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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Indeed... when I went looking into this out of my usual analytical curiosity, is that a bunch of prior titles (TPM, TLJ, Bad Batch) had said they aren't. Hence the confusion.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The thing about Macross's writing, as noted previously, is that it generally depicts both sides of a conflict as being decent, reasonable people who are just trying to do what they believe is right. The conflict springs from a failure to communicate, and is ultimately resolved when that failure to communicate is resolved. The one case where that doesn't hold up is the Anti-Unification Alliance seen in Macross Zero and Macross the First. Probably because they're not one single cause, but a sort of catch-all for smaller causes opposed to the Earth UN Government and its peacekeeping efforts. A mixture of people who couldn't let go of paranoia, ethnic and sectarian bigotry, xenophobia, etc. and folks who depended on perpetuating conflict for their livelihood like career mercenaries. Not exactly folks acting in the best interests of others. (Even then, there are some side story type setups where focus characters ARE depicted as basically decent people in punch-clock villain territory, who even end up switching sides after the story proper ends.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm ready to call it for one of the Winter '25 simulcast titles already. Bogus Skill <Fruitmaster> is genuinely a tedious, unimaginative exercise in blindly reusing the most common isekai tropes imaginable. It really is something awful. It's not quite Isekai Cheat Magician levels of bad, but it's GETTING THERE.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    You sure about that? Because The Bad Batch seems to directly contradict it, with the Republic credit being made worthless by nothing more than a decree.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    We know, via the scene we get with Maj. Malan and the commanders from the local NUNS general staff office that the New UN Forces were aware of the danger the ruins posed. Whether the Windermereans themselves knew at the time is unclear, but they absolutely figured it out in short order thereafter (if they hadn't already) and did attempt to weaponize the ruins exactly the way the NUNS predicted. Considering what happened the last several times someone went messing around in sealed Protoculture ruins, the NUNS's choice to destroy the ruins with the greatest possible prejudice rather than risk some idiot activating whatever lethally ill-considered gizmo the Protoculture left behind is less villainous and more dangerously genre savvy. Considering they seem to have believed he was trying to run off with the bomb and were likely contending with his attempts to disengage the remote override, there's plenty of blame to go around. Lady M wanted a weapon against Var syndrome, which had already been codified some years earlier and the normal people recruited for the Tactical Sound Units were just not cutting it. They basically built her to be a song supersoldier. It happens offscreen, but Lady M is said to have reached out to the general staff and challenged the New UN Forces plan already in progress to destroy the Protoculture ruins and Sigur Berrentzs with a tactical reaction weapon. The whole city was supposed to be evacuated to ensure that nobody was hurt, but because Xaos was interfering the work slowed down and people were still in the area when Windermere attacked and the trap was sprung. Yeah, they could definitely stand to do with the Prime Directive. Doing a more extreme verison of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is probably not something that's great for society as a whole, since quite a few mentioned worlds in the New UN Government's sphere of influence are described to basically have gone right from their feudal period or renaissance right to casual interstellar travel without all of the societal development inbetween. Variable Fighter Master File has a nasty incident in one of its story sections where a peaceful kingdom is invaded by a neighboring star system's not-so-peaceful kingdom because they were still mired in the era of altar diplomacy. Maybe... but it seems unlikely given that the lead researcher responsible for many of the discoveries was the son of a priest applying modern science to the relics of the gods his family had been charged with keeping safe for millennia.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I liked it, but like B Gata H Kei before it that kind of comedy is definitely not for everyone so I completely understand if you nope'd out partway through. The main comedy comes from kids being stupid and awkward about relationships, which can be frustrating at times.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The Macross Delta TV series initially mentions that the use of dimensional bombs in wartime is generally prohibited by an interstellar treaty enforced by the New UN Government. Both the series and the second movie go on to treat them not as banned weapons, but as restricted weapons that the military needs authorization from the New UN Government in order to use. It's not too different from how they present reaction weapons, which have conditions attached to their use and require authorization from the local government before they can be used. Yeah, the New UN Forces' original plan was to use a low-yield dimensional bomb to destroy the Protoculture ruins on Windermere IV in order to prevent the Windermereans from weaponizing the ruins. It's implied that the New UN Forces brass were at least partly aware of what the ruins could do and were trying to prevent the doomsday scenario that the main cast discuss later (a galaxy-wide "your head a'splode" from forced telepathy). It was definitely the lesser of two evils... damaging or destroying part of a city weighed against the possibility of a galaxy-wide mass extinction of all sentient life if the ruins were activated. Wright tried to run off with a weapon of mass destruction, resulting in the accidental obliteration of a heavily populated city instead of the dangerous ruins. That's not the New UN Forces or New UN Government, though... that's corporate villainy. In the Macross Delta TV series and first movie, it's said that NUNS pilot and special agent Wright Immelmann infiltrated Windermere's holy sites and stole the Star Singer relics to give to Lady M's company Xaos. Xaos then used those relics to create the illegal clone Mikumo and sell her services to the New UN Government member states in the Brisingr cluster. In the second movie, this is retconned into someone else (Sydney Hunt) having stolen the relics first and Wright having stolen some of them back. Sydney Hunt used them to buy his way into a position of power in the Epsilon Foundation and create the Siren Delta System, while Wright gave what he'd recovered to Lady M's Xaos and they used it to create Mikumo. The Macross Delta TV series clearly tried to achieve that effect by making the main NUNS representative look like a smug snake, but the story doesn't really bear it out if you think about it a little. A lot of the actual problems in the series are caused by Xaos fumbling the ball or interfering with the NUNS's work. Like how Lady M slowed down the evacuation of Barette City on Ragna so that there were still civilians in the area when Windermere attacked and the Spacy tried to set off its trap to destroy the Sigur Berrentzs. Or how, during the main trio's trial on Windermere, the series briefly acknowledges that Xaos's involvement in the war is literally illegal because they're mercenaries and that as a result they can't claim prisoner of war protections under the spacefuture version of the Geneva protocols. That one I'll agree to... the New UN Government letting emigrant fleets colonize planets with native sentients is definitely a bit dodgy. Megaroad-04 didn't really have a choice since she was damaged by the fold faults around Windermere IV, but the New UN Government seems to have a pattern of trying to uplift primitive civilizations instead of leaving them to develop on their own. Their heart's probably in the right place, in terms of making sure sub-Protoculture species aren't wiped out by the Zentradi, but a lot of those cultures almost certainly were not ready to acknowledge extraterrestrial life... most seem to have still been feudal societies. That said, Windermere's discontent with the treaty is revealed in the gaiden manga to be essentially just an economic problem. The whole Brisingr globular cluster struggled due to its remoteness, but Windermere was unhappy with its economic growth because they had a valuable resource they couldn't exploit to get rich quick because of New UN Gov't trade restrictions meant to slow the proliferation of dimensional bombs.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I know I sure as hell will. I went into this one expecting I wouldn't like it, and boy did it ever grow on me. One of the only good things to come out of Kurtzman-era Star Trek.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Not s'much, in fact. The Earth UN Gov't only really has the one questionable decision on its record: not trusting the crew of the Macross about the size of the Zentradi fleet. It didn't change the war's outcome at all and there's really nothing they could have done differently if they hadn't made the error. It's just unfortunate. The New UN Gov't had some growing pains but the few screwups that can be attributed to it directly are, in Macross tradition, well-intentioned moves that panned out badly. Like giving the military more autonomy in the name of peacekeeping and anti-terrorist security, only for them to get a bit too fond of their new authority. Or the attempt to make living aboard emigrant ships less stressful that turned into a big public incident with a crazy AI singer. In 7 and Frontier we're mainly seeing emigrant governments making their own whoopsies independent of the central government, and in Delta their involvement is mainly just the trade restrictions Windermere's upset about that are actually in place for very good, very sound reasons the Windermereans don't like due to a difference in perspective.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    "We're gonna be in so much trouble" is an apt, if somewhat overdue, title for an episode of this series. So, who had SM-33 is adding "rules lawyer" to his CV alongside "space pirate", "droid", and "Disney film reference"? SM-33 is such a scene-stealer... best new droid since K-2SO. Apparently the Onyx Cinder was more special than just being legendary pirate Tak Rennod's personal ship for his last, doomed mission... I have to admit, I am definitely disappointed by the big reveal. The great treasure of At Attin really is just... Very good episode. Very action packed. Jude Law and Nick Frost (SM-33's actor) are kind of running away with this one... but 33 always has been a scene-stealer. It's kind of starting to feel like Jaleel White's character Gunter is an advertised extra and has no real importance to the story. I remain convinced Skeleton Crew is going to stick the landing and finish as one of The Good Ones. That's a common joke fans make... but I don't believe that's canon. Per Lucas, the concept of Balance in the Force meant the absence of darkness. Anakin theoretically brought Balance to the Force when he turned back to the Light, chucked the Emperor down a pit to his death, and then died from his injuries leaving 0 dark side practitioners. Rey technically stole his thunder there, since Palpatine somehow walked it off and came back, only to for Kylo Ren to die saving Rey and Rey to destroy Palpatine for good this time(?).
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, it was the course of his career that did that. He wasn't about to give up and let the military push him into a desk job. I'd say Sharon Apple is not so much a victim of circumstance as a culmination of several "it seemed like a good idea at the time" bad ideas. A virtual idol singer is a harmless idea on its own. An AI computer that's designed to use music and imagery and subliminal effects to manipulate people's emotional and mental states (aka "mind control") in order to reduce stress and prevent rioting among emigrant fleet populations is already headed into dodgy territory. An autonomous military AI that's able to assume complete control of an emigrant fleet's defenses if its Human population is somehow incapacitated or unable is... well... surely someone working on this project in the Macross Concern, Palo Alto II research center, or Venus Sound Factory had seen Terminator, right? Combining the virtual idol singer with those two very dodgy ideas was already a terrible idea in and of itself. Hiring a failed idol singer with a boatload of repressed trauma and emotional baggage to supply the thing's emotions was practically in Too Dumb To Live territory. Sharon would probably have been pretty harmless if all she'd been was a virtuoid idol. The Venus Sound Factory might've been in the unenviable position of wondering how they send a computer to therapy, but without access to the mind control technology and military command and control interfaces she was designed with she wouldn't have been very much of a threat.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    More than that, it's a really clear sign you need some quality time with a mental health professional when the AI programmed using your emotional responses goes crazy rampage nuts the instant it gains autonomy. If you think about it, it's actually probably a good deal better for survivability. Putting the cockpit on the back of the Battroid puts a lot more energy conversion armor and misc. structural material between you and whoever's shooting at you. Something like that. He retired from the New UN Spacy and became a reservist, then joined up with Strategic Military Services. As a metaseries, Macross always tries to write its antagonists not as villains but as generally decent and relatable people who are doing what they do because they believe it's the right thing to do for themselves and/or their people. With that in mind, Sharon Apple probably didn't want to kill or even seriously injure Myung. She likely just wanted her out of the way while she tried to act on her inherited feelings for Isamu by giving him the ultimate adrenaline high.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's Character Sheet for Myung Fang Lone suggests that Sharon did not originally intend kill Myung... only to restrain/incapacitate her. She may have escalated things to attempted murder after Myung broke free and started fighting back. When Sharon tells Myung she doesn't need her anymore, she means it literally. The Sharon Apple that climbed the charts to become the galaxy network's top idol in 2040 was an elaborate fake. Her AI was incomplete, so the engineering team from the Macross Concern and the Venus Sound Factory were forced to fake their way through her performances by sampling "Sharon's" emotions from the mind of a living person. Myung Fang Lone was a failed idol singer the project hired to be the source of Sharon's emotion data, and they kept her real role confidential by announcing her as Sharon's producer. When technical director Marge Gueldoa "completed" Sharon's AI by installing an illegal bio-neural chip, she gained emotions of her own and thus no longer needed Myung to function. (This is why Marge snidely informs Myung they'll keep her on staff for form's sake.) We don't know. Nothing is said about Myung's life after the events of Macross Plus. Macross Chronicle and a few artbooks suggest she regained her confidence in her singing after the events of the OVA/movie, but nothing is said about whether she went back to pursuing a career in music as an artist or anything like that. We don't really know much about Isamu's life afterwards either, only a few small details related to his cameo in the second Macross Frontier movie. We don't have any really good line art of the VF-14 from behind, so it's hard to say. There may be a small nozzle cluster back there similar to what the VF-19 has. Mentions of the VA-14 are few and far between, but they are out there and it is identified as the aircraft upon which the Az-130 is said to have been based. Macross Chronicle Technology Sheet 01L "Variable Fighter: Mission-Specific Transformable Aircraft" mentions the VA-14 twice. Once in the context of being a derivative model of a VF that had a strong tendency towards fighter-bomber operations (alongside the VF-17/VF-171), and once specifically as the aircraft the Az-130 is said to have been based on. Exactly where the VA-14 is first mentioned, I do not know, but it definitely exists.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... and they don't need a ton of power to get the VF-31 moving at a respectable clip. GERWALK mode's made to hover and to be agile at low altitude low speed flight. A few hundred kilonewtons is gonna be plenty, and they have access to all kinds of stuff that they can use to heat the propellant up... waste heat from the cooling system, electrical arcs, lasers, lots of great choices.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    OK, there's more talent in this season than I expected... which is a nice surprise. Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms is an amusing little romcom that feels a little bit Alto x Sheryl from early Macross Frontier and a little bit B Gata H Kei. The series is all about a very spoiled/self-centered girl named Mona Kawai who is used to everyone fawning over her because she's just that pretty. She's going absolutely spare because the new transfer student Medaka not only doesn't fawn over her, but seemingly won't even give her the time of day. So she sets out on a quest to make Medaka fall for her no matter what, becuase her ego absolutely cannot stand not being adored. I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons is a real bait-and-switch. It starts out with a young noble girl's gloomy daily life being groomed to be the future queen after her marriage to the local prince is arranged. When he rocks up to the ball with another girl, she becomes a completely different person. It changes gears in a way that is basically the opposite of what I expected given the tone, and completely surprised me. I am genuinely curious to see where this one goes, because it's already effectively suckered me once about its tone and direction.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Started another new one over lunch today... Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time. It's nothing remarkable or particularly worth watching. Just another form letter isekai series where the protagonist is accidental collateral damage when someone summons The Hero to their JRPG fantasy world and gets to have an awesome slow life with the implausible super cheat powers granted by the gods. It doesn't cross the line into being out-and-out bad, but it is bland and formulaic and, as a result, pretty unintersting. I've picked up two more titles that were just added to the simulcast lineup between then and now: Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms and I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons. Gonna give those a whirl shortly.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Piped in from elsewhere in the fuselage. The VF-19 is noted to have propellant tanks in several locations including the wings and the shoulders. There are two small clusters of three nozzles along the underside of the beavertail where it links to the shield. You can kind of see them in the upper left portion of this image: Size is, after all, not everything. Thrust can be just as much about how much propellant you're willing to use, how hot you can make the propellant, and the structure of your nozzle. We don't know exactly how these nozzles operate, there are several different approaches used for maneuvering thrusters (verniers) in Macross including combustion nozzles, laser thermal rockets, arcjets, and in specific use-cases diverted engine exhaust. Master File suggests that many VFs mix and match types based on where the system is located in the airframe. No official word on that, AFAIK... but Variable Fighter Master File points to the slots in the trailing edge of the wing near the engines as being nozzles. They have BEWARE OF BLAST markings in the Caution Signs & MODEX section. I haven't fully translated either volume, but with that placement it's likely they're dual-mode systems that are using the cooling system in the sub-intakes as a heat source to drive the nozzles in atmosphere and are probably bleeding propellant from the wing tanks in space.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Hell of an earworm, isn't it? That's the same reason I watched it. 🤣
  19. Seto Kaiba
    One more new one today, also a romcom... OKITSURA: Fell in Love with an Okinawan Girl, but I Just Wish I Knew What She's Saying. What a title. The series is exactly what it says on the tin. It's a romance comedy about a high school student who falls in love with a local girl after his family moves from Tokyo to Okinawa. As the title suggests, he struggles immensely with this because he doesn't speak Okinawan and she keeps lapsing into it with a thick accent when they talk making her unintelligible to him. I'm enjoying it so far, though the art style is throwing me off a bit. The protagonist, Teruaki, is drawn with the industry's usual mukokuseki art style but all the Okinawan locals are drawn with a range of more realistic tan/olive skintones. The end result is slightly surreal since the titular Okinawan girl is very tan and looks almost orange next to him. It's set up as a love triangle comedy. The protagonist is crushing on the local girl Kyan with the super-thick unintelligible accent, so he relies on her friend Kana to translate for him, and Kana is crushing on him and Kyan totally ships it though he's incapable of understanding the very blunt things she says about it. They do get one really good joke early on about how common the surname Higa is... Teruaki calls out for a friend who interprets for him, but her surname is Higa, so he draws an enormous crowd of people whose surname is Higa and ends up doing a visual gag about how he drew so much unintended attention it felt like a zombie movie... which he then captions ZombieLand Higa... a nod at Zombie Land Saga. They do the same joke again a few minutes later as a nod to the second season Zombie Land Saga: Revenge. It's definitely not a show you can give less than your full attention to, esp. if your Japanese isn't good, because you'll be stuck following two sets of subtitles... one for the Japanese rendered into English, and one parsing whatever Kyan is saying in Okinawan at the time if someone's not translating for her.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Hulu was officially merged into, and became a proper subset of, Disney+'s service officially back on 27 March '24. They've been gradually nudging members of both services to merge their accounts ever since. Hulu is now one of the content categories in the Disney+ app, like Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, NatGeo, and ESPN.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Started another new Winter 2025 series, I'm Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class. I'm honestly not sure what it means when a series has to have its protagonist point out that its entire premise is literally illegal barely seven minutes into the first episode. In short, two high school students (Saito and Akane) meet at a fancy restaurant where they both discover Saito's widower grandfather and Akane's widowed grandmother had been lovers in high school, have recently renewed their relationship, and have made the frankly psychotic decision to unlawfully force their grandchildren to get married against their will due to their own regrets from childhood. This series is meant to be a romcom, but it's genuinely unsettling as a premise considering how downright deranged both grandparents act about it. Maybe I'm taking this too seriously because of personal experiences with a similarly batsh*t insane grandparent, but this whole premise is pretty f***ed up IMO.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Project No.9 did a great job with the animation and the presentation is overall actually pretty good. Most of the characters are actually pretty likeable and I have to admit I couldn't see the resolution to the first "mystery" ahead of time. Its main problem isn't even its protagonist's unprofessional behavior as a medical doctor or CSI-like interference in a police investigation. It's the frankly insane leaps of logic that drive the plot, with several based on blatantly incorrect or questionable-at-best medical knowledge. I'm not sure if the problems in the story are because they're compressing the story of the original light novel to fit the 24 minute TV anime format or the original story is just THAT badly written.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, as I understand it, the official take is actually worse. Apparently the Force in its natural state is just the light side. The dark side is a distortion of the Force created by misusing it. Balance is the absence of darkness... That they most assuredly did. The effects work in Skeleton Crew has been pretty impressive throughout, minus a few minor moments of green screen awkwardness.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the titular doctor from the medical drama series House were an anime girl? If so, you're a very strange person... and Project No.9 is currently serving up a new anime series which should scratch your phenomenally peculiar itch. Ameko M.D.: Doctor Detective is a very strange medical drama about the director of a hospital's pathology department wandering around the hospital and of the nearby area in sandals and solving medical mysteries while generally being rude and judgmental.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think there's anything weird about that, honestly. The Jedi, like the Sith, are an inherently self-limiting concept in the Star Wars universe. Because the Force exists as a rigidly self-enforcing system of simplistic moral absolutes, the characters who wield it are inevitably far more limited in their potential development than those who don't. The inevitable polarization into either a selfless hero or a sadistic villain makes them extremely predictable, and not just to the audience. It's such an overbuilt trope that the Jedi's uncontrollable chronic hero syndrome is the cornerstone of the Empire's strategy for hunting them. Characters who aren't locked into the Force's binary moral choice system can be written with a good deal more depth and complexity and be more believable and relatable as a result. Like Din Djarin, or Cassian Andor, or the kids on the Onyx Cinder. There's this old saying "only the dose makes the poison". The Jedi can be cool and interesting in small doses (e.g. Mando season 2), they're just painfully overused most of the time.
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