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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Harmony Gold couldn't do it before the lawsuit either, as pointed out (amusingly enough) by Carl Macek himself as one of the main reasons for redesigning every character in Robotech II: the Sentinels in an interview he did in 1995. Looking back at that, these people used to be capable of basic honesty back before 1999-2001... I wonder what changed.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    No... it's an attempt Harmony Gold made at an all-original Robotech series that suffered from such monumentally incompetent planning and execution that even Harmony Gold can't (and doesn't!) defend it as anything other than a MASSIVE mistake. It's lasting proof that, among other things, Carl Macek's "creative vision" was in dire need of some corrective lenses. That was his baby, and it threw some harsh light on the way that he was actually kind of rubbish when he wasn't leaning on someone else's intellectual property. The Shadow Chronicles art book has, in its foreword, what amounted to an apology for it being such a wretchedly awful idea... Not wishing to derail this thread by getting into the heavy matters of the actual troublemakers there, it's not Big West who did the bridge burning. Harmony Gold did a lot of scummy and questionably legal and ethical things to keep Macross out of the US, and it's come back to bite them in the ass time and time again. The deadlocked situation's only really going to be resolved when the Robotech franchise finally implodes. That's the reason a lot of Robotech fans are giving for not backing the Kickstarter... they feel that Harmony Gold using Kickstarter to beg the fans to fund Robotech Academy's development because the series concept is so surpassingly awful that they couldn't even successfully pitch it to their own management. Even among the faithful, there's the sense that if this doesn't take off it'll end up being Robotech's last gasp before its long-overdue end.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, this does look like something an Ork speed freek cult would knock together, starship-wise. Pound for pound, it's looks to be principally engine... all it's missing is the red paintjob, because we all know red 'uns go faster! Because they have to stay away from making anything too obviously derivative of any designs owned, in part or in full, by Big West... and Big West was involved in both Macross and Southern Cross. It's a distressingly literal application of "damned if you do, damned if you don't", but clearly they're smart enough to realize that it's NOT better to ask forgiveness than permission if the retribution comes in the form of a career-ending lawsuit. Macross II: Lovers Again was developed under the sponsorship of Macross co-owner Big West, meaning they could freely make derivative designs based on the stuff that was designed for Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Macross: Do You Remember Love?, and Macross: Flashback 2012. It had some minor limitations on what could be done, according to creator interviews, but it wasn't anything like the kind of epic no-touch list that Harmony Gold has to contend with for Robotech. What makes you assume those two things are mutually exclusive? The most passionate, devoted Robotech fans are typically the ones who are the most fanatical and in the deepest denial about its failings and limitations. That zealous devotion leads them to act like complete bellends. So, yes... they ARE bad guys, but they're a-holes because they're loyal to "infinity and beyond" and have no patience or tolerance for anyone who isn't as deeply in denial as they are or who dares to question their rose-tinted, heavily warped view of reality. If you stay the hell away from the subject of Robotech, some of them are almost inoffensive. There are some who undeservingly get tarred with the same brush. Tommy Yune's actually an OK guy if you talk to him away from the convention panels and crap like that, and even Steve Yun's not bad. Tom Bateman was far and away the most personable one of them, though.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but we had to endure Robotech-Minmei's caterwauling like a canary being given a barbed wire enema as punishment for it. Just my take on it, as someone who's actually had to go over the Shadow Chronicles production materials once or twice, but to me it looks like a conscious effort to make something roughly analogous to the Macross Quarter-class carrier from Macross Frontier... but with an aesthetic that combines traits from the Oberth-class from Macross and the Shimakaze-class gunships from Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. To me, the end result came up looking like the unholy lovechild of the METEOR system out of Gundam SEED and the Roger Young from the Starship Troopers OVA that Studio Nue did. The problem is that, by trying to meld those aesthetics, they've come up with something absolutely hideous that looks like it was hacked together by Orks.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Burn the heretic! (Just kidding ) While I applaud your optimism, I can't help but feel a little bad that you're likely to get it in the shorts if this thing actually ends up getting made. With amateurs and idiots behind it, the quality is going to be pretty awful. Worse than RTSC for sure. Also, to be entirely fair, every Robotech sequel except Robotech 3000 has been repackaging Robotech into something lame and unrecognizable. Robotech: the Movie repackaged Megazone 23 into something painful to watch, even just visually, because the spliced in footage was on smaller film stock. Robotech II: the Sentinels tried to repackage Robotech as equal parts Star Trek and Lost in Space led by a cast of expies of Macross characters. Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles tried to repackage Robotech as a mixture of Macross: Do You Remember Love? and Battlestar Galactica, and Robotech: Love Live Alive was just a mangled version of MOSPEADA: Love Live Alive I dunno man, the Shadow Chronicles was a pretty limited concept since the idea was to plunge humanity right into a fourth war as soon as the third one was done so they could play bait-and-switch with "Rick Hunter", and using him as the draw was the whole reason they made the thing at all. As far as "Macek's vision"... well, there's a lot less actual vision there than most folks credit him with (a lot of decisions were forced on the project by simple necessity or by Revell), but at least that's a damn sight more respect than he's getting from Harmony Gold right now. At least you're being rational about the backing of the pilot, I can't imagine how PO'd the people who threw five grand at it would be when it doesn't get picked up. Yeah, MEMO is a moderator there... he's one of two chiefly responsible for the place being a ghost town.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Probably because they're desperate for cash... Kicktraq has been predicting failure pretty consistently, and by an ever-increasing margin. They were probably hoping Macross fans would be eager to self-identify as loathing Robotech to troll the Kickstarter (the popular Robotech fanatic fanboy's dismissive stereotype of the "Macross purist troll") that they'd gain some ground.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Development is additive, and today's creators in the anime industry are people who grew up with classic shows. Even Macross's creators were Gundam fanboys. They take the parts they like and develop them in new and different ways. This is, for all of the design's supreme hideousness and clumsy execution, no different. So far, Kicktraq is still predicting failure by an ever-increasing margin, though, and that would lend credence to what I've seen on various sites where the "previews" of concept art are serving to further divide an already mutually-hostile fanbase.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Only if you've already lost your faith in humanity... otherwise it's just intensely depressing.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    ... are those... drills... in its engine nozzles? The UEEF's given up on protoculture in favor of spiral energy now?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    To be entirely fair, the Robotech fans don't really have much left to them besides the seething, unfocused rage of the "betrayed" fans, many of whom were backers on the other Kickstarter that's turned into such a PR disaster, or the blind faith of the fanatical fans who believe that one day the stars will align just so and magical space radiation will shower down on us to transform RT into something commercially viable for the first time in its history. Also, as much as I'd love to agree with you in principle that spewing "nerd rage" to the public isn't going to influence anyone to do anything, I have to admit that in this case it might actually be achieving something. The fans nerd-raged about what a bad idea it is and how it demonstrated Harmony Gold had so little confidence in this they wouldn't fund it themselves, and it persuaded a fair few other Robotech fans not to back it. So, in some small way, the nerd rage is actually accomplishing something... to the extent that Harmony Gold shills are trying to get various fansites to lock threads where people are speaking critically of the Kickstarter's content because they're convinced it's hurting the Kickstarter itself.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Simple answers: Palladium forums: Because many of the users there care not at all for Robotech as a series, and are only interested in the RPG for its own sake (in a way, that makes them the smartest Robotech fans, since they aren't holding out hope for a comeback). Some are misled about it thanks to having only read the brief, heavily distorted summaries of the legal situation put out there by Harmony Gold shills like MEMO, but those are few and far between. That's also where the Southern Cross wishful thinkers in denial hang out, so there's a little denial in play too. Robotech.com: No, we can't... because anyone who was sane and knew what they were talking about was banned by both Mav and MEMO for contradicting the aforementioned distortions. If you start making good sense, you get banned for "causing pain and suffering" (presumably to Kevin). Kickstarter: Doing more to dissuade Robotech fans from continuing to support Robotech than any reasoned argument we could put to them... MacrossWorld: We're so used to Harmony Gold having zero originality in its material that naturally MacrossWorld users are going to look first to where the idea could potentially have been drawing its "inspiration" from. (In short, "What shows are they ripping off this time?", since last time around it was Battlestar Galactica's remake and DYRL?.) *shrug* From the design cues it appears to borrow from MOSPEADA designs, there is at least some evidence to suggest this is going to be used in a fashion similar to the Macross Quarter (a small, highly mobile carrier with a small crew and a large forward anti-ship cannon and a small fighter complement). I don't think it visually resembles anything from Macross though.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It's a mess is what it is.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1381502542/robotech-academy/posts/910479 Gentlemen, I think we may have to say it's a little more likely this is Harmony Gold's attempt to knock off Macross Frontier... meet the poor man's Macross Quarter.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Buddy, what makes you think the Robotech fans who didn't already get fed up with the franchise after Shadow Chronicles would take exception to this? Their standards are so low they will literally take ANYTHING, regardless of quality, if it lets them keep on pretending that they're not wasting their time and money on a franchise that died twenty-five years ago. The fans who have put money behind this Kickstarter would almost certainly praise as a cinematic masterpiece it even if viewing it caused spontaneous bleeding from the eyes. Their willingness to accept anything, sight-unseen, as wonderful and perfect simply because it's Robotech is exactly what this Kickstarter is banking on. They'll do that anyway, man. When it fails - and it's a when, not an "if" - Harmony Gold will blame someone else for the failure and then loudly lament "This was gonna be SO COOL, but __________ screwed up our magnificent, flawless creative vision and turned it into crap". The only time they haven't done this is Robotech 3000, where they actually admitted that it was just a spectacularly awful idea. Meanwhile, the fans who invested in this mess will sink into the usual Robotech state of fanatic denial and proclaim the film to be another industry-defining, genre-defying masterpiece of animation and condemn anyone and everyone who dares to suggest it isn't as a hater or a troll. These people don't learn. If they did, they wouldn't be Robotech fans.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the all-important point you're missing here is that the only part of Robotech that the vast majority of its fans care about at all is Macross, so they're going to pander to what their audience wants by peddling what are little more than crappy Macross fanfics played out with MOSPEADA action figures. Making decent original content is far beyond their available budget and the skill sets possessed by their staff. Going back and trying to spackle over Robotech's many, MANY gaps is a fool's errand. Why? Because all it'll do is throw all their limitations into sharp relief, and they'd be focusing on the parts of the Robotech story and cast that almost nobody cares about... the fans hate the Masters Saga with a terrifying passion, and the New Generation is, for many of them, just sort of there... utterly inoffensive, but also uninteresting. They're retconning because that's the only way they can tell a story the fans will give a damn about... because the thing the fans want is the continuing adventures of the Macross cast. (Kinda like how Star Wars' EU has a fixation on the Skywalker and Solo families.) They're not gonna include homages to other real-world squadrons either, because 1. they don't seem to be very aware of actual military affairs and practices (but that's fine, because this is fiction after all, and the military powers in the source material all were rather bereft of the usual starch and polish of real militaries) and 2. they're pandering to Macross Saga fans, so Skull squadron's all that matters. Wolf squadron used to be on that list, but it doesn't matter anymore because they wiped it out. They're not doing a homage to the Jolly Rogers, they're hung up on the SVF-1 Skulls from Macross. Mind you, one of their old comics suggests that the "Jolly Rogers" never existed in Robotech... that VF-84 was never disestablished, and that it was called "Skull squadron" instead of the "Jolly Rogers".
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Wait... wait... wait... THIS gives you the impression that Harmony Gold wasn't serious about this project? I thought most folks came to that realization around the time they realized this Kickstarter was not, in fact, an out-of-season April Fool's joke. Also, expecting professionalism from a Harmony Gold isn't just trying to draw water from a dry well... it's trying to draw water from a well that only exists in unverified anecdotes.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    What it shows, more than anything, is that they're entirely keen to perpetuate the extreme animosity their most fanatical fans have for Macross fans. They assume anyone who's a Macross fan would have no interest in their Kickstarter except to tell them they're idiots... which just shows they don't understand the people who don't watch their garbage any better than the people who do, since, as I said before, nothing any Macross fan could say to a Robotech fan could do nearly as much damage as what the fans of Robotech do to themselves every time they get their hopes up. There's no need for a troll tier, because they're practically self-trolling at this point.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe they know, and it's actually a metaphor for the Robotech franchise as a whole? Y'know... stuck in an untenable position, a single wrong move away from plunging into the infinite abyss, and with ultimate failure being an inescapable matter of time even if they didn't screw up. It's deep, man... it's real deep. Under ordinary circumstances, I'd probably find that to be detestable behavior. But, since it's Harmony Gold...
  19. Seto Kaiba
    As terrible as the design and CG are, the best that could come of this is a fan-fiction crossover with Doom. If they produce this mess, Phobos might at least feel like the gateway to hell for Robotech fans.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    That's why so many Robotech fans have refused to fund it or offered only minimal contributions. Yeah, but I doubt that other Kickstarter was operating under the air of general suspicion, dismissal, and disgust that the Robotech Academy Kickstarter is. This one's a base breaker before it's even started development. Truly... we certainly don't stand to gain anything by trolling them. Nothing any Macross fan could say could ever inflict worse harm to Robotech fans than what the Robotech fans routinely inflict on themselves by continuing the cycle of getting their hopes up and then suffering disappointment after embarrassing disappointment.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how rapidly the number of donations per day is dropping off, I think we're drawing close to that point... the gain is now less large numbers of people pledging modest amounts of money, and more a small number of people pledging increasingly large amounts of money. They'll run out of people sooner rather than later, and they've already started petering out with twenty-seven days to go and only 1/5th of the way to their goal.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not so sure... the number of donors is decaying pretty significantly with each passing day. Today's take is just 43. I think they'll run out of people willing to give them money before they hit 500k. How many more folks are going to be willing to throw THOUSANDS at this, because that's how they racked up that total. Some nut threw five grand in. Take out those outlyers, and the average donor's still only giving fifty bucks. At that rate, they'd need to get 7,620 new backers to make quota. If their rate of donation stays steady, they'll be short by about 6/7ths that total.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The most likely candidates would be Mav and MEMO... they're both in the kool-aid-drinking fanatic set, and would do anything in the hopes of being hired by Harmony Gold. MEMO even has an alleged history of spending well above his means on Robotech. Odds are there are a couple reasonably well-off fans who are dense enough to think this has a chance, or some that likely can't actually afford it but are fanatic enough to pledge anyway.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Heh... they'll probably sucker me into buying it, at least until someone decides to criminalize cruel treatment of bookshelves. Between the two editions, mine are ready to give up the ghost. I've always been more about the artbooks than the toys.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Harmony Gold's reaction to the vocal, and surprisingly common, criticisms being leveled at the Robotech Academy Kickstarter by their own fans amounts to one big invocation of "What do you mean it's not awesome?". Also, I'm not so sure that Harmony Gold actually needs to bring more to the table than nostalgia and some half-baked concept art... their fans are famous for being not-terribly-discerning folks.
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