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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I'd assume the opposite, TBH... Everyone would expect a live action Terminator feature to go all-in on action because that's what live action Terminator sequels do. Animation is an opportunity to branch out, since you're not beholden to a visual effects budget, and this one DOES appear to be going back to before Terminator 2 changed the date of Judgement Day for the first time...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... and that's the problem. Each new Terminator sequel wants to be Terminator 2: Judgement Day. As a result, the Terminators get less threatening with every new installment because no matter what state-of-the-art bullsh*t gimmick Skynet's latest robo-killer has it's still going to be jobbing for one of the Resistance's seemingly limitless number of jailbroken T-800s. It doesn't help at all that the T-800s have gone from stiff and inhuman to downright folksy. It's Terminator... it's pretty much a given that a Terminator's going to be the principal antagonist and better than 50-50 that one'll be part of the main cast on the protagonist side too. The problem is that Terminator has not really succeeded with an action focus since Terminator 2: Judgement Day. They can do a much more grounded and interesting story with a horror focus like the original The Terminator. Well, we're almost certainly not getting that... esp. since every timeline except Terminator 3's has basically settled on time travel is annoying and cluttering the timeline without any real detrimental side effects besides Judgement Day moving around a lot.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    There's far more to Horror as a genre than just "has monsters". Horror evokes fear in the audience. Castlevania was never in the horror genre. It was a puzzle/platformer so it'd be filed under "action/adventure" in this day in age... and while it started out parodying classic horror movies, nothing about the game's story or gameplay is designed to evoke fear in the player. The game's enemies are horror movie monsters, but outside their original context the monsters aren't frightening... they're just enemies to be defeated. The Castlevania animated series reflects this, belonging to the fantasy/adventure genre rather than horror, as it really doesn't do anything to frighten. Similarly, The Witcher is a fantasy/adventure novel series and game series. The monsters that Geralt hunts are physically grotesque and frighten random villagers, but the story doesn't present them in a way that evokes fear in the reader/player. Geralt of Rivia is basically a jaded fantasy Orkin Man exterminating nuisance wildlife. The Terminator, on the other hand, was sci-fi/action with a LOT of horror elements in its premise and titular antagonist. Its presentation of the titular Terminator is well in line with the classic definition of a horror antagonist/monster: The Terminator is a manifestation of one of the audience's underlying fears... that of automation/AI untethered by human morality and an older fear that humanity's own unnatural creations turning against it as in folk tales like The Golem of Prague (c.1837). The Terminator and its master Skynet are deeply unnatural. The former being a literal murder machine that walks among us disguised as a person, unknown and unknowable in pursuit of its target. The latter is a bodiless unliving intelligence that seeks to exterminate all life. The Terminator presents both a physical and psychological threat. It's absolutely determined to kill its target and nothing short of complete destruction will stop it. Nor can the authorities, as it shoots up an entire police station without issue. As it's coming from the future, you have no way to know it's coming until it's too late. And as if having an utterly implacable killer who can withstand most any punishment and pursue you wherever you go isn't enough, there is no happy ending. Judgement Day and the machine war that follows are unstoppable, not dying now just means the future genocide of humanity won't be total and Skynet can always just try again. Earth will still be destroyed and billions will still die no matter what. Terminator 2: Judgement Day was every bit as catastrophic to the Terminator story as Aliens was to Alien. The reveal that there are "good" Terminators on humanity's side and that Terminators are capable of learning to the extent that they can form friendships and comprehend human emotion obliterated much of their menace. Why have a human like Kyle Reese fight a desperate fight against a Terminator when you can send a good Terminator back to fight an evil Terminator? It not only makes the T-800 unscary thereafter, but the T-1000 is demoted from a terrifying threat to more like a severe inconvenience with another Terminator standing between it and the Connors.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    At the very least, when they do use Jaghatai and the White Scars they use them VERY well. The 40K-era Hunt for Voldorius is pretty bad, mainly because its titular villain is about the most hilariously ineffective Chaos lord outside of the Ciaphas Cain series... but Heresy-era stories do them justice on the rare occasions they get a story. Jaghatai's basically the one Imperial commander to make significant strategic gains during the siege when he retook the Lion's Gate starport and banished Mortarion, leaving the Death Guard leaderless. As a legion, yeah... the Iron Hands get no love becuase they're mostly wiped out in the Isstvan V dropsite massacre. There are a few individual Iron Hands who play a fairly large role in the Heresy as part of ad hoc forces of Iron Hands, Salamanders, and Raven Guard who escaped the massacre and continued to operate behind enemy lines. One of those groups that shows up multiple times is directly responsible for the existence of Primaris Marines in 40K. Ferrus Manus gets a lengthy posthumous appearance in The End and the Death (Part II), when his ghost shows up to give Sanguinius what passes for a pep talk before his final fight with Horus.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... I don't know about that. I mean, all of the Terminator sequels pivoted to focus on action over horror and other than Terminator 2 they didn't really do so hot. What's that old saying? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? There's a million and one action VFX extravaganzas out there... but precious little decent horror. A Terminator relaunch stands a better chance of standing out, IMO, if it returns to its horror roots. Esp. with modern anxieties about AI. That's kind of a catch-22, though... if they go for big action set pieces depicting the war against the machines, we're absolutely gonna see John Connor's rebels fighting and defeating waves of derpy, fleshless T-series endoskeletons because that's what Skynet's got. Whatever they're doing, they've gotta get a decent script. The quality of the writing has been the downfall of multiple previous attempts, and is the reason Arnie doesn't want to be involved with the franchise anymore.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I'd be a great deal more interested in this Terminator animated series if it were to return to the horror roots of the original Terminator film. Esp. since it's seemingly set up to ignore all of the action-ized sequels including Terminator 2: Judgement Day. I have similar hopes for that Alien TV series that's supposedly in the works. Much like Alien's xenomorph, Terminator's... Terminators... lost a lot of considerable portion of their scariness when it was demoted to a problematic-but-manageable movie monster bested with the aid of a tween.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Just finished The End and the Death (Part II)... and I have to say Joytoy's timing to introduce a Rogal Dorn figure could not possibly be worse. People joke about how boring Roboute Guilliman is... but he has nothing on Rogal Dorn now that Dorn's exploits officially include being so boring that Khorne gives up attempting to corrupt him in disgust. The book has a lot of signature Dan Abnett touches... including some subtle references to the Bequin trilogy he's finishing up as the third in a trilogy of trilogies with Eisenhorn and Ravenor. It's essentially all buildup to the big final fight of the Heresy, when Big E squares off against Horus... since they boarded Horus's flagship at the end of Part I and Part II's ending has Sanguinius's death... He and his Legion are interesting characters in the story too... but criminally underutilized in the Heresy and 40K settings. I suspect it's because of the unwise decision to go all-in on the "space Mongolian raiders" meme and have them speak stereotypical broken English whenever they have to talk to anyone who doesn't speak their native tongue... which is difficult to pull off in a way that doesn't sound racist.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, this definitely screams "bad idea" to me. Terminator is one of those titles that's tried and failed so many times to get a proper ongoing story going that it really should be left well enough alone. Even Arnold doesn't want anything to do with it anymore, and he headlined it. They've already weathered two separate failures to launch a new trilogy: Genisys and Dark Fate.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    In The End and The Death (Part II)? Not that I've seen/read thus far... but I'm only about a quarter of the way into this admittedly quite long book. That said, I doubt there will be since the Horus Heresy series has thus far generally avoided discussing or depicting the far future implications of its current (M31) events. There have been a few moments in the story of the Horus Heresy series where characters have been given a vision of the state of the 41st millennium, but it's never anything specific... just a general "here is the bad future that awaits the galaxy if _______ [happens/doesn't happen] intended to motivate someone to take a specific action. The Horus Heresy series has jossed one particular theory about Sanguinius's return involving the Sanguinor. That said, there are other theories about how Sanguinius might return despite being deader than dead. The Emperor summoned the ghost/spirit of the dead Ferrus Manus as a part of his counterattack on the forces of Chaos in the webway in The Master of Mankind. Some fans think he might summon Sanguinius's spirit the same way, and put it into The Angel. It's a popular fan theory that, based on its abilities, The Angel was/is a prototype primarch which the Emperor decided was a bit over-the-top given its tendency to exceed its orders and massacre loyal Imperial subjects for being insufficiently devoted. I guess it really depends on how many of them have harnessed the innate warp-based powers the Emperor designed into them in the intervening millennia... Powered-up Corvus Corax was a monster made of shadows and knives that could turn into a huge flock of ravens able to tear space marines apart The Birds-style. It was enough to make Lorgar, a daemon prince of Chaos Undivided, decide that discretion was the better part of valor and hide in his tower in Sicarus for millennia. Of course, given that Big E has implied he can redeem the traitor primarchs... the door is potentially open to loyalist versions of traitor primarchs too.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    He did have a more mature form that he could switch to in the original work... it was something he used to get around in the human and demon worlds. Since they seem to be trying to play this one relatively seriously, I guess they decided to make more use of his teenage form instead of doing a CG baby or something.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I don't know about that... the third and final volume of The End and The Death, the conclusion of the Siege of Terra portion of the series, is currently scheduled to be released next January. I'm guessing they will probably follow that up with a short series about the Scouring, the period where the loyalists counterattacked and ultimately drove the traitor forces into the Eye of Terror where they remained bottled up for the next 10 millennia.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it was established from a very early point that Humanity started using Zentradi technology after the First Space War. It was written by a circle called MAT, which has variously been explained as "Macross Attack Team" or "Multi-Configuration Analysis Team". Masahiro Chiba was the leader of that group, which also included mangaka Nao Minda and mechanical designer Hajime Katoki. Chiba became associated with Studio Nue staffers through another doujinshi circle led by several, and while the Sky Angels doujinshi series was a fan publication at first the Macross Journal feature was ultimately picked up and put into official media fairly early on because of its exceptional level of detail... and led to Chiba being brought in to write technical setting material for Macross thereafter as well as to collaborate on other Studio Nue projects. Despite its age, the old Sky Angels VF-1 Tech Manual has found its way into quite a bit of official material including Macross Chronicle and Variable Fighter Master File considers it something of a progenitor. (And yes, Dr. Gadget M. Chiba from Macross 7 is modeled on the Dr. Masahiro Chiba the writer of Sky Angels and series mechanical setting coordinator.) Most of 'em are local Zentradi who've been caught up in events, with some being afflicted by an ailment that seems very much like Var syndrome. Some, like Quamzin's lot, are displaced from their own time.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. You may be thinking of Orguss... he did not work on Southern Cross. That was the work of Tatsunoko Production's internal design team "Studio Ammonite": Hiroshi Ogawa, Hirotoshi Okura, and Takashi Ono.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there may be something to that... at least in the very oldest versions of the lore. The old Sky Angels book lists both pre- and post-war aircraft complements for the ARMD-class space carrier. The post-war complement has done away with the 78 Lancers that were previously the main manned fighter complement and scaled back the number of Ghosts to just 120 in order to accommodate a full-strength squadron of 24 Valkyries... and 94 Regults. The best part is they've already got the high manual dexterity needed AND the fittings to carry multiple tools... you'd just need to remove the impact cannon from the chest and the plasma cannon from the back and you're ready to go. It does put in appearances in at least one canon game... there are Gnerls tooling around Uroboros in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the Horis Heresy series is now on its second to last book after 17 years. The End and The Death Part II dropped a few days ago. It was supposed to be the last book in the series but it seems like Dan Abnett couldn't get everything he wanted to into two volumes so it's going to end up being three.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Probably quite a few more than the Queadluun-Rau, given that the Nousjadeul-Ger battle suit was the battle suit of choice for the far more numerous male Zentradi who made up the bulk of the postwar defectors. Its survivability was better than the Regult's, but it's no surprise that it was ultimately outshone by both the Regult and the Queadluun-Rau in New UN Forces service. The Regult had the advantage of numbers, esp. after the Spacy captured one of the factory satellites producing them, and it also had a variety of mission-specific variants. The Queadluun boasted mobility that exceeded even a Variable Fighter's well into the 2030s so it's no wonder it was the darling of the air forces. The Nousjadeul's just kinda stuck there in the middle... more survivable and higher performance than the Regult, but far worse in a dogfight than the Queadluun and with nowhere near the flexibility of the Regult's design to boot. I'm kind of surprised we didn't see them reworked into a workroid like the Cheyenne... their legacy in the main Macross timeline is mostly in the Variable Glaug and Neo Glaug's Battroid mode. They get a bit more love in the Macross II timeline. Therein, the UN Forces capture a factory satellite producing Zentradi battle suits in the late 2030s and the technology reverse engineered from that becomes the basis for the Valkyrie II series... the Zentradi Valkyrie, the VF-2, VF-2SS, and VF-2JA. Ah, game designs... gotta love it.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That's a rather unfair and insulting statement. There's nothing wrong with the TV version of the Nousjadeul-Ger, and it definitely does not look like it was made from wreckage. The Queadluun-Rhea is not a "male version" of the Queadluun-Rau. The Queadluun-Rhea is an improved reproduction of the Queadluun-Rau that General Galaxy developed for the New UN Forces starting in the late 2030s. Accommodating male pilots wasn't a consideration. The design team's goal was to produce a replacement for the military's aging fleet of secondhand Queadluun-Rau battle suits that was in line with the military's requirements regarding operational capabilities and particularly survivability. As noted previously, the reason the Queadluun-series battle suits were used exclusively by female Zentradi was pretty much purely a matter of piloting ability and limited supply. Male Zentradi are engineered for size, for brute strength, and for durability. They didn't have the reflexes or the g-force endurance to bring out the full potential of the Queadluun-series battle suit, so the Protoculture went and built a better pilot: the female Zentradi. If there were a male version - and the unnamed battle suit from Plus is basically that - its performance would be much lower than the Queadluun-series because the male Zentradi have slower reflexes and aren't as able to endure high g-forces. The Queadluun-series battle suits are all about extreme maneuverability. Well, in the Macross Frontier novelization and in Macross the Ride we have something close... the Neo Glaug bis. It's a manned version of the Neo Glaug, the unmanned variable battle pod that was a competitor to the Ghost X-9 in 2040. ... that joke is awful. I'm not sure if you should be ashamed or proud of that one. Possibly both.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It's difficult to say with confidence. Macross 7 did establish that Song Energy is a manifestation of higher dimensional energy in three-dimensional space. Once its existence was established, the new technologies that were developed to leverage it were applications of existing fold technologies. The Sound Energy Converter driving the Sound Boosters is a converted fold system. Macross Chronicle did essentially confirm that Song Energy and its more efficient boosted form Sound Energy are fold waves in its Technology Sheet. The topic could be said to have been definitively settled by Macross Delta Gaiden: Macross E, which indicated that biological fold wave research grew out of the research of Dr. Gadget M. Chiba and Dr. Lawrence we saw in Macross 7 and Macross Dynamite 7, and was championed by Lawrence's student Elma Hoyly. Whether the fold waves produced by someone with anima spiritia abilities would be intelligible to the Vajra the way that someone infected with the V-type bacterium would be, that's unknown at present. Sheryl and Ranka's songs reach the Vajra because they're broadcasting the same type of zero-time fold waves from the fold quartz in the V-type bacteria they carry in their bodies. The biological fold waves of someone without those bacteria might register as noise or nonsense to the Vajra since it's possibly the wrong type of fold wave... then again it may not be, given that the Siren Delta System was seemingly able to break through fold faults using focused biological fold waves alone... a property previously known only to be associated with zero-time fold effects produced by fold quartz. Basara's Sound Energy was also able to resonate with the Fold Dimensional Resonance system in the YF-30 in Macross 30... so that argues that it might be the same kind of fold wave. The TL;DR here is that it's a very definite "Maybe"... more information is needed.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the Xaos PMC the protagonists belong to would probably have been absorbed into the New UN Forces the way SMS was late in Macross Frontier. Xaos are mercenaries, so the rules of war prohibit them from participating in a declared war between nations and they can't claim prisoner-of-war protections because they're unlawful combatants. That's something that comes up briefly when Hayate, Mirage, and Freyja are captured and put on trial in the TV series. Xaos being drafted would have likely changed the course of that entire conflict dramatically since they would've collaborated with the Brisingr Alliance NUNS instead of ignoring them and getting underfoot. The stuff surrounding Lady M's crimes might not change too much... except perhaps making Heimdall the good guys in the Absolute Live!!!!!! movie for wanting to bring Lady M to justice instead of arbitrarily trusting that she's the Big Good. Yeah, Messer's death was poorly handled in both versions. Roy's death in the original/DYRL? and Ozma's fakeout in Frontier are both impactful became the character was loved by the audience. Messer's death in the Macross Delta TV series and first movie fell incredibly flat because he was an antisocial jerk who was rude to basically everybody and his death was badly telegraphed by him being an undeveloped character until right before his death. Trying to play him off as a beloved colleague after the fact fell hilariously flat, and the reveal he carried a torch for Kaname is kind of creepy in hindsight because his "distant guardian angel" routine just means he's a benevolent stalker. It was only one-upped for terrible presentation by Absolute Live!!!!!!'s painfully telegraphed character death, with... ... seemingly feeling compelled to not only cover the Death Flag Greatest Hits but also raise a new death flag every other line of dialog. I'm sure the statute of limitations has run out after more than half a million years.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    He lost the arms blocking a number of incoming missiles. He purged his remaining Super Pack parts before making reentry. WRT reentry... we're all used to the idea of needing a ventral heat shield to make reentry because the structural materials of modern spacecraft would otherwise burn or melt under the heat of reentry. Variable Fighters generally don't need to worry about that because the super-composites they're made from have incredible strength and heat resistance all on their own. The same super-composites that are used in space warships that allow them to survive uncontrolled ballistic reentry both before and after the First Space War. Given that most, if not all, probably came from the Laplamiz direct defense fleet after it allied with the UN Spacy... probably several hundred to maybe a few thousand. Yeah, the VF-14 was deliberately designed with an oversized airframe to allow it to be easily upgraded or customized to meet the end user's needs... and also to carry the HUGE quantities of fuel it'd need for prolonged space operations with no Super Pack and regular thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. You may want to consider that escape from the aircraft may not necessarily always be strictly vertical.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Purge-able limbs like the YF-21/VF-22's don't have any space for mission-specific equipment though. They have to be made rather slim in order to fold and fit into the body of the aircraft, which makes them more fragile and prevents equipment from being mounted inside. You might remember that Isamu was able to shatter one of the YF-21's arms through brute force without damaging his YF-19 in Macross Plus. The more traditional VF body plan that puts the engines in the legs makes the limbs larger and more structurally robust. This opens up opportunities for weapons bays inside the limbs like the leg bays found in many 3rd Generation and later VFs. That said, mission-specific hardware isn't typically mounted in the limbs except in very rare instances.* Most mission-specific hardware is usually either mounted in the monitor turret (head)**, the cockpit***, or in bolt-on Option Packs**** when it's not simply being slung on a pylon. One could say that there is a reason the YF-21/VF-22's purge-able limbs didn't catch on... not only did it complicate the design of a VF in unhelpful ways, the utility of purging the limbs is so heavily situational that it's almost never going to be useful. * Like how Xaos's aftermarket customizations of the VF-31 Kairos fitted a multidrone storage rack into what was previously a modular weapons bay in the back of the VF-31's leg, or how the RVF-25 has a large but detachable phased array radar system mounted to one arm. ** Like the additional sensors in the RVF-25's unique head, or the high-precision optics in the VF-171AS and VF-25G's heads. *** Like the fire control system booster in the aforementioned VF-171AS and VF-25G. **** Like the radars and sensors in the Aegis Pack, or the various specialized weapons in things like the Armored Pack, Tornado Pack, Strike Pack, etc.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Variable Fighters are, by definition, already "truly" modular so I'm not really sure what you mean there. Modularized armament has been a feature since at least the 2nd Generation's VF-4, though few models have enough internally-carried armament to benefit from it. The YF-21/VF-22's ability to purge its limbs if the event of damage does nothing for operational versatility, so I'm not sure how that intersects with the YF-30 and VF-31's ordnance container system that is designed to allow a VF to hot-swap mission specific equipment. I'd guess that a YF-21/VF-22-style VF with an ordnance container would be extremely unwieldy since it wouldn't be able to use the engines to counterbalance that load properly in GERWALK or Battroid mode.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Now... when all's said and done, I doubt a species of clone soldiers engineered and indoctrinated for nothing but military service and warfare have a concept of gendered colors. Hell, the idea that pink and blue are associated with girls and boys respectively is a relatively recent contrivance dating back only as far as the 1950s. That said, it is theoretically possible that a male Zentradi could operate the Queadluun-Rau and we do see male operators of the New UN Forces derivative model Queadluun-Rhea. Macross Chronicle suggests that the reason there aren't male Queadluun-Rau pilots in the Zentradi forces is that the (male) Zentradi lacked the reflexes and g-force resistance to draw out the full potential of the Queadluun-series because they were designed for strength and durability. The Protoculture's response to the male Zentradi being unable to use the Queadluun-Rau effectively was not to tone its performance down, but to use their mastery of genetic science to build a better pilot in the form of the female Zentradi. Its complexity and difficulty of manufacture meant that the few Queadluun-Rau battle suits produced went to elite female units where the very best pilots would get them.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yup. Macross Delta is a metaseries that brings a lot of Unfortunate Implications to the table that the story acknowledges but never properly examines or resolves because they make the heroes (Xaos) look incredibly bad. Yeah, I guess they were trying for the same kind of bait-and-switch that Macross Frontier did when they hinted that Ozma was going to die. Passionate Walkure makes it look like Messer's going to survive when he dodges the shot that killed him in the Macross Delta TV series... only to die anyway a few minutes later from the damage Var syndrome did to his body. Yeah, Humanity was engineered the same way the Protoculture created the other humanoids in the galaxy. The topic comes up for the first time in one of the post-timeskip episodes of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, "Satan's Dolls", where the implications of the earlier discover that the Zentradi are virtually identical to Humans genetically are discussed... including the conclusion that Humanity is another creation of the Protoculture. The official timeline and other materials explicitly confirmed that conclusion as fact, and even in-story it's essentially treated as the only reasonable/sane explanation for why every sentient species other than the Vajra is humanoid and apparently genetically compatible enough to produce viable hybrid offspring. Macross Zero confirmed it in-story, when Humanity found the failsafe the ancient Protoculture left behind on Earth in case Humanity were to develop into a spacefaring species before resolving its own internal disputes.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    The early models of fold booster (c. Macross Plus) were single-use devices rated for one fold jump of not more than 20 light years. Later models of fold booster (c. Macross Frontier) were able to be used for multiple fold jumps and distances of greater than 20 light years due to improvements in the technology. Master File offers an explanation for this difference that points to the quality and quantity of the fold carbon used in the booster. The early fold booster designs were somewhat on the crude side and used a large quantity of poor quality fold carbon in order to keep costs down for what was intended to be a disposable system. This resulted in the fold carbon breaking down very quickly in operation and effectively ensuring that the booster could not be reused even if it were not disposed of. Refinements in manufacturing and in fold carbon synthesis would later yield a fold system that could operate multiple times using better quality but not prohibitively expensive fold carbon by the late 2050s.
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