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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure what I was expecting from a teaser trailer for what is, by any rational standard of measure, a glorified filler episode prequel to the Gundam franchise's least necessary movie. I swear, half the characters in the trailer look as bored to be there as I would be to watch it. Gundam SEED always had a real problem with most of its character designs looking exactly the goddamn same, and it feels like the higher animation quality of the movie and this teaser make the problem feel worse somehow.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the 2024 Autumn simulcast season's about 2/3 over... and I'm surprised how many of the new titles I'm having fun with this season. Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions continues to be a lot of fun. I'm not super-thrilled that it leaned far enough into the Sherlock Holmes references to become an unofficial sequel/spinoff of Arthur Conan Doyle's 19th century detective series, but that happens so wearily often in detective anime that it was expected. The actual cases are always very inventive and have wild conclusions, which keeps the series fun. As long the "House of M" stays in the background it should remain an exciting detective series. MF Ghost is another one where I'm consistently impatient for the next episode. It's everything a racing anime should be, which you'd expect from Shuichi Shigeno penning a sequel to his iconic series Initial D. The shilling for Toyota is at least understandable, and it's almost funny how Kanata seems to be able to summon a Eurobeat soundtrack as soon as he starts drifting. IMO, the only weakness MF Ghost has is that its occasional asides with the race queens for fanservice purposes veer into creepy "My face is up here" territory more often than not. As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World has finally stepped foot into the civil war arc it was teasing at the end of the first season. It's doing OK with it, since the protagonist Ars stays out of the combat for the most part and focuses on what he does best which is reading people and trying to manipulate events through non-violent means. It's still plenty engaging, but the last few stories have felt a little... thoughtless? Like the original author didn't know quite how to resolve those plots while keeping Ars out of the fighting. Blue Exorcist's fourth season has finally found the point where the original manga started to suffer from darkness-induced audience apathy. It's handled extremely well by the studio (which is to say, the intense creepiness of the moment is brought across faithfully) but it still ends up making the story less interesting by raising the stakes TOO far to the point that the series is suffering a multiple impending-apocalypse pileup. 365 Days to the Wedding continues to be a fun little romcom. It's slow, but the way the characters are handled manages to keep it a lot of fun to watch. Yakuza Fiance/Raise wa Tanin ga Ii is a pretty wild ride too. It's another one where I'm impatient for each new episode of this hilariously awful mismatched arranged-marriage mafia couple.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I've mentioned her a few times before in this topic. First mention of the Graf Zeppelin II (CVN-100) was in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix (2012). She's mentioned and shown in the section of the book devoted to talking about the Asuka II (CVN-99) as a second ship of the same experimental class and type that was a predecessor to the Prometheus (CVS-101). Master File says she served as part of the UN Navy 2nd Fleet and that her home port was Norfolk, VA. She's seen among the ships defending South Ataria island in December 2008 in Macross the First (2014), as a carrier launching VF-0's. Her name is noted to be something of an irreverant in-joke regarding the circumstances of her construction. The Asuka II-class was designed in Japan and was originally meant for service with the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces. When the UN Forces decided to build a second ship of the same class, the contract to build the new ship landed at some unspecified shipyard in (West) Germany. The irony of this was apparently too much to be contained by anyone in the military administration, and she was named in honor of Germany's only other aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, which had also been a copy of a Japanese aircraft carrier design. Defense forces for those worlds settled by the short-distance emigrant fleets were probably initially quite small. They're probably not small anymore, given that those emigrant planets are within spitting distance of Earth and were among the first planets colonized. They'd have had more time than almost anyone to build infrastructure, harness natural resources, and grow their local defense forces with the close support of Earth's immense manufacturing power. I'd assume the lander can operate independently. Zentradi ships use networked clusters of reactors and drives, so I'd assume the lander probably has its own fold system cluster and we know it has its own reactors, engines, and weapons. For a given value of "assault"... they're not really made to land ground forces. The Daedalus II-class is as close as it really gets, but it's not an assault lander like the Daedalus was. It's a dedicated space carrier like the ARMD-class but with the capability to carry out ramming attacks.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Normally when a film is that bad we see a brief advertising blitz to get as many people in theaters for opening weekend before word gets around that it's a turd. From this one? Nothing. It's like theater chains entirely forgot that this film comes out less than a month from now. It's not even in the "Coming attractions" reels in the actual theaters themselves.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    If you think about it, that's kind of... everywhere. Post-war culture is a hodgepodge of whatever cultural artifacts and traditions survived the First Space War and whatever they've come up with since to fill in the gaps. There are whole fleets that devote their living spaces to enthusiastic recreations of pre-war Earth like Macross-11 or Macross Frontier. Macross Frontier goes so hard on it that they made recreations of multiple cities worth of historic districts complete with superficially appropriate vehicles and other aesthetics. The ultimate fate of the Asuka II is not stated, but she was likely destroyed in the bombardment. Her sister ship, Graf Zeppelin II, was assigned to protect South Ataria island and may now be floating out near Pluto. At the very least, we know of one crew member on the Asuka II who has living descendants after the war. The movie Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure establishes that Walkure member Makina Nakajima is the great-granddaughter of the VF-0 program's chief mechanic aboard the Asuka II: Raizo Nakajima. That's the Battle Astraea, yeah... from the NUNS's 7th Fleet, prior to it being stolen by its commander and crew and becoming the flagship of Heimdall. Available information suggests planetary defense forces vary in size depending on the emigrant fleet that ultimately colonized the planet. The New UN Spacy escort fleet that the emigrant ship was protected by becomes the planet's New UN Spacy defense force after colonization begins. So some planets have a Battle-class to rely on because they had the good fortune to be colonized by a 3rd Gen or later emigrant fleet. Fleets that didn't leave with one (or lost theirs) would have to build one or buy one. Presumably the reason we see no Battle-class ships in the Brisingr cluster is that it was colonized by 1st and 2nd generation fleets like Megaroad-04. Macross Frontier is just as blatant, with the uppermost level of Island-1 being a loving recreation of several parts of San Francisco... right down to the infestation of Toyota Priuses and Ozma's replica of an early 90's Lancia Delta HF Integrale. Though I think no example better suits the post-war fervor for recreating pre-war history than Culture Park in Macross II: Lovers Again. Lovingly crafted recreations of many world famous pre-war monuments with Disneyland-like abandon. The whole scene is a massive homage to Roman Holiday, so we see a lot of Roman landmarks like the Trinita dei Monti church and the famous Spanish Steps, the Mouth of Truth in the Piazza della Bocca della Verita, and the Flavian Amphitheatre. We also see several other monuments from other places and cultures like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Louvre in Paris (we see Ishtar pose in front of Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People), the Moai from Easter Island, the Great Wall of China, and Petra's Khazneh el-Far'oun... all lovingly recreated for the sake of an enormous historical theme park. Or that Marines are simply carried as infantry aboard naval vessels... the Marines we see postwar have been the Spacy Marines.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    We got another month before this one comes out, right? I've been to the theaters like half a dozen times in the last two weeks and I've seen NOTHING about Kraven there. If there was any advertising at all, it seems like it's been buried under the advertising blitz for Red One.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Is there a petition we can sign to get the showerunners of Andor put in charge of Star Wars as a whole? Seriously. This is ten thousand times more interesting than anything about the glowstick society.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Just got back from a showing of Overlord: the Sacred Kingdom. Not gonna lie, I can see why IGN gave the movie a bad review. It's a very compressed adaptation of the light novel that is absolutely no ambassador to anyone who hasn't seen the anime up through the middle of its fourth season. It cuts out several major scenes, and merges a few others. Unfortunately one of the scenes it left out was a really important one that explains why the demons absolutely ham it up about Neia's bow being a "rune" weapon, so there are several scenes where demons just engage in dreadful acting about it with zero direct explanation. It's not a bad speedrun of the story, but it's definitely not for the non-fan.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    As narratively unnecessary and painfully dull as the movie was, I can honestly say I feel no inclination whatsoever to watch its equally dull and unnecessary prequel. On the scale of "better things to do with my time", watching Freedom Zero is going to fall somewhere below teaching myself to play the bluegrass banjo with my feet, catching the flu for purely recreational purposes, or rewriting the entirety of the European Union's tax code in dactylic hexameter pig Latin and publishing it as an epic poem. A hard pass even then.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    That alone was enough to get my attention. So much of Star Wars is focused on military affairs or the life of ne'er-do-wells on the fringes of society that there's little indication of what life is like for the billions upon billions of normal workaday folks who aren't living and working in the almost-literal ivory towers of the rich and powerful, the wretched hives of the crime lords, or the little farming villages in the middle of nowhere. Skeleton Crew'll be doing some interesting worldbuilding.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing is too weird for the Star Wars setting as a whole. Disney's in this to make money, though... so I expect the writers of this kid's show will keep the weirdness to a kid-friendly and marketably controversy-free level. (Elective cybernetics might veer too closely to a politically-polarizing real world topic for Disney's comfort.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Star Wars's Galaxy Far Far Away is an absolutely gargantuan setting that's allegedly home to over 20 million sentient species. I'd assume the only practical limits on "weird" are the imagination of the writers and the size of the budget for practical and digital effects. In a way, isn't that kind of the theme here? Skeleton Crew is a story about some bored kids from a nice, safe, middle class neighborhood where nothing interesting ever happens digging up a buried spaceship and finding out how weird, wild, and dangerous the rest of the Galaxy Far Far Away really is.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    In a way, it is oddly impressive that Disney LucasFilm's writers managed to make "Lesbian Space Witches" unappealing to Star Wars's predominantly male audience. (Even more so given that pre-Disney LucasFilm managed to sell fans on the idea twice. Once in the EU novels and once in The Clone Wars.) That said, pre-Disney Star Wars had its fair share of "Holy my beer" bad narrative decisionmaking too. Phantom Menace introducing three different alien species that read like racist political cartoons, absolutely every bit of dialog between Anakin and Padme, so very much of the Expanded Universe. It is not a new development by any means. It's gotta be there for a reason. AFAIK, Star Wars cybernetics are mostly organ/limb replacements for people with life-altering injuries. The few exceptions are low level clerks and functionaries who get elective surgery to boost their brains with computer hardware. That's why I hypothesized she might be blind. The casting does seem to be aiming to make the group of kids as diverse and representational as you'd expect for a kids show (which is not a bad thing, to be clear). Social media does absolutely feed the toxic fandom... but on the other hand, Star Wars has also served up enough disappointments in its rapid-fire release schedule since Disney took the helm that general audiences are greeting new titles with less enthusiasm and more skepticism/suspicion too. For every Rebels, The Mandalorian, or Andor there's a The Acolyte, The Book of Boba Fett, or The Rise of Skywalker serving up a bland and disappointing viewing experience or irritatingly bad writing.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, she's probably meant to be an inclusive character for viewers with disabilities. Like Geordi LaForge was in Star Trek: the Next Generation. It'd be a bit too weird for Disney to make a kid into a cybernetics fetishist like that ridiculous moped gang from The Book of Boba Fett. As memorable as he is, I'm sure I'll forget him again soon enough. And if not, there's bourbon.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I completely forgot that he exists. I think my brain glossed over his existence entirely, since he looks like an especially ugly Chia Pet and he and his crew managed to be slightly less intimidating than stormtroopers.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it'd just feel wrong to have a space pirate story in Star Wars without Hondo... seemingly Star Wars's only space pirate.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, that sounds like a recipe for hilarity to me. I would watch that. The undead Emperor just... getting completely casually disrespected by a bunch of exciteable kids who have no idea who he is, trying to keep his flesh from falling off his bones at the same time he's trying to keep their grubby mitts off his Sith artifacts until he can find someone to dump them on so he can have a moment's peace. The most dangerous and deadly villain in the galaxy treated like a Scooby-Doo villain for a few episodes. (And you can't tell me Star Wars has never done that kind of thing before. I've seen the episodes of The Clone Wars where Dooku is taken hostage by that magnificent ham Hondo and ends up chained to Anakin and Obi-wan.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I ordered mine from Crunchyroll and it arrived with no issues to speak of despite spending several additional days in the care of the USPS. They're definitely not going overboard with the padding the way I've seen HLJ and CDJapan do, but mine came wrapped in several layers of paper padding. It looks like yours got mangled in a sort facility though...
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Distance from the Skywalker saga has proven to be a pretty good idea... at least as far as good ideas go under the stewardship of Disney. There are just too many sacred cows on Skywalker Ranch for telling more stories there to be a good idea.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Oh boy... more lifeless and unnecessary garbage from Gundam's most overrated, least capable director. 🤮
  21. Seto Kaiba
    My copy arrived today. I was surprised by how hefty the box is. Definitely not thrilled with the decision to put the discs inside of the book instead of in a separate case. The print quality of the art seems nice though.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It's likely, given that Isamu is from Eden and never signed on with an emigrant fleet's escort detail as far as we know. (Personally, I suspect the reassignment to New Edwards was Isamu's CO trying not just to make him someone else's problem but to put him in a position where he might remove himself from being anyone's problem. By that point, the YF-19 had put two test pilots in the ICU and two more in the ground.) Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix takes that view. The Restored Phoenix story section mentions, in passing, a government-led cultural and technological restoration project that spent the twenty years after the First Space War combing through the ruins of pre-war Earth for any surviving cultural artifacts and technology. It was one of that project's expeditions to Edwards AFB that discovered a cargo container with two wrecked VF-0s from the Asuka II's air group and led to the reverse-engineering and restoration of the VF-0. While Battleships of the Galaxy is a doujinshi, we do at least know that the Battle-class was not limited to use by emigrant fleets. There was, of course, the second Macross 13 that was the flagship of Earth's defense forces under Gen. Kim Kabirov in the Macross Frontier novelization and more recently Battle Astraea from the NUNS's 7th Fleet that became the flagship of Heimdall in Absolute Live!!!!!!. Master File, while also not strictly official setting, does seem to suggest there weren't initially that many of them since Battle 7 was borrowed for the mission to suppress the main fleet that destroyed Spica III. Oh, absolutely. Traveling by space fold has always been a "speed of plot" way to get around. It's easier to leave the distances between places vague or undefined and have people get there when it's dramatic/necessary to do so rather than set up a bunch of detailed rules and stats that they'd then have to worry about following or breaking later on. This bit of intentional vagueness and the increasing casualness of interstellar travel is justified in-story in several ways. The introduction of fold faults as a navigational obstacle that can prevent ships from taking the shortest possible route and/or greatly increase the error in time measurement is practically a get out of jail free card for inconsistencies in presentation. Humanity's ever-advancing technology has allowed them to manufacture more precise and reliable fold systems and advances in fold carbon synthesis have made those systems more capable and efficient. They've also simply gotten better at using them through experience. Those are pretty extreme examples, though. Humanity in Macross isn't quite a monoculture, but most of the galaxy hasn't been separated for long enough to really develop their own ingrained independent cultures and traditions. The closest we can reliably get is emigrant planets that already had a native alien species living on them, like Windermere IV or Ragna. Though Macross being Macross, "not so different" is almost always in play and even these alien cultures end up being more like Human culture than they are different. Supplemental material like Macross the Ride and Master File suggest that the Macross Frontier fleet isn't quite as isolated as the series makes out and that there are several other fleets (incl. Galaxy) and some inhabited planets within semi-easy fold distance of the fleet. (~500ly, according to Master File.) The exact details are left to Macross's usual "broad strokes" continuity, but it's worth noting that both Macross Frontier and Macross Delta materials effectively treat the game's Vindirance route as the Good/True Ending of its story. Vindirance and the pro-autonomy faction triumph, the government and military are reorganized, the pro-centrists end up punished for their crimes and some become terrorists (like Naresuan) or mercenaries (like Ernest Johnson).
  23. Seto Kaiba
    This got me thinking... how many worlds within that bubble do we actually know about? As noted before, Macross doesn't often mention how far apart various planets/systems are so it's hard to know if we've actually seen any systems within that 100 light year radius bubble explored by the short-distance emigrant fleet besides Eden. Legible backwards text in the first episode of Macross Plus (during Isamu's dressing-down by his CO) describe several emigrant planets including "Planet Barnard", which apparently orbits Barnard's Star 5.978 light years from Earth. That may imply that the other planets Isamu is threatened with a dead-end assignment to (incl. Micross Minus and Banipal) are within that same zone. It's also possible that many of the planets visited in the course of Macross M3 are in that same zone. (Honestly, in astronomy terms, the idea of someone finding a planet at Barnard's star is quietly hilarious... considering how many real-world refuted arguments for a planet there have been made over the years. Sadly, it seems whatever fleet found it didn't have the sense of humor to name is Vandekamp or something like that after the late Peter van de Kamp, who argued for many years that there was a planet there.) Any space big enough to hold Battroids should be plenty capable of accommodating Zentran. You'd just have to be willing to put up with the drain on resources, which from what the Macross Frontier series implies, was a rare case indeed. Either. Quite possibly both. The Uraga-class is certainly not the only example... the Battle-class and the later Saratoga II-type are also designed for blue water operation. Probably not, considering how fundamentally wrongheaded the Earth UN Forces beliefs about an alien invasion and the strategies involved turned out to be. The Daedalus-class, Prometheus-class, and Destroids were all products of the assumption that Earth would one day face a classic alien invasion scenario with ground troops and efforts to capture terrain for resources or prisoners. That turned out to be lamentably wide of the mark. There is still some kind of blue water Navy in play though, as Isamu's service record mentions him serving about the Navy's Enterprise. Considering the disparity in munitions capabilities... probably. Largest ________ metrics are a bit muddy in real world terms thanks to several countries that play fast and loose with what counts as a military ship or aircraft. Based on officially published numbers, if you parked the Macross 7 fleet on Earth today it'd technically be the 4th largest air force in the world in terms of the total number of military aircraft, behind only China, Russia, and the United States. As of the 2050s, that's a solidly medium-sized fleet. Nothing specific... it's known that they can be artificially created by the Protoculture's technology and the Vajra's biotechnology, so presumably they understand how these things work. They're not really explained to the audience beyond essentially just being a higher-dimension navigational hazard that ranges in severity from "speedbump" to "pothole bad enough to mess up your tires/suspension/alignment", "sinkhole big enough to swallow your car whole", and finally "that's not a sinkhole that's a **** damn canyon". If we were to extrapolate from official materials, Macross Chronicle's Technology Sheet for barrier system suggests that a barrier is essentially a deliberately created fold fault: a region where the geometry of space-time is twisted into an impassible obstacle. So a fold fault is presumably a region of higher dimension space that's been warped by some (gravitational?) force (stellar gravity, black holes, stray pockets of heavy quanta?). They're one of those things that Humanity is still studying, having cheated their way to having interstellar flight via very lucky/unlucky first contact events.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    We've kinda had that three times already... in Macross II, Macross Zero, and Macross Delta. As above, we've kind of already had that too... Macross II's creators hint in-story and in interviews that the Mardook are the descendants of Protoculture refugees like the ones mentioned in DYRL?, who fled their civilization's fall to start over and lived a semi-nomadic life in space.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Crunchyroll's store has it listed at MSRP ($189.99) for non-members. The member discount takes 10% off the top automatically ($170.99) and it's eligible for a lot of their coupon code discounts too... which is how they handled the preorder discount pricing in the US, to the discontent of some. Since the coupon codes are pretty ubiquitous, the real pricing is more like $151 w/ free shipping.
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