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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Looking at this week's new releases... Dahlia in Bloom is still pretty much the anime version of white noise. A quarter of the way into its run and none of the characters really stand out at all. We're starting to see some variety in faces and personalities but not to a significant extent. The plot has finally gotten moving as of the end of the third episode, with the protagonist having her engagement dissolved because of her fiance's infidelity and starting her life over (for the second time), but it stops there. Pseudo Harem is still a very cute and funny but directionless sort of series. Wikipedia says the original source was a webcomic, and it does have that kind of 4koma-y sort of vibe with very little character development or sense of an actual plot. It's adorable, but it's just a string of things happening without any semblance of going anywhere. Failure Frame is... well... not improved by the return of the protagonist's classmates to the story. The irony is that these characters are clearly aware that their classmates are awful people and even seem to briefly be aware that they too are no exception, but that self-awareness never gets far enough for them to actually change their behavior. There is one bit that I wish the series would drop, and it's that Touka seems incredibly determined to spend half of each confrontation pretending to be terrified or unwilling to fight and stallling for time for no real reason. It has never been convincing. It's just padding the story out unnecessarily. The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army Was a Human is pretty anticlimactic in general. It's one where the story and the events actually being shown seem to belong to two very different plots. Ike spends the first few episodes terrified that someone will learn he's a human, only to find out everyone in authority already knew and doesn't care, and there's some fuss about an ambitious rival trying to assassinate him but it basically comes to nothing. Every episode just sort of leaves me wondering "OK, what was the point of all that?" The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to be Archenemies is one title that I wish was longer. They pack a lot of fun into those 11 minutes, though it's mostly the Lieutenant's tsundere overreactions and jabs at titles like Madoka Magica that sell it. (The mascot creature who the magical girl works for is far more of a villain than the Evil Lieutenant or his organization... being, essentially, a yakuza thug.) The Ossan Newbie Adventurer continues to be a hoot if you like that kind of Mashle and One Punch Man sort of "the protagonist is overpowered but nobody's buying it" comedy. It definitely relishes that, so it sets its villains up to be as odious and arrogant as possible so the ensuing beatdown is maximally cathartic. It's entertaining, but doesn't really do all that much to stand out. My Wife Has No Emotion... this is probably the most depressing comedy I've seen since Watamote. Unintentionally so, I fear. This is like the story of one of those terminally lonely people who "marries" a body pillow or a realdoll. We're watching a man go through life telling people that a vaguely humanoid kitchen appliance is his wife. It'd be less pathetic if he were dealing with a ridiculously human robot like the "Super Mina" series introduced in the 4th episode, but the kitchen robot he's dragging to public places is about as human-like as C-3PO from the neck down and even less so in behavior. Also I could swear there was a comedy manga that had basically this exact premise done better years back...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    We do see her attempt to use the Force to escape her cell on the Republic prison transport in the first episode. Like Obi-Wan in Obi-Wan, she's out of practice and can't pull it off. We also see her reconnecting with the Force when she spends time meditating in Smilo Ren's island hideout using his Jedi-style sensory deprivation helmet. That was what had allowed her to have the vision of Master Sol and Mae that allowed her to track them to Brendok and scare the bejeezus out of Smilo Ren. Presumably that reconnection with the Force is also what allowed her to start using her powers consciously in the finale. Osha left the Jedi Order years before the events of the series and apparently did not continue to practice using her abilities after leaving the order. It's implied she didn't leave the order voluntarily, but was more "invited to leave" for failing some kind of test. The memory of that was clearly a traumatic one for her and that trauma may have discouraged her from continuing to exercise her abilities. After all, Force powers seem to depend on your confidence in them as far back as Empire... and having been told that she wasn't "Jedi material" probabyl damaged her confidence in her powers immensely. Ahsoka, on the other hand, left the Jedi Order voluntarily in protest of the kangaroo court she was subjected to. She hesitated to use her powers immediately after her departure from the Order, but never really stopped as we see in The Clone Wars and Tales of. Ahsoka needed to keep using her powers to survive once the Inquisition was onto her, so that kept her in practice. That specific aspect isn't bad writing... it's two different characters who left the Jedi Order under very different experiences living very different lives. Looking at the franchise's history, there were plenty of "gap years" there... '79, '81, '82, and everything from '87-'99... Though those early side titles do seem to slip under the radar, perhaps because of how dreadful they were. "Good" is a subjective assessment. As the saying goes, "one man's trash is another man's treasure" or "There's no accounting for taste." "Commercially successful" is an objective assessment, but does not account for actual enjoyment. I think, to an extent, the infrequent nature of Star Wars releases shielded them from a lot of criticism they would otherwise have received. Now that there's a new Star Wars title coming out every year, we're not getting that honeymoon phase where fans are just overjoyed to have more Star Wars and they're examining things critically from the beginning.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It's no different to the treatment every characters from any "Expanded Universe" setting... and this phenomenon is by no means limited to Star Wars. Canon characters are dragged back into "the action" again and again and put through more and more trauma and suffering until everything remotely likeable or interesting about them has been worn away and they're left a hollowed-out caricature of who they were when their story actually ended. Then, and only then, are they allowed to die... and in some settings even death doesn't get them off the hook and they get dragged back to the world of the living to suffer more. Any happy ending will be overridden as long as there is any demand for the character. Disney's writers knew that they had to pull a Happy Ending Override to have a story after Return of the Jedi, so that part came to the story naturally. They just did the rest out of order so the legacy characters could pass the torch to the next generation, with every intention of going back and spending years lovingly filling in the details of all of the abuse, misery, and suffering that broke them in comics, novels, games, etc. It's why I'm glad my boy Cassian got an end to his story that precludes any of that nonsense. I don't have to see him dragged back again and again until everything that made him likeable or interesting is gone. He got to go out with dignity, having sacrificed himself to struck a MASSIVE blow against the Empire that would ultimately lead to its defeat. It's a shame The Acolyte's writers couldn't bother to show similar creative integrity and tie off the stump of their mediocre story... they just had to try to bait a sequel. The grain of salt necessary to take that one seriously is so large the finale of The Last Jedi is set on it. Godwin's Second Law is very much in play, with respect to the reliability of its source. 🤣 This, I agree with. Part of what's made Star Wars so appear to underperform is that the market has been oversaturated since Disney bought it. With a new movie or series every year, Star Wars has lost its sense of occasion. The release of a new Star Wars movie used to be an occasion. A momentous event. So much has come out for it lately that news about a new Star Wars title falls into the "another bloody" category, as in "it's another bloody Star Wars". That oversaturation of the market is definitely hurting some of these shows. All The Acolyte really had to sell itself on was that it wasn't set in close proximity to the original trilogy. Let's be honest, it's not even the acting... it's the direction. You can have the best actors in the world, but if the writing and direction is garbage you're going to get a garbage performance. ScreenRant can't seem to make up its mind when it comes to The Acolyte's performance... though at least they acknowledge that measuring the performance of direct-to-streaming shows is an inexact science at best or completely counterintuitive at worst. A few days ago they ran a piece using data from Reelgood which put The Acolyte at the second most successful series in terms of online engagement. About two weeks ago they ran a piece based on the Nielsen numbers from the premiere which suggested The Acolyte was the second worst series in terms of viewership. We'll probably have to wait for Disney's Q3 or Q4 earnings calls to learn how Disney actually views The Acolyte's performance. To be honest, I don't think this is an entirely reasonable argument. There's nothing necessarily wrong with having a character have experiences from before their role in the story starts. If a character is a police officer or a soldier for instance, the audience can reasonably assume they know their way around firearms and probably know how to fight. If they're just Joe Average, like Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor, then yes they need to show their development into a badass because those credentials have to be built up. It's a failure of writing, really. You can establish that a character has qualifications without having to show them developing those qualifications. It just has to be done in a way that it's intuitively understood by the audience. If you don't establish that, and write a hypercompetent protagonist, there's a word for that: "Mary Sue". I'd give The Acolyte passing marks in this area, because one of the first things we learn about Osha and the thing that makes her a suspect initially is that she was an ex-padawan who washed out of the Jedi Order. Having established that part of her personal history makes it explicable that she knows how to fight, how to use a lightsaber, and how to make use of the Force. Mae, for her part, is also relatively quickly established to have been training under "the Master" for quite some time so her badassery at introduction is also not unreasonable.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The Acolyte has a lot of bad writing, sure as sure, but I'll come to its defense (halfheartedly) and say that there was only really one such leap of logic and that was the whole schtick with Smilo Ren's lightsaber-proof body armor. As others fairly pointed out to me, we'd already seen lightsaber-proof armor before in The Mandalorian, just not a kind that caused sabers to short out. So it's more an irritating easter egg than a leap of logic IMO. From the reports I've seen, the series has the lowest viewership of any Disney+ Star Wars series except Andor, so I'm sure the execs are asking the same question about who this was for. Andor is as much the story of the birth of the Rebellion as it is the life of Cassian Andor. Its slow start could definitely have been handled better, but it was necessary to show how Cassian was "making do" under the Imperial regime and the chain of events that gradually convinced him the Empire needed to be torn down by all means available even if it cost him his own life. Rogue One's writing would not be nearly as powerful if the characters weren't sacrificing themselves for the cause. I'm also rather partial to the characters having a definite ending that precludes any Expanded Universe bullsh*t. Cassian gets to have an arc that actually ends where so many of the characters in Star Wars have to be dragged back again and again until everything likeable or interesting about them has worn away and they become an unrecognizable mess like The Last Jedi Luke.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Exactly why they went extinct isn't specified. It definitely wasn't the Protodeviln, as they were sealed in PC 2873 and the Protoculture were still hanging on over 22,000 years later in PC 25000. The official timeline mentions that the network linking the various Protoculture colonies collapsed shortly after the Protodeviln were sealed, and that by PC 5000 what remained of their civilization was small groups of colonized planets, space colonies, and emigrant fleets out on the edge of the galaxy. My read of that is that a lot of the Protoculture who had survived the Protodeviln's short-lived rampage across the galaxy were subsequently caught up in the out-of-control fighting between the Zentradi and Supervision Army and wiped out. The ones who were left spent the next 20,000 years trying to stay off either side's radar, and either were wiped out when the war eventually found them or simply decided not to bring kids into their post-apocalypse or became too spread-out and too few to maintain a viable population. (Macross II's creators imply the Mardook are the descendants of one of the groups of DYRL? Protoculture who fled their civilization's collapse to try and start over elsewhere, and ultimately ended up living as space nomads desperate to preserve their culture. They seem to have been a bit luckier than most, given that they're still around over 500,000 years later and heavily armed to boot.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that was a predictable outcome. Paramount+'s Halo was, IMO, a sterling example of how not every successful franchise needs a "Cinematic Universe". It's visually stunning like every big budget direct-to-streaming property has to be, but the story is just so empty and so unnecessary. Making it a prequel was unnecessary. Making it a separate timeline was unnecessary. Trying to to character drama with a character who is iconic for being a faceless and unflappably stoic power armored beatstick was unnecessary and counterproductive to boot.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    We have no way of knowing when the ancient Protoculture developed the technology to create artificial fold faults on that scale. Considering how few worlds Humanity has encountered that have that kind of protection, it seems likely to me that it was something they developed somewhere after the sealing of the Protodeviln in PC 2873 and used sparingly to protect worlds that contained critical or unfathomably dangerous tech. (The two planets we know of that have the protection of a seemingly or explicitly artificial fold fault are Uroboros and Windermere IV, the places where the Protoculture sealed their hideously dangerous temporal weapon and the ship that was the key to the Star Shrine and Delta Wave System respectively. How cynical you want to be about the Windermereans coincidentally enjoying the protection of that fault would be another matter... did the Protoculture truly want to protect them, or were they just self-replicating components to drive the Delta Wave System?)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I went back and checked, and they do suggest that the witches are Nightsisters in the 7th episode. They don't confirm it, but the only argument they make against it is Nightsisters don't raise younglings... which Sol replies to by pointing out that they don't treat the girls like children. They are seeing using the same kind of weapons that the Nightsisters use (the bows) and we do see them use at least two powers that the Nightsisters used in previous works, like turning themselves into mist (Mother Talzin's favorite trick) and mind control. Not using necromancy may simply be from a lack of dead bodies to use since they haven't been living on Brendok long, or they may not have been taught the skill since in The Clone Wars it was only the elder witch who actually knew how to do that. It was well received by those who watched it all the way through. It just didn't have a very high total hours viewed because of all the people who dropped it after the first episode or two due to its slow start. It makes for a sharp contrast to The Acolyte, which seems to have achieved a broadly negative reaction from most of those who watched it all the way through.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I just want to leave those two painfully mediocre films very far behind where they can be forgotten in peace. I respect what Ridley Scott was trying to do. I just wish he'd done a much better job of it.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    It is, but only against soft targets. Buckshot doesn't actually have much penetration power because it's typically rather soft lead pellets. It doesn't work very well against body armor even at short ranges. Also, explosive-tipped rounds don't explode inside the target. They explode against the hard surface of a target to break up armor and allow a smaller penetrator inside the bullet to continue deeper in. Normally that kind of ammunition is for antimateriel use, and most living beings wouldn't present a hard-enough first surface to actually set of the explosive via the incendiary primer. From what we've seen in the trailers, I wouldn't count on too many folks surviving this new one either... they seem want to continue pivoting back towards horror. Hmmm... not thrilling to that trailer, esp. since there are bits that look lifted from Covenant like the row of facehuggers in gel that looks like the embryo storage from Covenant's titular ship.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The Acolyte showrunner Leslye Headland credits Dave Filioni with mentoring her during the development of her series and helping her develop the setting for the story. I'm not sure it's a coincidence that some of The Acolyte's weakest and most-maligned writing - the witches - draws heavily on Filoni's prior body of Star Wars work.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    You'd think a multiple millennia-old organization that has strict emotional control as a central tenet of its philosophy because it exists in a universe where even justifiable anger or fear is literally The Power of Evil would teach its members healthier strategies for processing their emotions than "repress everything". This whole fiasco - by which I mean both The Acolyte's plot and the Skywalker Saga as a whole - could've been avoided if the Jedi Order had some therapists on staff to assist its members with processing trauma and perhaps preemptively identifying members at risk of falling to the Dark Side. Qimir's decision to quit the Jedi Order and join the Sith is implied (by Qimir) to be a mistreatment-induced betrayal. Osha washed out of the Jedi Order... ... because she was never allowed to process the trauma of her sister's attempt to murder her and the deaths of literally everyone she knew after becoming a Jedi trainee. Torbin and Kelnacca both holed up in isolation for over a decade because that was the only coping mechanism they had to deal with the guilt and trauma of their accidental roles in the Brendok massacre. Sol displayed a frankly creepy interest in Osha from the start, and was allowed to take her as his apprentice despite having killed her mother. Legacy characters seems to be their hook for a season two... getting Yoda involved, and possibly other familiar faces.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Wait, you mean you aren't simply crippled by FOMO over the amazing premise of an entire eight episode season devoted to how a lime-green Karen and a recent lobotomy recipient hunt the only halfway likeable character in this show and his new girl Friday across the galaxy to cover up the coverup of a coverup of events that are completely inconsequential to the setting and that almost nobody in the story cares about either? I am shocked. Shocked! Well, not that shocked. 🤔 It's actually kind of impressive what a complete nonevent the whole story actually is within the greater scope of Star Wars.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Why not hide in a cave if you're the Master? Perhaps it's just my jaundiced eye view as a filthy casual, but the Sith seem to have an extreme flair for the dramatic. I guess it must come naturally if you're part of an ancient sect that has spent millennia devoted to taking revenge on a bunch of stuffy and repressed space monks. That sort of backstory practically demands being extra AF. (What are they taking revenge for anyway?) Joking aside, if that really is Qimir's master then he has good reason to spy on Qimir. The one and only path to Sith career advancement is the Klingon Promotion: kill your master to become the master. If his student's up to something behind his back he has every reason to suspect imminent and possibly fatal betrayal is in the offing. Keeping an eye on a person whose literal job it is to one day murder you and take your place is common sense if you're as death-adverse as Darth Plagueis supposedly was. For bonus points, Qimir's come home with a living specimen of life created by Force manipulation... so if he's really Darth Plagueis the only thing standing between him and doing an undignified victory dance and giving Qimir a congratulatory hug is probably his villainous image wouldn't survive it.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Delta did establish that the New UN Gov't and other researchers think the Brisingr cluster was probably the last enclave of Protoculture before the species slipped into extinction, with a seemingly higher density of Earthlike worlds and sub-Protoculture species than other parts of the galaxy. We did see another sub-Protoculture species that isn't named in Macross Frontier: the Labyrinth of Time too... though it's not clear where in the galaxy their world is. Zola does seem to have been lucky in that regard. It probably helped that Zola's environment is not exactly suitable for Humans despite being Earthlike. The influence of Galactic Whales on the local ecosystem made the planet's microorganisms much more dangerous to Humans than usual. Depending on how you want to read it, descriptions of the state of Zola itself suggest it was possibly more culturally and technologically advanced than the worlds of the Brisingr cluster when first contact was made. Their tech level is around the first half of Earth's 20th century despite a low level of urbanization. If they were already in their industrial age when Humanity made contact, it would probably have been a lot less of a cultural upheaval... esp. since their culture places great significance on the Galactic Whales and thus presumably had some inkling of the idea of life in space for many years before Humanity found them. It was, and still is. The Macross Delta TV series showed us, via flashback, that the trial production VF-31A Kairos was first used in combat by Xaos in 2065 (I think it was Ep21?). Master File's story depicts the first use of Xaos's custom VF-31 "Siegfried" a year later in 2066, with only two of the eventual five aircraft in service. The VF-31's only been in service with Xaos for a year and a half or so when Macross Delta's TV series starts in April 2067. Per Kawamori (in Great Mechanics G), his concept is that the production VF-31 Kairos will be entering military service c.2069-2070. Xaos is basically doing the same job that SMS did, testing the new fighter in combat as disposable mooks whose deaths are legally accidents not combat fatalities to iron out any remaining kinks before it goes into mass production for the New UN Forces. Honestly, this lot sounds more like the Cardassians to me... particularly given that their invasion of Arkarelia was all about resources to fuel their economic growth and that they have a militarized government with strong expansionist leanings. It's not mentioned, but it's possible... and some of them were doubtless mercenaries in the employ of the Roakites like the four YF-30B pilots were. I'm sure I'll find more detail when I have time to delve into it... but the basic description suggests they were just scouting the area looking for the Supervision Army and ran into the New UN Forces instead. Yeah, I'm hoping there's some explanation there.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Palpatine won't be born for another 50-something years, so it certainly seems possible. Especially considering the turnover rate we've seen for Sith apprentices and the various students of those apprentices in titles like The Clone Wars.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Not that heavy... the rifles we see the Marines use are, according to the film's dialog, 10mm (.40 caliber) rifles firing light armor piercing rounds with explosive tips. That's not a fantastically heavy load by any stretch of the imagination. The smart guns supposedly use the same 10x28mm caseless ammunition too. We also see Hicks kill at least one of the xenomorphs with an ordinary 12 gauge shotgun. The only weapon in the movie that's ever shown to be ineffective is the Vasquez's pistol, which isn't discussed in the story itself but the prop is a S&W Model 39 in 9x19mm. Aliens definitely did not focus on setting up sequels, though the idea of successful horror movies becoming sequel factories was already well established and in practice when it was being written never mind filmed. Friday the 13th was a poster child for it, having run out an original movie and four sequels before Aliens hit theaters. Not to mention it's a matter of legal record that Brandywine Productions was pushing for a franchise basically right after they saw the box office performance of Alien. The main thing holding up the development of that franchise-starting sequel was Fox being a complete and total dick about it. (They tried to pass the first film's success off as a fluke and were sued for trying to cheat Brandywine out of profits from the film through creating accounting practices.) Aliens did well on its own, but it strangled the franchise in the crib in doing so. It's horror, that's pretty normal as outcomes go. The critics generally held that the problem with 3 was just its weak writing... it was a troubled production that went through a bunch of revisions and concepts trying to find a place for the story to go as an action story after Aliens before concluding it was a bad job and pivoting back to horror. Well, we couldn't very well go back to LV-426 again... so I guess the Engineers are just as irresponsible as the ancient Protoculture, the Forerunners, or any other ancient alien species now.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    To each their own, naturally... I don't disagree the fight in the throne room in The Last Jedi is beautifully composed. The style of lightsaber fighting used in the sequels is kind of awkward. It lacks the speed and the fluidity that made the lightsaber fights in the prequel trilogy so very impressive. There's a lot of (understandably) inexperienced flailing from Rey in the first and second sequels but Kylo Ren's style is very jerky with a lot of heavy slashes that don't feel appropriate for a laser sword with a weightless blade. They don't mesh with the style we saw in previous titles... which admittedly is not a very practical style as it involves so much flynning, but it looks more impressive. Whoever choreographed the lightsaber fights for The Acolyte is probably the only person on this series besides the set and prop designers who really earned their keep IMO. Just gorgeous, fluid, wild fighting especially from Qimir and Sol. It's a treat to watch, which makes the quality of the rest of the show kind of a pity. Qimir's style is brutal without being heavy and slow. It's why Kylo Ren's style should have been.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Oh boy... here I go watchin' schlock again. The eighth and final episode of The Acolyte. Mog is back... which I'm sure will not please @Mog one bit. Well, that explains that... I guess we now know how this little Sithy secret didn't get out. Well, that was... I think underwhelming might not be strong enough. The writers clearly tied themselves in knots to make sure that this series ended with the rest of the galaxy in the dark about the existence of the Sith Lords... except it finishes with Green Karen knowing... ... and we also see her taking the subject to a member of the High Council, meaning that there is now a pretty substantial plot hole. Neither Osha nor Mae's story received a satisfying conclusion. The Brendok Jedi's arc is basically a massive waste of time that goes nowhere and does nothing interesting. None of what happens here adds anything new or interesting to Star Wars. Like I said a few posts ago, the showrunner and writers are so preoccupied with showing their love for the lore that they forgot to write an actual coherent story.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The Law of Diminishing Returns says that, no matter what you do or how well you do it, you will hit that wall at some point as long as you keep doing it. Looking back at the chaos that ensued when Alien 3 was being developed, I think it's safe to say that the newborn Alien franchise hit that wall more or less immediately once they pivoted from horror to action. They had an absolutely miserable time finding a workable concept for a third film in no small part because the previous film kneecapped the titular monster so badly and left them no room to build. Ripley may be the protagonist, but it's undeniably the xenomorph most people are coming to theaters to see. Prometheus went and proved that point beyond dispute. Pivoting from horror to action got them one good movie, and ruined the prospects of everything that came after. They tried to go back to horror despite the handicap of Aliens as their starting point and failed. They tried to do another action movie spinning off the premise of Aliens and failed. They tried to do away with the xenomorph entirely and shift to monsters of an entirely different sort with a soft reboot in Prometheus and general audiences said "Where's my xenomorph?" and it failed. Romulus seems set to be horror soft reboot attempt No.3... which just shows, IMO, that as enjoyable as Aliens was as a summer action movie it isn't evocative of what audiences actually want from Alien. They're here for Scary Monsters, and I don't mean David Bowie... though he'd have been a hell of a choice to play a synth. If only they'd let it die there, but once it's a franchise there will always be someone ready to head into the graveyard with a shovel ready to do an unboxing in search of more money.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Writing good horror is a difficult proposition, sure. It requires a substantial grasp of subtlety, nuance, and pacing to really get into the audience's heads to build and release tension in order to ensure a palpable sense of menace throughout. Horror movie after horror movie can work if you have very good writers... or if you're working a more forgiving and campy horror subgenre like slashers or splatter flicks where the sheer personality of your villain can carry an otherwise weak story (e.g. Nightmare on Elm Street). It's hard, but it's more rewarding in the long run than the quick burnout that you get by cheapening the monster with an action movie transition. Once "just shoot it" is a valid option, you're left fumbling for ways to make the monster threatening again.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The problem with switching genres like that is that you can't easily switch back once you've made the jump from horror to action. That's the reason that Alien and Terminator have struggled so much as franchises. They're known for that first iconic sci-fi horror installment that made them pop culture icons... but they both went for an action-centric first sequel that robbed the signature monster driving the story of most of its ability to invoke fear. So what followed was a string of poor quality and increasingly campy action movies trying to cash in on the original's reputation and doing worse each time until they hit legitimate commercial failure. If the franchise survives, they try pivoting back towards the original's horror... but with the significant disadvantage of all the reputational damage they've done to the monster with all the action-centric sequels. A supremely good writer and director can overcome that obstacle and make the monster scary again (e.g. Alien: Isolation), but it's far more likely it'll just end up another flop. Based on people's reactions here, it seems reasonably common that folks think switching to action got them exactly one good movie and a whole lotta schlock after.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Started No Longer Allowed in Another World after dinner... and this is kinda heavy. Like really heavy. Indecently heavy. I have to admit, it's definitely a fresh take on subverting the usual isekai formula. A hero who has zero interest in, and negligible talent for, heroing and who is genuinely upset that his isekai-inducing run-in with Truck-kun wasn't fatal because all he wants to do is die and Truck-kun interrupted his double suicide attempt. There doesn't seem to be any of the usual power fantasy and it seems determined to subvert the usual romance/harem fantasy too. Is it gauche to say I'm going to keep watching this bizarre death-seeking hero out of morbid curiosity?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if they can't get to you they can't very well attack you right? Assuming one had the means to create and maintain artificial fold faults large enough to isolate a planet and intense enough to be non-navigable with a conventional fold system, that'd be a pretty dandy way to prevent attacks. The ancient Protoculture seem to have had the means to create artificial fold faults like that, given the unnatural fold faults surrounding planets like Uroboros and Windermere IV that were strong enough to disable or seriously damage ships attempting to traverse them and large enough to effectively isolate those planets from the greater galaxy. It's probably still a bit outside Humanity's capabilities, though. Their expertise with warping spacetime into an impassible mess are mostly focused on small-scale applications in realspace (barriers). To have any hope of matching a main fleet man for man, they'd have to mobilize everyone on the planet anyway...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I'm not sure that'd even be physically possible. What the Vrlitwhai branch fleet detected that led them to the Sol system were the gravity waves produced by the ASS-1's fold jump eminating from its defold point. Those radiate outward in every direction at the speed of light. Without knowing where the Zentradi fleet would appear in advance, it'd likely be nearly impossible to mask that.
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