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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    True! Yes, though the described course suggests that it continued going in more or less a straight line from Burma northwest for almost one complete orbit before hitting the island. Possibly, but given that the one thing Shin really says about it is the "one sun in the east, the other in the west" I feel like we're meant to interpret that as Shin lived somewhere east of where the ship came down. Guam is to the south and Okinawa is to the west. That and I just cannot shake the feeling that Shin being from California would be Kawamori's way of working his love of SoCal into Macross Zero. It's on prominent display in Plus, 7, and Frontier, so it'd be weird if he didn't get at least a nod to it in Zero. Zero particularly being his only chance to use ACTUAL SoCal instead of spacefuture replica SoCal.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    New season is go! Winter 2026's first few titles are dropping on streaming now. I have no use for My Hero Academia or its spinoff, so I chose to start my Winter 2026 with MF Ghost Season 3. Picks up right where the previous season left off, mid-race with an injured Kanata slowly losing ground due to an arm injury preventing him from shifting into 2nd gear. Not a hugely remarkable first episode, but clearly building to a big comeback. Honestly, the one thing that really stood out... My second pick for the season is Tamon's B-Side, a romcom about a typical-ish teenage girl who loves her favorite idol singer and works a part time job as a housekeeper. When a coworker falls ill, she takes over their shifts and finds she is now the housekeeper to her favorite idol singer and is stunned by the gap between his perfect stage-managed public image and the deeply insecure, chronically depressed mess he actually is.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The one good look we get at Shin's childhood home at the start of Macross Zero's first episode shows a house on top of a high hillside overlooking a large city directly on the coast. Given that he says he saw the ship fall to the west and we know from his bio that he's second-gen Japanese-American, we can assume that that's a western coastline. To me, that makes California seem like the most likely suspect. Honalulu faces out onto the ocean, but it faces south and east not west the way it would have to for the scene to be possible there. Not many Americans living in the Bonin islands, but Chichijima has another problem. If he saw the ship fall from there, the second sun he saw would be in the south not the west. IIRC, at the start of "Global Report", General Global attributes the failure to the booby trap compromising control of those devices.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's History Sheet about the fall of the ASS-1 mentions, in passing, that the ship decelerated far more than should be possible after entering that atmosphere, which it presents as thought to have been an intentional braking maneuver. The ship was going over 10km/s when it entered the atmosphere and by the time it crashed it had slowed to only about 1km/s. Of course, something so massive hitting at "only" 1 kilometer per second still made a hell of a dent. Macross Chronicle asserts that the impact force was equivalent to a 670 megaton explosion, creating a crater 3km in diameter, with ejecta from the impact reaching altitudes over 10km and devastating an area of 100 square kilometers with the shockwave. It also notes that the impact reduced the size of the island somewhat to 16.9 square kilometers. (One of the more unusual points Macross Chronicle introduces is that the island was inhabited. A 16-man US military communications and satellite monitoring output on the island understandably did not survive the impact.) Yeah, a 670 megaton impact is likely to shake the Earth a bit different to a usual bay area earthquake. A bit, yeah... perhaps somewhat justified in the sense that the Earth Unification Government basically threw the entire global tech industry and planetary GDP at the problem for ten years, heedless of the economic consequences, and even then ended up taking a bunch of shortcuts by reverse-engineering the materials and applying that know-how to existing theoretical and practical tech instead of trying to perfectly reproduce the alien technology. (It may also have helped somewhat that what fell out of the sky was the Protoculture's lowest-bidder, ruggedized, keep-it-simple-stupid military hardware and not a more refined or advanced ship they might've used themselves. Figuring out how Gravity and Inertia Control works was basically the key to a lot of the rest too, so once they had that understanding the rest probably fell into place a lot faster.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Not specifically, no. South Ataria is a fictional island in the Ogasawara islands (the Bonin islands to westerners) south of Japan. The coordinates we're given put it about 90km south and slightly to the west of Iwo Jima and 54km to the west of South Iwo Jima. About 1,300km almost due south of Tokyo. It's not sourced on the Wiki because the Wiki got it from Egan's old site, but remarks similar to that are in a couple older artbooks. The course described there suggests the Alien Starship 1 was traveling northwest at a high rate of speed and must have completed almost an entire orbit before crashing given that it ends up east of where it entered the atmosphere. (Considering the course, it's likely New Zealand, New South Wales, Queensland, the Solomons, and New Guinea didn't have a great time either.) Macross Chronicle also supports the idea that the ship was moving generally northwest on reentry and crashed into South Ataria that way. Shin is a second-generation Japanese-American, so presumably he was living somewhere in the US when the ASS-1 came down. Practically all of the US cities and towns with large Japanese-American populations are in Hawaii or on the west coast, so in all likelihood Shin hails from either Hawaii, California, or Washington. (There's an outside chance he's from New Jersey, Michigan, New York, or Ohio, all of which are home to small but significant Japanese-American communities, but given Shin's not f***ing melting in the South Pacific weather on Mayan it seems unlikely he's a New Englander or a Midwesterner. I'll forego the almost obligatory joke about Ohio.) Kawamori seems to really like San Francisco, given how much time was taken recreating parts of it in Macross Frontier, so I'm guessing Shin's family are probably from the bay area.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    An uninspired attempt to coin a derisive nickname for isekai anime. It doesn't make sense if you think about it even a little, because TRON's "Grid" is just the software inside of a computer not an alternate reality and doesn't fit the definition of isekai even a little. Incidentally, I did a little more checking after supper. Of Crunchyroll's current Top 10 most-streamed titles on their service, the 5th and 9th places are isekai titles (Campfire Cooking in Another World and Tales of Wedding Rings). The top four spots on the top 10 are all shounen, being held by My Hero Academia, Gachiakuta, One Piece, and Tougen Anki. Top-selling manga is also predominantly shounen too... with My Hero Academia, One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Dan Da Dan topping charts in the west. Netflix's viewership metrics have shounen anime absolutely dominating their service's anime offerings too. The top-ranked anime title for I think three years running now on Netflix is Naruto. One Piece, Seven Deadly Sins, and Demon Slayer are all on that list too. Not a single isekai title broke the top 10 on Netflix. I'm not able to find any data for Hulu, but given the pattern established thus far... well... their website has a list of 22 strongly recommended anime titles based on their platform's streaming performance data. 0 are isekai. The titles that DID make the cut include Bleach, My Hero Academia, Naruto, Dragon Ball Z Kai, Jujutsu Kaisen, Ishura, Mob Psycho 100, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and Demon Slayer. That's 9 of 22.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The point is that shounen's dominance of the anime conversation and public perception of anime goes all the way back to when the current crop of child-raising parents (Gen X-ers and Millennials) were exposed to the stuff via cable. Yeah, most anime is streaming these days but the reality is that if you go to most streaming services that carry anime most of what they're advertising prominently is not isekai... it's those big-ticket shounen titles like One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, and My Hero Academia and a handful of dramas and non-isekai titles like Frieren, Spy x Family, and Oshi no Ko. Demonstrably false, I'm afraid. Most of what viewers are tuning in for when it comes to anime on streaming is shounen anime. It dominates the awards, it dominates the news, and it's also the stereotype of anime fans that's been dominant since the 2000s.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Zentradi in the original Macross series run the full gamut of Human skin tones and onwards into Amazing Technicolor Population territory with Vrlitwhai being a baby blue behemoth and Quamzin being a sort of light lavender. The beard is new, tho. I don't think we see a Zentradi with facial hair before Macross Digital Mission VF-X in '97. Also, is it just me or do these facial sculpts look... familiar? Like this one is just straight-up Arnold Schwarzenegger c. Terminator. That's literally the same face he's making on the Terminator poster, just without the sunglasses. And I wanna say this one looks like a young Laurence Fishburne...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    As far as I can recall, we don't see any Zentradi with facial hair in Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Macross: Do You Remember Love?, or Macross II: Lovers Again. That said, they clearly can grow facial hair as we see several in later titles (predominantly in civilian life) who do have facial hair. The enemy Zentradi commander in Macross Digital Mission VF-X (1997) is, IINM, the first Zentradi character to be depicted with facial hair. In Macross Frontier, there are a few as well. Macross Frontier fleet sponsor and SMS owner Richard Bilra is a giant Zentradi rocking a big bushy mustache and beard, and Ranka's Zentradi manager Elmo Kridanik has a mustache. 's it just me or does that bootleg-tier Robotech figure bear an odd resemblance to a young Laurence Fishburne?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    > Australia > Spiders Of course it would be spiders. 😆 Now, we do know of at least one Macross design that IS apparently named for a specific genus of spiders. The Annabella Lasiodora mobile weapon from Macross VF-X2. Not sure what the "Annabella" part is in reference to, but Lasiodora is a genus of tarantulas native to Brazil. Huh, OK. That's a pretty solid description of the basic mechanics of a charged particle beam weapon hearkening back to Nikola Tesla's original design proposal in 1934. In principle, very similar technology to what's used in a lot of sci-fi including Macross. The description of turbolasers I remembered from long ago (which is apparently Legends now) was more in line with the gas-dynamic laser used by the VF-1's Strike Pack (using heat flows and pressure changes in a gas to generate a laser beam).
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, that's not even close to accurate. The genre that has absolutely dominated public perception of anime for like 20 years now has been shounen anime. If you turned on Cartoon Network in the late afternoons or early evenings you'd get the Shounen Jump Big Three (One Piece, Bleach, Naruto), reruns of older shounen anime like Dragon Ball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Ruroni Kenshin. Titles have come and gone, but shounen has basically ruled the airwaves and the conversation that entire time. So much so that the negative stereotype of anime fans - the weeaboo - is intrinsically associated with the Naruto's ninja headbands and its occasional bouts of untranslated Japanese words like "nakama". 😅 Isekai anime is trendy, but it's nowhere near that level. It's definitely the most numerous genre after shounen the last several years, but I think it seems more pervasive than it is that we're seeing a lot of isekai tropes leaking into non-isekai fantasy titles. Like The Banished Court Magician, I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince, New Saga, Scooped Up By An S-Rank Adventurer, Welcome to The Outcast's Restaurant, etc. Particularly instances of fantasy worlds running on JRPG or MMORPG logic for no clear reason, and stories that start with the protagonist being reincarnated in the same world but in a much different position. I do think we're entering the dying days of the isekai genre's trendiness, though. Like any new genre, you get that first couple big hits, a double handful of less-appreciated "cult classics", and then a lot of low-effort copycats. For mecha anime, Gundam, Macross, and VOTOMS basically defined the genre, you had some successful by less appreciated follow-ups like MOSPEADA, Orguss, and L-Gaim, and then a lot of unsuccessful genre followers that don't do very well like Southern Cross or Dragonar. We're in that "unsuccessful genre follower" phase right now. I wonder if it'll just peter out or if it'll die out with a last big deconstruction. I suspect not, since the actually-successful titles in the genre are mainly ALREADY deconstructions.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think it's necessarily bad, but it's definitely very Japanese in its sensibilities and relies a lot on silliness and acknowledging absurdity. I would not advise holding your breath for that one. Zenitsu develops rather slowly as a character, since part of his role was to be comic relief and a heroic coward who has the reasonable man's reaction to the insane supernatural BS going on at any given moment. There are reasons he's this way, but they don't really come up properly until the Hashira training arc (S4) and Infinity Castle movie(s) near the end of the story. Of course, he gets his in the form of being full-on Crouching Moron Hidden Badass. He may be a one trick pony, but he is very good at that one trick.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The YF-19/VF-19's wing folds backwards for storage, not up. The wing in this shot is no longer physically connected to the aircraft. That, combined with the fact that the leading edge slats are damaged and one section is straight-up missing, along with visible damage along the entire length of the wing, implies that this wing did not go gently... it hit something and was likely broken off. To be fair, that was hardly a problem unique to Isamu. The YF-19 had six prior test pilots before Isamu was assigned to Project Super Nova. Four of Isamu's six predecessors were hospitalized with injuries they'd sustained during testing and the other two died from injuries sustained in accidents during testing. The YF-19's performance was pushing the limit of what the human body could withstand in terms of g-forces thanks to its exceptional acceleration and maneuverability, and the previous-gen ANGIRAS airframe control AI used in the first two prototypes was absolutely not up to the job and as a result the prototype had extremely unforgiving handling. (That Isamu was able to not only handle the YF-19 in testing but draw out its full potential and even enjoy the experience is a testament to what an absolute goddamn MONSTER he is in the cockpit.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    That seems to be the implication in his bio. He's not mentioned as having moved to the 37th fleet and it is explicitly mentioned he's not legally a citizen of the fleet... meaning he's only ever resided in that rundown unregistered district. Pretty much. Even in-universe Basara's background is said to be unknown even to the man himself. He doesn't know where he was born. Ray encountered him for the first time in 2031 when Basara was 7 years old, and he was just this mysterious urchin who would occasionally show up near where Ray lived with an acoustic guitar and attempt to (literally) move the nearby mountains with his songs. Somewhere along the way Ray became Basara's de facto (if not de jure) guardian. They would eventually team up with street fighter turned drummer Veffidas Feaze to form Fire Bomber in 2038, the same year the 37th fleet departed Earth. The one thing we can say with some confidence is that Basara has always been insufferable. Mylene was the band's fourth bassist in six years because of how infuriating and hard to work with Basara was, and even she frequently wants to go upside his head.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    "Exactly what it says on the tin" means it's probably me who said that, and I stand by it. That said, Demon Slayer does eventually veer slightly in the direction of shounen cliches like super modes or secret styles and techniques. It's handled in a much more grounded fashion than most shounen anime manage and never really detracts from the straightforward feel of the series. The lost original demon slayer breathing style is rediscovered by accident (more or less) and then spammed gratuitously by its rediscoverer, and there's a "barely there" super mode that nobody can activate consciously because it's basically a form of hysterical strength. It's all very earnest and grounded and straightforward. A lot more accessible and enjoyable than a lot of shounen titles that rely on power scaling. (The realization that its plot bears a very strong resemblance to Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Parts 1 and 2 has me in stitches though. An ageless immortal who is fatally weakened by sunlight travels all over hell's half-acre looking for an ultra-rare red macguffin that is the key ingredient in a technique to remove all his weaknesses and become a perfect lifeform. He creates legions of nightwalking cannibalistic monsters to serve as his minions, and is opposed by a secretive organization of warrior monks who employ breathing techniques that imbue them with superhuman abilities in order to slay these monsters with attacks imbued with the power of the sun. I want so very badly to hear Tanjiro's VA shout "Sunlight Yellow Overdrive!" now.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The reason I think he managed to break the nose off the plane is that the camera/LIDAR modules are a part of that nose block and they're visibly still on the aircraft in that shot.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The Acshio/Akusho district is never given a proper official explanation. Officially (in-story), the district is an environment ship that isn't registered with the 37th large scale long-distance emigrant fleet's administration. It attached itself to one of City 7's portside docking ports and has accessed power, oxygen, and other resources from the City-class ship without authorization. Somehow, this state of affairs was either not noticed or not corrected before the fleet departed Earth and apparently nobody has bothered to do anything about it in the seven years since then. While there are surely laws prohibiting an emigrant fleet from simply abandoning an inhabited environment ship in deep space, that it seems like nobody has even tried to take any action on it gives it the distinct ring of a cover story. There's a neglected environment ship the fleet government has no jurisdiction over conveniently attached directly to the fleet's capital and flagship, with a hangar and airlocks capable of supporting next-generation VFs, and it just happens to be home to the unwitting subject of a secret military program? Macross 7 Trash at least makes it feel a little less implausible with the revelation that there are at least a few districts in the fleet that would count as "rough neighborhoods". It seems to work a little differently, series to series. When it comes to the Megaroad-class as seen in Macross: Flash Back 2012 and Macross M3, the artificial sky appears to be projected directly onto the ship's transparent hull sections. In Macross 7, City 7's sky is presented as being a hologram or other image projected from the interior of the shell onto the exterior of the dome. This is demonstrated in the show's first episode when one of the operators mistakenly begins powering down the shell's artificial sky projection instead of lowering the shell the way Max ordered. The Akushio district has an artificial sky too, though it isn't clear if that's projected from the shell or something projected locally. In Macross Frontier, the titular emigrant ship seems to be using both approaches simultaneously with the sky of Island 1 being a projection from the shell and the skies of the various Island modules seem to be projected directly onto their domes since they use retractable armored shutters instead of a shell and most of them are tens of kilometers away from the rear end of the Island-1's shell.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That's at a bit after 31 minutes into the movie, after the test montage and the first Sharon Apple concert. The scene where Isamu finds Dr. Neumann hiding out in what looks to be a either a supply closet trying to "kidnap" Sharon Apple. There's no clear event that led to the YF-19-2 being in such a state in the movie version, due to events being reordered.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Specifically, I was thinking of Macross Plus: Movie Edition and the wreck of Isamu's YF-19. When we see it being brought in for repairs, it's in pretty bad shape. The nose and left wing have broken off and are sitting on the hangar floor, the canopy is cracked, the canards are bent 90 degrees, there are several external panels and control surfaces that are entirely missing, the landing gear cover is deformed, the rear-facing laser cannon is bent, at least one of the dorsal intakes is crushed, etc. All of that and Shinsei Industry still has her flightworthy again in short order. The YF-29 we see at the end of Sayonara no Tsubasa (we get a clean view in Tenjin Hidetaka's Valkyries: Third Sortie) isn't exactly in fantastic shape itself, but the damage is a lot more limited. It's covered in grass stains, the horn on the monitor turret is bent or broken, the starboard wing and canard are both broken off about halfway along their length resulting in the loss of the No.4 engine, the port stabilizer is completely sheared off, and the port wing is bent with some nozzle damage on the No.3 engine, but that's about it. (Which I guess is just what you'd expect from a VF with twice the armor and four times the armor strength of the VF-25 or VF-27 with no mode limitation on energy conversion armor usage. It won't bounce, but even an uncontrolled crash landing after a bailout at Mach no-thank-you isn't going to wreck it. They just have to go find whatever hillside the No.4 engine ended up in and they can probably just replace the wings and fly it again.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, the reason that the Likes are anonymous is that the Reaction pane/Like button is the last surviving piece of a long-since-deactivated upvote/downvote karma system that's built into Invision's board software. It was originally a pure upvote/downvote system, and Invision later expanded it to include custom Facebook-style "reactions". The admins disabled the upvote/downvote feature back in the 2010s because people were abusing it to harass and bully each other. So now the Facebook-style reaction pane, bereft of any custom reactions, is all that's left of it.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yes. Initially, anyway. A year or so later there it's no longer a one-off and is in some kind of semi-official limited production. No. The YF-29's weapons are powerful, sure... but they're only impressive by the standards of an average Valkyrie's normal firepower. Yeah, it has a heavy quantum beam gunpod that can theoretically sink a small escort warship in a single hit in beam grenade mode. So does the VF-27. That's about on par with a warship's charged particle beam gun turrets. Its next heaviest weapon, the TW2 beam turret, is said to be the same type used for point defense on aircraft carriers. Its missiles and built-in guns are formidable because they have the same MDE ammunition used on the VF-25 and VF-171. In a way, this broadly mirrors the original RX-78 Gundam. Its beam rifle was an extremely powerful weapon by the standards of Mobile Suits-carried weapons at the time, but the firepower was comparable to a single warship-mounted beam cannon and the rapid proliferation of the technology meant that it went from "extremely powerful" to merely above average in a matter of months. Just five or so large chunks in specific places. Unclear... he does let the YF-29 crash after abandoning it, but there's nothing saying it's unrecoverable. We've seen worse.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    FWIW, I enjoyed it clear through to the end. Scarlet is so delightfully free of the usual restraint and timidness of so many other female leads in her genre, and I promise the punching does not stop until the very end.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    "Transitional" feels like the wrong word for it. After all, real(istic) robot anime didn't exist as a genre before the original Mobile Suit Gundam series. They were defining what it meant to be a non-super robot anime as they went and everyone that came after built on that concept. Mobile Suit Gundam made a clean break with a lot of iconic super robot tropes. The titular robot was a military prototype built for a morally ambiguous war between humans and a weapon based on explicable, reproduceable, practical technology meant for mass production. Its capabilities were impressive, but finite and limited by its specs. Its weapons were only what you could see and did not exceed the capabilities of more conventional platforms. It wasn't Earth's sole defender or even necessarily involved in many key conflicts. Super Dimension Fortress Macross went a fair bit further with the idea by having the Valkyries and Destroids already be mass produced weapons before the war started and by putting more detail into the designs themselves that emphasize their practicality and both "real" vehicles and military hardware. In his Macross Design Works book, Shoji Kawamori talks a bit about how the design of the VF-1 entered unprecedented territory by including realistic details emphasizing its practical use like its aerodynamic control surfaces, landing gear, or the way various parts of it fold or open for maintenance and storage. They went further than simply putting a giant robot into a realistic setting and emphasized trying to make the robot itself feel more grounded and believable as a practical weapon of war. That same unusual attention to detail shows up in Miyatake's designs for the Destroids too. Not only did they prioritize having a clear design lineage and show common platforms in use for different purposes, they went as far as figuring out things like how the various joints should be articulated, where the ammunition for certain weapons are stored and how the feed systems work, and even giving them realistic military bumper codes and bumper numbers based on US military formation markings. (That same attention to detail even extends to the Zentradi mecha, where Macross's creators even bothered to sit down and figure out how the Zentradi forces markings would work and even how they would record kill marks.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I suppose so! Of course, when I think of "super robots" I tend to fall back on how Japan likes to define the term. A super robot is in the most stringently literal sense a robot that is functionally the same as a comic book superhero. A larger-than-life figure that gets its power from unexplainable or unscientific sources, is impossible (or nearly impossible) to duplicate, is the Last Line of Defense against some evil that the military just can't handle despite being piloted by some random civilian, requires a lot of flamboyant posing and Calling Your Attacks, manifests new powers or weapons as the plot demands, and responds to the operator's heroic willpower or some other special quality in a way that causes it to exceed its specs, and exists to fight Evil in a fairly straightforward Good vs Evil-type narrative. Gundam doesn't usually indulge in those tropes. There are a few titles that flirt with some super robot-adjacent tropes like Gundam Wing having each Gundam be made by a single genius scientist working alone, or G-Reco and G-Witch having a Gundam that can only be piloted by a specific person... but those are usually paired with extensive subversions of the rest. IMO, the main sign of super robot "DNA" in the OG Gundam series was the Gundam's garish paintjob that Tomino so bitterly opposed. Macross's creators were even more gung-ho about realism, which is why they went to the trouble/effort of ensuring the designs included things like aerodynamic control surfaces, the feed systems for bullets, and how the powertrain actually worked to drive a walking robot. (And of course they put a lot of that same energy into GUNSIGHT, which provided an ex-post-facto explanation for same for Gundam.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, we'll get full-on Terminators. Human-scale bipedal robots armed with conventional weapons. Probably supported by other drone weapons platforms. Back in April 2017, Russian robotics firm Android Technics caused a bit of an uproar when they published a video of their multipurpose humanoid robot prototype FEDOR conducting a target shooting exercise as a demonstration of its precision and dexterity. Android Technics strenuously maintains that the FEDOR prototype was designed for rescue operations and absolutely not intended to have any military application, but the Russian deputy prime minster at the time still felt compelled to make a public statement in response to the demonstration that Russia was on no uncertain terms absolutely NOT developing a Terminator. (Which, I am certain, reassured exactly nobody.)
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