Seto Kaiba

Same as the others... it's just a different paint job. http://www.macross2.net/m3/sdfmacross/variant-vf-1a-darkbird.htm

Well... as I am reliably informed, the giant-ness of the giant tuna is not actually unrealistic... there really are tuna species that can get that large, up to 4.6m (15 feet) and can weigh over 600kg (1322lb). As far as Hikaru's survival goes... holding your breath the way he did is a stupendously bad idea if you plan to live through having jumped out into a vacuum (burst lungs are a real deal-breaker), but his flightsuit and helmet probably did a bit to protect him from vacuum exposure. You wouldn't exactly walk away from the experience unhurt, but it could be survivable.

As far as I am aware, no official information exists... though I would assume the number would be roughly comparable to what the Stargazer was able to carry in Macross 7. That would be about thirty-six planes. Who's Henry?

If anything, Mr March seems more miffed about it than I am... he was really hoping we'd get some clarity on the VF-22's gun pods and other hard details. It's weird that they felt compelled to invent a bunch of new, bizarre variants for this when they didn't even cover one of the official variants that existed in the time period... YF-21-1, YF-21-2, VF-22, and VF-22S, but no VF-22HG?

I'm more disappointed that they didn't even make an attempt to give information on the VF-22's gun pods... this book is depressingly light on useful trivia. Lovely art, but with so few variants of the VF-22 out there in Macross proper, you'd think they could've spared more thought for the details.

Don't think we've been told that one...

So... the one on the left is for Kamen Rider, and the one on the right is for a Gundam fan who's compensating for something?

Well... we know her surname changed, at the very least, when Ozma adopted her. Ranka seems to be her genuine given name, if the series is anything to go by. Her mother was Ranshe Mei, so that's probably Ranka's true surname there.

Hm... going to have to grab that. Thanks for the heads-up. That art's been printed in a bunch of places before though.

Pretty sweet stuff there... I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to kitbash a proper YF-24 if they ever did a YF-30 Chronos kit. Parts from that and a VF-25 should be enough.

Nope, HLJ had it listed as pushed back to October for a few days... and then it suddenly jumped to Backordered for about an hour, then September Restock (because it'd come in and they'd exhausted their inventory filling preorders). So if you had it preordered on there, odds are it's sitting in your Private Warehouse. Mine's currently en route to me via customs in Memphis. So... a stretch, two-seater delta wing type? Don't suppose they named that one Jagdvogel, did they? (There was a modeler who did exactly that in the same old issue of Model Graphix that first mentioned a VF-19E.)

Yeah, I got the autopay notification a bit ago... looks like preorders annihilated their inventory, it's already listed as "Backordered". Gonna be a good week for me... Chronicle #81, VFMF: VF-22, and my YF-30 showing up all at once.

Looks like HLJ finally got their copies of VFMF VF-22 today... it showed up in my Private Warehouse there. Anyone else got theirs?

Agh... that sucks mightily. If you need somewhere to park your site, you're welcome to as much space and bandwidth as you need on the M3 servers.

's probably not a good decision, on balance... better to kill the a-holes with kindness and let the moderators mop up. It has the added benefit of making you look more reasonable than them. Just going on my own experience with foreign films in... five languages now(?)... that's actually pretty rare. You can usually get the most basic level of the movie, but in order to really "get it", you need to at least be able to understand what people are saying. Not TOO much, because sometimes that can ruin the movie via bilingual bonus (like how Iron Man has some villains explain the whole plot at the start and the audience is expected not to get it because they're not speaking English). Personally, I've always been fine with endings that don't explain everything... so long as there's a feeling of closure about the whole affair, or at least the feeling that these characters have their own lives and their story goes on after our brief window into it ends. Western audiences, I think, are a little conditioned by sitcoms and comic books to expect stories to just go on and on and on... and that the conclusion has to be some big showy climax that wraps everything up and lets the cast quietly f-off to somewhere else and either deal with the consequences or live happily ever after. Done well, that kind of ending can be very satisfying. More often than not, that kind of ending is done poorly and feels like a cop-out (e.g. the Battlestar Galactica reboot, or, gods forbid, Lost... because we certainly were). Ending a story takes just as much, if not more, writing chops than starting one does... because you NEED that closure. To draw on some of my favorite titles as examples, you can have good endings that wrap up every little detail of the plot (like Outlaw Star or the anime "gecko ending" for Soul Eater), or ones that leave you hanging with the feeling of some greater mystery denied or a that your cast is going to need some time to cope with the consequences of their actions (like the endings of Big O or Needless). Then we've got the bad endings that either get so bogged down in obsessive tying-up of loose ends that the ending is a train wreck (the second season of Code Geass) or so unsatisfying and abrupt that you have to ask yourself "Did I just read/see that?" (like the ending of the manga version of Soul Eater). Macross usually ends up on the good side of things, whether they've neatly tied up the loose ends in the story with the feeling that it's very much over (Macross Plus) or the feeling that "this adventure is over, but their story is only just beginning" (like Macross Frontier's). The very worst offenders are the ones that reach a neat, logical ending and then just forget to stop... the most blatant offender that leaps to mind being Bleach, which has done that TWICE. There's a reasonable amount of meaning in the ending of the Macross Frontier movies, though it's the sort of faintly unsatisfying "the adventure is over, but their story is just beginning" type with the Vajra rescuing Alto from imminent heavy quantum annihilation while they mend fences with humanity. A lot of folks find the "the hero gets the girl" endings more satisfying, but sometimes that's not the most appropriate thing for the story. I think the Macross Frontier movies would've been poorly served by a "and they all lived happily ever after" ending, when the story got kinda dark in places. As wacky as Macross Dynamite 7 ended up being, that's not something that honestly shocked me. They were NOT subtle back in the Macross 7 about Basara being borderline asexual in his failure to notice ANY woman except the vampire-fanged space demon who wanted to eat his goddamn mind. Mylene spends a lot of time mooning over him, and he only notices her when she's around thirty seconds from lodging the nearest piece of furniture in his frontal lobe. When Sivil possesses Rex and Akiko, he's completely unmoved by their overly sexual advances... Akiko-Sivil comes on hot and heavy while they're alone, and all he notices is that she happens to be standing on his lunch, while Rex-Sivil is one good yawn away from showing off her huge... tracts of land... and he's only interested in noodling on his guitar. He's easily the most clueless Macross protagonist we've ever had. The way he left in Dynamite 7 made a lot of sense for the character... he didn't really see Mylene as a romantic partner, but as a fellow musician. Once she came into her own (in his opinion) and he'd already fulfilled his dream, it was "mission accomplished" followed by "exit stage right to make way for the next generation". He genuinely doesn't get that she's got the hots for him... and yeah, that's the payoff. He's helped her come into her own as a musician, and feels his work here is done. Done well, it can be a stimulating way to explore the setting of a large metaseries like Macross with the possibilities inherent in the other forms of media. Macross is really good at this. So's Gundam. You can have parallel stories set at the same time, even in the same place, without the two stories overlapping with each other because the universe is a BIG place. Macross 7 Trash is a decent example of this. Outside Macross, another example might be Louie the Rune Soldier... it's set in the same setting as Record of Lodoss War, but the tone and story are so radically different that it almost feels like someone's playing a nasty prank the first time you find out that they don't just share a setting, but that the two locations are geographically really close to each other. I think my favorite example has become the Horus Heresy series of novels for Warhammer 40,000... a huge amount of material that's both fundamental to what's done in the main story WITHOUT being a prerequisite to enjoyment of the main story, it builds the universe without building up an enormous list of "stuff you have to have read to know what's going on". Done BADLY, like Star Trek's reboot movies, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, etc., there's a lot of "disposable fiction" that has no bearing on, or relevance to, the setting and a fair few more cases where you don't get the whole story of the actual movie or series unless you also read a limited-edition comic book that most of the audience didn't even know was a thing. Star Trek didn't explain much about how Spock and the Romulans ended up in the alternate universe except in the comic, and Robotech made the villain's motivation something that was only explained in the limited edition comic book and never touched on in the Shadow Chronicles movie.

No worries, reply to it at your leisure. I keep weird-as-hell hours anyway. Macross is kind of a frustrating series sometimes if you don't have a grasp of Japanese... there's a lot of stuff out there that offers additional detail and even answers to some of these kinds of questions, but it's all in Japanese, which locks most western fans out but for the services of fan translators like sketchley (or myself, though I'm not nearly as proficient or prolific). With so much stuff out there to cover, non-Japanese-speaking fans and non-native Japanese speakers can sometimes end up missing out on a LOT, with a rate of releases that occasionally reaches "firehose-aimed-at-a-teacup" levels... to say nothing of the indifferent levels of quality and accuracy we get from fansubs sometimes. Like they say, "It's all there in the manual"... problem is, the manual's 2,560 pages long and written in a foreign language.

To be entirely frank and fair, it'd be hard to say that you've actually watched the movies because you didn't watch them in a format where you could understand what's going on... so a lot of people are going to think that your complaints are unreasonable on those grounds. As far as where this should've been posted... yeah, it really should've gone into the Newbie Questions thread or into one of the threads about the movies, but that's for the mods to fix at their discretion. Getting hostile just ensures that the mods will just close the thread instead of merging it. My advice, take a step back and a few deep breaths... then seek ye out a copy of the wholly legitimate English subtitled release of the films on Blu-Ray. IMO, well worth it. Eh... if you're not going to watch the movies in a format you can understand, you're going to miss things. Important things. In what is essentially a character-driven drama rather than a mecha-action series, you're going to miss a LOT of important things. What you ought to be frustrated over is not having had a subtitled version on hand when you watched it, because you'd be a lot less confused and upset if you'd gotten the whole story. I don't mean to be snide when I say this, but if you find shows that leave some loose ends or unresolved details in their stories, you will likely find a lot of anime to be unwatchable and frustrating. A lot of shows don't believe in trying to tie up every loose end at the end like an obsessive-compulsive in a shoelace factory. Happily-ever-after endings are kind of a cheap cop-out as writing goes... a story with complex characters tends not to have an ending so neat and self-contained if you're preserving the illusion that these are real people with lives of their own. It's never bothered me, so I've never had issues with the ending of the Frontier movies. Many Macross fans find the post-FB2012 "they disappeared" ending for Misa and Hikaru's story frustrating, because they're beloved characters. Zero, somewhat less so... "their story is over and they sailed off into the (metaphorical) sunset" is something Kawamori likes to do. It is, however, not really THAT pervasive in his work... and answers to these questions often exist in other sources. As far as Basara and Mylene go in Macross 7, it's hard to call it a love triangle when Basara barely acknowledges that Mylene is an entity distinct from the furniture. It's less a love triangle and more a polyhedron of one-sided infatuations. So Gamlin's into Mylene, Mylene's into Basara, Rex is into Basara, Basara's into Sivil (maybe) and his music (definitely), Gigil's into Sivil. Basara doesn't up and leave a love interest, he was never really presented as interested in Mylene at all beyond her talent as a musician... and leaves after he feels she's finally come into her own as a performer. Then he goes and spends a few episodes on Zola acting like a tit. Frontier is kind of the same boat... the movies actually do a better job depicting the romance between Alto and the girls, and is far more into the motivations of the individual characters. At the end of the series, Alto's still more into his plane than the girls (kinda the Basara ailment) but comes to the realization that protecting them is a motivation just as good (if not better) than flying for its own sake... and the three are free to pursue their relationships further without a war in the way. It's not an obsessively knotted-up ending but it holds water. In the movies, the characters motivations get more emphasis, so Alto actually does come to a decision at exactly the wrong time and ends up being rescued from imminent heavy quantum annihilation by the Vajra he'd just successfully established the beginnings of a mutual understanding with. It makes reasonable sense even if it's not wholly satisfying in terms of the sort of happily-ever-after romantic ending Disney has conditioned us to expect, and concludes the story reasonably enough with the beginnings of a friendly dialogue between humanity and the Vajra.

Nuts to that... I want the bloody VF-4/VF-3000/VF-5000 book they teased us with a cover for in one of the previous books. My poor Lightning III never gets enough love...

Those are just the same Sound Booster that Milia nicked from the Jamming Birds VF-11D Customs, right? The shorter one in Master File's teaser images looks like the regular Sound Booster, the longer one kind of puts me in the mind of those long-range booster packs instead... this is going to make for very interesting reading. Only six pages for variants though, so it looks like we'll get something more like the VF-0 book variants-wise. I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or not.

Hrm... I had honestly forgotten about that. That's from the M7 episode "Which one do you love?" right?

Seeing the VF-22 with wing pylons is weird enough... but FAST packs?

Unless they go the same route they did with the VF-0 book, and cover only the known variants while padding the book with other material. Still, I'd love to see more in-depth material on the VF-22's hardware and the VF-22HG from Ride in particular.

Considering this is the first (and likely only, considering the VF-17 was touched on in the VF-19 book and the VF-171 in the VF-25 book) General Galaxy fighter to be covered, and they've set the timescale as far forward as to be three years and change after the end of Macross Frontier's events, it's looking like a safe-ish bet they'll throw some VF-27 in there to pad it out, the same way they threw the SV-51 into the VF-0 book to pad that one. Not many VF-22 variants out there (that we know about), so the VF-22's successors and contemporaries are fair game. Whether it'll actually come out on September 18th like they say... well... that's a whole other matter. I've had my preorder in for ages though, so here's hopin'.

Hrm... first time I've ever seen a VF-22 with underwing pylons. Also, 2063 is this one's perspective? Hrm.

Yes, it's a VF-1 Riders display.