Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    13856

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the last episodes of the latest season of Blue Exorcist and The Healer Who Was Banished From His Party last night. The Healer Who Was Banished From His Party was definitely a disappointment start to finish. The animation is never better than "meh" quality, but the story is so disjointed and so full of random twists that I honestly found myself tuning out repeatedly during the final episode. Blue Exorcist's season finale was actually pretty good, capitalizing on the tension that's been building all season long during the tedious exposition dumps and culminating in Samael sending Rin off into the past for another major exposition dump with an absolute nightmare face of a smile and the gleeful acknowledgement that he is a demon after all. The only part that really doesn't land well is the incredibly derivative twist where...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The one good call that Leslye Headland made in The Acolyte was increasing Manny Jacinto's screentime. Qimir was the only character written with anything resembling a personality, and as a result ended up being the only likeable or interesting character in the show. Casting a different actress as Osha/Mae would not have improved The Acolyte any. The Acolyte's (main) problem was nothing to do with its cast. Its screenplay was a full-fledged Idiot Plot full of "that sounded cooler in my head" fan fiction-y set pieces with a cast consisting largely of typically stoic Jedi, a Sith Lord, and the twin protagonists in questionable-at-best mental health due to severe childhood trauma. Even a great actress would not have been able to rescue The Acolyte from its writers and directors. Amandla Stenberg delivered the performance that the director and the script she was given called for, which was wooden and unlikeable and frequently idiotic. If her performance wasn't what as the director and producers wanted it, it wouldn't have made it into the final cut. So if you want someone to blame... well... start with Leslye Headland (showrunner/director/writer), and go down the chain of command to Kogonada, Alex Garcia Lopez, Hanelle Culpepper (the other directors), Jason Micallef, Charmaine DeGrate, Jasmyne Flournoy, Eileen Shim, Claire Kiechel, Kor Adana, Cameron Squires, Jocelyn Bioh, and Jen Richards (the other writers). ... ... ... This show had way the hell too many writers, and no one writer worked on more than two episodes and six of the eight episodes had two or more writers. Every single episode effectively had a completely different writing team. What's that old saying? "Too many cooks spoil the broth"? Compare to The Mandalorian, which had only five writers for the entire twenty-four episode run and only four episodes with more than one writer. Simple. Because her performance goals as LucasFilm President and CEO are tied to LucasFilm's overall financial performance.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    What I recall from the one film studies class I took in college, film enthusiasts generally recommended to watch a film two or more times to fully appreciate it. Most people wouldn't, if they really hated it, but there are some sticklers out there. (Not to mention Star Wars fans determined to catch every little easter egg and bit of lore.) FWIW, I only watched The Acolyte once. If it hadn't been so offensively awful I might've done it twice just to make sure I was taking it all in. But nope, no thank you, once was once too many for this hot mess.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    There's a good reason for that. Prior to 1984, the PG rating in use was effectively equivalent to the PG-13 rating we use today. The MPAA split it into the modern PG and PG-13 in 1984 based on audience feedback to make separate categories to denote films not suitable for small children vs. films not suitable for pre-teens. Depending on if you ask Disney or George Lucas, the target age group is either 9-14, 10-14, or 12-14. Probably not coincidentally, the cast of Skeleton Crew are 13-14 and their characters are written to be around the same age. Relatable protagonists for the target demographic, I guess.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's probably a big part of it right there... it was very rare for an underperforming title to be licensed at all outside of very specific circumstances (e.g. what happened with MOSPEADA and Southern Cross). Not everything... but the selection is much broader both because the medium is more accepted and because the market model itself has changed. Switching from direct-to-video releases to subs-only simulcast streaming cut out a lot of the upfront cost, so distributors could license more titles with less financial risk, so we get a broader cross-section of what the industry produces now.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Disney makes no secret of the fact that they, like Lucas-era LucasFilm before them, tailor the Star Wars franchise's content to maintain a PG-13/TV-14 rating at most. Even Andor, which has a more mature story than usual, is TV-14. (The OT are rated PG, but that's because the PG-13 rating didn't exist until 1984.) Kids aren't the only audience, but they are the PRIMARY audience for Star Wars and always have been.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's about what I'd expect in terms of Disney trying to frame the show's cancellation in suitably neutral corporate language. Instead of saying "we didn't think it would flop like this", you say "we were happy with it, but it did not meet expectations". Instead of "audiences hated it", "engagement was good but not as high as we'd have liked it to be". Instead of "we cancelled this because making season two would be like burning a quarter of a billion dollars in the parking lot" you say "it wasn't where we needed it to be in terms of cost performance". Some folks want to be thorough and not base their whole review just on a first impression. I can respect that. It's similar to how I tend to refuse to drop a show partway even if I don't like it because it doesn't feel fair to criticize the work as a whole based on just part of it.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I think I've finished up for this season except for Yakuza Fiance. Pretty happy with it overall. Definitely gonna grab a few of these titles on Blu-ray when they hit shelves. Esp. Yakuza Fiance, MF Ghost, and Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions. Looking at it logically, I think that has a lot more to do with the existence of the internet and social media. It's easier for people to express their discontent in the modern era where in the 80's you'd have to pick up a pen and write a postcard to a hobby magazine if you wanted to make a visible complaint about the sameyness of the copycat shows and whether they'd even print it is another matter entirely. There are some articles in those old magazines that talk about the problem, though with typically professional politeness. A few titles, like Galaxy Drifter Vifam and Metal Armor Dragonar are noted to have underperformed commercially in part because they struggled to distinguish themselves from the titles they were imitating (Gundam) visually and narratively. Southern Cross is probably the most extreme example. Given that many of these isekai properties are, due to the nature of their stories, not likely to spawn sequels I wonder what the future of the genre will look like in ten or twenty years time. Of the big four, KonoSuba's light novel ended a couple years ago with volume 17 and Overlord's is set to end in a year or two with volume 18. Re:Zero and Tanya are still going. A few of the other stars of the genre are over or on hiatus like Ascendance of a Bookworm (out at 33) and Rising of the Shield Hero (on hiatus at 22).
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Have a "senior moment" there, mate? You launched into this tangent by arguing that Star Wars isn't being produced for kids. I pointed out that George Lucas is on record as saying it has always been for kids first and foremost. You asserted that Disney Star Wars is totally separate from Lucas's so Lucas's opinion doesn't count. I pointed out that practically everything in the catalog disproves that claim directly because all but two of the shows are direct extensions/continuations of Lucas-era stories that were developed for kids, and that even the two titles that aren't direct continuations of Lucas's work are still explicitly developed and marketed as family friendly kids shows per Disney itself. Or maybe your opinions of these shows are not universally held and people actually like titles like Skeleton Crew? Just a thought. If one were to go on reviews and what viewership data is available at this point, Skeleton Crew appears to be on a course to finish its first season as one of Disney+'s best-received original Star Wars titles. Up there with The Mandalorian's first two seasons.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    No, it's not pointless. You're missing a key distinction. Skeleton Crew has a bunch of easter eggs in it, sure. But none of them actually affect the story in any way. They're just there as freeze-frame bonuses. That's completely different from all of the other shows and movies I mentioned in my previous post where the story depends on characters, events, and/or macguffins from a previous work and assumes the show assumes the audience is already familiar with. To give a few examples: As it stands, there's nobody and nothing in Skeleton Crew thus far that requires the viewer to be familiar with a prior Star Wars Disney+ series. That could change, but thus far there is no prerequisite viewing required to fully understand Skeleton Crew the way there is for other shows. They absolutely have an incentive to produce quality shows. They're measuring the success of these shows in terms of viewership hours and subscriptions. If the shows suck, like The Acolyte, people tune out or even cancel their subscriptions if that's what they were there for. If the show is bad, people aren't going to buy the merchandise either, which is why The Acolyte saw most of its merchandising cancelled when it bombed. No, that stumbling block is quite real. It's what killed The Acolyte. Disney put a longtime Star Wars fan who adores the Old Republic setting in charge of the project, and she totally dropped the ball because she was too interested in showing her love for the setting to bother telling a coherent story.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It's not technically George Lucas's Star Wars anymore, I'll give you that. But, at the same time, Skeleton Crew and Resistance are basically the only two Disney Star Wars titles that aren't 100% built on Lucas-era Star Wars. The sequel trilogy is exactly what those words imply. Rogue One, Andor, Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Rebels are all Episode IV prequels. The Book of Boba Fett is a spinoff of Episode VI and of The Mandalorian. The Bad Batch is a direct sequel to The Clone Wars, while Rebels, Ahsoka, and The Mandalorian are all spinoffs of story arcs from it. Ahsoka is also very much a spinoff of Rebels as it directly resumes plot threads from that series. The Acolyte was set up as a prequel to The Phantom Menace. Tales of the Jedi is set predominantly during the prequel trilogy and directly crosses over with The Clone Wars in a few places. Tales of the Empire is two separate stories that both directly pick up plot threads from The Clone Wars with Morgan's one tying directly into Rebels too. Nah, Disney paid a fortune for LucasFilm and the Star Wars IP. They're going to try to make Star Wars appeal to new and broader audiences to try and maximize their ROI and bring in new fans. Doing nothing but pander to the long-time fans is a losing proposition creatively and fiscally. Their main stumbling block is staffing. They need/want to develop new titles that have broad appeal, but they keep self-sabotaging by hiring longtime Star Wars fans or creators from the pre-Disney era who don't share that objective.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... George Lucas defended Star Wars, and particularly the prequels, as "kids movies" on more than a few occasions. But yeah, even though Skeleton Crew is being marketed as a kids show it's definitely for... what's that old marketing spin... "Kids of All Ages". 🤣 I'll be interested to see the viewership numbers when Disney releases them a year or so down the line. I get way too many trick-or-treaters in Star Wars costumes each Halloween to believe for a second that there are no kids who like Star Wars. On Halloween '22, it seemed like every fifth kid was Din Djarin.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    There are those who would make the same defense of the many copycat isekai titles. Also those who would point out that quite a bit of the bad stuff in those old mecha titles was genuinely just bad... in some cases so much so that it drove licensees and studios out of business when they gambled on copycat titles and lost.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... though that may be truth in television, since Earth can't even get its sh*t together enough to do that for just a single planet or often even a single country. Well, yeah... but it's not like Disney/Hasbro are setting out to deliberately make "uncool" shelf-warmers. So much of what ends up collecting dust on shelves and in bargain bins is in "What do you mean it's not awesome?" territory. A bunch of people at Disney and Hasbro sincerely believed that characters like Rose Tico or Reva were going to be beloved additions to the franchise. Writers and producers and directors fought for the characters and set pieces that audiences absolutely loathed, thinking they were going to be awesome additions to the story. The same is true for Skeleton Crew. Somebody working on this series had to propose, and likely defend, depicting a brothel operating on Port Borgo in this series for kids. To say nothing of its role in the story being Wim making a beeline for it the minute they land or the hooker out front trying to coerce KB and Fern to come with her, possibly with nefarious intent.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    In a galaxy far, far away... where they've had casual interstellar travel and laser guns for over 25,000 years. It's totally an affectation. You just know this wolf-man-thing is going "Arr matey! A pirate I be!" the minute none of his men are looking. SM-33 is even doing it unironically. Reva left such a lasting impression on me that I had to resort to Google to remind myself who that even was. Turns out it's the crazy girl from Obi-Wan Kenobi. Sure you can, it's just a question of how to write it off as a loss on your taxes, rent a truck to haul it to a landfill, or if you're willing to risk prosecution for illegal dumping. 🤔 I'm sure retailers thought they could never get rid of all those unsold cartridges for E.T. for the Atari 2600, until they discovered the magic of landfills in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's a pretty normal trajectory for any genre that's trending. You get some rough starts, a few key innovators who perfect the formula and make bank, and then a deluge of low-quality copycats trying to cash in on the trend before it goes out of fashion and the next thing comes along and leaves just the well-established and successful properties. We saw this same thing happen in the 80's with mecha anime.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Can we appreciate for a moment their commitment to the "We're pirates, but in space!" bit here? Our boy Wolfman is wearing what appears to be a brace of laser flintlocks across his chest. Laser. Flintlocks. This is a setting where laser guns hold hundreds of shots and have detachable magazines. Wolfman is lugging around a bunch of extra and unnecessary guns styled after firearms that are tens of thousands of years obsolete purely for aesthetic purposes. That is commitment to the bit, and no mistake. Someone get this canine a bicorn hat and a jolly roger, stat!
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It's an interesting title to say the least. I'm quite fond of the alternate history it presents, a world where "sufficiently analyzed magic" became practical technology in the early 20th century and events are slowly building towards world war. It's one of the top titles in its genre for good reason. It's a shame that so little of the light novel has been adapted thus far. A second season was announced back in 2021, but there's been radio silence about it from Studio NUT ever since, so all we have right now is the 12 episode first season and the "special episode" (plus a compilation movie). If you take a liking to it, there is a passable English translation of the original light novel by Yen Press available in both realbook and ebook form. Thirteen volumes out so far, with a fourteenth due out in June. Success inspires copycats, and they did REALLY abuse the hell out of the premise. IMO, the only ones in that genre really worth bothering with are the subversions of that "introvert fantasy" that drives most of the genre. Not coincidentally, the major successes in the genre are almost all hard subversions of the formula where the protagonists either suffer a Reality Ensues, are Blessed with Suck, or end up in something approaching an ironic personal hell.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Three Body Universe is a Chinese company that was set up to own and manage the intellectual property rights to Liu Cixin's 2006/2008 science fiction novel Three Body Problem , overseeing the various adaptations thereof incl. the 2023 Chinese TV series and 2024 Netflix series. If he's making an announcement in partnership with Three Body Universe, it's not a Macross announcement. The book that Kawamori is holding is a copy of one of the books in that trilogy... I can't read it clearly enough to tell which one. Looks like it might be the third one, Death's End.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Looking at the Crunchyroll Winter 2025 lineup... and a LOT of it is overly long title isekai or isekai-adjacent trash. The season's highlights look to be mainly continuing shows from the Autumn 2024 lineup like Dragon Ball DAIMA and a handful of new seasons of existing shows like Solo Leveling, Dr. STONE, Blue Exorcist, Unnamed Memory, and Re:Zero. The only new title that really stands out is a new AQUARION series, Myth of Emotion. It's gonna be a lean season good for catching up on backlogs.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, I was under no illusions to the contrary. Like I said earlier, Star Wars is a franchise renowned for its groundbreaking visual effects work... not for the quality of its writing. One thing I've had to accept as my friends twist my arm into watching more Star Wars is that the amount of fanservice in any given story is never going to be less than "excessive". Too many of the showrunners and creatives working on Star Wars projects are longtime fans for there to be any other outcome. The only real question in any new Star Wars title is whether the kudzu-like tangle of cameos, easter eggs, and references will overwhelm the story or just infest every corner of the scenery like porgs. Compare Rebels to Andor. Andor's showrunner is a non-fan and the show's emphasis on telling a compelling story reflects that. The excessive fanservice is still there, but it's been confined to the set dressing and a few minor in-jokes. Every curio on display in Luthen's shop on Coruscant is an easter egg referencing a previous Star Wars title, but they have no bearing on the story besides being Mon Mothma's excuse to visit Luthen being her husband's hobby of collecting antiques. Rebels, on the other hand, bogs down in its fanservice with distressing frequency. Ezra's pretty much the only all-original character in the show. Kanan, Hera, and Sabine are all closely related to characters from The Clone Wars, Zeb and Chopper are recycled designs from early Star Wars concept art, etc. In the course of their adventures, they encounter almost the entire OT cast plus a bunch of other people from past titles including: And a bunch of those have actual relevance to the story... which makes it a tangled ****ing mess at best, and gives the impression that this vast galaxy is so small that everybody knows everybody like the Republic were a town with a population of 200 not a million-plus star system polity with a population of a hundred quadrillion. That's why the Glup Shitto jokes are a thing and will never not be a valid way to mock the fanbase. Looking back, I almost feel like the backlash against Star Trek: Discovery for Michael Burnham being frontloaded as Sarek's foster daughter and Spock's secret sister was unduly harsh when Star Wars gets a free pass for doing the same and worse to most of its key characters. Skeleton Crew is, thus far, at least a passable young adult "space adventure" story in the Star Wars universe. It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's eminently watchable and thus far its story isn't bogged down by a bunch of continuity with other shows. That's more than I can say for most Star Wars Disney+ originals.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... maybe! I'm trying to keep my expectations reasonable and realistic. This is a franchise known and loved for its groundbreaking visual effects work, not its writing. 😅 Of course, what I want to see from Star Wars is also rather different from what the real Star Wars fans want to see from Star Wars. I look at Star Wars and I see this huge sci-fi/sci-fantasy setting that's almost completely unexplored because the almost nobody involved with it can seem to conceive of a story that doesn't involve the Jedi and isn't within two degrees of separation from the original trilogy. Skeleton Crew is, at the very least, scratching that itch to see more of the galaxy and the people who live in it without the reductive, morally simplistic, one-dimensional writing that inevitably accompanies the members of the Glowstick Society. This franchise absolutely CAN produce compelling original narratives with nuanced characters and more moral complexity than "Sainthood vs. Baby-Eating" as we saw in Andor and The Mandalorian. It just almost always chooses NOT to because too many of its creatives are longtime fans and lightsaber fetishists unwilling or unable to step outside their Jedi-Sith fan fiction comfort zone. The franchise is just going to keep stagnating as long as the people running it refuse to stop mindlessly recapitulating the same tired stories and focus more on telling new and exciting stories than on trying to break the continuity nod and easter egg density records.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Apparently it stands for Modern Formula. The "Ghost" part is, at least initially, presented as a sort of acknowledgement of the motorsport's anachronistic nature as a gas-only street race in an age of self-driving electric cars.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, it'd probably actually have been better as a movie. It's a heavily serialized story, so it already basically has the flow of a movie. I think we'd probably have gotten a bit tighter narrative with fewer digressions if they were building towards a 90-120 minute movie instead of an eight episode TV series. The biggest problem with the most recent episode is that they had a good concept for At Achrann, but they failed to integrate it into the overarching narrative smoothly. So it's an interesting built of worldbuilding that comes off feeling like an optional sidequest because there was really nothing stopping the kids from skipping it entirely. Even with the not-great fourth episode, I'd still rank this head and shoulders above many other Disney+ Star Wars originals like Ahsoka, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett, The Acolyte, and so on. Skeleton Crew is out there putting in the work to be its own original story in the Star Wars universe, and that's worth something. IMO, it's worth a lot more than another lazy Skywalker Saga spinoff like Obi-Wan Kenobi or The Book of Boba Fett or a lazy spinoff of a spinoff like Ahsoka or Bad Batch.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    There is not an exhaustive list of all emigrant fleets and when they were launched in official media. Such information is typically only available for fleets which figure prominently into the story of one or more Macross titles, such as Megaroad-04, Megaroad-13, Macross-1, Macross-7, Macross Frontier, and Macross-29.
×
×
  • Create New...