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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Decided to go for one that dropped today, Villain-san's Day Off... a comedy about what a standard tokusatsu villain does in his copious free time when he's not fighting teenagers with attitude. It seems to mostly consist of a tall and fairly intimidating gentleman doing ordinary everyday things with an incredibly overdramatic voiceover to remind the audience of the conceit that he's a card-carrying villain when he's on the clock. It's... wholesome? A little funny, but mostly just kind of slightly silly. Also went for 7th Time Loop: the Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy. We've been seeing a lot of these otome game-type shows lately, and most of them are pretty weak stuff so my hopes are not high going in. At the very least, the production values are higher than Tearmoon Empire or I'm the Villainess, So I'm Taming the Final Boss. An awful lotta blood and dying for the start of an otome storyline though... yeesh. Lotta disembowelings too. Starts pretty much the same as all the others too... the usual "the prince cancelled his engagement for a flimsy reason and now the main girl is running off to romance the bad guy" schtick. (It is mildly amusing that the first episode is basically just a very long tale of the universe repeatedly going "Would you please stop getting caught up in a war and dying?".)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It is... but as far as we know it's never been used that way (to facilitate long-range patrols), no doubt due to the very limited range of small craft without fold capability. It's only ever been presented as an emergency measure to protect the life of a mecha's operator when immediate rescue is not possible.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Just as well, imagine the DoorDash/GrubHub service charge for a trip of 5.4 billion km...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids is pretty thinly written standard "the world runs on RPG logic" fare... it's halfway to being Bofuri but without the conceit of being in a VR MMO, with the hero being a tank who's kicked from the standard fantasy hero's party so the hero can expand his harem with more girls and discovering he's got defense skills that make him stupidly broken. It feels very... half-assed? Quarter assed even. The first episode feels like the product of an isekai/MMO series mad lib. Banished from the Hero's Party season two is pretty unremarkable stuff as well. Tomorrow over lunch I'll probably tackle Tales of Wedding Rings or The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's actually kind of depressing how many shows in Crunchyroll's Winter 2024 lineup are isekai or at least isekai-adjacent with the whole "fantasy world that arbitrarily runs on JRPG or MMORPG logic" schtick. The only titles I've found in that genre that I've considered actually good or at least interesting are the ones that subvert the genre's usual power fantasy formula... Overlord for its protagonist being an overpowered villain, Youjo Senki for its "god hates me specifically" plot and its protagonist who wants anything BUT fame and power, KonoSuba for its heroes being a pack of incredibly dysfunctional morons, Re:Zero for its unstinting commitment to reality ensuing WRT a useless hikikomori being equally useless in a fantasy world too, and Ascendance of a Bookworm for its protagonist being thoroughly uninterested in ANY isekai shenanigans (or indeed anything outside of her monomaniacal desire for books). So much of what that genre produces is so transparently derivative of a handful of first-gen plots that the whole genre feels like shovelware sometimes. Still... gonna give the season's new offerings a whirl. I've already tried the first episode of Mashle's second season and found it... ok, but not great. Weird pivot to Mash's lack of magic suddenly being out in the open with no preamble and now having to Prove His Worth, but hey... if they wanna mess with a man who could probably punch god to death over a cream puff, so be it right? Mash is just Saitama with hair, in off-brand Harry Potter. My next port of call is A Sign of Affection, a romance comedy series about a deaf college student and a young man she takes a fancy to after he helps her out with a tourist who doesn't understand she can't hear him. The shoujo manga art style shines through this one's animated art style to an almost distressing extent... the original artist clearly has a type. No judgement, just... every single man is tall, slim, with a narrow face, and big pouty lips. It's like a island of misfit boy band members. The series does take considerable care to emphasize the social complications involved in having a disability and having to explain that disability to others. The launching point for the romance seems to be that Itsuomi (the lead man in the story) consistently puts in the effort to make things easier for Yuki (the main character). It is relentlessly cute. I'm interested to see where this one goes.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's where they got the Daedalus and Prometheus... thankfully with minimal losses among the crews of both ships due to their airtight semi-submersible nature. I'd guess they'd probably leave it alone... it's not only a memorial of sorts, but also technically kind of a mass grave considering how many soldiers and civilians died there during the first battle of the war.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... at the outset, Winter 2024 doesn't seem like it's going to be a particularly enjoyable season in terms of anime releases. The one I really want still has a vague "Coming 2024" release date, but that's a movie... the Overlord movie adapting the Holy Kingdom arc. Crunchyroll's Winter 2024 lineup is still launching, but it's downright distressing how much of it is third- and fourth-iteration isekai copycat titles. There's one that popped out at me - The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids - that might as well just retitle itself Borufi: Non-Cutesy Edition. The Unwanted Undead Adventurer reads like a darker take on Skeleton Knight in Another World, which was itself a ripoff of Overlord's Men of the Kingdom arc, but also The Legendary Hero is Dead. Isekai is quickly becoming the genre I wish would hurry up and die, much like western superhero movies. There are a few good and interesting ones, but it's mostly trash. I'm past Mugen Train... but it's still kind of a solid 5/10, maybe 6/10 on a good day. It really did make me stop and do a double-take at how similar Demon Slayer's Tanjiro and My Hero Academia's Midoriya are... right down to their color motifs. Is this just the era of protagonists having to be whiny doormats?
  8. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, it probably has a lot to do with when the SF-3A Lancer II was developed and that it was developed for the Earth UN Government's concept for planetary defense that didn't survive the realities of the First Space War. The Lancer II was a relatively early development from the early-to-mid 2000's, and it was developed around the idea of fortifying Earth against a classic alien invasion scenario. It presumably would have been operating from the static space stations in geosynchronous orbit to strafe enemies as they approached Earth under the original plan, before the UN Forces reworked the plans for those space stations into the ARMD-class space carrier. Even then, it wasn't really intended for deep space use. More like a sort of a space-based game of Red Rover where Lancers would strafe an approaching enemy on their way from one station or carrier to another. The UN Forces just fundamentally did not understand, at the time, the sheer scale of the enemy force they would end up facing. The UN Forces did also introduce the QF-3000 series Ghost in that approximate timeframe, but it should be noted that the Ghost was not a fully autonomous unmanned fighter. It needed offboard command and control from a ship or control aircraft, and a few sources assert that its early model semi-autonomous air combat AI was not the most stable and reliable system around. The sheer quantity of Lancer II's the Spacy intended to deploy for planetary defense would probably have made making them unmanned unfeasible or at least prohibitively expensive relative to the uncomplicated Lancer II design.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Apparently there's a new season of Blue Exorcist that's also airing... I'd completely forgotten about that series considering how mediocre the first season was, but I guess it's still going.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The island itself, and presumably the surrounding ocean that came with it, is still out there... but the crew of the Macross stripped it for absolutely everything usable (including the ships that'd been in the ocean) before setting off for Earth. They probably took a fair chunk of the ocean too, since water is an important thing to have not just for human needs but also as a propellant supplement.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Not as such... the Lancer II does have a cold sleep function, but it's not for long-distance journeys. At least, not intentional ones. Despite being designated a space fighter, the Lancer II is actually a space attacker that functions rather like a manned missile. It's designed to make a single high-powered strafing run on an enemy ship and then be caught up to and recovered by an aircraft carrier. Its engine is a thermonuclear rocket that only has enough fuel to burn for 60 seconds (but at a gargantuan 153,000kgf) and its verniers are only good for about 5 seconds (but at a similarly gargantuan 230,000kgf). It has massive acceleration but basically no endurance, so it's designed to come screaming in at high speed, strafe the enemy ship with its high-powered particle beam cannons and thermonuclear reaction missiles, coast past the enemy, and wait for recovery. The low metabolic function cold sleep system built into the Lancer II's cockpit is there to cover the possibility that immediate recovery might not always be possible due to the loss of the carrier, the fighter drifting off course, etc. It's rated to operate for anywhere from 6 hours to 6 months using the Lancer II's backup power system. If a Lancer II with a pilot in cold sleep was discovered out near Pluto (which is ~36 AU from Earth) it would either have to have come out there on a fold-capable ship (by accident or design) and been mistakenly written off as destroyed, or its pilot is the luckiest SOB in existence having his life support system somehow hang on 50 times longer than it was designed to while his fighter spent 25 years or so drifting there at ~7km/s after missing a carrier recovery near Earth. If there are patrols out that far after the war, they're either operating from a base out there or from a fold capable carrier.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, the Macross's engineering crew mercilessly kink-shamed the gravity control system on the way back to Earth.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... at one point, the Macross was going to have a 10km-diameter parachute for atmospheric reentry. It's only really mentioned as a side note in the outline of the early series development, alongside the other rejected/unused ideas that were later reworked.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the new season is starting... the first batch of simulcasts dropped on the major streaming services this afternoon. Just finished the first episode of Mashle's second season. It's a weird pivot considering where the previous season ended, but it's still plenty enjoyable. For now, I've got The Unwanted Undead Adventurer, The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic, and A Sign of Affection on my to-watch list. More titles are going to become available in the next few days. I also ended up letting one of my mom's ESL students twist my arm into watching Demon Slayer. It's... not bad. Not great... but the main trio have an entertaining dynamic and it's an interesting if not particularly original concept. IMO its main problem is that it waits far too long to actually develop characters and thus every time a character with any kind of significance dies their death has to be bookended by obnoxiously long, flow-breaking flashbacks to their tragic backstory. It is rather interesting to see a shounen anime which is more or less fanservice-free up through the first season and movie. It's running entirely on the strength of its story, which is quite something for that genre these days. Also went back and started Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and started a rewatch of Tenchi Muyo!'s OVAs with a friend over the holiday. Frieren is interesting for its premise of your standard fantasy elf who doesn't quite get that other people don't live as long but not being an arse about it like most fantasy elves. At some point, also gonna go back and watch Phantasy Star Online 2: Episode Oracle since that's become available on Crunchyroll now.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    One thing I should add that I probably should have remembered in my original response but only just recalled a short while ago is that a battle in the asteroid belt was a part of the earliest versions of the series outline. It was one of the stories that was dropped or combined with other premises when the episode count was changed. It shows up in both the 52 episode outline and 48 episode versions of the series plan, but was dropped starting with the 39 episode version. The episode would have featured the "Asteroid Cracker", a special strategy/gimmick like the Daedalus Attack wherein the Macross would launch its anchor cables into a nearby asteroid and then swing that asteroid into enemy ships as an improvised weapon. Macross the First did finally bring this battle and rejected gimmick back in its version of the story, though the "Asteroid Cracker" strategy was changed from using the asteroid as an improvised bludgeon to using it as an improvised projectile. The anchor cables were used to help deploy a pinpoint barrier onto the back of the asteroid which was detonated, propelling the asteroid into enemy ships. (Three of the other four rejected gimmicks found their way into Macross in one way or another. The "Sunriser" weapon probably evolved into the barrier explosion from Burst Point, the Prometheus Attack probably evolved into the ARMD Attack in from the DYRL? games and Macross Attack in Frontier, and the "plate tectonics specal" that involved the ship kicking the ground so hard a chunk of the Earth's crust could be flipped up to use as a shield is indicated to have been the inspiration for Formation Big Wednesday in the Macross Frontier movies. The only one that hasn't been used is the giant reentry parachute.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    So... we should clarify a specific point regarding the movie version ARMD-class here. In DYRL?'s version of the First Space War, the movie version ARMD-class was the only version of the ARMD-class to exist and it had essentially the same backstory as the version in the SDF Macross TV series. The class was designed with a fold system but the first few ships of the class were competed and launched without them because delivery of their fold systems was delayed. The Macross was docked to ARMD-01 and ARMD-02, which did not have fold systems at the time they were completed and would theoretically have received them via retrofit later on had the war not gotten in the way. The Macross ongoing official setting has a somewhat different view of the movie version ARMDs. As with so many of DYRL?'s new designs, both the TV and movie versions coexist but the context of the movie designs is not always the same as what's presented in the movie itself. The official setting treats the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV version of the ARMD-class as the correct design for the ARMDs of the First Space War period. Its movie version is recontextualized as being a new class of ARMD ("ARMD II-class") that was introduced after the First Space War and used both as a standalone space carrier and docked to the mass-production Macross-class ships to support their air wings. The ARMD II-class, being intended for use both domestically and with emigrant fleets, was designed to be fold capable. It's implied that something like 200 of them were made in the 2010s and 2020s before the class was discontinued in favor of the next-generation Guantanamo-class Advanced ARMD that serves as the main carrier of the New UN Spacy thereafter. In the movie's story, ARMD-01 and ARMD-02 didn't have fold systems yet when they were completed and connected to the Macross. Given that the in-universe version of the movie was filmed with cooperation from the Spacy and to an extent used actual ships and mecha, the ship standing in for the Macross in the film was almost certainly a late 2020s era mass-produced Macross-class (many fans suspect the SDFN-01 General Takashi Hayase) with fold-capable ARMD II-class ships for arms.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno... the dates that we have are primarily for events depicted in the series proper. Episode 6 depicts the Macross in the vicinity of Saturn in the first half of April 2009, and episode 7 depicts the ship approaching Mars in the first week of October 2009. Little of what happens in the middle is touched on. If we were to assume (unwisely) a uniform velocity for the entire 173-day period between the events of episodes 6 and 7, it would take approximately 47 days to cross the asteroid belt based on observations that suggest the belt is approximately one AU across. Of course, this is unwise because constant thrust does not equal constant velocity. The ship would accelerate briefly to a specific speed and then coast at that speed until needing to decelerate on approach to a target.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    At present, Macross Plus doesn't seem to be available on any of the major streaming services outside of Japan. Part of it may still be available on Amazon, if their web storefront isn't lying to me, but your best bet at this precise moment is probably the old home video releases of the OVA and movie from Manga Entertainment. It'll presumably become available on streaming again after the new licensee releases the OVA and/or movie on home video in high definition. We've just recently started to see the new licensees for Macross titles announcing release plans for the older shows, so hopefully it won't be too much longer before Macross Plus's release date is announced.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yes and no. The ARMD-class was designed with a fold system, but the eight ARMD-class ships that were built before and during the First Space War were launched without them due to delays in production. It wasn't until after the First Space War that the first ARMD-class ships with fold systems were launched. IIRC, Master File suggests the first one completed with its fold system in place was ARMD-11 Kiev. All subsequent ships and all ships of the ARMD II-class (the movie-type ARMD) are fold capable.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure "tow" is the right word, given that space folding is something akin to teleportation rather than traveling at faster-than-light speeds... but it is possible for a folding ship to (intentionally or otherwise) carry other ships, small craft, or objects with it during fold navigation. In normal operation, the volume of space the fold system is exchanging between the point of origin and destination is kept as small as possible in order to minimize the required energy the ship has to have stored in order to make the fold jump. Anything inside that volume of space, by accident or design, is coming along for a ride. Ships do appear to be able to control the size of the volume of space to be folded, and multiple fold systems can be networked together to fold a larger volume of space than a single system would be able to. (This is how very large ships get around.) We've seen many examples of a folding ship carrying small craft that aren't fold capable along outside itself as long as they're inside the perimeter of the fold effect, and as long as the folding ship has enough energy and a capable enough fold system to extend the fold effect out to encompass another ship it should be perfectly possible for 2+ ships to travel in the same fold. (It's implied this was/is how the Oberth-class ships were going to get around. They did not possess fold systems of their own, so they would have to be carried on the fold of the ARMD-class ship they were escorting.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The Earth UN Government took the first few steps towards colonizing space in the nine years between its founding and the First Space War, but it was mostly driven by plans for Earth's defense. It wasn't until after the First Space War that the newly established New UN Government really put the spurs to Humanity's emigration into space. The nations of Earth broke ground on the first permanent lunar base - what would become Apollo Base - in October of 2000. The base was built in the Sea of Tranquility, and was home to a factory/shipyard that began construction of the Macross-class SDF-2 in November 2003. During the war, Apollo Base was the home port of ARMD-6 Constellation, and hosted space trials of the next-generation VF-X-4 program. After the war, Apollo Base became home to several squadrons of Valkyries conducting patrols of space around Earth. Hikaru served a tour there during the timeskip, around the same time the base became one of several offworld factories producing Valkyries and other equipment for the New UN Forces. In 2001, the newly-inaugurated Earth UN Government commenced work on two new projects: a shipyard/factory complex at Earth-Moon L5 and a permanent base on Mars. The complex at L5 was never visited in-series, but was the primary shipyard producing the ARMD-class and Oberth-class ships for the Earth UN Spacy. It's implied in Master File the accompaying L5 frontline base is a space station of the pattern that was retrofitted into the ARMD-class from back when they were intended to be geostationary space airfields rather than ships. Mars Base, of course, is seen in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series proper. The UN Forces temporarily withdrew their personnel from Mars Base in 2005 due to the UN Wars, but the base was never re-staffed after the return fleet was ambushed and destroyed by a Oberth-class destroyer that'd been hijacked by the Anti-UN Alliance forces. Mars Base was subsequently destroyed in October 2009 when the crew of the Macross detonated the base's thermonuclear reactor in order to destroy gravity mines that'd been planted around the base to trap the ship by Quamzin's 109th Branch Fleet. Other than that, the only settlements in space before the war were some nondescript space colonies at the Lagrange points that also served as manufacturing centers before and after the war. After the First Space War, those surviving settlements in space were the backbone of Earth's manufacturing until the capture and retrofitting of Zentradi factory satellites. They then built several more offworld settlements around other planets in the solar system including the Henry Beggs satellite city in orbit of Venus, Axia Roader satellite city orbiting Earth, several more settlements on the moon, at least one city on Mars (H.G. Wells City), Ceres Base in the asteroid belt, multiple satellites cities over Jupiter, surface bases on Europa and Ganymede, Red Woods satellite city orbiting Saturn, and Grande Savoie over Neptune. Of that lot, we've only really seen Mars in a Macross 7 omake and Ceres Base in VF-X2. The rest are only really known as the birthplaces of various characters in Macross 7, so we've got no idea what they look like or anything. We only know about a few of those moon bases because they were places Isamu was either assigned of threatened with a transfer to at the start of Macross Plus. Yup. South Ataria Island definitely had them, though the island was the site of several major battles in the Unification Wars. Not sure about anywhere else, but your average air raid shelter wasn't going to do much against the sheer scale of firepower the Zentradi brought to bear... never mind that it came at basically no notice.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    As far as we know, nobody who was on Earth's surface at the time of the bombardment survived it and the accompanying environmental calamity. Most resources that've discussed the aftermath of the First Space War put the total number of Human survivors at "approximately 1 million" before the start of the New UN Gov't's mass cloning and space emigration programs. The survivors were people had the good fortune to be either underground in the command bunkers beneath the incomplete Grand Cannons III and V or living offworld in one of the space colonies built at the Lagrange points, in the military bases or colony on the Moon, or in one of the few surviving UN Spacy warships. Earth's new population of Zentradi defectors and refugees supposedly numbered approximately 8 million. Not a world totally bereft of dogs, at least... they're just rare. IIRC, former SDF-1 Macross bridge operator and career soldier Kim Kabirov was noted to have a pet dog c.2045 in Macross 7 Docking Festival. The "Lost Children" narrative in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah also includes a moment where a pilot from the SVF-173 Ripsnorters takes on an additional objective to locate and rescue a lost dog during the defense and evacuation of a resort ship from the Macross Valient fleet that'd failed to fold out of the path of an approaching Zentradi main fleet. 1st Lt. Sato ends up using his squadron's VF-25G to locate the dog, a fold booster to jump his VF-25C into the ship's interior, and then escape the same way before the ship was destroyed with a MDE warhead to prevent it from being taken by the Zentradi.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Earth's not going to win any awards for "best garden party venue" anytime soon, but with the most advanced technology and most robust economy in the New UN Government it's not exactly an awful place to live. It's still going to take thousands of years, but Humanity is still basically speedrunning the process of recreating the pre-war environmental and ecological conditions on the planet thanks to a combination of the cloning technology obtained from the Zentradi and the gene and seed banks created in anticipation of an environmental disaster. Perfect Memory suggested that they started cloning extinct animals back into being relatively quickly, though later material suggests they mainly focused on plant life early on and that Earth pets like dogs are still rare and valuable animals into the 2060s.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That's a Robotech-ism... I don't believe Macross ever specifies where the small forested area Quamzin found his derelict ship was. Probably not that far away, considering that the forces loyal to Quamzin were raiding cities near Macross City for supplies on foot and using cars... and that's in Alaska. No, Earth was basically a write-off... it seems like the only reasons Humanity didn't simply abandon it was because they didn't have enough ships right off the bat and didn't know about Eden yet. Even as far as back as Macross Perfect Memory, it's indicated that the bombardment wiped out nearly all flora and fauna on the planet. A few tiny pockets of life survived, but in practice the planet was rendered almost totally lifeless. Perfect Memory suggests the bombardment was so intense it actually changed the axis of Earth's rotation, and agrees with later works that it radically changed the composition of the atmosphere and the global climate. Later works (e.g. Macross Chronicle) added more detail like that it kicked up so much dust and debris that the air was basically unbreathable, much of the oceans evaporated, the global average temperature jumped by six degrees centigrade to 21C with ongoing global warming occurring due to elevated carbon dioxide levels and almost no plant life to process it, apocalyptic levels of air and soil pollution, etc. It took drastic measures to make Earth even marginally habitable again, including installing a massive orbital sunshade to slow global warming down, deploying designer bacteria to correct the atmospheric composition in place of the wiped out plant and plankton species, cleanup of radioactive contamination, cloning animals back into existence using the captured cloning technology of the Zentradi, etc. The damage is so severe that it's indicated it'll take ten thousand years or more to restore Earth to something like its prewar state. The restoration efforts are said to be going well, to the point that plants have been found growing outside of cultivated areas, so those patches of forest are probably still around but they're a tiny exception in what is otherwise an enormous desert.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    We haven't actually seen Earth's surface outside of Macross City in a while... but yeah, almost certainly. Earth's environment was almost totally destroyed by the Zentradi in 2010 and it's only through technological measures that the planet has a breathable atmosphere and isn't being quickly rendered uninhabitable by runaway global warming. It's supposedly going to take thousands and thousands of years to restore the environment to something resembling the planet's pre-war state. It was still mostly a desert in 2040, and it's likely that hasn't changed much by 2067-2068.
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