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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    New episode's out... "Can't Say I Remember No At Attin". I have to say, I love how even the recap can't resist reminding us how dirty and rundown the ship is... every time it jumps to lightspeed it leaves behind a cloud of brown grit. All in all, "Can't Say I Remember No At Attin" is a pretty weak installment. Around half the episode is devoted to an extended digression from the plot that doesn't add anything to the story, meaningful or otherwise. It's inconsequential and doesn't affect the ending in any way.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Generative AI has a long way to go indeed... preferably in the direction of "away". 🤮
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Running up against the end of the season, it's been a mixed bag but one with far more gems than I'd dared hope. For me, this season's standouts are Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions, MF Ghost season two, and Yakuza Fiance. Having a grand time with all three of them. MF Ghost is everything you could ask for from a sequel to Initial D and even at the end of the second season it only feels like the series is just getting started. Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions is still a great detective series even if the protagonist Toto gets sh*t on a lot by basically everyone. Yakuza Fiance is a romance/romcom that really is working with all the baggage that crime dramas so often forget about, and the overall effect is fantastic. As a Reincarnated Aristocrat has kind of fallen off, to my great dismay. Now that the war has begun in earnest, Ars is just kind of... around? He's not really doing anything, he just kind of exists in the vicinity of events and so much of the story is just "we're planning around their plan that they will plan around our plan" repeated over and over again. The very many twists don't really feel adequately foreshadowed or explained. 365 Days to the Wedding remains a serviceable, if frustrating, 6/10 romance comedy. It's not a bad story, but it's frequently a tedious story when so many scenes are just the two main characters staring off into space like they can't remember if they turned off the stove before leaving home. They're so awkward and socially withdrawn that it's hard to buy that they're employed as travel agents, a job that requires a lot of talking to people, never mind that they're faking a marriage convincingly enough to fool their superiors. Lotta shovelware-grade titles in this season too, though: Let this Grieving Soul Retire is tedious at best, and more regularly nigh-unwatchable. It's basically just a j-fantasy version of The Flashman Papers but nowhere near as well-written or interesting. The protagonist Krai is an unrepentant scumbag who doesn't really do anything, he's just sort of around while things happen. The Healer Who Was Banished From His Party is just the most generic kind of isekai-adjacent j-fantasy garbage imaginable. There is not a single original thought on display anywhere in this series. This feels like a bargain bin mockbuster version of basically any "adventurer" j-fantasy or isekai story. Mecha-Ude is, if anything, a bit worse. It's a total cliche storm written by a staffer who once worked on .hack// (not as a writer, mind you). It's clear that its creator is a huge shounen anime fan who is absolutely not clear on how to make a shounen anime story work. They know what they like, and peppered their Kickstarter-funded series with all their favorite tropes, but they have just no clue how to make it work together as a story. It has that same knockoff brand energy that Mighty No.9 does. Blue Exorcist's latest season is very much in "Why are you here?" territory. The manga's way past its relevance, and the anime's story is at the point where the manga jumped the shark by going all-in on edgy darkness. The story is just a mess. I'll Become a Villainess Who Goes Down in History is... well... it's watching someone with a terrible case of chuunibyou that is played absolutely straight instead of being used for comedy. It's pulling out every otome game isekai cliche it can at every opportunity, to the point that its sheer repetitiveness is unintentionally funny. It actually has a not-terrible and actually unique premise hiding under the trash, but it's so underexplored that it might as well not be there. It's like the writers are counting on this thing getting three seasons minimum. A Terrified Teacher at Ghoul School is a terribly low-effort "token normal at a school for the fantastic/supernatural" series. A lot of its humor comes from its protagonist being a total loser and being bullied by his own students, but it's so wrapped up in explaining to the audience what each kind of yokai is that it kind of forgets it's meant to be telling a story half the time. The Stories of Girls Who Couldn't Be Magicians is, ironically, almost totally bereft of an actual story. Its interesting and charming art style is completely wasted on characters who don't really DO anything. There's no sense that they're involved in the plot at all, since they just go about their day, stumble into trouble, and someone else usually fixes whatever went wrong before they can even figure it out. Acro Trip has one joke, and flogged it so hard it wore out. The premise was initially fun, that being a magical girl fangirl who gets dragooned into villainy so that her favorite magical girl doesn't end up without a villain to fight, but it never really goes anywhere with that premise because the villain she's working with is so astonishingly inept that he's never really progressed past grade school pranks like flipping doormats. Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister wants to be a harem comedy so badly. It just doesn't know how. Or why. Or where it is. The premise is an old standard "You have to marry one of these girls because Family Obligations" and it just rolls with all the standard-issue jokes and setups. It's serviceable, but it's so form letter that it almost feels like the original author was being forced to write it. Oh, absolutely it's a suspicious-sounding title... but the series is actually a squeaky-clean drama about loss trauma and domestic abuse. (It's a reincarnation thing. The reincarnation of the protagonist's wife, who died in a car accident, strongarms her way back into his life to get him to move on and become a better person.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Whatever it is that the Old Republic hid on At Attin - or hid At Attin to hide from the rest of the galaxy - it's almost certainly WAY older than any of Palpatine's schemes. Which potentially puts some really weird space magic bullsh*t on the table for whoever finds it. The thing with Disney Villain Death as a trope is that, as long as you don't see the dead body, it's used to leave the door open for characters to come back later. Palpatine's return is a lot harder to accept than those other examples because the circumstances of his death aren't something you can plausibly survive. Getting thrown down one of Star Wars's trademark bottomless pits is, by all indications, eminently survivable with main cast plot armor. Still being aboard the space station said bottomless pit was on when it was vaporized in a massive reaction explosion is not plausibly survivable. Everything past the point of announcing he had returned "somehow" was frantic backpedaling to come up with some kind of sane explanation for why he isn't deader than dead.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be odd, for sure. It's easy to see why someone might want to hide a planet that was manufacturing a clone army, but why would they want to hide an apparently peaceful planet populated by clones? I talked to a friend of mine who's a big Star Wars fan and they said something in passing that I think might make this a much odder puzzle and might lend some credence to what @jvmacross is saying about it tying into Palpatine's return. That level of writing flies now. Disney villain death being a thing and all, it's mostly just the lack of any buildup. He comes out of nowhere, quite possibly literally, to become the big bad because the studio didn't want to have Kylo Ren be irredeemable.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Always, but go on... 🤣 Eh... if it doesn't contribute to, or act against, his return in any way does it really lead to it? The whole timeline grinds to a screeching halt with The Rise of Skywalker because Disney has no idea how to make the tangled wreckage of the story go forward, but that doesn't mean everything has to lead inexorably to it. As a franchise, Star Wars is all but incapable of resisting the urge to tie everything into everything else these days. Even Skeleton Crew isn't exempt from having to have a ridiculous number of continuity nods, easter eggs, and tie-ins. It's why one of the pirates Mando didn't kill on Nevarro is part of the pirate crew in this series, why the two planets SM-33 names when asked about At Attin are planets that figured prominently in other shows (Atollon, the location of Chopper Base in Rebels and Aldhani, the location of the Imperial garrison Cassian Andor robs), why Jod Na Nawood's alias is the name of a pirate from a Star Wars comic from the 70's, etc. Kh'ymm spent the best part of an episode building up the mystery of At Attin as a grand conspiracy by the Old Republic to safeguard something of such vast importance or value that keeping it safe merited cutting off all contact with, and deleting all records of, nine entire planets. Eight of which have apparently since been destroyed. Last time something was important enough to merit deleting a planet from galactic records in order to hide the secret on it (the Republic clone army on Kamino), it led directly to the Clone Wars and the rise of the Empire.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Nah. Skeleton Crew is a totally unforeshadowed side story. Whatever the big secret behind At Attin and the other lost treasure planets of the Old Republic is, it's inevitably going to remain a nothingburger in the grand scheme of things to avoid shaking up the setting of the sequel trilogy. If the secret IS something with potentially setting-shaking implications, it'll either remain secret or basically be ignored going forward. (Basically, it's the Star Wars version of Laplace's Box from Gundam Unicorn. A big important macguffin for its story that turns out to not matter at all in the long run.) That said, if it was something worth forcing multiple planets to go off the grid for decades if not centuries... it must be something pretty important.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Quite a few of those bells and whistles would be difficult to replicate on a scale model like that... the slats, the double-slotted fowler flaps, the ruddervators, the wingtip verniers used for attitude control, the boundary layer control system, etc. The dorsal sub-intakes do remain open in flight. Like most things on the VF-1's design they fulfill multiple purposes but the two main ones are serving as an intake for the VF-1's boundary layer control system (which is used for laminar flow control to reduce parasitic drag and minimum airspeed and increase the usable angle of attack the aircraft) and as an inlet for one of the Valkyrie's heat exchangers that's used to vent waste heat in atmospheric flight. The sub-intake is shuttered in Battroid mode and in space flight, since heat can be exhausted from the exchanger directly upwards and there's no air for passive cooling in space. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie volumes 1 and 2 describe another use case for the intakes specific to Valkyries operating in space. Essentially, the intakes don't serve any functional purpose on their own in space but they are a substantial cavity in the airframe in close proximity to the engines... making them an ideal place to install an optional set of propellant tanks. The intake spaces are filled in with a set of soft plastic fuel bladders containing supplemental propellant to extend the Valkyrie's range in space. Master File also asserts that later models, like the VF-19 and VF-25, would go on to add more functionality to the sub-intakes including: As an inlet for a Slush and Liquid Air Cycle System (SLACS), a system which allows a VF to harvest propellant from atmospheric gases in flight via compression and cooling of air passing through the sub-intake. As an intake for airflow to be used in blowing Flow Control on the aircraft's control surfaces (incl. both the wing and tail). As a supplemental propulsion system, turning the heat exchanger in the sub-intake into a de facto engine nozzle to provide thrust in GERWALK mode. (It's implied this is part of why the VF-25 and VF-31 don't have a visible large engine nozzle for forward thurst in GERWALK mode.) There can't be very many fans out there who have access to a wind tunnel... and fewer still who have access to one meant for scale aircraft testing. I'd assume I'm one of very few who has access to a wind tunnel at all, and that's a MGP system meant for automobiles.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    With enough thrust, anything can be made to fly. Flying well or controllably or stably... now that's another matter. Can it fly? Yes. Absolutely it can. It's actually got almost 18% more wing area to play with than other fighters in its size class (e.g. the F-16). Its aerodynamics are reasonably good, though like the YF-23 it uses a combination of a V-tail and thrust vectoring in place of elevators. Not counting overboost, its engine power is very close to that of the F-22 Raptor while weighing 11 metric tons less at standard takeoff weight. It's not going to be super stable, as noted in Macross Delta by Mirage Jenius, but that's partly intentional since high mobility and instability are essentially two sides of the same coin (and are why digital flight control systems exist to take some of the burden of maintaining stable flight off the pilot). People have modeled them in immersive flight sims and they DO fly... though not well. Without the various technological cheats (all of which exist in the real world) that the VF-1 uses to fly well, the end result tends to be somewhat uninspiring. Most "realistic" sims have limited or no support for thrust vectoring or ruddervators (being designed around the needs of more conventional civilian aircraft) and often don't bother at all with unglamorous or highly specialized systems like blown flaps or boundary layer control or strictly experimental ones like vortex flow control. Both Western and Japanese fans have built and flown model VF-1s as well, though a consistent theme is that they typically don't even try to do the ruddervators or thrust vectoring and instead use the beavertail as an ad hoc elevator to achieve more traditional attitude control.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    You really have to hand it to Spaceballs... Mel Brooks figured out what the crux of future Star Wars storytelling was going to be as far back as 1987. "Evil will always triumph because Good is dumb." Between Andor, Rebels, and Rogue One, there's a definite recurring theme of the Rebellion's successes being in spite of its leaders rather than because of them. Mon Mothma's the poster child for this. Her role is almost always to be the "leader" who is against taking action and who the protagonists have to either ignore or change the mind of before they can get on with the plan that saves the day and nets a big win for the Rebellion. The one time she actually advocated action was to order the Rebel fleet into the trap the Emperor had set for it at Endor. The same ineffectual career politician whose delicate sensibilities were a massive millstone around the Rebellion's neck went on to be the Supreme Chancellor of the New Republic for all but the last six years of its 30 year existence. Small wonder the New Republic was a pangalactic joke with decision-adverse leadership like that. This episode... pretty meh IMO. The escape is nowhere near as exciting as I'd expected, and the whole mystery of "What is At Attin and why was it hidden from the Republic?" is the kind of mystery where it's really easy to end up with an unsatisfying answer.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It's just the narrative cost of doing business. The New Republic has to be incompetent in order to keep the setting action/adventure-friendly for future stories. If they ever actually succeeded at restoring peace, justice, and good governance to the galaxy in a lasting fashion the setting would lose its action-friendly set pieces and it would be The End. Skeleton Crew shows us a perfect example of what the Star Wars galaxy looks like when it's not constantly on the brink of war with itself: At-Attin. It's neat and clean and safe and the population's only real worries are the little day-to-day troubles like work meetings or grades at school. A nice place to actually live in, but boring if you're looking for adventure.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Hell, go big or go home... a Joytoy Imperator Titan at 1/18 scale would be 3.1m (10'2"). Who wouldn't want to build an extension on their house to house a 1/18 scale version of the infamous Heresy-era Imperator Dies Irae?
  13. Seto Kaiba
    There are just too many streaming services nowadays... with every major network having to have its own, they've reinvented the same problem that their broadcast/cable network channels had in that none of them have more than one or two shows that are actually worth watching at any given time. Value-for-money in Disney+ is pretty heavily dependent on being invested in Star Wars and/or having kids. For a while, The Mandalorian justified that expense... not sure if Skeleton Crew is up to that challenge yet but it definitely feels more up to it than most of the previous work. Paramount+... eh... their main draw was, until recently, the one thing they were screwing up the hardest. He was so surprised you gave him full-blown soap opera amnesia about it. 🤣
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I'd put most of the Disney+ Star Wars originals in that broad but unremarkable category myself. I've seen a few titles I'd call genuine stinkers (e.g. The Acolyte, The Book of Boba Fett) but most of them were reasonably entertaining even if they weren't especially memorable. The one impression of these shows that's really stuck with me is that the quality of the writing tends to improve as the narrative distance from the Skywalker Saga increases. It's one reason I actually have kind of a good feeling about Skeleton Crew. It seems like it's going to be an adventure in the Star Wars universe more than it is a Star Wars story... the New Republic and First Order are distant concerns at best, the Jedi are a myth, and it's more interested in exploring just how weird, wild, and wonderful the universe can be. That's the kind of premise that can get me excited. But I recognize that I'm thoroughly atypical in that.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's a bit early to be passing judgement on the series as a whole, isn't it? We're only 25% of the way in. (Though that hasn't stopped some folks involved with the production from talking about wanting to do a second season.) With six episodes left and the story only just kicking off in earnest at the end of the second episode, this could still fall basically anywhere on the critical spectrum. Even if all they manage is to tell a fun-but-forgettable space adventure story Skeleton Crew will still stand head, shoulders, knees, toes, several Imperial megastructures, and a few galactic radii above the likes of The Acolyte.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    First Astartes, then the Knights... Joytoy Warlord titan engine when? 🤣 (In the same 1/18 scale, a Warlord titan would be 1.82m tall.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    They're more like helicopter skids than feet... not meant to support any significant weight and definitely not meant for maneuvering on the ground. Most space-use Mobile Suits in the UC have verniers in the feet, but the G-Quacks seems to have a full-on engine in the leg similar to one of Macross's Valkyries or the MS-09 Dom... which may be the reason for the unusual foot choice. They needed a larger nozzle.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It's been about twenty years since I last watched Gasaraki, so I honestly don't remember. If the story/setting leaks from the Italian-language official Gundam website are accurate, this unusual approach to Mobile Suit design for the "G-Quacks" may be a result of it being designed exclusively for use in space.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Wow. I mean, I was expecting Star Trek: Section 31 to look like ass and have aggressively bad writing because it's Kurtzman's pet project and a hilariously ill-advised spinoff of the franchise's all-time worst rated series (Discovery) starring its most hated character. Am I crazy, or does nothing about that sound like a good idea? I want to see this, but only so I can compare it to the Borderlands film in terms of "What the actual f*** were they thinking?" Star Trek: Springtime for Space Hitler's definitely going to be a cringeworthy exercise and another ungentle reminder that Discovery was a mistake. Paramount's hemorraging money and its share price is down over 70% across the last five years. The company is desperate to sell out or merge with another so someone else can take the helm... and this is what they're sinking money into? 🤣
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, I don't think we have any evidence to suggest that it's based on the movie version. On the one hand, it is a neat idea. On the other hand, I can kind of see why it probably isn't as commonplace as we'd think. One of the main use cases for such a force would be policing giant Zentradi citizens, but there are precious few places in the galaxy where Zentradi are allowed to live as giants. An armed revolt by giant Zentradi in 2030 led to Earth banning its Zentradi residents from living as giants. Macross Frontier materials describe the titular fleet as very unusual for allowing Zentradi citizens to live as giants and even setting aside a dedicated residential area for them. It probably wouldn't be unfair to describe that concession to giant Zentradi as a massive and showy display of wealth on the Frontier fleet's part, no doubt for the convenience of its fabulously wealthy Zentradi sponsor. Giant Zentradi in New UN Gov't territory are mainly going to be soldiers, policed by the military, so a separate force isn't likely to be necessary in most places. Civilian-owned Valkyries would potentially be a reason to have a small force like that. We've only had a few stories with true civilian-owned Valkyries in them, so it's hard to know what the norm for those. Macross the Ride's presentation of civilian Valkyries suggests that not only is there is a license requirement for operating a Valkyrie in general, but also that civilian-use Valkyries are generally not permitted to carry live weapons. Macross 30 makes it explicit that arming a civilian-use Valkyrie in Uroboros's jurisdiction, where that kind of thing is actually allowed, requires special permits/licenses/insurances only obtainable via registration as a mercenary with the Hunter's Guild and passing an exam. The Guild can presumably just slap a bounty on any badly behaved individuals and as we see in the game the guild chairwoman is not above wading in with her own ultra high-spec Valkyrie a (VF-27γ). So the one place we know of where it's legal to most people to have an armed civilian Valkyrie is also the one place where there's a substantial presence of civilian VFs used for security services by Hunter's Guild mercs. So most places, I feel like there probably wouldn't be a ton of call for a police-use giant robot. Anything in space is going to be the military's business, and unarmed models in an emigrant ship can probably be brought down fairly quick with adhesive rounds from man-portable missile launchers and light tanks similar to what the Zola Patrol uses on their VF-5000s. It was probably inevitable once the NUNS figured out exactly how good the VF-19 was... they were bound to run a test of it against their own defenses at some point during the phase-in process. Isamu just preempted that test in the showiest way possible.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    While Macross Dynamite 7 is set a few years after the New UN Government really started restricting arms exports to the emigrant governments in the wake of the Sharon Apple incident, it's probably not a major factor in the Zola Patrol's use of VF-5000s. Zola's a remote and unimportant planet in the New UN Government's sphere of influence. Its Zola Patrol is basically an anti-poaching law enforcement unit rather than a military force. They don't need bleeding edge VFs because they're only squaring off against civilians with black market weapons intent on poaching galactic whales. Getting a bunch of secondhand VFs on loan from Earth instead of investing a huge part of the planet's GDP buying a bunch of state-of-the-art export models makes a lot more sense for their less extreme needs. The export restrictions that gave rise to New UN Forces monkey models were a direct result of the Sharon Apple incident. It was only after Earth's next-generation fighter proved it could break through the defenses of the most heavily defended planet in the galaxy solo, the New UN Government started having second thoughts about letting everyone have it. They were having little regional tiffs as humanity expanded into the galaxy, but the prospect of everyone having access to such powerful weapons able to stealth past planetary defenses and drop reaction bombs likely felt like opening Pandora's box.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'll wait for more info before I decide if I'm going to say "duck this" to G-Quacks... but if the "leaks" about the show's premise are true I am kind of already not feeling it. They're so out of ideas for AUs that, according to the "leak", we're doing UC Elseworlds now. Bandai Namco and Khara allegedly settled on that oldest and most overused cliche for doing an alternate history story: "What if the Nazis won the war?". The alleged leak from the official site claims the series is set in an alternate UC 0085 in which the Principality of Zeon won the One Year War after Char captured the Gundam. I'm really hoping that's fake, because they already handled one Zeon story badly this year and this premise is even easier to screw up than Requiem for Vengeance's. Now, in all fairness, there is absolutely no practical reason that a giant robot has to have the same rotational limits to its joints that the Human body does. The main reason they do is it's easier to consider choreography if the robot is treated like a giant person. The only series I can think of that actually does anything with that idea is Full Metal Panic!, but it's still a valid point. There shouldn't be anything, mechanically, stopping a Mobile Suit or other giant robot from spinning its head and windmilling its arms like a cartoon character or having the flexibility of a contortionist. It's not like the pilot has to match that flexibility inside the cockpit. That "action pose" would probably look a lot more impressive with a model that isn't quite so visually busy. The G-Quacks is covered with so many differently-colored and oddly-shaped bits and bobs that it has very few clean lines, and thus when posed like that it's just a visually indistinct blob until you start processing the fine detail and figuring out what patch of color belong to what extremity. I feel like the increasing visual complexity of the designs is an escalating problem that's only getting worse. As much as I love the IBO designs, they got busier and busier as the series went on until they lost all their visual punch. The Aerial had the same problem, it had to have a trillion panel lines and TRON lines and curves everywhere, which must've been hell to draw but just make it look cluttered. The Quacky here is just the newest and most severe example. If they took the top two or three layers off it in Photoshop it might be presentable, but any charm the design might have is lost under the layers of extraneous surface detail.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah. According to Macross Chronicle, the Zola Patrol's fleet of VF-5000s (c.2047) are retired aircraft on loan to the Zolan government from the New UN Forces. They're old military aircraft that've been refurbished and modified for non-military use, so they're not technically an export variant. The VF-19P, VF-19EF, VF-19C/MG21... those are in the "monkey model" category as export variants with deliberately reduced capabilities.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    *impressed whistle* You were not kidding... that is way worse than I thought. My brain honestly struggled for a minute to reconcile what this pose even was... ... and for a hot minute I was honestly wondering if it'd gone full starfish like that one Gundam Athrun had in SEED.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Gack... it's even uglier in profile view. This design is so incredibly busy that it's honestly hard to tell where some parts of it begin and end. Lose the weird pods hanging off the upper arms and lower legs, give it some proper feet, ditch the weird ring hanging off its hips and the second one on its waist, lose that wing thing on the back, and dial back the V-fin a bit it and could be pretty cool. As it is, it feels visually cluttered like a JRPG protagonist wearing far too many belts.
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