 2040s, when the New UN Government began to devolve more authority to the individual emigrant fleets and planets. I'd imagine that they'd want a different insignia than the one that had historically been exclusively Earth's.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Based on Macross Chronicle, the reorganization of the surviving UN Forces into the New UN Forces began in May 2010 and ended at an unspecified point in 2011. That's when the military's areas of responsibility expanded to include the operation and defense of emigrant fleets. Macross Chronicle supports this interpretation. Kawamori has commented briefly that the reason the "New UN Government" is mentioned in SDF Macross but doesn't appear again until Macross Frontier is a simple error on the staff's part. They essentially forgot about the "New" they'd tacked on after the timeskip when they were making the Macross Plus and Macross 7 series.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda reminds me of Prometheus... in that the only expression the giant alien's face is capable of is the fabled DULL SURPRISE!
  23. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, it kinda defeats the point... the whole thing about the Zentradi in the original SDF Macross series was that they were virtually identical to humanity on a genetic level. It would make sense that most of them look essentially human, as they did in the series, and continue to do in most of the non-animated works. Giving them all an obvious "I am an alien" trait feels a bit off-message. They're working with a limited amount of airtime, so they have to prioritize... Macross Frontier did a pretty good job with its main cast's backstories, less so with the supporting cast for whom detailed backstories are less necessary. Macross Delta dropped the ball bigtime, because its main cast was several times the size of the ones from previous shows without a proportional increase in airtime. Nah, Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team is too upbeat... after all, the titular team there are operating Gundams and therefore aren't cannon fodder. (Never mind Shiro's Invinci-Ball from the first episode.) If you want to focus on something like destroids, you need the kind of soul-crushing cannon fodder experience you can get from Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO's three OVAs: The Hidden One Year War, Apocalypse 0079, and Gravity Front. That show's so serious about its death toll that by the third OVA a literal shinigami is one of the show's regulars. Gravity Front's first two episodes are probably the best facsimile of the Destroids one time to shine in the Unification Wars, when land warfare robots were actually terrifyingly OP instead of Made of Explodium.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That's about the only plausible explanation, though it's dubious how he'd have actually known about it since the wars didn't exactly devastate Earth. For the most part it was little brushfire conflicts the local partisans started after balking at the idea of a unified world government. There are plenty of similar conflicts in this day in age, but they don't exactly provoke such an intense, seething, almost self-destructive hatred in people totally unrelated to the actual casus belli. Such an intense hatred can't have just popped up out of nowhere, and as I noted before the one really plausible-sounding theory that he picked it up while wandering the globe doesn't work because it was his reason for running away from home to begin with. Admittedly, I'd also like an explanation for why Basara is so down on the military. It's a real tough sell that he's so stupendously thick that he doesn't realize that Ray Lovelock is still working for the Macross-7 fleet's NUNS, and that he himself is serving as a test pilot for a black project run by the fleet's military brass. I mean, he can't possibly believe Ray just happened to find a custom VF-19 Excalibur set up for Minmay Attack ops. Nobody could be THAT dense and still dress themselves. Likewise, he has to know Ray's a former ace pilot from an elite combat unit, yet he doesn't give Ray any grief for his military past or his ongoing affiliation with the military. ... that'd make him an even more monstrous hypocrite than he already was, which is admittedly a hell of a trick. About half of the Anti-Unification Alliance's major military actions in the chronology are massacres of one kind or another, like nuking St. Petersburg, hijacking an Oberth-class space destroyer and using it to wipe out the Mars Return Fleet, or bombing the construction crews who were working on Grand Cannon II. (We can't count their bombing of Mayan, since that was still secret at the time.) He'd have to have been a complete psychopath to still support them at the time he was introduced in the series... the UN Government's cover story for the disappearance of the SDF-1 Macross along with South Ataria island itself was that Alliance remnants had nuked it off the map, which would've killed his entire immediate family and his cousin. We don't know a lot, I'm afraid... but the UN Government was supposedly a reasonably effective and levelheaded representative democracy for a free society. They did go too in their efforts to avoid the panic that would ensue if word got out that they were potentially at war with an alien military, but in the case of the few specific grievances we've heard the Anti-Unification Alliance lay at their door, the big ones seem to be a mix of simply not knowing what the real reason for certain actions were and a healthy dose of twisting the facts like Nora's claim the UN Gov't stole the variable system from her homeland when it was freely shared. That's why Kaifun's seething, focused rage toward the military doesn't make a ton of sense... we've never really seen them do anything to actually deserve his loathing.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Kaifun and Basara are, I think, probably not really pacifists at all... or at least they're using pacifism as an excuse for their own personal problems. Kaifun's character is, in some ways, even stranger than Basara's. Throughout the series, and even in events set before it, his whole life seems to revolve around this seemingly sourceless hatred he's nurturing toward the military. I've never found any explanation for why he has such a hate-on for the UN Forces. You'd think it was something he picked up while wandering the world after he ran away from home, but his hatred for the military was the reason he ran away in the first place... he didn't want to live near the Macross after his family decided to move to South Ataria. In hindsight, his pacifism, his belief in nonviolent conflict resolution, and even his relationship with Minmay look like reactionary behavior triggered by his inexplicable loathing for the military. He didn't seem at all troubled about compromising those principles as long as it meant sticking it to the military, like his exploiting his position as Minmay's manager to instigate borderline riots or emotionally and verbally abusing Minmay herself when she expressed support for the soldiers and government. The guy's clearly got some mental health issues, but we're never told why... which makes him really bizarre considering how often his pathological hatred of soldiers causes problems. Basara's a bit easier to understand, but it's hard to say if his issues are the result of him having an autism spectrum disorder, that Ray did a crappy job raising him, or both. He clearly doesn't relate well to other people outside of a few narrowly-focused interests, and as part of his obsession with music he seems to have created a pacifist philosophy based on an idealized, historically inaccurate version of Minmay as a singer who ended the First Space War with her songs. So he seems to be living his entire life around that ideal of songs ending conflict, and he reacts badly when reality is unable to align with his ideal. I'm sure, in his mind, using speaker pods to FORCE enemy pilots to listen to his song isn't an act of violence because the songs are supposed to end the fighting. His reaction to having to resort to violence when singing doesn't work in a street fight is similar... he's furious with himself for not being able to stop the fight with songs, and because Ray never forced him into normal social interactions he takes his frustration out on Mylene, who he sees as being in the wrong for forcing him to compromise his ideal. So, I guess I'm saying that both fall short of actual pacifism because Kaifun's just using it as an excuse for his personal damage and Basara's so wrapped up in an ideal he doesn't realize the hypocrisy. When it comes to the actual pacifists in the Macross metaseries, I think if you wanted to relate their treatment of pacifism to the show's overarching theme of communication the way we'd have to look at it would be as a refusal to participate in a meaningful dialog. Instead of engaging their opposites in a two-way exchange as equals they're taking a passive-aggressive "say whatever you want, I just won't be listening" approach to communication or a holier-than-thou attitude. Like how Serge Glass's administration on Macross-29 led the fleet to economic ruin by pursuing a non-confrontational approach to EVERYTHING. Because he wouldn't open a dialog with the other fleets on an equal footing to avoid anything resembling aggression, he couldn't even communicate that his fleet was falling apart because of its neighbors' economic policies.
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